Adventures of Yoshikawa

Gift, Exhibit, Orange

2011-10-25T18:19:00.008-06:00

No of items found in inventory when search "pumpkin": lost count after 50 (bad); No of gifts: 1 (v. good); No. of free prims on Infolit iSchool: 526 (bad); No. of times neighbour's security orb attempted to eject me from own land: 18 in 3 minutes (bad)

Tis the season of mellow fruitfulness and halloween overdrive, so am stuffing inventory with floating candles, spooky houses, spooky greenhouses, tombstones, poisoned cauldrons, and some v. questionable items, namely a noose pose set and a burn-the-witch bonfire. Latter is great fun as you stand at the stake with flames licking round you, making unrealistic shrieking noises.

As usual have set up Halloween house on Infolit, this year in a shack on the hill. New items include aforementioned cauldron (dispenses apples which cause you to fall dead) and v. good ghost in form of flying pumpkin, from New Trails. Pancha has contributed an animated skeleton and some freebie candles that she created for a Day of The Dead project. Also had tombstone that dispensed ghost that followed you round saying she wanted her mummy. Spooky.
However, when visited tomb just now, the GHOST HAD DISAPPEARED, and was no longer to be seen in the Contents tab of the tombstone. That is even spookier, frankly, and also means product no longer works. Could ask for replacement, but on the whole that is just too much effort.
Meanwhile have a pumpkin for all purposes: pumpkin heads, pumpkin lights, pumpkin chairs, pumpkin to look like cats' heads; pumpkin soup; pumpkin pie; pumpkin gun; pumpkin earrings; pumpkins that come and hit you if you click them; static pumpkins of every size and hue; not to mention pumpkin-coloured boots, necklaces, shrugs etc. etc.
Am trying to show restraint, as it tempting to just pull everything out and Paint The Island Orange. Is easier since am fighting continual prim war. Students have been populating their mini islands, and I have been encouraging them to fill islands with stuff, but has now reached stage when really want to say DO YOU REALLY NEED YET ANOTHER PALM TREE but is easier to just keep zooming round trimming prims here and there.

Latest things to go were an old barbie (40 prims, see pic) and the cardboard house that was lurking under the Farradane Centre. Have fond memories of getting drunk with Pancha and Ishbel over that barbie, but is four years old, so postively vintage.
Autumnal colour added to by a) my final "52 weeks of colour" frock, which have selected from Caverna Obscura and b) v. pretty set of marigolds in vase on cute rustic stool which was unexpected gift from Hanaya's owner. Have got v. few blogger gifts to date, in fact think has only been 4 of which 1 (set of shoes) was v. useful, 1 (jewellery from Magpie) was pretty, and 2 were useless as were short dresses of kind do not wear.
At once opened box and tried to take pic to show gift-giver. Was thwarted for some time
1) Went to Fantasy Woods corner of Noyo. Was immediately bombarded with messages saying that was about to be ejected: neighbour must have set his security orb thoughtlessly wide. Loathe security orbs. IMed neighbour and await response.
2) Crashed
3) Logged in and went to autumn house and started to rez marigolds,
4) Crashed
5) Rezzed marigiolds
6) Crashed
7) Crashed again. Perhaps was Curse of the security Orb.
8) Tried logging into Infolit iSchool instead. Success!
9) Noticed Quilt was missing. retrieved her from under building. How DO they get down there.
10) Posed with Naomi. (see pic)
11) By this time had forgotten why had gone into SL in first place and started playing with Quilt.

Will use marigolds in final 52 weeks of colour post, as harmonises so well with dress. Am sad 52 weeks challenge is almost over. However, at approx 2 hrs per post x 52 weeks = 104 hrs, means have spent 3 working weeks on blogging virtual clothes for not many people to look at. Hmmm. Still, it was fun.

Way too old

2011-10-04T17:30:00.006-06:00

Cats who are past it: 2 (bad)
Recently discovered distressing fact. Latest update of kittycats included v. cute new cat petting poses, including possibility of petting other people's cats. Immediately zoomed round grid seeking out cats to pet. Fired with new kittycat enthusiasm, clicked on Quilt and for first time selected Breeding option, toying with idea of finally opting for kitten boxes.

However was shocked when a message appeared in text chat telling me that "Quilt is way too old for breeding!" Not only does this seem like a super-truncated window of opportunity, but feel that language ("Way too old" indeed!) would score v. low in "diversity and age sensitivity" stakes. The poor thing is less than 200 days young!

Naomi is not much Quilt's junior, so turns out that both have descended into twilight years without me having given either of them the opportunity of fulfilling their destiny (i.e. making money for Kittycats by obliging me to buy more Kittycats food for all the new kittens).

Must be said that Naomi and Quilt do not seem overly bothered about this, indeed must have passed kittycat-menopause some weeks ago and thus had chance to reconcile themselves to their elder status.

Meanwhile Stone took to disappearing under the floor of the CILR office (see last pic), so have had to go hunting for him on the sea bed more than once. Perhaps is sulking because of lack of young frisky female kittycats. Whilst ponder kittycat future have removed him to adorn another of my homes.

Not even tempted

2011-09-26T22:34:00.000-06:00

webuyanycat.com has valued my cats at £14.69.

The usual

2011-09-17T13:22:00.008-06:00

Hours spent at Jewelry Fair: 1.5 (bad). Items bought at Jewelry Fair: have already forgotten (bad) but was certainly lot less than COULD have bought (good).

Since have not yet fixed proper laptop, one that started going clunk-clunk in April, am now rather restricted about access to SL when away from office. To begin with, new netbook allowed some access, although generally of slow grey lumpy kind. Still it meant could attend those kinds of educators meetings where all you do is find a seat and then throw in the odd bit of text chat to show you aren't just letting your avatar sit there while you go off and make coffee or check your facebook page.

Anyway, gaps mean that when do get back in have loads to catch up on. Cute items for Spruce Up Your Space or Super Bargain Saturday that might still be out and available! Paying rent for shop in Juicy! Feeding the cats! And of course have the weekly obligation of the 52 weeks of colour challenge, which now has ONLY SIX WEEKS LEFT, gosh what will I find to do with my time when that finishes.

Obviously a couple of things are - going on hunts and visiting fairs. Have tried to give up fairs as tend to be v. time consuming, somewhat laggy, and also inevitably feed shopaholic tendencies. However, when doing Brick Red outfit for current Week of Colour Challenge decided that hadn't got quite the right earrings, so a visit to the Jewelry Fair that just opened was the only logical solution. Results can be seen here and here. Found v. pretty peacock feather earrings, only prob being that if viewed from front they disappear into hair. Think this is something to with alpha textures. Anyway, easy solutions are to
a) wear updos so is no hair in immediate vicinity of lower ear and/or
b) take pictures from side, where feathers magically appear again.

Am accumulating vast store of lore of this sort. Not sure what will do with it all, but then probably don't apply most of stuff that have picked up outside SL either e.g. once restored and re-caned a chair but don't think have been once required to reapply this knowledge in intervening period. What find slightly puzzling is that researchers who have researched SL fashion scene have tended to pursue v.v. dull questions about identity inside and outside SL, yawn, rather than interesting stuff e.g. why you might prefer Truth hair to Lelutka hair (in my case answer is simple as Lelutka don't do blue hair).

1st pic shows particularly tempting booth, and 2nd pic shows one of the Jewelry Fair sims ("Fire") Interesting that last year's organisers seemed agonisingly concerned about exhibits only using small number of different textures, no animated items, no particles, layout designed so that people's computers only had to absorb limited no. of graphics at a time, strict instructions about de-primming yourself before visiting etc. etc. This year all that has been jettisoned, as may see from rather murky pic, sim was filleed with animations and textures, and one often found oneself having to plough through a lava chasm to try and get to the next booth.

Talking of lava, the 3rd pic shows part of a short and enjoyable Quest that BareRose had, where you had 4 skyglobes with scenes in them that you had to navigate. In this one you had to go across narrow bridge with giant swinging axes, at risk of boiling to death in the lava. At the end you got some cool armour and a beautiful flying dragon. In final pic can see me swooping over Cowell on my dragon. Wheeeee.

Catablog

2011-08-25T13:52:00.009-06:00

Kittens bought: 1 (good); Kittens unupdateable: 1 (bad); Cats lost in the vasty deep: 1 (bad)

Seem to be continuing to use this as cat blog although will also mention in passing that have spent more hours than can shake stick at in styling new home by Nordari, then taking pics of new home, then photoshopping them lovingly into composite pic, then uploading all pics to Flickr and listing provenence of each item in each pic in tedious detail.

Whole process was interrupted because kept hitting the prim limit for the island, which bearing in mind that island has 15,000 prims is not good news. Have had small clear out which cleared 700 prims (well at one point 800 prims since inadvertantly demolished part of main office building and had to spend ages rezzing whole thing then extracting bit needed to replace missing part. hey ho had thought had locked the whole building to prevent just such an error, but no).

Still, will need to do better than that before students arrive. Could be bye bye Hobbit House but think can just do a systematic prim-trim through whole island. Will be rather like trying to reduce 9,000 word article to 6,000 words to meet ridiculous journal word limits: if go through it enough times taking out odd phrases and words on every page (rather than deleting whole section, thus ruining structure and main argument) is much better. In this case for odd words and phrases read prim-heavy ornamental carriage clocks, beavers which swim round and round, floating mini-islands which dispense ice cream etc etc.

To get back to house decoration, why o why, you may ask. Simple answer is that there is contest for best decoration of this particular house. But to be honest it really is more about taking part than winning in this case. By time winner announced will have probably forgotten even entered since attention/memory span not at optimum at present (this could be because stay up all night decorating virtual houses).

Anyway, moved Quilt the cat into new home, to make it feel cosier, and then to add cute factor to pics, since noticed that comments on 52-weeks-of-colour posts seemed to rise dramatically when included cute kitty in winsome pose (see above).

Then suddenly gave in to whim of wanting another kittycat. Had had a sort of hankering after a Siamese and last week, to put off reading yet more draft dissertation chapters from Masters students (just like now, in fact) went on impulse shopping trip. Snapping up siamese could scarcely have been easier, a quick search on "kittycats", a TP to some sim or other with rows and rows of kitten boxes, and there you were. Whereas in Kittycats early days you were lucky to see a siamese under L1000, now appear to go for 100 Linden (or possibly less, but couldn't be bothered to shop around).

TPed home, rezzed kitten box, clicked it, endured 30 minutes of coy messages about kitten opening its eyes and getting its strength up and then - woomph - a tiny kitty. A tiny kitty with "Update Me" over its head. A tiny kitty that stoutly resisted to be updated however many Updaters I rezzed and activated (see pic). Assume that kitten box had been born ages ago and it just needed too many updates. In the end filed a report, and practically at once a new kitty dropped softly into my inventory, admirably free of any red lettering above the head.

Had meant to buy yet another female cat. And indeed thought I had. However, it slowly dawned on me that the gender sign above new kitten's head was NOT THE SAME AS QUILT's so realised now had male cat after all. Had already named kitten Amane, after a schoolgirl in an anime series, but though Amane would sound pretty gender-neutral to most people (it even has the word "man" in the middle), thought it might give the cat a complex, so renamed him Stone. This is after the Nordari house which is called "May a stone guide your way". Stone seemed a masculine sort of name, and Stone (the cat) is sort of stone coloured.

Not sure whether Quilt resents new cat (she is probably thinking "how come you are too mean to keep Silky updated and rezzed, but are spending same amount on frivolous new kitten? we aren't just for Christmas you know!" No answer to this except "Stone cute, Stone new, who was Silky again?") At any rate Quilt has twice gone missing and turned up Mitsy-like in the sea underneath the house. Am particularly baffled since can't see at all how she got down there: there don't seem to be any holes in the floor and the gully she gets trapped in is entirely under the house. Perhaps she fears that she will be forced to have kitten boxes. And must admit, am rather tempted to unneuter them both and see what emerges. Whatever it is like, it will be cute.

Outdated, disabled

2011-08-07T12:09:00.006-06:00

Kittycats disabled: three (v.bad)

Was going to blog something completely different, but when happened to go into common room today, discovered poor Naomi immobile with her face to the wall, with the words "OUTDATED! Disabled!" over her head. Clicking her just resulted in her ID being chatted out. TOOK her and went to common room where, as I feared, both Silky and Qulit were similarly affected.
They all just lay or sat there, and would not communicate, move, play or cuddle. Most distressing.

I googled around and discovered that there had been an update a few weeks ago, which evidently I had missed. However, normally, it just says "update me" above their heads, and you can interact with a menu to get them updated.
After some fruitless scanning of the Kittycats website forum, teleported to the Kittycats sim, where I discovered a customer support person, Straykitten, standing near the door by a display of kittycats scratching posts.

After some conversation, Straykitten lent me a kittycats 1.8 updater, which I took home and rezzed near the kittycats, but it was all to no avail, the updater couldn't detect the kittycats, and the kittycats couldn't detect the updater. I took the updater back to Straykitten and he said that the only option was to file a ticket on the kittycats website. This I duly did.

Only about 10 minutes later, I was delighted to have a new, Updated Naomi dropped on me by Kitten Longmeadow. I rezzed her next to the inert Naomi, so I could take a picture (you see the new Naomi on the right), and then moved Outdated Naomi quietly and with dignity into the Trash folder of my inventory.

Apparently Quilt was no-transfer, so for reasons that I'm sure were very sound, some other avatar was going to have to drop Quilt to me. I took a couple of snaps of me and Naomi reunited (similar to the last pic here) and sent one to Kitten (lol).

The question remains of what to do with Silky, who belongs to Dimitrova. Dimitrova could go through the same process, but, at the moment, feel rather large amount of apathy.

Was quite upset about losing all kittycats, but somehow saving two kittycats almost seems like enough, especially considering the ongoing cost of kittycats food (85 Linden per month per cat). Hmm. In black and white that seems rather callous, and Silky is very cute. On the other hand, Silky could just sit quiet on a plinth for all SL eternity without costing another linden, which does have its up side.

Multicoloured musings

2011-07-28T03:55:00.001-06:00

Hunts toyed with: 2 (good); Papers on SL delivered in RL: 1 (excellent, Naturally); No. of people attending talk: 7 (4 more than one of the other speakers; so, good)

Seem to be writing blog posts here circa once a month. Have speculated before on sad fall-off in Adventuresofyoshikawa productivity. One factor is still 52 weeks of colour challenge which has reached week thirty-something, so might as well mention that have blogged clothes in mauve, electric blue (see 1st pic), celadon, lemon and patriarch since last post here.

Some of these are colours that didn't know existed before 52 Weeks challenge, so am engaging actively in lifelong learning. Other skills for 52 weeks challenge include shopping, buying more linden so can do more shopping, spending hours trying on different virtual clothes, playing with lighting so look more exquisite in photo shoots and fiddling with photoshop to add final touch to exquisiteness. However, most of these are skills had mastered already, esp. shopping.

Have also acquired numerous freebies from Hunts, including bed with cotton bunny draped nostalgically over rail (see 2nd pic), boat, and supercute house with shutters that make creaking sound when open and close (also in 2nd pic). Stash of not-free-but-cheap includes 2 starry night skydomes, zen massage platform with parrots and urban rooftop garden. Could now have whole islands themed with different types of building e.g. think have at least 3 different stables and 3 different spa/massage sets, so could already create either equine paradise or health/spa resort.

Meanwhile, am dazzling RL friends with news that am researching how to do research in SL. Actually for "dazzling" could substitute "inducing glazed eyes and sudden realisation that they have urgent appointment elsewhere".

Have got v. interested in research on documentary photography & its application to SL, and whole issue of documenting and presenting research about SL. This is what paper at RL conference was about, and am sure that after hearing topic of presentation, readers will be wondering why audience was not 20 deep and queuing down the corridor rather than being confined to 7 people, one of whom was chairing session.

However must be said were only about 40 people at conference and at that point were 4 parallel sessions, so did not feel too bad about it. Also had attended previous session where were just 2 of us plus chair, so felt relieved were as many as 7.
Presentation included numerous pics (e.g. "spot the difference" ones above) and 2 videos, one of which is on Youtube and is linked below. As predicted, acquiring fraps recording software has been ... come to think of it, yet another reason why am not blogging here.

Call in the Cats Protection League

2011-06-24T09:29:00.011-06:00

Starving virtual cats: 1 (bad)

Had IM saying "The object 'KittyCats - Quilt' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Mewwwwww... I'm 30% hungry :( Please feed me and pay some attention to me"

TPed in expecting to see Quilt under a quilt, like when had forgotten to set catfood to "anyone can eat" and Silky (who is owned by Dimitrova) had retired to bed starved (see first pic). However when arrived, they were both sound asleep and didn't look particularly deprived. Anyhow, went and got some more food and Quilt deigned to show some interest (see 2nd pic).

Have been out of SL for nearly a week, having been at a RL conference. Have oodles of work to do, but inevitably once had gone inworld to feed cat was caught up in various essential activities like deciding what was going to wear for the next 52 weeks of colour (colour is mauve) and then somehow being sucked into a pursuit of strawberry-related objects, think it was because saw that there was a cool strawberry table set from Whats Next.

This led to creating strawberry nook in the Moonbeam Garden. This obviously required not just digging out anything strawberryish from inventory (e.g. strawberry picking set and strawberry flavoured shaved ice), but also purchasing new items, like strawberry shortcake from Feather, and a new china teaset.

In between saw that that was interesting new hair from D!va, but when got there turned out that they only do dull colours, and nothing remotely blue. Was huge number of people clustered round the lucky boards, so lingered a moment examining people's outfits, then crashed when tried to take a picture. You can see the lagginess in the one eventually took when logged back in, below.

In fact crashed several times, hope is not a trend. Perhaps is guilty subconscious trying to ease me out of SL frivolity.

I Thought I Was So Over Julia Hathor

2011-05-24T17:28:00.009-06:00

Sparkly moon gardens bought: 1 (enchanting)

Although have dozens of houses in inventory, some unrezzed, was prepared to be captivated by some new residence at the Home and Gardens Expo. What had not expected was to be right-click-select-buy-ing on an item by Julia Hathor.
Now, Julia Hathor was designer of first treehouse on Infolit iSchool, in fact at one point island was positive shrine to Hathor, since also had Fairy Bridge, Magic Apple Tree Bridge and Magic Apple Tree. 2 apple tree items are still in situ, near hobbit home (even though pose on Magic Apple Tree went wonky, so you get swallowed by the tree), but tree house and bridge have gone way of all prims, i.e. deleted in favour of newer items.
Old tree house had a waterfall grove at the bottom, spiral staircases (impossible to negotiate, one of the reasons it went), elegant viewing terraces, a splashy pool halfway up the tree, and a nice patio nook with cushions at the top, plus lanterns, nature sounds and some sort of bird of prey. Have numerous pics (e.g. here) of Ishbel and I floating in the pool, Marilena posing elegantly at the poolside, teaching meetings in the top treehouse room etc. Feel quite nostalgic just writing about it.
However don't think was just nostalgia that prompted the click-buy. Products definitely seem improved, but basically as soon as entered moon garden, all with moonbeam twinkles and lush grass and meditation pads and a waterfall and a cool tree-climbing animation - it is is all just SO PRETTY and so SL that I thought - blow realistic baked-in shadows and artfuly distressed concrete - this is Magic.

Was going to replace greenhouse with moon garden, but as noted yesterday, have decided greenhouse is too cute to delete, so it was summery coast house that went. Did a fraps of the house before deleting.
With 600 prims at disposal, rezzed moon garden and set about decorating. The thing about a Hathor garden is that it is pretty much loaded with stuff already, but think sometimes you just have to go over the top, so piled on some more plants, a bird bath, a bird feeder, birds, beer, knitting, more birds, buterflies, more plants, more butterflies and a cute rabbit. I put on my fairy crown and rode my fairy steed around, for added effect.

Yesterday got Pancha to come along and lounge with me by the waterfall. Think this makes the cuteness complete.

Bye-bye Screenr, hello fraps

2011-05-23T19:18:00.004-06:00

No. of videos which failed to publish on Screenr: 5 (bad); No. of minutes it took to to buy fraps and download it: 10 (good); No. of minutes it took to work out how to record a video in fraps: 5 (v. good); No. of minutes it took to work out how to edit and save a video use Windows Movie Maker: about 60 (bad)
Relationship with Screenr somewhat under strain. Had been using it happily to record video in SL. Can only do 5 minutes, but in some ways that is opportunity rather than constraint, as they say.

However, had something of a SL-fest on Saturday (after 9 days away from SL) looking round Homes and Gardens expo, doing some dancing to virtual Albannach, and fitting in some photo shooting for the 52 weeks of colour. Attempted to capture some of this for posterity, and was successful with Albannach vid, but film of Homes expo persistently failed to publish, so had to rerecord it (see above, it ends with me purchasing the Julia Hathor enchanted moon grotto, but that's another story).
After this was downhill all the way, as tried to record one vid of the Spring Home that am about to delete on Infolit iSchool, and another of the greenhouse on Noyo (which was going to dismantle, but doing the tour reminded me how much I like it, so it stays). In end recorded tour of greenhouse 3 times, each time attempting to publish it endless (well, not literally) times, v. frustrating.
Thus purchase of fraps today. Downside is that it captures the whole screen, rather than allowing you to frame the part you want. Upside is that it records inworld sounds and is simply toggled on and off with the F9 key.

In heady rapture proceeded to record 3 tours had failed with before: the 2 mentioned above plus a broomstick tour round Infolit (since am just clearing out the cherry trees and installing summer), which had tried to record on Thursday. Also recorded art installation by Pixels Sideways and a brief cherry blossom idyll. Files run beautifully on my computer, but are huge, and as want to share some of these with world have to fiddle around with them in Windows Movie Maker. This is in fact why have never bought fraps until now, as see this is dreadful slippery slope towards yet more late nights playing with pixelated technology. Edited 2 videos and uploaded them to Youtube (where resolution seems pretty low grade, or could be way Movie Maker Saved the project, the saving options seem somewhat obscure to me, having been user-friendly-fied to point where not clear what is actually going on).
Anyway, above you should see the greenhouse tour.
My, I do sound twee.

4th Rez Day

2011-05-03T18:37:00.011-06:00

Years in SL: 4 (good); No. of rez day greetings: one (better than nothing)
Have not tended to make much fuss about rez days, though had toyed with idea of having a party this year. Am not v. good party person since generally assume that will be disaster and no-one will turn up. However, more to point, am snowed under with work, plus have been handicapped on SL front because:

1) Have been away from office for 2 weeks and therefore dependent on laptop for SL fun;

2) Said laptop started making clunkety-clunk noises about 12 days ago, never a good sound for a laptop. Think bit might have got loose and interfered with fan. Laptop did not crash, but hope to get good bit more mileage from it, so am not risking using it til it's been (hopefully) fixed by Samsung Laptop Expert.

3) Seized by laptop deprivation, made impulse purchase of cute Samsung mini-laptop. Whilst have bonded with new purchase for blogging and suchlike as is lighter, smaller and has more battery life (plus was cool conference accessory), is basically carp as regards SL. Can get onto SL, but spends ages being grey, graphics never resolve properly even on lowest settings, and it sort of flickers periodically. Therefore is OK for emergency SL (collecting & sending IMs etc.) but not for much else.

Thus, no time for party organisation. Was even late for first time with 52 weeks of colour posting, so posted Periwinkle on Saturday and then today celebrated with Tangerine (this week's colour) and then pics of rez day outfit, also seen above. Floaty eh. Will wear it for LILAC conference report meeting tomorrow, though possibly minus the butterfly hair corsage.

Checked up on land: as usual several things had crashed into my parcel in Noyo e.g. this jet fighter and had to return them.

Also made sure cats were ok: turned up they needed updating (you can tell this because they have Update Me in red hovertext above them). Update included exciting new animation, Play. When click cat and then click Animation and then click Play and then click Yes when asked Is It Ok To Animate Your Avatar then you do a throwing-the-tiny-coloured-ball animation, and if all goes to plan, cat starts patting and chasing tiny coloured ball, very cute. Only problems were:

1. When had Played with Quilt and then clicked Quilt again to get Qulit to jump to be cuddled, Quilt obstinately refused and started chasing ball further and further away, well outside her cat range. In end got her to Jump Home.
2) When tried Play with Naomi later, she was stuck in a corner and kept ignoring the ball, so I got her to jump home. Then started to click Play again, but it crashed. So may be a few bugs in animation.
Also, is tendency for ball to get stuck under sofa or behind chairs, in which case cat sits and stares at it until you come and retrieve the ball for her. This seems somewhat like RL. Cutest thing is probably when cat picks up ball and drops it at your feet (first cat pic), though not sure have ever seen actual cat do this, is somewhat beneath them. 2nd cat pic shows Naomi running after ball. Note cat and ball shadows (other shadows are from the windows).

So that was the day in SL.

Will not list all dull jobs should have been doing instead of playing with virtual cats, creeping round lag-laden shopping precincts waiting for vendors to rez, and posing in new clothes on romantic sea shores. Would be just too, too tedious.

Hunts, Bananas

2011-04-01T10:13:00.011-06:00

Hunts completed:one (good); No. of times same hunt completed: twice (bad; but v. quick the second time); No. of Kawaii objects collected: numerous (but some more kawaii than others)

The Albero Kawaii hunt just finished, Albero being a shopping district covering a couple of sims and kawaii being Japanese for Cute. Did it twice since first sent Dimitrova out to do the time consuming stuff untroubled by IMs, then Dimi compiled a handy set of landmarks which she dropped to me.
Am thinking of developing taxonomy of hunts, which could become a faceted classification scheme:
Facet 1: Process: do you have to do something with a HUD BEFORE you get anywhere near the objects, or do you wander about looking for the Hunt object directly? Is there a list of hints and landmarks on a well maintained Hunt website, or are you reliant on some selfless SL resident providing an online walkthru?
Facet 2: Material: are the objects clothing, interior design, plants; steampunk artefacts etc.?
Facet 3: Energy: is the hunt object v. easy to recognise and find, or is it tiny and hidden in obscure corners that you can only discover if you are prepared to spend hours camming under the flooboards and on the roof?
Facet 4: Space: Is the hunt in one shop? one sim? the whole grid? the inifinite metaverse?
Facet 5: Time: Firstly: How long is the hunt on for? Secondly: What's the fastest you can get round?
Facet 6: Matter: At the end of it, are you flitting from item to exquisite item going mwuah mwauh you godlike creators, or have you just got a pile of random junk from shops that couldn't get into any of the quality hunts?

The kawaii would have be classified as follows:
Facet 1: Process: HUD. You attach the HUD, and then you are given a visual clue to tell you where the first hunt object is. When you find the next object, you click it. This fills up a square on your HUD and gives you the next visual clue. Eventually, after you have crashed a zillion times camming and flying round and round the 2 sims, you have a completely filled-in HUD which says "you did it" in English and Japanese. You don't get much help in solving the HUD-oriented problems (would say it rates a "4" on a scale from "no brainer (1)" to "impossible (6)"), but you do get a full landmarked list of shops. And all the landmarks worked!
Facet 2: Materials: Mostly homes and gardens.
Facet 3: Energy: The visual-clue thing was quite tricky, because you have to try and work out where the picture was taken, and if all you can see is grey lag, this means you have zero chance of success. In fact in end rather enjoyed puzzling out clues from roof colour and types of building in background etc., despite zillion crashes. One you have a complete HUD it is easy-peasy, since you then just use the list of links to shops and collect the prize from the entrance of each shop.Facet 4: Space: Over 2 sims.
Facet 5: Time: Two weeks: rather frustrating if those are two really busy weeks.
Facet 6: Matter: Mwuah mwuah.

All I need now is a notation scheme and I could represent any hunt by a string of numbers separated by eccentric punctuation.

The information scientists amongst you will know that I have been ALMOST using the categories devised by the guru Ranganathan for the Colon faceted classification scheme. Alas, whilst I was devising the list I had thought I WAS using them, but I see now that "Process" should be "Personality" and "Material" shouldn't be in it at all. And to think I used to teach that stuff. Still, I can't be bothered to change it, so this is officially my revision of Ranganathan's work, for application to SL hunts.
Realise have left out cost element (most hunts are free, but increasingly there are 1 Linden or 10 Linden hunts), perhaps that is an aspect of energy, since you have to expend energy to earn the money to buy Linden.

After all this only remains to show you some of the booty.
Firstly you see me doing my "52 weeks of colour" shot for tomorrow (banana colour, if you hadn't guessed). Actually only the tv and panda are from the hunt, but the picture is in the kawaii spirit. That banana phone belongs to Nigl and has been on top of the library for years, it's a sort of landmark.
Secondly, Dimi with all the hunt items, everything you see is hunt, apart from her hair and a small grey wall in the background. Thirdly, a particularly kawaii collection of panda doll, boho couch, smiley cloud decal and smiley rocket. The sack with the rainclouds was actually the box the Cleo stuff came in, cute or what. In the last hunt that had some Cleo it was about a week before I realised that what I was displaying was the box rather than the actual gift.
Finally a rather arty shot of me and the Giant Dandelion pose. I already have dandelion fields (dandelion flowers and dandelion clocks) and dandelion seed particle emitters so I can set up a nice dandelion-rich scene for the summer.

Final thought. When I have in my inventory a panda cushion, a panda toaster, a panda hug-doll and a panda hot-chocolate flask, why has it taken this long for me to use the blog tag "panda"?

Moderated success

2011-04-01T01:42:00.001-06:00

No. of sessions agreed to moderate: 4 (good); No. of sessions actually moderated: 3 (bad)

Wrote this post a week ago and then forgot to post. Is about Virtual Worlds conference which is History now, but am loathe to waste some writing. Also reading through realise it sounds as though conference was bit disasterous whereas (will hasten to add) was mostly fine and even good. Really it was.
Anyway.

Somewhat belatedly, am continuing tale of moderating at the Virtual Worlds conference. Was, as they say, one of Pride Before Fall. Had felt rather pleased with moderation at Friday's events, and rashly agreed to do 4 more sessions next day. However, failed on 3 counts, namely:
1) Did not manage to find out SL name of first speaker on day before;
2) Did not check that knew how to get to first venue;
3) Did not allow enough time on day to establish 1) and 2).
Thus found self at point when was supposed to be starting session lacking both speaker and venue. Did have tiny bit of excuse in that would have been v. helpful to have been given SL name of speaker rather than first life one (since various googlings turned up a blank), and also would have helped if landmark for venue had actually landed one IN said venue rather than considerable distance away.

However, was generally mortifying. Encountered one equally baffled punter at the teleport point, and said would contact him if found speaker/venue. Then TPed to anywhere in area that had green dots (since dots mean People). When eventually found my session, was already 10 past the hour (and person had offered to help was already in audience, so doubly embarrassing).

Apologised profusely to speaker afterwards (1st pic) and did manage to help 2 people in audience with sound and general info. Anyway, after this things could only look up, and connected with other 3 speakers in good time. Last of my sessions, on Open Wonderland, really moderated itself, since was team of people who were fielding questions in text chat.

In between had attended keynote of colleague Jackie, which thought was v. good. Afterwards went to last few sessions, including Zana talking about Conne River project (2nd pic) and Graham talking about Opensim (3rd pic). Also v. good. Pleased to see Kattan in audience. After that she visited cat and took picture 2 posts ago.

Had look round exhibition, well in fact was mostly amusing excursion round exhibition since discovered flying thing on Virtual Pioneers stand, and spent most of my time zooming round it in this, rather than contemplating pedagogic virtues of exhibits. Here is a celebratory animoto about VWBPE that I did.

Kitten growing

2011-03-24T16:44:00.005-06:00

Progress of kittens: steady (good)

Some of you may be waiting for another update about VWBPE. However more are likely to be wondering: how are Quilt and Silky?

So, here you see them. Quilt is shown sleeping, which is what kittens need to do to grow healthy and strong. Are those hind paws cute, or what.

Silky has not grown any more, since that was already her at her prim peak. However she looks rather fetching in this pose.

Cat diversion

2011-03-21T22:39:00.009-06:00

Kittens grown to cats: 1 (good); New kittens bought: 1 (bad)

Have more to say about VWBPE conference, but today has seen a new addition to the menagerie on Infolit, so will have a short cat diversion. After the conference was over, Kattan visited Dimitrova's kitten, which is kitten no longer, but full grown cat. And v. cute it is too, it sleeps, it plays with butterflies and (as Dimitrova found out today) it will pad across floor and leap into owner's arms and cling limpet-like until DROPPED.

In Fact 1st embedded video will show this in some detail. [curses curses they aren't embedding. Will try and work out why tomorrow. In meantime this is the link http://www.screenr.com/V4o]
1) Cat ignores Dimitrova
2) Cat shows fatal attraction to Dimitrova and jumps to be cuddled
3) Dimitrova forgets she is supposed to DROP cat and instead DETACHES it. Panic!
4) In haste to restore cat to thr ground, Dimitrova inadvertantly drags and drops cat half way up window
5) Dimitrova clicks cat to jump home, which it does, only suspended 5 feet in air
6) Dimitrova takes and rezes cat again. All is well.
[and this is the link to this video http://www.screenr.com/V4o]

After these excitements, only sane response was to buy another cat. Thus 2nd video shows kitten turning from a cardboard box into a kitten.
She is called quilt, because she is patchwork coloured.
Like a quilt.
Oh well.

Moderating

2011-03-18T18:34:00.005-06:00

Sessions moderated: 4 (good); Percentage of speakers appearing on time to give talks: 100 (v. good); No. of pics taken during moderating: 5 (bad)
Calmed self before conference through use of tai chi (see first pic) and it had desired result since rather enjoyed moderating duties in end. Only down side was that since taking pics seemed to trigger crash computer out of SL, did not dare take any until last of 4 sessions, when had minor supporting role.
This was session about "veteran dialogues": ex soldiers in USA using SL to talk about their experiences. Jenaia was really chairing session and I was sort of backup link person. Therefore risked taking pics at that point, and duly crashed. This showed had been sensible not to try previously, but was pity since in particular session from Globalkids Bixby had been very photogenic (involved Globalkids dressed in bee costume raising teen grid avatar from coffin). Earlier in day had encouraged own students into SL and know that majority attended at least one session, after some fiddling around with headphones and audio settings. Saw various other people, including Dousa who was involved in recording some of the conference, and had some nice chitchat with Loreena.
Am wondering whether crashing thing could be avoided by some sort of computer upgrade. However, would have to be inexpensive computer upgrade, what with funding cuts to Higher Ed etc.

Attended some of a session about recording stuff, and learnt about new screenr-type app, which immediately used to record part of the session on recording stuff. Am not sure can remember what it was called exactly - screencastomatic? - something like that. Feature was that you had the opp to upload, download, whatever, and then clicked "done" and it was gone. Main disadvantage over screenr (apart from it not staying online) was that it seemed to have a rather small area for the recording screen.

After this went to session on focus groups. Quickly emerged that I WAS the session on focus groups, since only other person was presenter. He had filled in time by putting words expressing pain in having noone turn up to your session on innovative interactive board. Had interesting conversation: at least I thought it was interesting. Only thought afterwards that perhaps should have asked for a copy of innovative board as prize for being only person there.
Finished day, heady with earlier moderating success, by volunteering to moderate more sessions tomorrow. May regret this.

Awesome-ish

2011-03-18T09:15:00.005-06:00

No of sessions am moderating at VWBPE: 4 (good) No of speakers with whom have not made contact: 1 (bad); No. times crashed out of SL in last 18 hours: more than 18, I think (v.v.bad)
Have not had serious crashing problems for a couple of years, but am currently attending the VWBPE conference and with huge crowds in first session was just like old days of no sound, greyness, bits of sim suddenly vanishing (see first pic) and sudden crashes. Sims created for conf are steampunk and awesome (see 2nd pic) but wonder if also a bit lagtastic. Particular worry as am moderating sessions shortly and do not want to crash in mid-moderate.
But enough negativity! Loads of speakers and lots of them v. interesting - and all free! And you can attend the conf in slippers.
As I am doing.
Or is that too much information.
http://vwbpe11.vwbpe.org/

Kitty

2011-03-10T06:42:00.004-06:00

Breedable kitten acquired: 1 (good)
Up til now have resisted fashion for breedable SL animals. Idea is that you have at least one of each sex of animal, you set them to breed, then after X days a prim package arrives that turns into a baby animal. Fortunately do not have to watch Mating Animation, apparently it all happens by osmosis.
Way that inventors of breedable animals make money is buy selling food (you buy prim food, put it near prim animal, and if food runs out animal stops moving and dies).
First big craze was chickens, then bunnies and horses, and anyway latest one is cats. As readers will know already, have fondness for cats, so have been tempted esp. as if you just have one cat and set breeding OFF, then only costs 170 Linden for 2 months worth of food.
As didn't want Mitsy and Goggles to be jealous, Dimitrova bought the kitten. It arrives in a cardboard box, which you rez and have to wait 5 mins or so whilst it gives twee messages about kitten opening eyes etc. etc. Then suddenly cardboard box TURNS INTO the kitten (bit spooky, that). Perhaps idea is that kitten had to eat box to get first nourishment.
Anyway, you rez the kitten, shove some food near it, and then can watch it grow for 1st week, until it becomes an Adult Cat. At birth Silky the Kitten was about 4 inches, but after a day it has grown to 6. You see her here in close up, and then with Dimi, for scale. She blinks, and does breathing animations, and also gambles around and you can hug her, but when took these pics she kept saying she needed more sleep, so all you get here is Sleeping Kitty.
Silky may be future source of quiet joy. Alternatively she may simply be drain on finances. If you want to see her she is in the CILR on Infolit iSchool.

The luck of the lost pig

2011-03-04T08:02:00.004-06:00

Hours spent waiting for "S" to come up on a lucky board in February: 2 (bad); Hours spent on this blog in February: zero (bad, very bad)

Spent 2 hours a couple of weeks ago waiting for letter "S" to come up on this Lucky Board in the Aju shop. During that time "D" came up four times. Know this since actually got Dimitrova to hang round (so wouldn't be troubled by friends expecting me to do something more constructive than lurk round a lucky board waiting to snag a cute item of virtual furniture). Eventually "S" did come up and was able to clutch item to Inventory and later position it in yet another new house (see here). However of course when teleported into Aju yesterday, "S" came up straightaway. Why does that happen? Must be a Law of The Lucky Board.

On another note, when clearing up after the Inf6011 class last week I found this escaped pig outside the Educational Informatics village. It had been there for a year, floating in space, the result of some mismanaged piece of Editing or perhaps just of someone who had decided to Abandon Pig in mid flight. Anyway, it was swiftly Returned to its owner's Lost and Found.

Of course, could make up some elaborate story about pig making bid for freedom and an eternal flight over Infolit iSchools mossy hills.

But, after all, it is just prims. And, to be frank, not very ornamental prims either.

Hmmm, I feel a bit mean, now.

Trying to keep up

2011-01-23T11:11:00.006-06:00

Cute stuff viewed: lots (good); Cute stuff bought: some (good); Animotos created: 1 (good); Guilt factor in time wasted faffing round SL viewing and buying: high (bad)

So, no actual work done in SL since last blog, but reasonable amount of activity. Rediscovered cute furniture shop and bought sculpty giant leaf with ladybird and pose on it, also (elsewhere) 50 Linden Friday pink poolside chair (see pic) and 2 items featured in new Oh My Stars sim (see latest 52 colours post). And some trees and a coat and a pair of trousers and doubtless other things that I can't even remember now.
Think spent largest amount of time converting 2 screenr videos of dancing at the Arvel end-of-year party into an animoto and then posting it to Arvel ning. To date has had 4 views, but noone has rated it, which find disappointing. This desire for tangible approval from people that don't know is also rather worrying. Could have been worse i.e. people could have rated it a one-star vid, but on whole people only tend to rate things if they like them. Oh well. Anyway, here is the vid.

Whatever happened to the last 4 hours?

2011-01-20T12:52:00.014-06:00

No. of SL pictures uploaded to Flickr since last post on this blog: 160 (good); No. of posts on Yoshikawa fashion blog since last post on this blog: 8 (exquisite yet quirky); No. of Screenrs & Animotos recorded since last post on this blog: 6 (good); No. of posts on this blog since last post on this blog: zero (obviously) (bad)

Appears to be over 6 weeks since last blogged here, so brief reflection seems in order. Of course have had Xmas in between which is always bit of a blogging lull. Still 6 weeks is a long time, during which (as can be seen above) have been busy bee in other social media, and have also done fair share of talks, meetings etc. etc. in SL.
Possible factors for blogging failure include:

1. 52 weeks of colour challenge. Majority of population will need reminding that each week Luna Jubilee announces a new colour, and to keep to Challenge have to post an outfit in that colour before end of week. Have completed 10 weeks! Have even managed outfits in green and sienna! In fact seems a pity that only 42 more weeks to go! Also starting to get sucked into that vortex of time which is Commenting on Other People's Posts, since Luna rather amazingly is commenting on the zillions of blogs which are following challenge, and this has even drawn in a few comments from others on my pics, so of course I have to at the least do some Silent Faves on Flickr.

2. Am starting to feel need to do interior design posting too. Started when put pics into the SL House and Garden photo comp on Flickr in August. Were supposed to be only 3 prizes, but was given special 4th prize which was cruelty really, since now can only strive to recreate said glory. Took ages photographing & photoshopping entries for "colours of fall" (=autumn) Flickr comp, but with disappointing result that a) noone faved my pics and b) winner of comp has never been announced, even though comp ended last year. Anyway, sad thing is that have started to Crave Faves, and (since know that to she that giveth shall be given) have started doing some Faves myself and even odd comment. Must be admitted that most of people who fave me are designers whose work is featured in my pics. therefore is scarcely disinterested. But, hey, a fave is a fave.

3. Am now dabbling in video, using Screenr screen capture and often blending video clips and pics to create a slideshow on Animoto. Have been encouraged in this endeavour by getting the Golden Crown at the ARVEL meeting before Xmas for 5 minute vid about Infolit iSchool. Has to be said that were only 2 entrants, but still, this shows this is all adding up to pattern of amazing success in the media field.

4. Have been doing loads of stuff, but lots of it is same old same old: arrange SL interviews, return abandoned vehicles to people that have crashed into my land, go to VWER meetings, arrange discussions, take endless pictures of self and photoshop them, observe griefing and wait for someone else to mop up the problem, create winter wonderland, delete winter wonderland, get overexcited by new shop selling cute plants/ hair/ animated kittens.
Still find this riveting to do, but perhaps no longer to ponder upon.

5. Having started to write sort of short stories, so perhaps all creative juices are leaking into these.

6. Is possible that have lost sense of humour. Assuming that ever had one.

Anyway, will finish with brief account of SL activities today, namely:

1. Bought new cardigan

2. Considered buying new blouse in Zaara's. Looked at them. Decided not to.

3. Attended large chunk of Metanomics meeting (on: experiences of Queensland flooding)

4. Whilst there, saw that Chimera had some rather nice hair

5. Looked at the Object profile and tp-ed to the new-to-me shop

6. Tried on hair. Bought hair

7. Discovered that browser has been creating separate files for each day's chatlog rather than bunging them in the same one. Relief in some ways since had thought was simply not logging chat at all. But - Why oh why?

8. Attended VWER meeting. Took pictures. Said some things.

9. Took pics of self in new outfit, in new Greenhouse house (created yesterday)

10. Photoshopped pictures

11. Uploaded to Flickr, responded to some Flickr Faves & did fashion blog post

12. Reflected that all this answers my question "where did the evening go to?"

. . . .

More of the same

2010-12-04T16:19:00.003-06:00

Screenr captures taken: 1 (good); Screenr captures failing: 1 (bad); Registrations with Mendeley: 1 (good, I think)
Today had 2 meetings, namely the first Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Meeting, in which committed self to various things that will doubtless regret later, and meeting with Pancha to discuss article about SL journal club. Invited her over to the new skating rink and were able to skate, drink and talk about qualitative research all at the same time. During this discovered:
1) That hot chocolate dispenser only dispenses hot chocolate to me, somewhat pointless. Rectified anomoly by putting in Gluwein keg and tray of functioning hot choclate from What Next.
2) That is service called Mendeley that does academic stuff. At any rate have registered for it, and it appears it will aid our research work mightily, if I can work out what it's for.
3) That sometimes Screenr doesn't work. Recorded 5 mins of Pancha and me going round and round rink, and when last looked it was processing the vid merrily, but certainly doesn't work now and also can't download anything. Will give it til tomorrow in case Screenr Fairy was merely sleeping.
As substitute have created v. short Animoto video with some still pics that took of me and Pancha. Here it is. (NB 1st pic, above, shows me talking to a reindeer with a coal tit on its nose, in Noyo. The picture of the VWBPE meeting was just really too dull to post.)

Winter

2010-12-03T19:40:00.003-06:00

Penguins installed on ice rink: 2 (good); Hot chocolate cabins installed on ice rink: 1 (piping hot); Snowmen installed on icerink: 3 (a nuclear family); Skating poseballs installed on icerink: 7 (v. good); No. of skating poseballs for which you do not have to turn off your AO : zero (bad); Enjoyment gained from skating round and round a virtual ice rink: considerable (sad, or what)

Motivation for blogging only seems to occur when not concerned with Professional Life. So not surprising that suddenly felt urge to blog about new Winter Wonderland have created in bay area of Infolit iSchool. In fact good part of Infolit is now Winter Wonderland, since changed seasons approx. a week ago when felt need to cheer self up after hard work. Autumn colour is gone to be replaced by snow emitters, trees with frost on, snowball givers, ice portals etc. etc. To begin with just changed terrain in mountains but today basically covered whole island with snow. This mirrors RL which has been covered in snow for some days.
Created Screenr/Animoto vid showing self cavorting on and around ice. Used one of the Animoto Seasonal Themes, which has upside that scenery in it looks a bit like the SL scenery I am filming, but that is also a sort of a downside too. Anyway, here it is.

Colours

2010-11-22T15:53:00.007-06:00

Colours: 52 (challenging)
As usual when doing oodles in SL have had no time to blog same. However can be noted that do appear to have enough time for fashion blog posts here, here and here. These are part of the 52 Weeks of Colour bloggers challenge, started by Luna Jubilee. Each week she announces a new colour and then bloggers fall over themselves to dress up in it, blog and post the pics to Flickr. Or some people signal coolness by declaring how dreadful one would look if one DID dress entirely in said colour, and blog something which is meant to amusingly hint at the colour, in an artful way. However, as can be seen on right, own approach is simply to drape self in variations in colour, in hopes that at least one of the colours is the right one.
Main challenge seems to me in finding 52 different real colours, but even by 3rd week emerges that unreal colours will also feature i.e. this week was goldenrod week. Now, goldenrod is a real plant and is sort of mustardly colour, fading to grungy kind of brown (at least stuff you get in bargain bouquets at Tesco's is). However, colour as set by Luna is sort of pleasant pale honey. Anyway, main benefit is that may discourage spending on new clothes in SL, since have set self a sub-challenge, which is to try and only use existing inventory. Not very difficult, actually, so far grey, blue and goldenrod have been a case of Spoilt For Choice. As you can see, even managed to find golden nail polish.
This is all rather in the line of fiddling whilst Rome burns, as good SL sims are renounced, LL introduces bizarre and unsettling things like display names (so, "sheila.yoshikawa" is now just my username??? but it's my NAME!), and various aspects of the UK public sector teeter on brinks.
But one has to get ones priorities right. And colour-matched nails surely must come pretty high up on anyone's priority list.

R&R

2010-11-04T14:54:00.008-06:00

Relaxing horseback rides taken: 1 (v. good)
Have felt somewhat stressed out not to mention suffering from what appears to be yet another RL cold, so today decided to insert a little rest and relaxation by exercising a newish purchase, namely Golden Streak the palomino horse.
Had tried out an AKK horse demo before, and been v. impressed, but they are not cheap. However, when Pancha showed me the build she had created for the Vet School at her uni, was reminded about them.
First Dimitrova tried out a demo, and then I took plunge, fulfilling girlhood fantasy of owning a palomino (fantasy actually involved 2 palominos, one of which won Derby, and one the Grand National. At least had realised even as youngster that needed different type of horse for 2 events, but hadn't appreciated that racehorses have to be thoroughbreds and you don't get palomino thoroughbreds)
Anyway, after that quick bit of horse lore, cut to me investing the Lindens in a fine palomino animal with integral bridle and saddle.
Its ears twitch!
It snorts!
It goes clippety clop!
It trots!
It gallops!
It jumps!
It flies!
You can dimount and lead it!
You can get it to pose (rear, paw earth, bow etc.)!
Really do find it strangely soothing to trot through forest or gallop along beach. Is this odd? Anyhow, seem to be reasonable number of other odd folks around, if it is. Here are some arty pictures of same. In first one Golden Streak looks disdainfully at a cow on Drowsy whilst turning his back on a momento mori, and in the 2nd we visit a gypsy encampment on Zigana.

When I should have been marking

2010-10-31T17:48:00.000-06:00

Where did it go?

2010-10-29T09:10:00.004-06:00

Stuff done: lots (good/bad/indifferent)
In terms of blogging have to award self mark of C double minus. Is more than whole month since last blogged. As have noted before, when v.v. busy in SL, then blogging tends to slump. So as a quick catchup:
No. of new student sky homes created: 1 (good)
No. of new autumnal trees bought: 10? 12? (who knows)
No. of halloween houses created: 1 (good)
No. of sessions done with first year students in SL: 4 (good? only they can tell)
No. of 3D versions created of information behaviour models developed through empirical research using a grounded theory approach: 1 (v. good)
No. of times Opinionator repurposed for specific exercise: 2 (good)
No. of Infolit iSchool events: 3 (good)
No. of fashion blog postings: 4 (good)
No. of houseboats bought: 2 (floating)
No. of tops bought: who's counting? (not me)
No. of unwarranted and surprise price hikes by Linden Lab: 1 (v.v.v. bad)
& so forth & so on.
Last item is one which has cast pall of gloom over proceedings since announced a few weeks ago that educator's discount was being removed, thus doubling price of island. Consternation, anger etc. followed. was then announcement that people could buy up to 2 years in advance at old price (which am trying to do) but still is bit gloomy in long term. Apart from anything else seems like Community of educators, librarians etc. will get fragmented.
Reacted by attending meetings and buying a lot of clothes.
Also pumpkins. Creation of halloween stuffage seems to have escalated to insane proportions, can scarcely go inworld without being bombarded with message cards about cute new pumpkin lights/seats/decals. Was tempted today by 50% off on cauldrons from What Next, but in the end got free Wizard cosi from NRD and 1 Linden staff from Tekeli-li and then wasted, ahem, ahem, spent hour or so flouncing round Immersiva taking pics.
Choose first one as looked vaguely apocolyptic e.g. SL disintegrating because of ill advised customer relationship management on part of LL staffers.

Czech, lesson

2010-09-23T12:25:00.003-06:00

Sessions in viewer 2: 2 (bad); Training sessions attended in Czech: 1 (foreign yet familiar)
Today was giving talk about SL in Prague. Created short video as well as presentation, so will link those at the end. During talk had to to stop every few sentences to let interpreter translate into Czech, which worked surprisingly well as interpreter was v. good. She also later whispered English translation of Czech talks into my ear.
However, by time of SL workshop (given in afternoon by Zdenek, who have mentioned before in this blog) she had gone. This was not v. important as I was merely set decoration, with Zdenek doing hard work inducting Czech newbies into SL in Czech.
Was one element in which I was newbie also since have not yet Bitten the Viewer 2 Bullet but have been skulking along in comfortable old Viewer 1. This has not mattered since haven't done any how-to-use-SL sessions over summer. Now new academic year is upon me, though, will have to come up to speed v. rapidly, since think should use it with first years. To be more precise, will have to start teaching using Viewer 2 in 9 days time.
As can see from screenshot above, Viewer 2 was what was installed in lab, so took opportunity to find out where things were (in which partially suceeded). In fact was not very first time had experienced V2: went into it by mistake on someone else's machine last week, then took fright (Where had new IMs gone! Where was the map! Why was inventory taking 10 minutes to load! Why is the chat box so small! etc etc). This time had been in a good 5 mins before realised that clothes was wearing were not clothes was wearing when logged out yesterday, but clothes had been wearing when last used Viewer 2. Remembered others discussing this glitch, and know this means must plump wholeheartedly for this viewer 2 thing.
Anyway, ppt, Using Second Life as a learning environment, is here on Slideshare: and this is the video, made with Screenr and then Animoto. Have also put it on Youtube, but it isn't (for reasons am too lazy to fathom) as high res on Youtube, so this is the Animoto version.

403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it

2010-09-20T05:22:00.004-06:00

Unintelligible messages received from Twitter: 1 (bad); Nostalgia factor: 5 (nostalgic)

Just tried to log into my sheilayoshikawa Twitter account and received the above message. Was not logging in for any serious purpose, so am instead assailed by sudden nostalgia for days when there were REAL error messages, ones which gave you no clue whatsover about what was wrong. Still do get those sometimes, but tend to be associated with V. Serious Meltdowns involving blue screen of death and stange series of numbers rushing over screen, which is not a situation where you can have a good old nostalgic wallow.
Sometimes they would be a bit like the one above, implying that it wasn't just some strange random error, it was a personal piece of malice directed at YOU. "The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it": that's an error message with attitude.
The most famous web error message was the "File 404 not found" one, which you got if the page you wanted no longer existed and the webmaster hadn't been bothered to do a redirect or explanation. You still get it now and then but there was a time when you would be more or less guaranteed to get it once a day, and there were some wonderful spoof websites and collections of amusing/dreadful 404 pages.
After half hearted googling have managed to retrieve a page which I think is one of the more amusing spoofs - except it is in what Google Translate thinks is Estonian http://puhkused.com/ Is that right?
[several hours later] Have managed to find ye olde Geek Haiku - ah, this was my favourite:

A File That Big?

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Discussion 31 August 12 noon

2010-08-30T17:02:00.002-06:00

On Tuesday August 31 there will be a discussion in the virtual world, Second Life: Contribute your ideas for future events on Infolit iSchool
When: Tuesday August 31st, 12 noon SLT (see http://tinyurl.com/323l83u for start time in other countries)
Where: Infolit iSchool http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/127/236/22/
We already have lined up for Oct/Nov 2010: talks from Alexandria Knight (Esther Grassian outside Second Life) & Adra Letov (Diane Nahl outside SL) and Sheila Yoshikawa (i.e. me) plus a reading group! But we want more! Come with more ideas of visits, discussions, events to do with information literacy, digital literacies and learning.

Exhibit

2010-08-22T04:40:00.007-06:00

Exhibitions created and fine tuned: 1 (good); Flags acquired: 3 types (good); Quirky Swedish rabbits acquired: 1 (good); Swedish cushions acquired: 1 (mistake)

Have had fairly active week in SL. Most constructive part is probably making the exhibit for IFLA conference discussion. Had originally spent happy hour whilst still in Gothenburg, sifting through houses in inventory to find suitable venue, and settled on older Japanesey building, like one that used to house CILASS in dim and distant. Had got all posters from satellite conference set up, but fact was that it looked a bit messy.

Then had idea of taking pics of RL Gothenburg venue (the Palace) and using these to texture the walls and floor. Is not exactly work of art but think it has nice feel and is at least distinctive & could set it to copy if so desired as is all own work. Completed this box with all the posters, some RL pics, and a board with all the delegates’ names and the briefing for the exercise that produced the posters. Also could not resist a bit of set dressing with a table rather like the ones in the RL venue, a cup, a pencil holder and a pic of a RL poster on a table top.

To house powerpoints, chose same building as the Wilf Saunders Library, a simple wood floor and glass walled box. Discovered in process that creator of this (who also created the Victorian Steampunk sky platform and the thing I used originally as the Departmental office building), is no longer selling homes. Sad. Think they were ahead of their time, at the time (i.e. 2007) but suppose things have moved on.

After putting in selected ppts, and doing some notecards with abstracts and some links to other stuff, created walkway between two buildings with paving and boat, to evoke Gothenburg harbour At least that’s the idea.

Seemed to go down well with people on Thursday, though is scarcely rocket science. Since then have added noticeboard for people to add their own thoughts about Contextual Factors for Information Literacy (that is, if they can work out how on earth noticeboard works, and then manage to type in their thoughts in a mere 30 seconds, no mean feat). Also, by chance, acquired set of Swedish flags: one you wear and wave, one small one to put on table top (so put it on table top) and one full sized flag on pole which waves just like in the Torley Tutorial.

Additionally have small rabbit in Swedish colours, holding carrot and Swedish flag (not sure if carrot is symbolic of anything). These all were acquired because yesterday was setting up a tableau with a diagram of the Information Literate University to create some graphics for a ppt that am giving in RL in Uppsala in a couple of weeks time. Uppsala is also in Sweden, and, finding that lacked Swedish flag, visited the Swedish Institute sim, where hit jackpot. Appears to have been some kind of high-profile wedding celebration, and were boxes lying around containing said set of flags, and rabbit. Only expense was that almost by mistake bought fairly dull heart-shaped cushion in Swedish colour scheme, for 59 Linden. Oh well.

Anyway, after event on Thursday, but before whiteboard and flags, did a quick Screenr screencast for those unfortunates who cannot see the exhibit in SL. Only real regret is that had just changed outfit: Sugarcube had produced a dress for the first time in ages, which was a “50 Linden Friday” item (or is it “60Linden Friday” now?) Whatever, the dress is a shortish fluffy red thing with amusingly patterned leggings. Married this with stiletto boots from G. Field, a black shrug, black tights to bridge gap between pants and stockings (so am covered up, that isn’t the issue) and then some free hair that acquired in Curious Kitties. This was a few days ago when decided that time had finally come to invest in a couple of Curious Kitties hair HUDS, without which you cannot control colour of their most recent hair.
Free CK hair had big black hat, and actually think that hat balances skirt quite well, but, still, it is all a bit red and black and patterned, and might have been better advised to go conservative route for something which after all am publishing on Youtube. Witchy black hats was possibly not image aiming for. Of course, could junk the video and do another – but – frankly – is it worth the effort?
No.
Is possible people might like the hat.

Foolish

2010-08-20T04:23:00.002-06:00

But I forgot and turned up on Tuesday.

Remodelled

2010-08-14T18:43:00.004-06:00

Common rooms remodelled: 1 (good)
Have been spending some time demolishing common room and Nigl/Ishbel's office, and replacing them with new common room/office. Not quite finished yet, but almost there. Aim was to free up some space in the corner of Infolit, for the health information literacy stuff.

Probably should have told Ishbel and Nigl before axing their cute cottage. However they now have pleasant area in new common room, so hope they are not too offended.

And pan upwards

2010-08-13T17:10:00.001-06:00

No. of useless gatcha items bought: 2 (good); No. of screens bought that turn out to look too much like hospital screens to be of any use: 1 (bad); No of pans upwards to sky in Screenr screencast: about 6 (good, but cliched)
Am currently in Sweden and today gave talk about SL which will blog about when Danish gentlemen who was doing podcast has casted the pod. In fact have also been v.active in SL, since the not-inexpensive wifi in hotel is also v. good so am getting full money's worth.
However, when came to blog to post about presentation, found various unfinished blog posts, and decided should finish some of them, especially as the pics which had already uploaded are sort of relevant to one of current activities.
In this post, had already made some notes on 6th August, namely:
"Went inworld for 50 Linden Friday house from Turnip's
Saw notecard about Clemetis Gatcha
Saw installation of ChouChou sound bank
Followed creator profile to Chouchou sim
Thought was worth a screenr
Uploaded it to youtube
meanwhile
ppt is relutely refusing to upload. whyowhy"

hmm, is almost a poem. A bad poem, obviously. Anyway, will proceed to unpack this.

"Went inworld for 50 Linden Friday house from Turnip's": well, that is pretty self explanatory - a house from Turnip's for only 50 Linden. Bit of a no-brainer. Imagine saw some notice about it on the feeds.
"Saw notecard about Clemetis Gatcha": This arrived inworld whilst was in Turnip's waiting for things to rez, I think. Clemetis do cute stuff, and hadn't come across a roulette wheel gatcha before. The first pic is me having paid my 30 Linden, waiting to see which of the bags I'm going to get.
"Saw installation of ChouChou sound bank": This is the second picture. When you touch the boxes you get different kinds of sound - bells, voices, piano etc. After had played with this a bit:
"Followed creator profile to Chouchou sim": which was next couple of hours gone, basically.

There is this location shown in 3rd pic, of dreamy beach with piano and strange ladder into the sky.Then there is a cathedral in the sky and finally a place where you can encounter all the music boxes that I found initially, and buy them.

"Thought was worth a screenr" this was initially because I bought (free) and wore the cinematic HUD on ChouChou, which makes the camera sort of drift round you. I thought what a cool machinima this would make, so dug out my Screenr skills. At once discovered that I couldn't use the HUD when activating screenr, but still ChouChou is v. cool place, so in the end (after junking a number of false starts) made Screenr video. Tha tis embedded at the end of this post. It is silent, idea being that you listen to ChouChou music while you play theScreenr.

"Uploaded it to youtube" naturally. But wasn't totally satisfied with it so didn't upload it to Flickr
"meanwhile
ppt is relutely refusing to upload. whyowhy"
This was the ppt that presented today in RL in Gothenburg. Had put in "placeholder" ppt so could get Slideshare URL for presentation even before had uploaded it. You are supposed to be able to replace one presentation with another version, but essentially could not get this to work after several tries, so inend uploaded it as new. Never did find out why replacing hadn't worked.

Lost and found

2010-08-09T14:19:00.004-06:00

Hours spent trapped in SL: 20 (v. bad); Minutes elapsed between reporting problem and getting fix: 5 (v. good)
Last night was footling about on Infolit iSchool when crashed. Nothing new there, but when tried to log back in, got message "The system is logging you out right now. Your account will not be available until ..." and then it would always give a time that was always 5 mins later than the time I tried to log in. It was v. late so gave up in hope that might sort itself out, and couldn't try again until this evening since am currently in Gothenburg and today was being conference chair for an event about information literacy for which had been lead organiser.
However, when DID try had same problem. Then logged in as Dimitrova and found self hovering in place where had crashed (see pic, Dimi happened to be dressed a la greek goddess at the time). Odd, though was grateful it had happened on Infolit, where am less likely to get bumped around etc.
Anyway, phoned LL at some expense from Sweden and helpful person quickly identified that SL had been "trying to save attachments" after crashing, & failing to do so, obviously, so she just restarted the region and then could log in OK. All attachments in place as well, as far as could tell. One embarrassment was that when asked to spell Sheila Yoshikawa, got v. muddled. Realised that have typed it countless times, but have possibly never been asked verbally to spell it before. May be some message here about literacies, but not quite sure what.

Shopping

2010-08-06T10:58:00.002-06:00

Houses hunted: 12(good); Chairs hunted: 23 (approx); Waffle irons hunted: 1 (it opens, it closes, but it doesn't give waffles)
Have spent ahem (coughs) hours doing the House and Garden hunt, 50 shops, with some good stuff. When finished, rezzed it all out on Infolit (which brough Infolit perilously close to its prim limit, but that's another story)
Mostly people on the hunt were polite but purposeful, with not much chat, but towards the end, when tp-ed to Napoliy again after initial fruitless search, was approached by small lady with offer of help. Not only did she show me where the hunt item was, but she gave me her blog address, where she listed hints for all locations: at http://stephanieleclerc.blogspot.com/2010/08/httpslurl.html. Was very useful for filling in gaps, but did most of it myself.

Here it all is rezzed out, thought at this stage there was one item (a flower in a sack) that was actually the delivery bag and I thought it was the gift til I saw the full stuff on the feeds. Anyhow, here is all the goods rezzed out. This Belle Belle swing is very cute, but, as with all her stuff, a bit primmy.

Now all that remains is to work out what to do with it (inventory beckons, I fear).

Griefed

2010-08-04T16:41:00.007-06:00

Boxes revolving in water at edge of sim: 1 (v. bad); Boxes replicating from first box: zillions (v.v. bad)
Had first taste of griefing on new land. Was pottering round in Heidi home (positioning a new sheep ornament and modding a straw hat to make it look like Heidi's hat, quite successfully I think) when heard noise and went out to see green screens zooming up.
Turned out there was a box bobbing away in the water, held just outside the boundary of my land. Have land set to no object entry, no build, no scripts, so think that stopped it coming on. However could not move or return it since was in Linden-owned water.
Wondered whether this might be connected to earlier incident, when came across Fedex van crashed into the river bank around the same point and returned it to its owner. Perhaps it had just dropped its Parcel of Doom, perhaps owner though Fedex van looked nice where it was and did the griefing out of spite.
Anyway, realised that despite oodles of sessions on How To Deal with Griefing offered at various conferences, had not really paid much attention, since have experienced v.v. little of it up til now.

Tried to at least put owner of offending object in ban list, but curiously the person picker could not find the name in search. Then started desultry search of SL website for place to report griefing to Lindens. Then as was v.v. late in my time zone, decided that perhaps if just logged off and went to bed, someone else would deal with it.

And this morning logged in and voila the thing was gone. So apathy was best policy in this case.

Can you have too many butterflies?

2010-08-01T12:37:00.005-06:00

No. of butterfly objects in room: 11 (good)
Yesterday added another 3 butterflies to my butterfly/art room, namely the 3 hanging in front of the window at the back (they revolve! they are in 3 colours! they are copy! they were only 60 Linden!). This adds to butterfly chairs, butterfly table lamp, butterfly ceiling lights, butterfly table, butterfly ashtray and butterfly emitter. Butterfly emitter is responsible for good number of butterflies visible in picture, and is cunningly placed under table.
Question is: at what point does butterfly overload set in? I suppose at the point that I try to rez one and am told "cannot rez Another Supercute Butterfly in Noyo, because the parcel is too full".
Which means, pretty soon.

Home and abroad

2010-07-25T13:04:00.005-06:00

Utopias visited: 4 (good); Artwork discovered near my land: 1 (good); Amount of land still held in Harms Way: none (good, but not exactly profitable)
Recently discovered four sims which are Art, namely the four Utopia sims which have been created by Bryn Oh. Dimitrova visited Utopia 4, and then a couple of days ago I did a Utopia hop of the other 3. Spent most time on Utopia 3 where there is a spooky statue (see pic) and a very creepy building.
When I got there, realised that it had been blogged by a couple of people on the fashion feeds: one of the features is a tree that turns slowly into a column of shopping trollies. Anyway, there is lots to see and do. Can buy the spooky statue (huge) for 15000 Linden, and is a bit tempting. Coincidentally then discovered that have another artwork by Bryn Oh on my doorstep: next door but one, so to speak. Was created for Helen Keller day last year and seems to be on Linden-donated land. Bit embarrassing that didn't notice it before, in fact.Anyway, adds further to general desirabilty of location.
Location is too desirable if anything; old land was just too laggy and busy to enjoy being on it, but now is very pleasant calmly to do tai chi overlooking the river and cherry blossom, or clamber around the mountain top tweaking the odd pine tree, or sit indoors contemplating view.
Also has distinct zones so am plannng to have some areas stable aand others which can play around with. Was reflecting on fact that thing am most pleased with is the "What Information/Literacy means to me" exhibit, and should really experiment doing more installations with words and visuals.
Have finally said goodbye to all old land in Harm's Way. Following useful conversation with neighbour on old land (who turns out to be friendly and nice, bit late to discover that) parcelled up land small and lowered price. She also said if land set to 0.5 Linden per metre would be picked up by bot and sell instantly. By tier date had only sold two plots, so set all the rest to low price and indeed they all immediately converted to Linden, not that many Linden, but still will keep me in shoes and artworks for a few weeks. Unless I buy the statue, that is.

A wasted evening or a pleasant evening?

2010-07-22T19:22:00.010-06:00

Hours spent in SL last night: [mumbles shiftily] (bad? or good?)
Spent rather a lot of time in SL last night. Have been ruminating on whether this is Good Thing or Bad Thing. Peer pressure pushes one to latter view, but had reasonable amount of fun, so surely must be Good ...
Have been toying with idea of doing autoethnographic study and was thinking (whilst walking to work this morning in RL in pouring rain) about how might put together chatlog and pics and other people's pics to make a rich narrative of what went on. Was thinking could present this in SL, in fact ideal might be if you could be sent on the SAME JOURNEY (which implies some kind of HUD). However, believe that starting point (Relay For Life sims) are gone already. Therefore installations somewhere else in SL with giant posters and perhaps sound might do it, or COULD use one of the tour vehicles with one's commentary going on in text chat as you were flown round.
You may be thinking "surely autoethnography is some sort of cheat research" (unless you yourself are an authoethnographer, obviously). However, you can get published or even a PhD by doing it. This simple fact can be proved by googling "autoethnography aims" (as did but a short while ago).

The basics of autoethnography involve writing about yourself, but have to be illuminating some kind of reserarch problem, obviously, and also have to convince people that you are a sufficiently interesting case that you will give insights to others. Was thinking that perhaps if started by analysing a bit of data then might start refining questons. However, also realise that have just had annual Staff Review session with Head of Dept without word autoethnography passing lips, so perhaps thsi is one of those projects that will talk about for years and then lose interest in.
Anyway last night:
1) Visited Relay for Life sims, flying round the builds in a rather touristic fashion, pausing to try out any particularly cool animation e.g. shovelling coal or playing the church organ. There is big road, with donation points all along it.
2) Followed up on some items, found, notably, a v. pretty blue tree (which was Relay For Life charity item) and some goats. Bought tree but not goats. Sim with goats mostly sells wearable horses and hought horse demo which the tried out on Noyo after planting new tree.
3) Stalked visitor on my land who was outside one of my oriental houses, wearing sort of ronin outfit, in order to take pics.
4) This is point when might have gone home, but Brielle IMed me to ask if liked Scottish piping and next thing was doing a sword dance whilst the live pipes skirled away impressively. Stopped for a dram, then did some more dancing.
5) Looked at iheartsl fashion feed and saw an embedded video of this week's Fabulous Fashion which featured interview with creator of Swansong and Atomic Bambi. Watched it.
6) Remembered had Swansong dress in inventory that had never actually worn. Changed into it and saw it was good. Decided to base a look around it.
7) Tried on shoes, tights, wraps, necklaces, hair etc etc for some considerable time. Decided needed different shoes, went to G. Field where bought shoes AND tights. Also bought hair butterflies from Atomic Bambi.
8) Photographed self in rose garden in G. Field
9) Photoshopped and uploaded to Flickr, and then blogged outfit here.
10) Visited a sim. What? Why? Who knows, it was v. late by then, but think was in pursuit of some cute item. Anyway, ended up in Evans Cafe and at that point crashed out.

So, ever do analysis of the v. interesting night of 21st July, will be in good position to do so..

I discover I have many albums

2010-07-21T05:51:00.006-06:00

No. of pics on Flickr: 2059 (good); No of pics on Picasa: 925. Plus 1000 more (surprising)
Am somewhat dim, but have only just woken up to fact that, since have Blogger blog and upload pics to Blogger blog, therefore as night follows day, have Picasa album containing pics from Blogger blog.
In early days of Blogger it was not owned by Google, and therefore pics went one knows not where into some vast bloggy picture server. Have feeling that when Blogger was bought by Google, for a while Google did not own Picasa (may be wrong about this and do not care enough to check). Anyway, have gone years now uploading pics to Blogger and it was only yesterday, when happened to click on question mark icon on the Upload panel, that was led through to info about Picasa and thence quickly to own Picasa albums.
In fact to multiple albums and also, since blog with multiple identities, multiple albums on multiple accounts. So I find that there are the aforementioned 925 pictures on MY Picasa: 2 albums of Adventuresofyoshikawa (not sure why there are two, looks like there might be a max size), plus 5 pics I uploaded on the Low Prim Living with Style blog (mostly by mistake) and 3 blogger profile pics. Additionally my Sheila Webber account had 1000+ pics that have been uploaded to the Information Literacy Weblog. Dimitrova also has a Picasa space, because of the stuff she uploads to Low Prim Living.

So this may be starting to seem a rather tedious blog post, but really did find it disconcerting to discover this large pool of my own content just sitting there out in the cloud without me realising. Was a bit as though had been placing photos with meaningful captions around my room to make artistic displays and suddenly discover that copies of all the photos were also simultaneously being chucked into a crate in the Departmental Office. As far as can see there is not a backwards link from pic to blog post (which is not surprising, as basically you are just linking from the post to the pic), but the CONTEXT or caption for the posts are therefore lost. Am not now going to waste yet more of my life creating 2000 captions. However, think is the decontextualisation of pics that find a bit odd.
Have not hesistated to make albums public (default being that Blogger albums default to private, which is something; at least they were, so to speak, in the Departmental Office and not in a grab bag in front of WH Smith). However, now that know they are there, might as well chuck them out to the interweb like my other stuff.
So if you want to see just the Yoshikawa pictures: go to .. umm .. I think go to http://picasaweb.google.com/101342941470414817695 May add link to Webber stuff as well, but would have to log out of this first, so will do it later. There is overlap with Flickr set, but not 100%.
Anyway THESE pics are of an exhibition of art created by David Hockney on his iPhone, and then of me doing Tai Chi at home, having liked the Tai Chi balls outside the exhibition gallery. Peace. Harmony. And so forth.

Sakura

2010-07-15T14:21:00.008-06:00

Sakura bonsai bought: 1 (v. good); potted sakura hauled from inventory: 1 (good); sakura petal emitters removed from shop: none (bad)
Today went windsurfing in Bora Bora (for this photoshoot) and ended up browsing round the tikis. Discovered quite a bit of new stuff, including a whole gardening area that was new to me.
Included v. cute display of bonsai (see second picture), and could not resist cherry tree bonsai, which took home and positioned in entrance hall of the chinese house that is tucked on the hillside at Noyo.
From the start in 2007, have named my home land "Sakura" (Japanese for cherry blossom/ tree). So my first plot was called Sakura (as you can see here) and so was the land I have just given up and am still trying to sell ;-(( and now this new land in Noyo has been renamed. Have also kept in part of the original name, Urtahra (see here, Noyo was originally part of the Kahruvel Forest). I always have actual Sakura on my land, and you can see some of them outside in the first picture, a big pink tree near the entrance and some white blossom further off. I am lying on the rocky ground outside, listening to Ishbel's windchime and enjoying the view.
Also did a little bit of tinkering in the room next to the entrance hall, where have put some of my pictures (ex shop), a small sakura in a bamboo pot, an information literacy calendar, and a teleporter to infolit locations.
Have been meaning to put in more information literacy stuff, but so far that and Woolley the Sheep are it. Am wondering about putting Woolley (who contains definitions of information literacy and bleats) with the Heidi House sheep, but he might get an inferiority complex as they are infinitely better made. Well not infinitely, but a good deal.

Have also changed exhibition in my shop. Theme is now Glasgow Botanic Gardens, which visited last week in RL. Am v. fond of it: when lived in Glasgow, Botanics were only 10 minutes walk away. Background photos on walls and floor are of Kibble Palace (which houses national tree fern collection) and there are some photoshopped pictures of the carniverous plant displays plus some pics from a park in Prague. A stone dragon creature creaks and turns head to face you: have been meaning to find somewhere to use him for a while.
Display also includes falling sakura petals. This was not intention. Petals were part of previous display and spent at least 20 minutes trying to find out where the **** the petal emitter was. Tried CTRL ATL T to see invisible prims, cammed all over the shop from various angles and so forth, but thing is nowhere to be found. Anyway, falling petals not wholly inappropriate to this exhibition so in the end gave up.

Manifestations

2010-07-12T18:50:00.005-06:00

Publication-related things: 3 (good)

1) Response to the 9th Virtual World Watch snapshot on use of virtual worlds in UK tertiary education: Silversprite decided to put it in full on his blog http://virtualworldwatch.net/2010/07/01/sheila-webber-responds-to-snapshot-9/

2) Paper by me and Adra Letov (or Sheila Webber and Diane Nahl, as we are known outside SL), which am going to present at the World Library and Information Conference in August in Sweden, and which is full text on the IFLA website: Sustaining learning for LIS through use of a virtual world at http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/123-webber-en.pdf

3) Was asked permission for reproduction of pic from Flickr, to go in a forthcoming book on digital literacies.

Picture (not the one that is going in the book, BTW) shows me taking some welcome morning coffee, from my new expresso maker. However, am thinking of asking for money back, since (as can be seen) coffee is quite plainly NOT expresso, but (at best) machiatto, and appears to be alarmly thick, given how far am tipping cup without anything dribbling out.

Cute

2010-07-01T19:27:00.008-06:00

No. of poses in deer: 13 (unlucky for some?)
After last post decided should actually show cute hair from Exile (have already forgotten name of hair and can't be bothered to log back in and find out. Think it began with a K. Karen? Kerry? Something like that).
Since deer on mountain automatically = cuteness, decided to choose one of the dozen poses available when you sit on deer. Was intending to use Hug Deer pose, but turned out that this meant that ends of hair were poking out of deer's nose which ruined effect rather. Am not 100% sure about this pose, though. Is it cute, or is it just a bit weird?

For second attempt at cuteness posed in new cherry blossom hillside path that leads up from watermelon shop to shrine-y building that just put in, halfway up mountain. Surely can't go wrong with cherry blossom. Think this is probably more straighforwardly charming, but slightly vacuous.

Vacuous or whacky, which is cuter? You decide.

Trying it on

2010-07-01T18:21:00.005-06:00

Hair bought: 2 (good)
Today visited Kin, which is shop where bought first proper hair, Kin's Ryuzaki. Rereading that 2007 post, note that at time thought hair might be "too cute". However, compared with some of the stuff have been wearing recently is relatively low on the too-cute scale. Realise that worry about being too-cute has been with me from start, but think that gradually cuteness threshold has risen.

Kin has now gone in for sculpted hair, which as always can be a bit alarming whilst it is rezzing (see first pic.).

However got. v. excited when realised that some of the demo hair at Kin is actually in MY COLOUR i.e. blue, which is something of a first. Normally demo hairs are in some random "normal" colour, and require some hope and imagination to visualise what will look like in blue.

Therefore could not resist buying a new Kin hair (see 2nd pic), which is actually a bit like Ryuzaki, but sculpted, so does not wave around in breeze so much.

Scoured walls to see whether Ryuzaki is still on sale, which it is, and was cheered by that. For months was really the only hair I wore and ended up buying it twice, since the first time around did not know about how you should COPY your hair before stretching it around (for a back up), so first Ryuzaki had to be abandoned in the end as it got somewhat malformed, with strange giant strands. Happy days.

Second hair, BTW, is a newish one from Exile (which does some nice blues). Is another "turning into me" kind of hair, since is long and straight, with a windblown effect. Evidently have learnt little from past experience since couldn't be bothered to copy it and instead started editing and stretching it straight away to try and get rid of bald patches. It still looks cute. Think the new Kin hair is more SL-me, though.

More stuff

2010-06-28T14:32:00.005-06:00

Beach huts bought: 1 (patriotic); Weeping willows bought: 1 (pretty but superfluous); Fawn with 13 poses bought: 1 (v. good); Set of scuplted stone and garden stuff bought: 1 (good); Hot springs installed: 1 (v.v. good since was already in inventory)
Despite fact that already have 34,000 items, new land has stimulated consumption lobes, even more so since have actually sold one chunk of land (which is now on sale again at higher price, but would say likelihood of resale is correspondingly smaller). Thus have linden burning holes in virtual pocket.
Have created willowy waterside area, with variety of willows (i.e. willows made by 3 different designers) and decided that needed beach hut to complete this area. By happy chance, one of the offerings for Spruce Up Your Space this weekend was an English beach hut, complete with Union Jack details (actually to be ENGLISH should really just be St George's flag, as currently being torn off a zillion car aerials following the mollocking of England by the Germans in the world cup) (and what's with the blue union jack? perhaps it indeed symbolises the spirit of the nation following defeat).
Anyway, spent happy hour setting hut up and furnishing it with some items from the Bloggers Hut that was a previous SUYS buy, plus a couple of sculpty shells and one of my own pictures (duck on boat in canal, appropriate I thought). Also put in Antique Typewriter that bought ages ago, which tells people whether Sheila Yoshikawa is online and allows them to send me IMs. Obviously am hoping that these will be IMs complimenting me on exquisite taste and hopefully not complaints about blocking sea views or polluting riverside with excessive willow leaves.

I hope that Goggles settles in

2010-06-21T19:17:00.003-06:00

Here is Goggles in my repositioned home. Am a bit worried. If he tries to walk back to Harms Way, most he can hope for is a return to my Lost and Found. Not sure he realises he is only made of prims.

Moving

2010-06-21T18:56:00.008-06:00

Land set to sale: all in Harm's Way (Moving. But not as moving as had anticipated, actually)
It's my tier date soon, so I decided I really must clear out my land in Harm's Way and at least try to sell it. Know that mainland plots are v. hard to sell at the moment, so set it at about 2000 Linden per 512 and will hope for best. In fact should have split it up into smaller plots, rather than one lump, perhaps will do that tomorrow. If it comes to it, will abandon it, since in the end that might be cheaper than continuing to pay huge tier.

Had only intended to move my new skybox home + its contents(which proved quite easy to do, except there is always SOMETHING you leave behind, can see in first pic that it was a shadow and a rug in this case, also a couple of the potted plants and a saucer). Then started taking & deleting at ground level and decided in the end was better to get whole thing over at once.
Have had some kind of plot on Harm's Way since summer 2007, and had this particular part of it since November 2007, so may be a shock to the remaining neighbour who has been there as long as me. Managed to go all that time without exchanging a word, I think.
It is a pleasant place, with a sloping grassy hillside ending in beach and water, which is obviously why I liked it. However have just not been spending enough time there, since the views are not nearly as pleasant as when first moved in, and have mentioned lag issues.
Thought would feel quite moved by all this deletion (even more final than RL moving, since in RL one does not actually root out garden and demolish house once have removed furniture, normally). But think must have mentally said goodbye already, or something.

As final act, sat under spreading cherry tree and listened to windchime. This was a present from Ishbel when I got my first home and it has become a sort of ritual to move that last.
It is installed in my new land, so it definitely is home now.

Digital designing

2010-06-19T14:35:00.010-06:00

Venues retextured for event: 1 (good); No. of items of clothing created: 7 (or 9 if you count all the bits of shoe separately) (good); Neon cherry blossom balloon dispensers deployed: 1 (good); Notecards created: 1 (good); Magic bottle created: 1 (good, if accidental); Quantity of floor mysteriously disappearing: half (bad)

In fact did all the above yesterday: today was digital literacies seminar that advertised a few days ago, where was being Chair and organising venue. Am now in brief post-event Euphoria, and chief desire is to zoom round SL acquiring new clothes and getting new Home to rights (in fact am going to have to do Emergency Marking even if it IS a Saturday night, v. depressing)
May or may not write more about the event on this blog: can legitimately put something on Serious Blog about content. Therefore on this one will mainly concentrate on fripperies i.e. clothes and decoration.
Had already retextured the venue used for ESRC conference in March, picking up colours from cute poster. Decided to push out boat with seminar memorabilia, starting with a skirt using semi-transparent textures of the poster, then to get a bit more creative did t-shirt (the well-worn template from Robin somethingorother) and Jeans (a template on some LL site), using the bluebird from the poster to create patches. Reused bolero template (bought for last event) putting said cute bluebird on the chest knot. Also found some sculpty full perm shoes on xstreetsl (I hope legit, they didn't look good enough quality to be ripoffs) and made blue shoes and stockings to match.
In fact for first time decided that could bear wearing my customised clothing for the event, though with some Shiny Things flats rather than my shoes. The Infolit Week in SL necklace and earrings rounded out the look, and also a small bluebird on my shoulder.
Before this had tinkered around with other sculpties, to make some kind of artifact to put in the pack. Ended up by stretching bottle sculpty, putting a sort of label on it with the seminar banner and "sit on me" and when you sit on it it disappears and you are sitting in a meditation pose in mid air.
This was not altogether deliberate. I WAS intending to put the pose in the bottle, and I was able to change some of the parameters, but I didn't know it was going to disappear when you sat on it (think the script must be assuming it is a pose ball, that you would want to disappear). Didn't work out how to rotate the sitter round 90 degrees either, but in the end thought it was quirky enough to pass muster. You could have a circle of them as seating, then when you all sat you would be suspended in air. Cool or what (don't answer that one)
Other disappearing thing that will mention was the floor. The venue floor is taken from the "Cercle" build that used as HQ from Infolit week in SL, rather a nice stone round. When standing about chatting afterwards noticed that half of this had vanished. Also could no longer see a variety of other things e.g. posters, Farradane Centre, half of Hobbiton. Had had a couple of people in the event who dashed around fruitlessly for most of the afternoon (and continued to do so as we stood and talked) so worried that had been griefed. Going back in later, it seems that the buildings are ok, and the posters are back, but the floor isn't. Did I delete it by mistake?

No pollen in SL

2010-06-17T11:53:00.007-06:00

Hay fever suffering in RL: great (v. bad); Hay fever suffering in SL: zero (good)
In RL am v. miserable with streaming eyes, sneezing etc etc since hay fever season is in full swing. Over many years have tried various pills, sprays drops etc. but these have zero effect (apart from adverse effect on purse) so main therapy is staying indoors with doors and windows closed, a rather stuffy remedy which is not favourite with nearest and dearest. Am allergic to common grass pollen, therefore, since said grass is, understandably, common, am international hay fever sufferer, and if were very rich masochist would be possible to be suffering from hay fever all year round by following the pollen season around the globe e.g. was unpleasantly surprised when visited Melbourne in November (their early summer) a few years ago to find that Australian pollen was as irritating as British pollen.
Anyway, here I am in SL, enjoying the virtual grass with no side effects whatsoever, hah, take that, hay fever.

Children's and young people's digital literacies in virtual online spaces

2010-06-13T03:17:00.001-06:00

On 19th June in Second Life, is the second half of the final meeting in a seminar series funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC): Children's and young people's digital literacies in virtual online spaces. The first half of the conference takes place in Sheffield, UK, and the conference continues with a free event in Second Life. The aim of this seminar series is to consider the digital literacy practices which take place in virtual online spaces and to explore potentialities for literacy educators. In this final conference, speakers will consider the nature of literacy in virtual worlds and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)

The start time is 6am Second Life time (2pm UK time, for start times in other countries see http://tinyurl.com/39vvq6q ). The location is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/169/173/22 The Second Life schedule is as follows.
- 6am (SL time) Sheila Webber (Sheila Yoshikawa in SL), University of Sheffield, host in SL - introduction
- 6.10-6.50am Peggy Sheehy (Maggie Marat in SL), I'm not good at Math but my avatar is
- 7am – 7.40am Rebecca Black, University of California (Irvine)
- 7.50 – 8.20am Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Virtual worlds at the nexus of a constellation of literacy practice.
- 8.30am SL time Wrap up from Julia Gillen, Lancaster University

Information on the whole day's event is at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/digital-literacies/events/conference.htm and on the complete seminar series at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/digital-literacies/index.htm

In transit

2010-06-10T17:24:00.010-06:00

Linden spent on new land: Too many (bad); Plots bought overlooking Cowell and Forest of Kahruvel: 1 (v.v. exciting)
Have had itchy feet for ages, since although like many things about current personal land-holding, it has become laggier and laggier, which is why last addition was (as noted in previous post) put right up in sky above it. However, since favourite occupation is landscaping, seems a bit pointless to have land that is no fun landscaping, because of lag. Also views have become less and less attractive with fewer green areas and more high walls and nightclubby stuff.
Recently noticed land on Mare that was for sale, but ridiculously priced. However, last week was in land-hopping mood, so zoomed out Map a bit and started to teleport, starting at Mare, from yellow (for sale) area to yellow area until suddenly found self in very pleasant steep hillside area, with river on 2 sides. Then realised with excitement that was right next to seaside village of Cowell.

Now, had discovered Cowell very early on: it is part of the Phyneas Jack Memorial Trust land and had thought at time would love to live there (except noone lives there, my guess is that (being quite elderly in SL terms) the actual village is quite primmy, so wouldn't be room to have extra stuff from tenants). Anyway, have visited it every now and then, and still find it charming.
From website (linked above) discovered that area for sale was previously part of the estate but was now being sold off. Price was not dirt cheap, but really very reasonable for something with such a good prospect. Area for sale was the same size as current land ... so dithered for whole hour, but really it was foregone conclusion that before long would be hearing mega tinkle tinkle of Linden as claimed the land. Should really have waited to sell/abandon current land, pass tier date and THEN buy, but having a short dual period means can shift treasured material bit by bit.

In fact the first area that worked on had (another) new house, namely the Heidi house, which is quite plainly modelled on the one in the Miyazaki Heidi anime series. Am about halfway through this series, and actually the view from the cute circular window in the upstairs loft (where Heidi has her straw bed) is v. similar in SL and in the anime (you can see the hut on that Japanese site).
Should really be goats (rather than sheep), but had to delete goat shed to fit nicely on mountain top, also had no goats in inventory but did have some v. cute sheep, one of which have named Heidi, and one of which have named Hercule after Heidi's grandfather's dog (in the French language dub of the anime, am watching it in French since there is no available English dub).

2nd area for development was right at the other end of my new estate, where installed the Frida home from Mudshake, complete with all the stuff had put in it on previous land. Shown here is the view over an inland pond, with the Frida home to the right(barely seen) and Cowell village and Abotts Aerodrome in view over the water.

The day is done

2010-06-03T19:43:00.007-06:00

Events organised: 4 (good); Events taking place: 4 (good); No. of lines types into ISTE IM rather than local chat: 12 (approx) (bad)

Had long day in SL, since today was the information literacy mini-festival. List of things done includes:

- Presentation slides converted into jpegs, renamed, uploaded to SL and copied into presenter: 26 (actually uploaded them twice, so is 2x26, since first time forgot to make thge jpgs full perms and this was quicker than changing 26 permissions by hand)
- Customised teleporters created (with links to 4 venues and 1 tour site): 1
- Boards with notecard containing programme: 1
- Customised teleporters and notecard boards placed: 6 of each, at actual venues, and 2 key landing points
- Notecards created for own presentations: 2
- Posters created with weblinks: 2
- No. of notices and IMs sent out advertising events: lots

- Time spent deciding on conference outfit: suprisingly little, which is perhaps why ended up with something of a Scottish Widows look.

Anyway all was ready by 7am SL time which is when own presentation on "Information Literacy for 21st century Life" started. Had also had nice conversation with someone who was at the INFORUM conference but who hadn't talked to in RL. Audience included people from good number of countries including Italy, Poland, USA, UK and Czech Republic.

Low point was start. Whereas in RL when giving presentation have some moments to gather thoughts and ready self for speech, in this case was worrying til last moment about whether everyone had found the venue, could get notecard etc. etc. Anyway, introduced self and mini-conference in text chat, but had been rattling on for some time when had gentle IM which alerted me to fact that had been typing away into the ISTE group chat, rather than local chat. Mortification. ISTE has about 5000 members so that is a lot of potential spam, although at least at that time of day there are fewer people inworld.

Anyway, things could only brighten up after that. Was basically giving this presentation, minus a few slides to make sure it was within time, and it seemed to go ok. Afterwards some people continued on to Sakura House where talked about some other sessions at the 2 RL conferences had been at.

Pi Illios' health literacy sessions (in Spanish at 9am and in English at noon) were successes: I joined in the English language one only, since my Spanish is confined to words like "Hola" "Gracias" and "Merluza a la plancha" (grilled hake), though I also know the Spanish for information literacy.

Relaxed at end of day by sitting in my 60s home, buying some parasols (from a gatcha, so cheap) and posing in one of AM Radio's installations. Finally did some tidying up on Infolit and changed the advertising board for the next multi-event, on 19 June. So soon will be hey ho for another round of advertising and goody bags. Have already collected something that gives you a wearable balloon in the shape of a cherry blossom, sure that will go down a treat with delegates.

Information & health literacy events

2010-05-31T12:30:00.002-06:00

When: Thursday June 3rd, Where; Infolit iSchool (& tour to Tseshkovsky); in Second Life, the virtual world
- 7 am Second Life time, presentation Information Literacy for 21st Century Life
- 8 am SL time reports and discussion on recent conferences; plus at
- 9am SLT (en Espanol) and 12 noon SLT (in English): repeat event: Pi Illios (Universidad Puerto Rico) Literacia en Salud en Second Life (en Espanol, 9am) / Health Literacy in Second Life (in English, noon)

* 7am SL time (see http://tinyurl.com/38755tv for time in other countries): presentation from Sheila Yoshikawa (Sheila Webber in RL, University of Sheffield) on Information Literacy for 21st Century Life (as presented at the Oeiras a Ler conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in May, with some amendment).
Venue: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/147/170/21
In this presentation Sheila will elaborate a definition of information literacy and give examples of what information, and information literacy, mean in a number of contexts (e.g. in computer gaming, in a workplace, for "tweens") and sum up key messages about IL in the 21st Century.

* 8 am SL time (see http://tinyurl.com/2vlrgup for times in other countries): Report back from recent conferences (Oeiras a Ler, Informa 2010, and any others participants have been to recently!) Venue: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/43/203/22/

* 9am SL time (see http://tinyurl.com/3aznlgt for times in other countries) Literacia en Salud en Second Life ( en Espanol: Pi Illios, University of Puerto Rico)
Venue: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/190/215/749/
La Biblioteca Conrado F. Asenjo en el Recinto de Ciencias Médicas de la Universidad de Puerto Rico lleva a cabo un proyecto de Literacia y alfabetización en salud dirigido a hispnos que residen en Second Life .
La literatura profesional señala que el 31,5% de los pacientes de habla inglesa y el 61,7% de habla española presentan una inadecuada o marginal alfabetización funcional en salud.
La plataforma virtual Second Life tiene una población considerable de hispanosparlantes (alrededor de un 11.8 %) que residen en en este mundo virtual por infinidad de razones. Nuestro objetivo es enseñar y orientar al residente hispano en SL a encontrar información de salud confiable, actualizada y adecuada a sus necesidades; see https://sites.google.com/a/upr.edu/tusaludbuscadistingueaprende/?AuthEventSource=SSO

* 12 noon SL time (see http://tinyurl.com/369bq3u for times in other countries) "Health Literacy in Second Life" (talk and tour; in English: Pi Illios, University of Puerto Rico)
Venue: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/129/242/22/
The Conrado F. Asenjo health library of the University of Puerto Rico has created a prototype for health literacy to help Hispanic residents in Second Life. This is responding to the factthat surveys have shown that people have poor health literacy (31.5% of English speakers and 61.7 Spanish speakers). They have used the platform of Second Life to create a prototype informative build. Pi Illios with introduce their work, and then take people on a tour of the build on Tseshkovsky; see this page

VWER, SL/RL

2010-05-25T16:51:00.007-06:00

Meetings attended from exotic RL locations: 1 (good); Windchimes bought: 1 (superfluous to requirements); SL Czechs met in RL: 1 (good)
In RL am in Prague to give talk (well in fact gave it earlier today), which is obviously not exotic for people who live in Prague, but it is for me. However the city has decided to make me feel at home by providing British weather ie sun and showers (or now and then, downpours).
Today at the conference met Zdenek (SL name) who attended some of the "Information Literacy in SL" events. He interviewed me for student radio after my talk which was v. exciting. Was able to take pic of him beside a laptop showing his avatar (cool): you can see it on my serious blog here http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2010/05/inforum-2010.html.
Am unusually well off for broadband, there is *free* broadband in the hotel, and free wifi at the conference venue. So took advantage of this by buying random SL item (new windchimes, like I need more windchimes), and attending Virtual Worlds Educators Round Table. Topic was teaching large groups. Olivia IMed me at the start to ask if I could take pics, and have already uploaded them to VWER pool http://www.flickr.com/groups/vwer/pool/ Most amusing is shown here. What did I do to annoy Profdan? 1st pic was of me contemplating windchimes and pretending they weren't a sad impulse purchase.

Screenr. Still cool.

2010-05-22T17:26:00.003-06:00

No. of additional screencasts made: 1 (stop! stop!)
So, here is screencast about new home, as featured a couple of posts ago. Have decided sound bit too much like Queen showing plebs round Windsor Castle.

P.S. Have uploaded it to Flickr too. Sigh

Screenr. Cool

2010-05-22T15:44:00.006-06:00

Screencasts made using Screenr: 2 (good)
Today noticed a Torley video about screencasts, watched it and by half way through had zipped out and started a screencast. Seems to be eastpeasy way of making machinima of SL. Yipee!
Now at present should be:
- Marking, or:
- Emailing RL people who proposed abstracts for a RL conference to tell them whether or not they are IN, or;
- Doing the ppt for the presentation am giving in RL in Prague next week, or;
- Getting some sleep.
However, of course am instead recording screencasts, twittering them and publishing to Youtube. And now am blogging it. Suppose next thing would be uploading them to Flickr, or perhaps emailing them all my friends, however will stick with Screenr, Twitter, Youtube and Blogger for new.
According to Torley can't get ambient noise from SL, which is a shame (and if Torley can't work out how to, sure I can't) however, is v. good for doing voice overs. Considering that spent whole nanoseconds working out what to say beforehand don't think did too badly. Well, in fact with one on Information/literacy exhibition did actually reject two partial takes. Also is what will now call deliberate mistake when say that will not show full quotation, and then do.
Can only record 5 minutes but that is actually a plus since after 5 mins most people get bored with videos IMHO.
Hmm, perhaps can turn this to good effect and create some sort of screencast as part of Prague talk.

More homemaking

2010-05-15T17:36:00.006-06:00

Houses deleted: 1 (slow process); Houses rezzed: 1 (v. good); Houses disappearing: 1 (odd)
After the Infolit session on Thursday when Brielle did her excellent presentation, decided to have some r&r in SL after hard day in both worlds by finally setting up new home from "Y's" on my land. Had already decided to demolish the Ingrid Ingersoll Town House, which still like, but didn't really spend much time there and bedroom was frankly bit of a mess.
Took longer to demolish than had anticipated, since must at some point have UNLINKED everything and so had to delete prim by prim, v. tedious. Had originally intended to set up new house in roughly same place i.e. overlooking beach, but is SO laggy at ground level in the end made the new house a skybox.
Spent happy time filling it with some stuff from old house and some stuff had been saving up.
Key items for display were various objects with butterflies, and artwork. To start with put these in central courtyard, but in the end have created one room with butterflies/art and put bed in courtyard. Remaining room is kitchen/living/music room and has ended up rather cosy.

Will delight readers with some proper pics, but in meantime these ones show rather curious effect when last went in (to install a few cute items that had just bought in Kloka, namely teapot, box of tissues, tea set and comfy chair) and found that everything was there ---- except the actual house. Am sure house in fact IS there, since do not fall through space, and meet resistance if try to go through places-where-walls-were.
So did not panic, but took opportunity to take interesting pics of inside of house. Think I like it almost as much without walls, as with.

Creatures on Infolit iSchool: part 1

2010-05-10T16:27:00.002-06:00

Creatures on Infolit iSchool: quite a few (good); Average age of creatures: 2 years (approx) (bad)
Instead of doing anything vaguely useful, have decided to create a record of creatures on Infolit iSchool. Was prompted by squirrel encounter last week, thinking how the creatures are all getting on a bit and perhaps some of them ought to be sent the way of the really STRANGE deformed rabbit that lived on the hill behind Hobbiton, and which I quietly put out of its misery last autumn. On the other hand, some of them are still cute. Or are they just cute to me? You decide
First up is Mitsy the cat. Mitsy is definitely showing her age, and you only have to search on Mitsy (on this blog) to see that she has a history, mostly a history of getting trapped under buildings and disintegrating in the sea. However - she is named after a RL cat who is no more. In fact she is about the only SL creature I own that HAS a name (apart from some one-prim goldfish that arrived with names). So, Mitsy is likely to stay, even though she is the size of a small pony and regularly roams away to her doom.

In these next two pictures you see an orange parrot: it roosts, it flies, it screeches. The screeching is actually quite lifelike, and when it swoops around (see small orange blur in top left of 2nd pic) it looks moderately convincing. However, when it roosts, you can see it is just made of prims. Fortunately it spends a lot more time swooping than roosting. I got this bird in some closing down sale, and I have similarly retro crows and seagulls in my inventory from the same source.

Am not sure whether the cat and the dog in the 2nd pic count as creatures, since they each have springs instead of legs. On the other hand, the cat one probably looks as much like a cat as does (for example) Mitsy. Anyway, these are functional creatures since you can sit on them and wobble around to your heart's content. Like the parrot, they are in the Sure Thing cafe on the sea shore.
The parrot seemed appropriate since the Sure Thing is named after a RL cafe of the same name in Queensland, Australia. The RL rainbow lorikeets, that make an apalling racket at dawn and dusk, just over from the RL Sure Thing, sound a bit like the orange parrot, only more so.

So can sit back in SL and feel nostalgic for Aussie sun and sand with right sound effects.

Am thinking I could make this into a kind of i-spy guide: find all the creatures on Infolit iSchool. Can just see the contemptuous smirk that this would elicit from students. Librarians might enjoy it, though. Which is not an insult to librarians BTW, rather the reverse, I would say. He who is tired of i-spy is tired of life. Or has more interesting things to do. One or the other.

Rez Day present

2010-05-06T21:29:00.006-06:00

Alien space ships bought: 1 (amazing! awesome!)
Stumbled across my rez-day-present-to-me on recreational outing after the Infolit iSchool meeting today. Is Alien space craft which immediately fell in love with. Is enormous, and has inbuilt sounds and swirly coloured lights. You can also get bits of the floor to move, and it is all very organic. In fact I think it qualifies as Art.

Is also over 400 prims, and although intend to put it on my own land, need to clear out - well about 400 prims - to make room for it. So at the moment is rezzed above Infolit, which means might need to start removing trinkets from my office and cutting down on the number of bedding plants.

Because it's already so ornate, you don't really want to put too much in it. And, e.g., is not exactly the location for the shabby-chic stuff had been collecting recently. So have brought out some disquieting nursery-type items (oversized rabbit chairs, giant bluebirds etc), a few spooky items (though frankly is pretty spooky already) and the red plush afternoon tea ensemble (with a Goldberg Variation on the music stand) which has a view directly out into Space. It's made by Alex Bader BTW.

Am not sure am going to be doing any teaching here, but would making spiffing party venue (with dance ball over floor that retracts to dump you straight into the air, when you touch an Alien pod, hehe), or possibly could hold conference about angst and identity in it. Will be ready for it with depressing results currently coming in for the general election. Can just retreat to the mother ship and wave goodbye to my pension.
Anyway whilst the ship is anchored over Infolit, it is here http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/169/114/1999/

I missed my rez day

2010-05-05T12:11:00.007-06:00

No. of rezdays in SL: 3 (good); No. of rezdays celebrated: 0.5 (sad)
Had been contemplating celebrating my rez day (3rd May) with some sort of party this year. However, turned out that was away from SL that day and realised today that had actually forgotten to celebrate it yesterday when got back in.

Was v. excited about first rez day and contemplated all sorts of celebrations. In the end bought new dress and managed to get Harumi inworld briefly to celebrate (which is the 0.5 celebration mentioned above). As can see from that 3 May 2008 blog post also went to Babylon 5 party. However, do not think actually told anyone in B5 that it WAS my rez day, so not sure that counts.

Note that did blog on 2nd rez day but, as for this year, was day when was expected to do various RL things, namely watching Kentucky Derby and 2000 Guineas (these are horse races) on TV. Another problem is that in RL and SL am sort of person who thinks that if DO organise party NO-ONE MIGHT TURN UP. In SL is partly because most friends are from work-type connections, which makes them no less friends, and certainly does not rule out virtual discos and drinking (far from it) but suppose means that am more likely to invite them to an indepth discussion of pedagogy for information literacy than simply hanging out and chilling. (In RL, BTW, friends are scattered round country, so organising anything would require more Effort than can muster)

Anyway, Now I Am Three, and am sure that some kind of philosophical reflection might be called on, however instead have simply given you a pic of me communing with the squirrel under the magic apple tree and some photos of me and Adra. I was doing a bit of wandering round checking things are ok, and realised hadn't spent any quality time with the squirrel for ages. It possibly now shows its age, but is still cute IMHO, bounding around, chirping and still generating its own nuts.

The 2 pics of Adra and me were taken to go with a paper we have written about teaching library and information science in SL. At first we tried her sitting down and me standing up (see middle pic), but it ended up looking like a still from some play about alienation ("A common room. Adra is seated. Sheila is standing. They both stare at the wall. There is the faint noise of typing. Sheila: "I'm still waiting for things to rez". Adra is silent.")

The last pic is the one we are going with, since at least we are looking at each other. And both look very stylish, I feel.

Something old, something new

2010-04-19T16:50:00.001-06:00

SL designers returned: 1 (v. good); Cabinets filled: 1 (horribly easy)
Discovered last week that Effulgent Brown has a shop in SL again. Hurrah! My very first home in SL was a tea house, but once I ventured over 512 I invested in a series of Asian homes by Effulgent, all of which are atmospheric, cheap, and come with free packs of furniture. At the moment the ones which are out are the Wild Dragon (Sakura House on Infolit iSchool) and the Winter Lotus (one of the homes in the Educational Informatics village), though The Songbird is probably my favourite.
Although they don't involve sculpties and don't have the latest in texturing, think they still have a lovely feel to them.
Students must have agreed since Winter Lotus was one of the homes I had to install twice in the Educational Informatics village by popular demand (replacing the more "fashionable" shabby chic rooms that weren't dwellings of choice). Some of the furniture still works well, too, I think, and you can get a copiable home and a ton of Asian furnishings for a few hundred Linden.
Here I am in front of vendors at the House of Effulgent, Blarn Isle (170, 51, 27).
A new shop was Cheap Cheap which is indeed pretty cheap, and came away with cute cabinet, plate with caribou on it, a low table, a revolving iPod (not sure what to do with that yet) and a couple of other things I can't remember.
Have sort of given up on "if put something on Infolit, must take something off" policy at the moment, since my main teaching on Infolit is over, so am not expecting a legitimate large influx of prims. Therefore put cabinet in my office and loaded it up with some of the cute objects that were hanging round in my inventory. One of cutest is the wooden music box with a Japanesey lady who revolves whilst it plays a tune. Have had that unused in my Objects folder for well over a year. Also moved my Earthstones mug from my desk and one of the vases from the curio stand to the right of the cabinet.
Am planning on replacing one of the houses in my personal land, and this has given excuse to collect more stuff, including a kitchen unit from Bitter Vanilla. Attraction there was the tap (can have it on, off or dripping), washing up liqid that gives a bubbly sponge to wear, and fact that it DIDN'T have any larky animations in it. Am not prude, but I don't put up any nasty red ban lines round my propery and have ghastly vision of returning home one day to find complete strangers at it on my draining board (hm, so perhaps am prude after all).

Pink, comments

2010-04-14T17:05:00.007-06:00

Comments received: 1 (odd); Pink tops bought: several (ok); Of these, number worn: zero (bad)

Today is pink shirt anti-bullying day (see e.g. http://www.pinkshirtday.ca/) in various parts of the world including SL. I spent far too long trying to find a pink top that went with my current skirt and hair, only to end up with "something old" out of my inventory (of course). Here I am after my pointless shopping trip, in the "Animal Farm" type main square in Gaylord (some kind of porcine pogrom going on), having browsed my way through the Pig and Thimbles shops.

I also just received a blog comment from someone who evidently hadn't read my blog, since they were asking me to review an online shop of RL furniture. It's a comment on a really old post http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2007/07/shopaholic.html#comments where I'm not even talking about furnishings. Even calling me a "home decor-modern design connoisseur" doesn't win me over. Most puzzlingly, they say at the end "Also, it'd be swell if you can place our suede wassily chair in a bag set in a bag on your blog."

Suggestions on how I put a RL chair in a bag on my blog are welcome, as if I work THAT out I can evidently get myself a real free suede chair.

Home expo

2010-04-13T18:00:00.005-06:00

Benches bought: 1 (good); Houses bought: 1 (good); Time spent watching objects rez: aeons (bad)

Have spent a little time at the Home & Garden Expo. Amongst purchases is a cute sofa from Greene Concept. Am seen in first pic sitting on one at the Expo (haven't actually unpacked my own yet).
Am still in new Eva skin, to give it a chance. Still think it is a bit too grey. With the Marguerite hair from Truth, that was wearing to start with, seemed to look much too SMUG all the time. However with this new hair from Simply Britnee possibly look too CUTE. And cuteness evidently leads to pole dancing (see previous post) which can only be a slippery slope.

Bought yet another house, well, it was only 500 Linden and has sash windows that open and close, a retractable ladder, and (the clincher) a teleport to the attic, disguised as a mouse hole. The vendor is Turnip. Will need to be for personal use, since navigating round it would be challenging for a noob, so can't really put it on the island.

Unfortunately must be said that spent less time looking at cute homes than I did watching oddly shaped lumps rez, trying to work out what they were going to be. The 2nd pic shows an example, and not the worst. Will it be a chair? A washbasin? A grandfather clock? An amusingly shaped vegetable? Who knows, and (after half an hour of slow-rez pain) does one care enough to wait and find out?

Ups and downs

2010-04-13T15:18:00.009-06:00

Chatlogs recovered: all (probably) (v. good); Hours spent setting up new exhibits in shop: 2 (good); No. of hours before new exhibits returned to lost and found inventory: 6 (approx) (bad)
Good news is that Kisa responded to email re: missing chatlogs and is setting them up so can be accessed. Is relief, since will not have to ferret about to find chatlogs. However, think will still also upload them to a server here at Sheffield for security. Plus am rethinking poster strategy: think will put chatlogs into notecards and then have poster that GIVES ALL with chatlog notecard and any other notecards from each discussion. Also means that stuff will be given in informatively titled folder.

However, much work lies ahead before this achieved i.e. have to create 30+ new posters, make 30+ notecards with chatlogs, and transfer other notecards etc. event by event to each new new poster. Still, had meant to reorganise them, and hopefully can make display easier to navigate.
In meantime spent time yesterday making new pictures to put in shop on Juicy and then fitting out shop to fit with theme (which is "photoshopped spring"). Sat back and admired (see 1st pic., I'm in the chair towards the back of the shop). Then went home.

However this morning found all stuff returned to Lost and Found, and not for usual reason (i.e. failing to activate correct group, in this case "I love Juicy") but because landlady was remodelling sim. Sigh. Plus point is that as compensation got 2 weeks rent free.

When went back this evening did indeed manage to get all of the setup from inventory in one lump (you have to select BUILD first, and then pull things out the inventory, to be able to manipulate a set of unlinked objects). Fortunately shop is exactly same size as old one, and you can see that 2nd pic in new location looks pretty much like the first.

Made a few adjustments, including adding a bench with cute poses at the front. And also have view of sea and palm trees (see 3rd pic).

Less enticingly, also opposite is a shop selling disco floors. Do not have anything against disco floors as such, they can just make things laggy. However, did find a pole for pole dancing behind the shop, and could not resist trying it (n.b. with all clothes kept ON, see last pic.)

Report from the LILAC conference

2010-04-07T00:55:00.003-06:00

At 12 noon Second Life time (8pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/yghsjlh for times in other parts of the world) on Thursday 8th April, in Second Life, there will be a one hour report/discussion on the LILAC conference. This year the LILAC conference (the UK's information literacy conference) took place 29-31 March 2010
(http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/). Pancha Enzyme (Edinburgh University) and Ishbel Hartmann (St Andrews University), who both presented at LILAC this year, will give you a report from some favourite items from the conference. There will be a couple of short presentations in voice, with the discussion and some report in text chat. The location is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/125/240/22/

I have added some lilac to the discussion platform, and retinted the bench and barbie, to get in the mood.

More reasons for not trusting to other people's websites

2010-04-05T11:01:00.007-06:00

Chatlogs lost: thirty-something (v.v. bad) Chatlogs recovered so far: 21 (good); Wallace and Gromit games played in RL: 1 (good)
Was alerted by comment on this blog (thank you!) that the links to the chatlogs were no longer working. These are the records of discussions etc. on Infolit iSchool. Chatlogs were uploaded using an app from someone at the Leeds Met university, which gave a more pleasing layout. However, appears that domain name (sleeds.org) is no longer in use, since all links now just show meaningless advertising.
This is v. v. depressing since had LOTS of chatlogs archived that way, starting in 2007, and although think have them all in text files, said files will be spread over 3 computers and possibly a couple of data sticks, and am not sure that the file names will be that meaningful either.
Will obviously contact Leeds to find out whether files are in fact safe somewhere on a Leeds server, but in meantime tried some search engine searching, to see whether could find cached versions. Google caches are too up-to-date, but managed to find 21 of the chatlogs via cached files on Bing.com
Am hopeful of getting most if not all the chatlogs together, though the work does not end there, since will have to upload them somewhere else, change all the links on the wiki (if nowhere else) plus change the posters in the CILR on Infolit iSchool, which means making new posters for all of them (groan, see above me contemplating them all gloomily).
Have taken mind off all this in RL by playing amusing Wallace and Gromit computer game (from Telltale, currently £12 for 4 games, v. good value)

A quiet evening in

2010-03-28T17:38:00.007-06:00

Rubber ducks bought: 4 (good); Ducks floated: 3 (good)
In RL have had long train journeys, so felt in need of some relaxation, and what could be more relaxing than soaking in a warm tub with 3 assorted rubber ducks? They are from the gatcha at Theosophy, 25 Linden a go, and I ended up with 2 Ninja ducks (that's a Ninja duck poised on the rim of the bath tub), so Dimitrova has got spare one of those.

Am thinking of moving, because my mainland area has got hugely laggy from a place that SELLS nightclub gear, so it has enormous warehouse filled with glitter balls and the like going all the time. Still am fond of my bathroom though, which created in line with RL fantasy for huge bathroom with flowers, candles, view of sea, etc etc actually fear this is pretty standard girly bathroom fantasy.

Of course key difference from RL is that do not have to remove clothes or indeed hat. At least ducks seem indifferent to non-standard bath wear.

Procastinating whilst summoning energy to write posts about ESRC, VWBPE and Inf6011

2010-03-28T16:14:00.005-06:00

PhDs examined in RL: 1 (good); PhD students taking successful viva this week: 1 (v. good); PhD topics consulted about: 1 (good); Articles written: 0 (bad)
Last week was Phd-y sort of one in RL in that first part of week was spent in whirlwind trip to Thessaloniki to examine PhD, then one of my own PhD students also came through viva successfully, and someone else chatted to me in SL about possible PhD topic. Somehow is all reminder that ought to be doing more research myself, and is not that lack material for same, nor indeed is there lack of pressure since my Department is already having Awaydays to prepare for the next research assessment exercise, so that we can retain current status in field ("Number One for 24 Years" as it says on our website).

So, probably ought to be doing less of this kind of writing and more introduction-methods-results-discussion-conclusions kind of stuff. Realised recently that one unfortunate fact is that, whilst rather enjoy rereading own blog entries, find that after having gone through n drafts of an academic article, and then reworked it to fit in with nitwit comments from referees, can scarcely bear to revisit it once published. This contrasts with some colleagues who get buzz from seeing own names at top of scholarly article. Wonder whether there is some kind of attraction therapy so will suddenly get amazing thrill from seeing own name on journal title page.

In meantime (to get back to serious matters) bought new Eva skin from Tuli. Tuli’s Elizabeth has been my main skin for ages now, being only one with the right level of paleness and (lack of) makeup. Will persist with Eva for a while, since makeup is OK, and skin detail is satisfying, but the Eva Tone 1 (which am wearing in 1st pic) is really a little bit TOO pale, whilst next colour up is a bit too rosy. Since hair is blue, have to keep to neutral skin tone, otherwise am v. restricted as to clothing colours. Anyway, Tuli’s remodelled sim is cute (as shown) with floating islands in sky and volcano on ground. Sim is called Journey. Think that this has no connection with T. Blair’s autobiography of same name, but is doubtless dollop of fantasy in both.

Searching, shopping, sightseeing: literacies in virtual lives

2010-03-17T18:07:00.000-06:00

Event title: Searching, shopping, sightseeing: literacies in virtual lives
Thursday 18 March, UK time 8pm, Second Life Time: 1:00pm (see http://tinyurl.com/y8ghoer for times elsewhere)
This is an official event in the ESRC Festival of Social Science (ESRC is the UK's funding council for social science research) - the only Festival event being held in SL!
Venue: Infolit iSchool in Second Life, the virtual world: the venue is pictured below
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/149/171/21/

Researchers in information and digital literacies (Sheila Webber (i.e. me) and Dr Julia Davies (DrJoolz Smythe in SL) will talk about their research, with the emphasis on drawing out advice on more virtually literate approaches to everyday SL. The session will be chaired by Professor Jackie Marsh, Head of Department in The School of Education, Sheffield University, UK (Jackie Darkstone in SL).
Sheila Webber is Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research, a Senior Lecturer in Sheffield University's iSchool, and an international speaker on information literacy. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Dr Julia Davies is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, Sheffield University, and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of New Literacies. Her research focuses on online digital practices and social learning. Her numerous article and chapter publications include Pay and Display: The Digital Literacies of Online Shoppers in Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices, edited by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2008)
ESRC Festival of Social Science: see http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/fss/default.aspx for information on the festival and http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/
PO/releases/2010/march/secondlife.aspx for the ESRC press release on this event

Landscapes

2010-03-15T17:47:00.004-06:00

Animotos created: 2 (good); Subscription paid to Animoto: 1 (bad); Hi-res conversion payments to Animoto: 1 (bad)
Have succumbed to Animoto's cunning marketing strategy, paid up exorbitaant $30 (that's real US dollars, not Linden) to be able to make longer Animoto slideshows, plus $5 to make one into a high resolution MP4. Sure, could do all the things you can do with Animoto for free, with a bit of extra effort, but then, life is short and credit card payment is easy.
Have made 2 Animotos so far about the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, one with slides of the exhibition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWcYV-FliQk) and one with pictures of the sims that were specially created. Spent rather too much time playing with lighting and water effects, whilst taking pics, and then a bit of time photoshopping. Think I got a bit too carried away with the Mirror Water effect at the end, but on the whole am pleased with this landscapes Animoto, which is a tribute to the team that did the landscaping and building:

Exhibiting

2010-03-12T19:16:00.004-06:00

Exhibits catalogued: over 40 (good); Calendars created: 1 (good);Times crashed: 2 (good, considering)
A quick post after extraordinarily long day in SL. Am at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference (http://www.vwbpe.org/), where am one of the people looking after poster area. Spent most of day creating catalogue of exhibits, taking landmarks and putting them into a notecard. Followed up this activity by taking some pics and creating a calendar using the IntelliCalendar, for promotional purposes.

Intend to distribute these 2 items in almost-spamlike way (but not quite spamlike, obviously) tomorrow, to try and boost visitors. These are the February and (I think) March pics from the calendar. As can see, February is actually my build, but, hey, I paid the 100 Linden for the IntelliCalendar blank and spent an hour making it.

Building

2010-03-08T13:11:00.013-06:00

Flamingos bought: 2 (good); Exhibits mounted: 1 (in progress)

Am working on exhibit Inquiry based learning (IBL) in Second Life for the Virtual Worlds best Practice in Education conference. As usual this is taking aeons longer than anticipated, but is interesting exercise.
Am trying to make 3D visualisation of conceptual fromework for IBL developed by colleague Phil Levy (RL name) from research study done at Sheffield.

Attraction to Animoto ap has lasted more than usual 24 hours, so provide below a glimpse of some of the stages it has gone through so far.
Realise that in haste to throw Animoto vid together have got 2 of the pics out of order [added later: no I haven't, I got confused by perspective change], but the last one is in the right place. This last one was taken after had decided that whole thing needed to be turned 90 degrees, as most people likely to be approaching it from that direction.

First pic, above, shows back of exhibit, where have positioned a slideshow and (installed after this was taken) a screen streaming a youtube vid about IBL. Second picture shows Educational Informatics village, and more specifically pair of pink flamingos that have put there. Have included this since when I looked at this picture, reminded me that I had bought them, and so have positioned one of the flamingos (with shadow removed to bring it down to 3 prims) on my exhibit ("If you want a laugh, bring on a flamingo") If you concentrate really hard you can see it (a flash of flamingoid pink) in bottom right hand corner of last Animoto slide. Whole exhibit has to come in at 100 prims max, which is challenge. Have 35 left at the moment.

You too can can create your own cheap and hasty video slideshow at animoto.com.

Picture perfect

2010-03-02T22:51:00.001-06:00

Animoto slideshows created: 3 (bad)
This Animoto thing seems to be addictive, though doubtless by tomorrow will have forgotten about it altogether as move on to next shiny new distraction.

If you have time to waste, you too can create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

30 seconds of something or other

2010-03-02T21:58:00.004-06:00

Minutes spent tinkering with Animoto when should have been writing report: 35 (bad)
Distracted tonight by Animoto, a free way of creating slideshows with music. Animoto is pretty blatant in aiming to extract dosh, since end up with inadequately short video in low resolution, being reminded at each point that could make it longer, whizzier and legible if only willing to fling dollars in direction of Animoto's owners. Have resisted so far. Here is initial effort, which is still sort of cool. At least it seems like that at 3am.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

I am millennial (official)

2010-02-27T13:00:00.000-06:00

Score in millennial quiz: 73 (unsurprising); Houses claimed in Edu Informatics village: 20 (good)
Came across quiz on Pew Internet website, which gives you score that allegedly identifies whether you are Generation X, Baby Boomer or Millennial. Now in RL must be confessed that am middle one of these, but final score was only 1 point off the exact point for Millennials.
Makes sense, really, and explains why am likely to alienate friends through thoughtless blog posts, forget appointments and, after starting out very academic search for literature on information literacy, end up looking at site about the tree octopus. And latch onto spurious excuses for bad behaviour.

Had actually legitimately been quite busy in SL, finishing up arranging interviews for one set of students, and introducing a second set, namely our Educational Informatics students. Have again created an Edu Informatics village in the sky (1st pic shows me trailing hand in water feature in front of the 2 beach huts). Since people last year seemed to enjoy claiming houses and putting up their nameplates, made it more of a feature this year, and also did some on-the-spot deletion of unfavoured houses, and copying of popular ones, so the final village has more beach huts, japanesey houses and tree houses than originally.
Also visited Teesslife with some students, also Tour of the Testis, and Tim (co-working on a session) led a tour of the Canadian Border post at Loyalist College. Hope to post some of these pics, but feel should ask students first.

Apart from advent of Linden Homes (as claimed by Dimitrova, see previous post), big news has of course been advent of SL Viewer 2 in beta. Felt that, having only just introduced Edu Informatics students to old viewer, might be confusing to suggest they use the new one. As increasing number of problems reported, seems sensible decision. Is also a bit of an issue for the session that am holding on 18th March (which realise have not blogged about yet all), viz, event that has been accepted into official programme of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences and even awarded grant of c. 50,000 Linden (at least, think that's how it translates), which aim to spend pricinpally on hiring someone to do a machinima. There is going to be an official press release and everything.

On a more trivial level, have a nice new washing machine.

New home for Dimitrova

2010-02-17T19:52:00.008-06:00

New homes: 1 (excessive)

Was tempted into SL action by the announcement today of the "free homes" available for premium residents. This is an attempt to get more people staying in SL and starting to pay tier. You don't have to pay for the land, the ready-made houses don't count towards your prim allowance (a definite bonus if you only have the minimum area), there is landscaping, and paths between the houses, and you are guaranteed not to have a nightclub start up next door.
It's an interesting move towards a "housing estate" approach to mainland, away from a North American free-for-all: though of course some people have been offering these kinds of environments on a rental basis for ages.

I went premium with Dimitrova, my main alt, when I cut down my personal land, but found that I was going over into to the next tier if I kept the amount I wanted to. It was cheaper to have Dimi go premie, so I could sell her the land for 1 Linden, and make her a buffer between me and nightclub land. However, I then found it was more interesting still to move her around to explore living in a couple of other different places. Now she has taken up the Lindens offer, abandoned her old tiny plot (land prices, already dire, will go even lower, so pointless to try selling) and opted for a dwelling in what appears to be The Shire, except they can't call it that for copyright reasons, I presume.

The pictures show her 3 roomed house from 2 angles, plus one of the rooms. You'll see it has integral mushrooms. The houses are not really state-of-the-art design, but I imagine that is so the commercial house designers feel they still have some sort of competitive advantage.

I think that there will still be issues for newbies, since the rooms, being small, are difficult to position things in (the only "furniture" in it to start with was the fire, the other stuff belongs to Dimitrova). There was also a curious glitch that meant that any rugs I tried to rez were disappearing into the floor, and couldn't be spotted with any amount of camming round. However, there is more of a feel of safety and possibilities for meeting up with neighbours.

There were a good number of green dots on the map when she was there: though if everyone's an alt like me, community building will take a bit of time...

Like, awesome, man

2010-02-15T18:08:00.012-06:00

Parties attended: 1 (good); No. of bottles of vodka consumed: 1 (virtual, curiously non-alcoholic); Nights danced away: 1 (good)(but will regret it in the morning)

Tonight attended UK educators' party in which Usual Suspects met pleasantly together on Bluesky's island. Initial impressions were mixed as appeared we were going to spend party sitting round mystitool table, which is not my idea of rollicking abandon. However soon emerged that actual party was at beach bar complete with barstools, louche poses, glitter dance ball and soulful palm trees.

Had dressed up for occasion in what turned out as a sort of Helena Bonham Carter ensemble, lace and freaky hair, and felt that party had enjoyably retro 70s feel, but that is probably because the 70s was when was at uni, and just getting nostalgic flashback.

Bar dispensed bottles of Jack Daniels (always a fave, never tire of that drunken collapse animation you get after 3 sips), beer (my first tipple of the evening) and vodka (bottle or glass, obviously went for the whole bottle). Not that drank vodka in RL, in 70s or now, if going to knock back RL alcohol, it should at least have a proper taste (pref. of fine wine or malt whisky).

Kattan and Plymouth led way in disco dancing, at some point people started doing fairy dances (where you leap up and twirl round), and the chat seemed v. amusing at the time. Added later During banter, someone made joking remark, which remark I alluded to in earlier version of this post, as if it had not been a joke. If had allowed brain to intervene between self and keyboard would have realised that could not possibly be true. Consequence was offending someone that certainly would not want to offend, and having a general lord-I'm-useless freaking-out moment. Many lessons to be learned here, including 1) think before blogging, especially about friends; 2) don't blog at 1am when v. tired and therefore not firing on all mental cylinders. Just sort of thing I might tell to my students. Oh dear.

Buttering parsnips

2010-02-09T15:33:00.010-06:00

Educators meetings hosted: one (good); Educators meetings attended: 2 (good); Tools demo-ed: 2 (v. good); Parsnips chopped: one (tasty, I hope); Simultaneous identities logged in: 3 (challenging, but only in retrospect)

Today was host to UK Educators "Second Tuesday" meeting, this being (unsurprisingly) meeting of UK educators that happens on 2nd Tuesday of each month. Had dithered about where to host it, but then opted for Farradane Centre, since felt had not shown off glories of winter wood to enough people, plus it has enough space to do SL tool demos.
Therefore prepared space by:
1) Installing hot chocolate cabin;
2) Removing Floral Bench;
3) Putting more chairs, cushions and cardboard boxes round edge of platform;
4) Cleaning aquarium and feeding fish - nothing more offputting than arriving at a meeting and seeing a tank full of floaters.

As witching hour approached had usual tension as to whether anyone would turn up, but in end was respectable number, including Csteph, who I had "shouted" at in Avatars United about the meeting. So, a use for AU, if only one so far.

Serious bits of meeting were about ideas for the Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference, and Graham doing useful demos of 2 tools. Unexpected theme of meeting was vegetables, since emerged early on that Silversprite was balancing his Mac on his microwave whilst chopping vegetables for a stew (as pictured here: http://www.twitpic.com/129tuo - the titular parsnip is at the bottom of the picture).

Was much banter which seemed v.v. witty and amusing at the time, and in fact STILL seems at least v. witty and amusing when read the chatlog, however it could be one of those "you had to be there" type of things so will not reproduce it here. At any rate, banter extended to demonstration of wiki tool and Graham's Story Machine, since the nodes in the wiki became parsnips (or to be more precise, pasrnips, lord how we laughed at that typo), onion, butternut squash etc. etc. Discovered that Anyone could alter nodes by clicking on them, so wiki morphed into strange pulsating object, which Graham has kindly left behind so can show it to students this Friday as example. Will have to decide exactly WHAT it is example OF.

VWBPE conversation is in fact mostly being carried out in Google Wave, which deserves a whole post to itself, should I ever get round to it.

2nd meeting was Virtual Worlds Educators Roundtable in which was merely passive audience member whilst - to be v. frank - was processing pics from UK educators meeting. However, meeting was in Voice, so could listen on headphones whilst resizing, adjusting Brightness, uploading to Flickr and adding pictures to Groups and Sets. Did check back to look at local chat, but main questions had to be channeled via Google Moderator, which works quite effciently, but not sure about it as a combo with SL yet. You can add questions, and/or vote on other people's questions so most popular ones come to the top.

I happened to be logged into Blogger as Dimitrova at the time (finishing off a fashion post), so logged into Moderator as her too, and tried to vote on some questions, with mixed success (wasn't always sure why vote hadn't registered).

Until just wrote that down, hadn't really thought about how was logged into 3 different things simultaneously, well actually 4 since was also logged into the university portal, and all with different userids and with 3 different identities.

However, is all me, in the end.

I am 1013 days old

2010-02-08T15:08:00.004-06:00

Profiles rediscovered on Avatars United: 1 (forgotten); HUDs activated: 1 (good); SL blip messages sent: 1 (pointless); No. of AU friends so far: 7 (ok); Of those, no. who are actually known to me: 1 (bad)
Linden Lab have bought Avatars United, so AU has suddenly become EITHER v. cool OR v. cool-to-mock. Was slighlty suprised to find was already on it, since had thought that social networking site that I had joined in October 2008 was Avatars REunited. Such a memory glitch will be unsurprising in one who had blogged the same thing in 2 successive posts (i.e. the VWER meeting on Jan 12 - though interesting to note that said different things about it in each post. Interesting to me, anyway).

Had also unsurprisingly forgotten password, but once had requested new one, logged in, and since then have been accepting Friendship of all who care to offer it. So far this mostly consists of people who want to sell me things, but nice things (e.g. poses) rather than sort of stuff advertised by blog-spammers. Amusingly, saw one of my "new friends" complaining about how people SHE didn't know kept asking to Unite with her; rather sculptie-calling-texture-laggy, I would say.

Have discovered that actually feel embarrassed by lack of friends, presumably because of contrast with vast list of friends in SL itself. Disturbing; thought was above that kind of thing. Had short feverish burst of making Unite requests, but have calmed down now. Think it was when realised that in desperation for friends had agreed to unite with Emerald Viewer i.e. am now chums with a piece of software, namely an alt. SL browser.

Was alerted by a blog post to "SL blip", free on Xstreet, which is an inworld HUD that somehow links up with an app in AU. It tells you your age in days, which is where title of this post came from. You can send messages from SL to your AU profile, which automatically have your location attached. In the instruction sheet they suggest you send blips such as " I'm at this cool music event, come check it out!" This inanity probably tips AU firmly into "cool to mock it" category.

NB: picture is nothing to do with Avatars United, it's the cute new Educational Informatics Village I created for this year's class.

P.S. Balloona became a blog Follower again, with same pic. of her Assets, but presumably with different userid. Perhaps she really is a fan. Or perhaps she googles occurrances of her name. Shouldn't have said it was cute in last post, asking for trouble really.

Followed

2010-02-05T19:06:00.005-06:00

Followers blocked: 1 (bad)
Have resigned self to clearing out my 2 Ning sites of unwelcome members who sign up and then proceed to spam Ning with posts about chemical substances and write-your-homework services (latter is rather ironic, considering both sites are about information literacy). Am also used to rejecting posts from all sorts of people spamming my blogs.

However today was a first in blocking an unwelcome Blog Follower, namely one Balloona, who attracted my attention since her profile pic consisted of a naked torso, presumably hers. On investigation did indeed prove that her profile had links to sites such as "My dirty habit" and "Balloona stellt sich vor" (Balloona introduces herself).

Hmm, having denied Don Tapscott the oxygen of publicity, am now giving rather too much of it to Balloona. Her name is quite cute, though. Do hope I was not doing her an injustice, would be shame if I was banning a serious fan of my deathless prose.

Photo is of the Wilting Heart Shrine, a freebie in a hunt, from the Julia Collection. The heart pumps and makes a beating sound, and there is a cool pose (illustrated) and a doomy sort of poem. Have placed it in winter woods area, and to counterbalance this have also installed a romantic table and chair set from Belle Belle, in the shade of a valentine tree (top right). So, take your pick, depending on your mood.

Moving in circles: it's time

2010-02-05T15:48:00.003-06:00

Educators meetings attended: lots (good, if circular); No. of these meetings starting at 10pm or later: all (bad)

Have not organised any meetings since Christmas, but have tried to get back into swing of things by attending the Virtual Worlds Educators Roundtable meeting more regularly, and also organising committee meetings for Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education.

Unfortunately former start at 10.30 pm on Tuesdays and latter start at 10pm on Weds and Thurs, so means that am getting late night habit again. Broadband reception on mobile stick has also been v. variable, so means that if want to be sure that can actually attend meeting have to go into office (rather than stay at home, attempt connection, login and rez v.v. slowly, catch a few minutes, crash, then stare at little light on mobile stick til it turns requisite blue colour again, indicating some minimal connection, so whole cycle can start over again).

First pic is from VWER meeting on 12th Jan. Unfortunately am now totally unable to remember what topic was, am sure it was riveting at the time. [Added later: I just checked. It was "The Future of SL and VW through the Eyes of M. Linden." I think my contribution consisted of suggesting making it easier to add metadata to Objects. You can't get much more riveting than metadata, can you.][Added still later: realise that had already blogged this in previous entry. But am too lazy to take it out of this one]

2nd pic is from the VWER this week (2nd Feb). This was a talk about ethical and legal isues in SL. This was also revieting, obviously, but am afraid that chief memory is that one of the speakers was wearing a demo skin. Could tell this as it had DEMO written on it in various strategic places. Was distracted into wondering whether this was a mistake (you may remember I spent some time wandering round with demo eyes without realising), or some sort of anti-consumerist statement. Anyway, you can find all the VWER transcripts here: http://vwer.podbean.com/
3rd pic is me at a VWBPE organising committee meeting. This looks v. similar to other pics, except there are less of us. The VWBPE organising committee is chaired by Zana, who is a wizard person, being hardworking, well organised and pleasant. Actual conference is 12-13 March. This pic was taken at around the point when felt compelled to volunteer to do more work, viz being one of the leaders for the poster stream. Unfortunately this has set me up for yet another post-10pm meeting tomorrow, Saturday i.e. starting at 11pm. Hey ho.

On another note, have just seen irritating new essay by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in which they propose doing various things that quite a lot of teachers have been doing for years, as if these were new ideas and they were lone radical voices. They include v. large number of dubious generalisations about collaboration, as if was always Good Thing That Students Love (evidently THEY haven't done much teaching). Not that am AGAINST collaboration, far from it, hasten to add, but is not solution to all world's problems, by any means. Essay is called Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! Lord knows in UK can't get away without constantly Innovating, or at least producing Annual Reflections and Strategic Plans and so forth that say that you are. Perhaps is different in USA?

Was going to link to essay, but then thought, they have publicity enough, why give them another link. If you are v. keen, just copy the title in Google, and up it will pop.

Meeting, meeting, winter warmer

2010-01-12T18:42:00.005-06:00

No of meetings attended: 2 (good); No. of trees felled: 8 (good); No of trees planted: 7 (good); No. of times have tagged a blog entry with the word "chocolate": 0 until today (surprising: in RL would probably have to tag every day "chocolate")
Invigorated by RL train journey through Peak District (from Manchester to Sheffield; trees and snow look amazing) attended UK SL educators "Second Tuesday" meeting. There were what might be called Usual Suspects in attendance and chat was pleasing mix of banter (new year resolutions; cats; feather costumes; that kind of thing) and useful convo re education. UK educator meetings seems to have higher banter-to-Serious-Stuff ratio which is OK by me. Had not visited Bangor sim (the venue) before so that also interesting.

Couple of hours later was the SL educators roundtable, now renamed in 21st century fashion "Virtual Worlds Educators Roundtable", since meetings also take place in other virtual worlds. Was load of people there and lots of discussion (loosely) around points that one of the Linden's had made in a sort of "state of the grid" blog post. Did not make much contribution and at one point inadvertantly turned Voice Chat on (when checking to see whether someone else had an open microphone, ironic really) and AJ IMed me about it, which is shaming. However, did not have any microphone device plugged in so do not think will have been making much noise, unless laptop was providing own conversational contributions without my knowledge.

Following this checked up on some of my homes; renewing rent on Babylon 5 room, returning a suspicious looking item to its owner from my main home, and also having a look at the African sim where Graham is renting some land. All the African heat reminded me that was intending to make Infolit even more wintery, so tp-ed back, adjusted the ground textures a bit to get full snow in NE corner of Infolit iSchool, and changed trees around greenhouse to wintery ones. Also added an extra winter deer and suddenly remembered had Hot Chocolate Hut in inventory, and put that in too. If you click the cups or dispensor you get mug of warming chocolate with usual drinking animation that throws beverage in rough direction of face. Can then go and bother the deer. No dogs though, please.

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T13:30:00.004-06:00

Took advantage of Belle Belle Piano with Poses (free to Belle Belle groupmembers instore) that Dimitrova had helpfully placed on the snowy mountaintop on Infolit iSchool. Belle Belle items are beautifully crafted, but some of them have ... very FRIENDLY couple poses, ahem, ... however thought this one was rather cute.

Lest auld acquaintance

2010-01-01T11:12:00.000-06:00

No. of months without blogging: 1 (bad); No. of friends selling homes in SL: 1 (bad) (but good for friend, hopefully)

Have been v. lax on blogging front due to various things including Xmas and RL visit to snowy Moscow. Was also hampered by curious fact that whilst using mobile broadband dongle with Internet Explorer was able to view blogs, order books online, Google, play vids on Youtube, do SL etc. etc., but not LOG IN to blogger.

Whenever attempted it, got minutes of "contacting blogger.com" followed by that enigmatic error page that appears "user friendly" but in fact gives you no more clue than ye olde error 404 (which internet veterans will remember fondly). Was probably punishment for using IE browser, since when tried Firefox today, was no prob at all. Curious.

Anyway, first couple of pics show of winter wonderland that is Infolit iSchool. As usual, conference platform has been turned into skating rink (first pic), with snow emitter, Xmas trees, free skates, skating poseballs, tankards of warm punch, festive cake and so forth.
Woodland area near Farradane centre is also fully snowed in (see 2nd pic). By now can find lots of stuff in own inventory by searching for "frosty" "snow" or "christmas", indeed have whole seasonal folder bursting with cheer. However, but did indulge in a few extra items, mostly trees.

Had a couple of presentation sessions to finish off year on Infolit iSchool which may blog seprately. Ishbel came along and was able to have a chat with her. 3rd pic shows us on the Info Literate sky platform.

She is giving up her home, Windygates - when last looked her lot was cleared up and offered for sale. Felt quite nostalgic - remembering first days with her and Citril, when we all lived within flying distance of each other (see early months of this blog). She isn't giving up on SL altogether, but isn't spending recreational time here so is sensible really, but still felt a bit melancholy.

Last picture shows Ishbel's plot: actually can quite understand need to move as has Acid House night club at end of garden, never exactly no. 1 on the favourite neighbour category.

Belated Merry Christmas!

2009-12-28T06:14:00.000-06:00

In memory of Bluewave

2009-11-25T14:47:00.010-06:00

This is a serious blog entry, as you can't get much more serious than death. A couple of hours ago I heard that someone who I admired and liked greatly in Second Life died last night. I knew her mostly as Bluewave Ogee: in the physical world she was Professor Leslie Jarmon.

When I saw the subject line on the SLED discussion list I was first disbelieving, and then stunned. She was one of the co-founders of the Educators Coop, and after I got to know her co-founder, North Lamar, I was invited in, even though I wasn't renting Coop land. It has been wonderful being part of the Coop, a group of people to chat with, learn from and share frustrations with. Bluewave was always helpful, always encouraging, a real leader and mentor. People say a lot things about people being loved and inspirational in obituaries (which I suppose is what I am writing) but Bluewave was those things.

I suppose I will be getting increasing numbers of cold shocks from electronic messages beamed out to discussion lists or twitter - deaths of real friends, but who are not so close that I would be someone who was told before all the others who will be mourning too. There is a memorial set up on the University of Texas sim at http://slurl.com/secondlife/UT%20Austin%207/118/86/29 with pictures of her in both lives and a box to post notecards with tributes and memories. I teleported in and left a notecard and exchanged words with people there, but there wasn't anyone I knew.

Then I saw that North had come inworld, and when I checked on the map there was someone on the newest Educators Coop island, so I teleported over and he was there at a memorial that Rx has made. Bluewave was North's advisor for his PhD, and he had been with her shortly before she died. I learnt a bit more about her family, and her illness, but mostly it was good to be in the Coop, with North, who I think must have introduced us, and who must feel her loss greatly. While we were standing there, North sent out a message to the Coop group, and so gradually a few others arrived.
The second picture shows us there: we are adding flowers around the pool and North put up a word bubble that a friend of Bluewave's had made.

North said that she had sent a message for the Educators Coop members "tell them it's been REAL". It is real, and that means the loss is real too. Going back to find a decent picture of Bluewave I remember the many Coop meetings, the visits, Coop projects ... it seems impossible that she won't still be part of that. She had just had an amazing success: Texas had bought 50 islands, to invest significantly in SL as an environment for learning, and her leadership had managed that: so it will be a loss for SL education too. However what I will miss most is the chat, the IMs to "Dear Sheila!"

Don't think I'll be putting any jokey tags on this entry.

Happenings, meetings, all too much

2009-11-18T09:10:00.003-06:00

Storyquests taken: 1 (excellent); Educators meetings attended: 4 (approx) (good); Teaching sessions held: several (as good as can be expected); No. of days between writing this entry and publishing it: 12 (bad)

As is usual when v. active in SL and indeed RL have been failing somewhat on the blogging front. Have, though, noticed unerving tendency to compose blog entries in head as working into work. Alas when get to work am swept away in happy (ahem) whirl of email, teaching, etc. etc. Also may have noted before that tend to avoid blogging about students since would not want to offend them by sounding offhand or slighting. Thus will not say to much about that side of things, perhaps will reserve that for special post in dull and factual tone.

In fact did a lot of reflecting about SL because did talk as part a research seminar series and was invited by Jackie and DrJoolz to talk about my adventures in SL in autoethnographic fashion. Since "SL" and "myself" are 2 of my favourite things, was v. excited about this, and will upload ppt in due course. Actually should be sooner than "due course" as am getting polite reminders from organisers. And could be doing that instead of blogging whilst uploading to flickr (these are the two tasks currently being multi-ed)

Note: Have returned to blogging after mad whirl of information literacy week in SL, and discovered this sad stump of a post. Decide might as well publish it, although it is pretty dull. Picture doesn't show any of the events mentioned above: once infolit week was over decided to spend 40 minutes recreationally, & created moody autumnal island with new sculpty reindeer from G Field, 50 Linden greenhouse and my new favourite birch trees from AG.

Remembrance

2009-11-04T21:16:00.003-06:00

Trenches visited: 1 (sobering); Remembrance day areas created: 1 (tasteful, hopefully)
Am in midst of Infolit Week in SL prep, but took time out to locate remembrance day poppy wreath, poppy rezzer and Heart garden centre poppy plants (Big and Small) in inventory. Remembrance Day is (for non-Brits) on the 11th day of the 11th month, but the big commemoration (Cenotaph, Queen, wreath-laying etc.) is on the Sunday nearest to the 11th. Oxford Uni have just opened a Western Front Trenches & war poems archive sim (in case people needed reminding that war not good thing), and from that I got a full permissions poppy, so you can get one on Infolit, also there is a tablet that gives a landmark to the Western Front. The Infolit area, with poppies and tablet, (pictured here) is at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/107/180/21/

Halloween, cave, mountain

2009-10-21T04:16:00.008-06:00

Sculpty halloween cave mountains installed: 1 (good); No. of coffins installed: 2 (good); no. of gravestones installed: 3 (good); no. of funky multi-time-zone chronometers installed: 1 (v. good); No. of pumpkins installed: countless (v. orange)
As a break between serious work with students (3 sessions so far) and numerous education meetings, have been installing and decorating Halloween cave mountain. Discovered basic mountain (2 levels of cave complex, plus 2 layers above with one cave room each, plus assorted waterfalls and paths) I forget how, but anyway was designer whose work hadn't really explored before and his/her sim turned out to be filled with exotic sculpty cave constructions. Had seen some grottos made out of Scupted Prims, but this takes to whole new level (literally), with apartment blocks of caves.

Buying finger was itching to purchase, and v. soon thought of excuse, namely that had not yet determined form of the 2009 Infolit iSchool Halloween celebration, and a cave complex seemed just the ticket.
Think, with all those rushing waterfalls (which cover cave entrances BTW, so is actually Secret Sculpty Halloween Cave Mountain) is probably also v. v. laggy, so waited til after 1st student session. Then positioned carefully in what is normally the empty corner of Infolit iSchool and have proceeded to stuff with accumulated Halloween Fun, as collected in Halloween 2007 and 2008, with several must-have 2009 additions.
My 3 favourite items, in no particular order are:

1) Aina's Grave and Prayer, consisting of a grave and a patch of ground. In each you SIT and then cycle through 3 poses by clicking the item. In the Grave the positions are: Buried (invisible); One hand sticking out of grave; Leaping Out of Grave. In the Prayer object the positions are: Praying, Startled and Running Like Hell. In the pic you see Ishbel as the dead person, and me as the mourner. Ishbel had just bought a free pair of wings from an ajoining cave, which think adds to the effect. Creator: Aina Yoshikawa (I've also put her Chair That Drops A Flowerpot in the caves)

2) Halloween pumpkin chronometer. This has time in various places of SL and RL, and it whooshes out steam and bats, also there are spooky noises. It is thus the only item in the caves that has some vague kind of utility (the time function, rather than the bats). I started by putting it outside the cave and then moved it to be the piece de resistence in the innermost of the ground level caves. Creator: Greene Concept.

3) Pumpkin hanging lights. These do not do anything apart from hang there, but they are v. cute and colourful. Creator: Oddment

If you want to Explore, then the bottom entrance is at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/198/216/20/ but go soon, as it will all disappear after Halloween.

PS am thinking of adding recording of me reading entries as another way of wasting own time and possibly yours. Below is the recording of this one. Am too close to microphone in some places, but frankly can't be bothered to record it again, but, anyway, there it is. Will do better next time.
URL is : http://www.archive.org/details/SheilaYoshikawaBlogEntry21October2009

Pigs fly

2009-10-16T12:34:00.008-06:00

Research launches attended: 1 (invigorating); Flying pigs rezzed: 1 (joyful); No. of flying pigs set with Poop On: 1 (amusing)
In RL attended today launch of Digital World initiative in which researchers in all reaches of university are exhorted to work in purposeful harmony to bag huge wodges of dosh for research that is, in some way, however tangential, about The Digital World. As far as can see are not v. lucrative new opportunities for dosh, but idea is that by working together can grab more of what is already on offer from research councils, EU etc.
Anyway, most memorable part was when assembled company was exhorted not to submit crap research bids, since said crapness would soil fair name of uni and make it likely that any future bids from other parts of uni would be lightly tossed aside simply from have originated from same institution. Obviously everyone v. sobered by this awful prospect, though must say that was seized by sudden urge to go home and write crap bid just to be awkward. Burning question remains though: exactly what IS a crap research bid? e.g. is it worse if the proposed research is crap, or if the proposal itself is?
On further thought, realised that could propose whole research programme stimulated by this theme, e.g.
1. Phenomenographic investigation into variations of conceptions of “crap research” at a Russell group University **
2. An action research project with starting problem “I want my research proposals to be less crap”, with at least two iterations of the action research cycle and employment of a panel of embittered old dons as critical friends
3. An auto-ethnographic investigation conducted by someone who has a well-documented trail of evidence showing that s/e always submits crap research proposals; leading to playfully transgressive accounts of lived experience of not getting research grants.
4. A case study of an academic department which is reknowned for its crap research bids, using Eisenhardt’s process of theory building to develop a model of crap research bid production;
5. A Delphi study to gain an expert consensus on the future character and prospects of crap research;
6. An investigation into factors determining crapness in research proposals, using a grounded theory approach;
6. A poll on Facebook of which researcher you would most like to throw crap at.

Hmm, that last one is a bit nasty, but if Facebook then would only be virtual crap. Anyway, might well ask what connection this have SL. One answer is that any of the above might become Virtual World Research candidates were the words “in SL” inserted somewhere within them. Other is that, although have been doing digital stuff for aeons, SL has made RL alt more likely to troll along to events such as these.

Day was not without SL activity, in that after zipping from said research meeting to some teaching, zipped back to help Bluewave who was introducing SL to a roomful of people in Texas. Bluewave has been v.v. successful in getting money to purchase dozens of regions, and is also v. helpful person generally. Have pics of this but on my other computer, so may add one later.

Afterwards spared a few minutes to fiddle around with latest animal purchase, namely flying pig.
Was in v. cute shop on Wednesday (see first pic) when Pancha IMed re. the posters that we are putting together for Alejandro’s Spanish-language discussion in Infolit week. As well as flying pigs, are also flying moles, moles that pop out of ground, lamb and pig merry-go-rounds (they wiggle their legs! they are so cute!) and much more. Tped Pancha to admire same and also have more serious discussion, and could not resist buying pig before leaving for Infolit.
Pigs are copy, and can set height, range o flight, and set chirp and poop (splats descend from sky) on and off. They take off v. gracefully, and are good size for those occasions when some animal interest is in order but you don’t want people being knocked over all the time. Also could be useful if you have to implement decision of Facebook poll, though might need to rez whole flock to get sufficient splat coverage.

Unfortunately haven't yet taken close-up pig pic., but looks like pig in 1st pic, but with wings. Is speck above me and Pancha in 2nd pic., happily chirping and pooping. 3rd pic shows Pancha and me contemplating her information literacy poster with multiple embedded notecards. Alfabatizacion Informacional para toda la vida. Indeed.

** [note to Australians: this is like “sandstone”; note to Americans: this is not quite as good as Ivy League]