I want to preface this post by saying I’m not trying to attack SecondLife, nor any of its supporters. My sole intention is to identify what I see as some important issues that need to be addressed when individuals and organizations investigate moving into SecondLife. There are many people doing very cool work in SecondLife, and I respect them for it. I now pull on my asbestos underoos…
I’ve been following much of the SecondLife cheerleading over the last year, watching as it got hyped higher and higher as The Next Big Thing That Will Change Everything. And I’ve been getting more and more nervous about it. As a piece of technology, SecondLife is really amazing. It’s a seamless integration of multiple virtual realities, providing ways for individuals to come together and interact, create, and play in a pretty impressive 3D environment. My issues aren’t with SecondLife, per se, but its elevated status on top of the hype pyramid as something that will revolutionize business and education.
While Malcom Gladwell (and Howard Moscowitz) were describing the need for different varieties addressing different preferences, Barry Schwartz warns about the far side of that slippery slope. Having too much choice is paradoxically not a freedom-inspiring situation. Instead, an overabundance of choice does a couple things:
Brian wrote about about the EDUCAUSE ELI web seminar on net gen learners , and after reading that post and the great comments, I got to thinking about the overgeneralization of the mythical “Digital Native”. Fast forward to this morning’s bus ride, where I’m watching Malcom Gladwell’s presentation at TED2004. Now, Malcom is the author of The Tipping Point , so I was expecting some discussion of how small changes build up to affect large, even transformative effects. But, he wound up talking about something so much more interesting, and likely more important to my perception of students. Spaghetti sauce. No, really.
I picked up a new camera case backpack on the weekend. I’d been using a small LowePro Rezo TLZ 10, which was handy for carrying the XT with the kit lens, and a spare battery. But that was it. And Janice kept calling it my “purse”. It felt like a purse, too. I wound up using it most of the time without the strap, just to protect my camera when stuffing it inside my backpack. I bought the Canon Gadget Bag with the camera, which is a nice storage and transport case, but not really something you want to lug around for long.
I’d mentioned recently how I’ve been using Crossover to run Internet Explorer for Windows from my MacBook Pro, without having to install Windows. That works rather well, but doesn’t give much flexibility - only a relatively small subset of applications run under Crossover.
Today, I downloaded the MacWorld-announced Parallels Release Candidate, and grabbed a WinXP SP2 install CD. It took about 2 hours to get Windows installed and updated, but once that was done, Parallels is pretty darned cool. Coherence mode is sweet, hiding as much of Windows as possible, and letting the Windows applications’ windows float freely as nearly first-class citizens on my Mac desktop. I installed iTunes and Quicktime to see how they perform - pretty darned well, surprisingly. I then went to install a real testing application - Quake3Arena - only to find that Parallels doesn’t support OpenGL. Yet.
I just finished the first pass at upgrading this blog to Drupal 5.0. Looks like almost everything is working right out of the gate. I hit a few minor glitches:
spam.module has a strange bug, where it fails to display nodes with ID larger than 1519. Node 1520 and higher failed to display at all until I disabled spam.module and switched to Akismet.
CCK - my bikelog is MIA. not the end of the world - actually, I’d hoped to just go ahead and retire it and do what normal/sane people do: get a cyclecomputer. But, enough people find their way to that page from the CCK/Calculated Fields page that I’ll give ’er a shot when I get a chance.
The K2-derived theme I’d been using borks under D5. Again, not the end of the world. I’ll take a look at upgrading it later. For now, I’m kinda liking the new default Garland theme…Theme updated. Borrowed snippits from Garland to get the scripts etc… properly included.
TinyMCE appears to be shy. It’s installed and enabled, but refuses to show up. Again, not the end of the world, as I’d just as often write raw text/html or use Performancing for Firefox, which works just fine. Update: I grabbed FCKEditor, and it’s doing a decent job. I miss having the user setting that let me turn off rich text editing by default, so it doesn’t bork embeded code, but maybe FCKEditor doesn’t do that…. Bork embedded code, I mean. I’m really not a fan of FCKEditor’s lack of semantic markup (using br br instead of wrapping paragraphs in p elements, for example) but it works.
The code I’ve been using to automatically generate the colophon (list of active modules, etc…) borks under Drupal 5.
There may be other gotchas. I did the upgrade on my desktop box, then moved it into place so I’m relatively sure nothing is pouring smoke…
But, there’s a better way. Crossover for Mac - it’s a polished commercial version of the open source Wine tool/library which provides a way to run Windows applications in MacOSX without having to install Windows. Basically, it provides a self-contained environment where applications are tricked into thinking they’re running on Windows, but they’re actually running on a bridge between the Windows API and MacOSX (and X-11 for display). You set up a “container” or a “bottle” to hold an application or two, and Crossover takes care of system-level stuff. You get an application icon that’s right at home in your dock, too.
Northern Voice is definitely the most community-oriented conference I’ve heard of. First, they keep the cost so low it’s essentially free when compared with other tech (and even non-tech) conferences. If you’re in Vancouver, there’s not much of a financial barrier to attend.
But, what if you’re not in Vancouver? What if you’re a blogger/student from Small Town BC (or beyond)? Well, now there’s the Northern Voice 2007 Travel Bursaries. All you have to do is write a blog post or record a podcast that describes how you meet a few criteria, and you may be awarded one of 6 travel bursaries of $500CDN each so you can offset the costs of attending. How freaking cool is THAT? There’s no mention of the source of the bursaries, whether a philanthropist or corporate donation was involved, or if they come from registration fees. Either way, it’s awesome, and something I’d like to see from more conferences (many offer student discounts, some even comp admission to individuals, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a conference offering to reimburse people for travel expenses too).
I got a MacBook Pro this week, and am absolutely loving the thing. The little remote that controls Front Row (and other apps) is so elegant, and I miss it sometimes on my G5. At home, I set up the MBP on top of the fireplace so it’s visible everywhere, and fire up iTunes or Movies. Very handy and cool.
But, the Photo display is tied to iPhoto. I just moved up to Aperture. So, for now, I’ve got my end-of-life iPhoto library sitting next to my shiny new Aperture library. Wasting 18GB of disk space just so I can look at photos from Front Row.
