Gone cats; on Comments; too much stuff

Comments on fashion blog: 2 (bad); Cats disappearing into Lost and Found: 7 (very very bad); Amount of cute stuff that can be bought at SL events: limitless (so bad, it becomes good again)
My Blueness fashion blog is attracting comments, but alas not from what one might call discerning punters. Indeed a sceptical reader might think people were spamming the blog to advertise some tawdry search engine optimisation services. First comment reads "Its such as you read my thoughts! You appear to understand so much approximately this, like you wrote the e book in it or something. I believe that you can do with some percent to drive the message home a little bit, however instead of that, that is magnificent blog. A fantastic read. I’ll definitely be back."

This so barely hangs together as English that it almost becomes poetry (really awful poetry, obviously). Quality of the prose is probably explained by next comment

"I read a lot of interesting posts here. Probably you spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, SEO friendly articles in minutes, just search in google – laranitas free content source". Is evident that author A must have been using services being peddled by author B and in my view should ask for their money back, though the phrase "like you wrote the e book in it or something" has a certain ring to it.
Makes me nostalgic for the early days of spam where either messages were lovingly handcrafted by spamming maestros, or consisted of random chunks of text welded together with no regard for sentence structure, punctuation or meaning.

Moving on, had been looking at fashion blog because just posted new outfit (see above) presenting just a few of the many items hoovered up at recent SL events. The Arcade! Kustom 9! We Love Roleplay! Jewelery Fair! The Chapter Four! Basically, there is just too much cute stuff to be had, and my inventory is stuffed to the limit (i.e. 71,000 items) with things so delightful have never even opened the box let alone worn them.

Could have disquisition on moral decay of Western Society here (what kind of world is it where spend money on virtual hat consisting of giant butterfly, when should be doing marking?) however will move on swiftly to Case of The Disappearing Kitties. Was going quietly about normal business in SL, setting up a picture shot of me carving pumpkins amongst autumnal trees and grass (see first pic), when realised that item which had just rezzed was more than the prim count that I had left on the land. Strange.
Turned out that this was because SL had decided to send into Lost and Found
- 7 assorted kittycats
- 1 folding chair
- 1 set of washing, on a line.
Items are all scripted, but then so are oodles of other things. To cut long story short, kitties are returned to their homes, but still seems to be some kind of aftermath in which when "holding" a kitty animation does not work, so get unfortunate effect as pictured here with Marl.

Perhaps  is revenge of the spammers for sending their comments straight to spam.

I discover I have many albums

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.

VWER, SL/RL

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.

I missed my rez day

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.

Blogging session

Chatlogs put online: 1 (good); Wikis updated: 1 (good); Posters mounted in Infolit iSchool: 1 (good) (and so forth and so on)

Spent some time tidying up after last discussion session - amount of posting and updating seems to increase exponentially but can't blame anyone else but self for this. Latest effort is a wiki at http://infolitischool.pbwiki.com/ where already have put up links to chatlogs etc. of previous discussion sessions - list looks rather impressive if say so myself.
Chatlog of last discussion, on blogging, is now at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=316 . Some people mention their blogs in the chat, but Robin didn't: Robin's blog is at http://librarianbydesign.blogspot.com/ Think I might as well put in text from my SL notecard as well: Dulcie Dull to read, but gives some info:
"Sheila Yoshikawa is in RL Sheila Webber, faculty member in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. She started blogging The Information Literacy Weblog in 2003, and has been regularly blogging ever since.
"My main blogs [note confusing slip into 1st person here] are
- Information Literacy Weblog: http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/ (professional blog)- Adventures of Yoshikawa http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/ (main SL blog)
- Low prim Living with Style http://lowprimstyle.blogspot.com/ (more irregular fashion blog for my alt) [all is revealed, eh]
"I'm a regular co-contibuter to:
- Inquiry Based Learning: http://cilass.group.shef.ac.uk/ (education blog)
- Information Literacy meets Library 2.0: http://infolitlib20.blogspot.com/ (professional library blog)
- iheartsl: http://iheartsl.com/ (this is a high volume SL fashion blog, so I'm only a minor contributor to this)
[so frankly is wonder that get any time to eat, sleep, remind friends and family that am in land of living etc.]----
"Obvious resources/ links
- Second Life group: Second Life bloggers
- Ning community: http://secondlifebloggers.ning.com/
- Bloghud (enables you to blog from within SL: I haven’t tried this tool myself): http://bloghud.com/
"There have been various discussions inworld e.g. as part of Orange Island media week earlier this week. There is a blog entry at http://www.orange-island.com/?p=565 with links to audio recordings of the sessions (“Blogging virtual worlds” and “Using a blog as part of a media strategy”)"
****

Now an interesting addendum to latter is that have discovered yet another pic which has been siphoned off Flickr and onto web page of multinational company, namely a quite fetching pic of me in fairy queen outfit examining Liverpool Uni's website on a prim. Indeed pic is used to illustrate Orange Island item on web on a prim. Credits me, but even so. And how did they find it? Didn't index photo with prim word. Hey ho.

BTW the photos are totally irrelevant to what is discussed in this post. Apart from being of me, of course.

Added later Revisited Flickr pages and in fact is not wonder that photo was found since I had entitled it "Web on a prim". How had I managed to forget that in a few short days? Worrying.