Currrently I am caring for 2 lovely cats in a friends apartment. A giant, oak beamed open space, so large I could jog from one end to the other. It’s like borrowing someone elses lifestyle, or glimpsing mine were I more ambitious and financially astute. If this is a good thing, I can’t tell.
Anyway, being on a late shift gives me time to sample the niceties of a lazy morning looking out on to the canals. Said apartment is one of those warehouse style Amsterdam houses with giant doors that open on to nothing. I took a picture of the view through the doors, as you can see.
Also feeling rather smug that my old Toshiba Libretto 100CT has come in handy as an email and blogging tool, even with it’s horribly buggy install of Windows 98.
Recent revelations include Poker Is Cool. A game on Sunday night proved to me that losing money at cards could be excellent fun. Great! Gambling, it’s so me I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it earlier.
Online I have been wandering around Linden Labs Second Life, the uh, there is an acronym for these things but I forget .. MMPOE lets call it for “Mega Multi Player Online Environment”. Basicly it’s a V1 of Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse.. you can do business there, in Linden dollars - which can be exchanged for real hard cash. You can host events, with streaming music and have your avatar dance like a Northern Soul-er, you can build a home, have garage sales, create and sell clothes or furniture..or just chat with the huge array of strangely shaped beings you bump into. Oh, and there is porn and gambling too, just like real life.
To make things (a toaster, a hat, a house) you use a built in 3D modelling tool that creates primitives, the basic shapes for all objects, and then you can add behaviours to your objects with the Linden Scripting Language. Being that I am that way inclined, I am hoping to start a business there making novelty pets. My first effort is called “fuzzball” and does little at the moment except compliment me when I say “gimme love”. It’s a start.
It’s free for a membership (without rights to own land, yes I know, the whole thing is bizarre) so if you pop by, my character is called Pickled Newt, and varies between between being a muscular, slightly gay man with pink hair a goatee and a bald patch, and a run-of-the-mill cyberpunk chick with some heavy blue make-up. You need a spicy PC (or Mac) to run it, and there is a beta Linux client somewhere too. Be aware that it isn’t game based like Everquest or Eve Online, so if you are looking for thrills, they are a bit few and far between. It’s also a time eater, and you need to read a good deal before you can do any cool stuff. There is a google Tech Talk which turned me on to Second Life (or just “SL” if you are down with the lingo, hah) if you go search around a bit on google videos.