Catablog

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.

Griefed

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.

Happenings, meetings, all too much

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.

Swinish

Meetings held: 2 (good); Weeks taken to put up chatlog of 1st one: 3 (bad); Hours spent on pasting up chatlogs, making wiki pages, revising notecard etc: 3 (bad)

Am trying to catch up on backlog of recording info on discussions, amidst all the backlog about everything else. Life is just one long backlog.

Firstly was Adra Letov's meeting, The Information Environment is Affect-Driven held on 21st May. Adra (Diane Nahl in RL) spoke in Voice but helpfully provided notecards with text and refernces, and the rest of us spoke in chat. Have put texts on wiki here http://infolitischool.pbworks.com/IB-and-emotion%3A-Dr-Diane-Nahl-21st-May-2009 and chatlog is here http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=418
Was v. pleased that had persuaded colleague Nigl (who is information behaviour researcher) to come along, and Jackie, Ishbel, Maggie (& various others) were there too. Lot of interest and things to follow up. Humorous moment when Nigl sat accidentally on my head. Lol.

Last Thursday was the Swine Flu Information Literacy event. Graham blogged the meeting rather faster than I have at http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/seven-pillars.html and managed to capture the Humorous Event of this meeting, namely point where I had dropped people a surgical mask and we had all donned them as if for strange ritual. Maggie added to this by wearing mask on head, which was, frankly, more becoming than wearing it on face.
Have put up chatlog (this was all in chat) at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=417 and also have started up wiki page with some summary notes & explanation at http://infolitischool.pbworks.com/Information+Literacy+builds+-+Swine+flu where people are encouraged to comment. Or do visit the build at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20%iSchool/169/189/21/

When going through chatlog was disturbed to notice several occurances of:
"[2009/06/04 12:37] Pig poster: Unable to give inventory: 'No item named 'Bird flu - the exercise'.'."

Feared this meant that Swine Flu Notecard, that had cheerfully told everyone to take, did not work, but everyone was too polite to say. Turned out (when tried clicking stuff just now) to be in poster that wasn't meant to have notecard, so all well. Apart from fact that some people probably thought they were MEANT to have a notecard. All water under bridge now, anyway. And is charming that Pig Poster was able to take part in Chat, even if contribution was on repetitive side.
After session was clearing up when Spotted Dousa on Regent Plaza. She ran an idea about student journalism interns past me - could be interesting. Graham also was showing a colleague the build, so island felt pleasantly busy.

And after this stayed up far too late and ended up taking advantage of the open hours on the University of Washington sim (last pic), where there was a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs build. You had to do a lot of climbing up and down, and there was some interactive element.

Was enjoyable, but am now wondering: did I learn anything about the hierarchy? Probably only clicked the bits and did the bits that looked amusing, rather than the parts which were most informative. On one hand, was frivolous academic v.v. late at night - on other hand gnat-like attention span probably means am rather like these millennial students everyone talks about.

And now think Sleep has come to top of my Needs hierarchy, so will stop.