Twelve islands
It isn’t exactly news that IBM is interested in virtual worlds, but Friday represented a bit of a milestone when we unveiled our official land in Second Life — twelve interlinked islands, open and built-out for business use, research, internal collaboration, and anything else we can think of. As always, Eightbar has the inside scoop.
It’s exciting times, but not because we’re in Second Life. We’ve been working in SL for months, albeit without the sanctioned presence that this island megaplex gives us. This is important because it represents the results of collaboration between a somewhat bewildering variety of interests inside IBM and it points to much more to come. This event, the founding and development of the twelve islands and not Sam Palmisano’s announcement in Beijing (much as I loved it), is the real beginning of IBM establishing itself in this space (literally).
But what really interests me — end press release, start me release — is that this will be a springboard to the rest of the metaverse. Second Life itself is but an island, really, a popular walled garden that was one of the first to the game. Zoom out and move forward a few years and SL will be just a powers-of-ten-sized chunk of a much larger universe of virtual worlds. The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time will be one, as will thousands of others. In fact, to really make an impact there shouldn’t be distinctions between the various worlds. One should be able to hop about as from webpage to webpage, seamlessly. That’s a bit of a dream these days with the leaders in the industry less interested in standards and interop than community-building. But we’ve seen that before with the browser hell of the early web days and we’ll no doubt see it again.
If you’re in Second Life and would like to visit, just search for IBM on the map and pick an island. There’s a lot to see. I’m Immerito Foley in-world. Ping me if you need a guide.
Seasonal smattering
A few trinkets for your stocking.
After over a year shuttered, the Division Street Russian Baths are back open. The “renovation” is somewhat underwhelming. The classic, mildewy old entrance is gone, replaced by a brokerage or something. I sauntered into a room full of cubicles and thought “can’t be.” Indeed, it wasn’t. The entrance is now through what used to be the women’s spa. The new upper floor is a vast, soul-free community era decorated in stunning what-do-you-do-for-style-after-communism Russian cheese. The sauna benches have been rebuilt and enlarged. Yes, the charm of worrying about hooking an appendage (ok, the appendage) on a rusty nail popping through the slats is gone. As is the old tiled Russian and Turkish Baths sign. The eucalyptus steam room ain’t working and the cold bath looks like the holding area for the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Granted, I visited two weeks ago, so maybe things have improved, but Russian Baths 2.0 is definitely still in beta.
On a recent ground stop in SFO (weather in Chicago, imagine that) I had a few hours to talk to the pilot. He told me about all the shit that’s hit his plane’s windshield during flight. Birds, obviously. But also fish over Cleveland that had been sucked up in some Great Lakes equivalent of a waterspout. He’s also had a snake smashed into the glass, dropped from a bird of prey presumably. Snakes on a plane, indeed. Then there are the animals in the plane. The pilot told me about all the legally-permissible guide animals — animals that are not required to be caged. Dogs, obviously. But also guide pigs (small) and even a guide falcon, which sat (hooded) on his owner’s shoulder the whole flight. I suggest that the person behind the falconer was not about to complain about a too-reclined seat.
The ‘tubes have been good to me this year. I’ve reconnected with my roommate from Rome in 1993 (one resolution, complete), my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in 20 years, and a student I taught freshman composition to in 1996. Is anyone still saying the Internet makes you antisocial?
The shooting at a law office in the Chicago Loop last week over a patent misunderstanding has gotten me thinking about the value of ideas these days. The business of patents — creating them, licensing them, suing for them — is gigantic, billions of dollars annually. And yet, they are only ideas, most never to receive material or methodological implementation. It’s no wonder — though certainly tragic — that a sociopathic gunman didn’t understand that just because a truckers’ toilet hadn’t been built didn’t mean it hadn’t been patented. The patent system clearly needs an overhaul, but so do people’s expectations of the value of a single idea. Innovation ain’t worth much if it isn’t paired with insight and implementation. And for those of you who think your life has been ruined because of a stolen idea, perhaps check Google’s new patent search first?
Independent Claus
The Santa Claus myth is alive and well in our home. Our five-year-old believes and so do his younger sibs. How long this will last is a mystery. We’ve already identified the schoolmates we think will burst the bubble. (In fact we did this years ago.)
But the real problem may not be an informant friend, we’re coming to realize. There are just too many opportunities to see Santa Claus out and about these days. Any half-witted kid will soon realize it isn’t possible for Santa to be at the mall, on the L, at the neighborhood party, on TV, and at school all within a week and, somehow, never looking quite the same. Now, you may argue that this wouldn’t raise suspicion since children gleefully accept Santa’s trans-global physics-defying* gift delivery trip on Christmas Eve. The difference is that the many encounters of Santas throughout the too-long Christmas season are a much more local, tangible phenomenon than the concept of an unseen Santa flitting through the night sky. And kids are uncanny at pattern recognition with local, tangible things.
Now, I’m not about to throw in with the War on Christmas pundits. In some ways this is the opposite: too much Christmas, not enough room for imagination. My wife actually wanted to talk strategy about how we’d answer if my son asked “Is this the real Santa?” at the local neighborhood festival. I didn’t think we should say that he wasn’t real. Why even plant the seed that there is such a thing as an unreal Santa? We’d just explain that Santa can be in many places quickly, like magic. I’ve polled some of my friends and I seem to be in the minority with this stance. Some friends call Rent-a-Clauses “Santa’s Helpers.” But aren’t his helpers elves? And why would a helper dress up exactly like him? Seems a stretch to me.
Parents, how are you dealing with this?
[*] There’s a rebuttal to the classic Physics of Santa argument. Of course he uses an ion shield. Duh!
Dreamy Tangerine
You know that field in iTunes for beats-per-minute? Ever wondered what the hell it was good for? Well, now we know. Tangerine, a scrumptious little OSX app, will analyze your entire library — mine of some 12,000 tunes took 15 hours — and plop the BPM into track metadata — another 12 or so hours. So that’s nice: more complete metadata. But Tangerine actually allows you to do something useful.
Tangerine locally logs BPM and beat intensity. You can then construct playlists by selecting a frequency and intensity range and choosing a pattern.
The playlist view is nicely done. Songs are represented by their cover art and scaled vertically to represent BPM, horizontally to represent duration. You can of course save your playlists to iTunes.
This particular fruit will set you back $25.
Track level
A view of our holiday track layout. Complete with derailment.
Music: ’76 aka The Slow Train, Lemon Jelly
Intercoastal
For Turkey Day I spent some time with the male members of my family on the now-annual fall fishing trip to coastal Texas. This was the site of last year’s encounter with Larry the Fishing Guide. We hired him again. Most decent guides know where the fish are. Larry has a preternatural ability to know what the fish are doing. He reads the barely-subsurface topography of the intercoastal and can tell you why a school of drum is in this place but not 15 feet to the north. Of course, he’s constantly on his cell phone with other guides so there’s bit of a hive mind aspect to the local knowledge. But still. Larry’s uncanny.
Larry has a great verb: “to box.” As in “Nice one, John, that’ll box for sure.” As in “that fish is large enough not to get us arrested if we keep it so we can put it in our onboard freezer box.” To say “that’ll box” is easier, you see.
My favorite Larry trick? He sets the drag on his poles (which we all use) to the exact tension so that if the drag lets out you know you have a fish that’ll box. If the drag does not give then you’ll be tossing this particular fishie back. Think about that. Drag tension varies from reel to reel and yet he is able to set the drag precisely to differentiate a 19“ redfish from a 21” redfish. It worked too.
The new experience this year was flounder gigging. You go out at night into the extreme shallows and stand at the bow of your floodlit flatboat with a trident ready to spot-and-spear the flounder. It is so primitive and, well, satisfying. There’s absolutely no sport to it at all, but it is astonishing how much fun it is. It just shouldn’t be, but it is. Bloody too, as the pierced, spewing flounder are arc’ed into the holding tub on the end of trident.
Actually the best part is the marine life you see. In those shallows with that much light at night you encounter herons, crabs, jellyfish, mullet, redfish, and even porpoise. In fact, for most of our evening we had a two-porpoise escort. They played off whichever side of our boat was away from shore, effectively pushing fish into even shallower water for us. Smart creatures! The flip side of this natural beauty is the clear evidence of human negligence. Propeller-scarred lanes of sand criss-cross the grassy shallows like a satellite photo of Europa. Granted, navigating the tricky waters and tides of the intercoastal is difficult*, but some of these scars were deep and suggest foolishness rather than ignorance.
It is a bit eerie too. Some people gig flounder without a boat by walking in the shallows. These die-hards trudge through the muck with a lantern powered by a car battery floating in a sytrofoam enclosure tethered to their waste. They also drag a bag of bleeding flounder. This is intrepid bordering on stupid given the sharks that patrol the same shallows. The last thing I’d want is to try to outrun a blood-crazed shark with a car battery strapped to my waist.
[*] Quote of the Trip: “John, do you know how to use a sextant?” — father-in-law after we somehow ended up in Corpus Christi bay at night miles away from where we should have been. I am ashamed to say that I did not know how to use a sextant. But if he had an astrolabe …
Party as a verb
The deafening silence on this blog is attributable to one thing only: the obscene workload of preparing for our holiday party. Trying to one-up ourselves each year seems to be driving us asymptotically closer to insanity. And yet, it is a damn good time, bigger than Christmas day in some ways. Certainly more work, usually more fun. It all went down on Saturday night.
We were worried about the fire marshal and the ATF. The first because we invited way too many people and we don’t have a gigantic space. The second because, well, let’s just say the freeze-distillation of the homemade apple cider succeeded.
To combat the crush of people that inevitably orbit the bartender we devised a few ploys to get people down into the basement/mancave. We set up a DJ table downstairs. Two laptops — one running the Hercules DJ Console, the other running Ableton Live — were connected to a two-channel mixer which hooked into the stereo system. The trusty Denon AVR-4306 (oh how I love that piece of machinery) ably handled playing Christmas tunes upstairs and the mixer’s output downstairs. Everyone wants to be a DJ and, after a few drinks, no one seems to care that you aren’t. (Beatmatching, like downhill skiing, is not really something to be done drunk.) It was great fun.
We also set up a prom-style photo wall, inspired by an excellent photostream on Flickr (which I cannot find at the moment) link (thanks, Craig). Borrowing a friend’s kickass SLR and installing some remote control software we were able to rig it so that the revelers had only to hit F9 to take their own shots. A laptop displayed the output immediately. 800 photos later, I am amazed at what people will do in front of a camera. In any event, the ploys worked and by 9pm the basement was throbbing with people vamping for the camera and thumping to the choons.
Adding to the rave-like quality on the lower level were this year’s party favors. Traditionally we’ve created a mix using Coudal’s superb Jewelboxes. One of the great things about these cases is that the hinge between the covers creates a nifty little chamber. Coudal encourages creative uses of the chamber so last year (for a mix called “Shaken”) I filled the chamber with red, white, and green Tic Tacs. I was pleased with the results. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Coudal actually now has an entire sub-line of Jewelboxes with Tic Tac-filled hinge chambers! Flattering, I suppose. (Hard not to love Coudal. Even if they did steal my idea!)
Anyway. The rave-like quality. This year I searched high and low for glow sticks that were the proper size for the hinge chamber. My idea was to have red and green glowing CDs. Turns out glow sticks are made in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes for everything from costumes to golf balls to fishing lures. This last category — called Lunker Lights — was the perfect size for the chamber. The effect was stunning — though it only lasted for about 8 hours. Rave on! (For those who enjoy stylistically schizophrenic playlists, the tracks are listed here.)
Our ATF worries were less Ruby Ridge, more Al Capone. There’s nothing wrong with making your own hard cider, of course. It turned out very well, if a little dry. But the real hit of the party was the Applejack. This potent distillate is made by putting a quantity of cider out in the snow for a few days, letting the non-alcoholic liquid (which is most of it) freeze, scraping that off, repeating. Liquid volume reduction, no alcohol reduction. (Some pics at the end of this photoset.) You can figure out the rest. It isn’t precisely legal, but then who says I didn’t just leave the tub out in the snow by accident? Calvados is the name of store-bought heat-distilled Apple liqueur. I’m quite certain it tastes nothing like my Applejack. But people clearly drank it at the party and, refreshingly, we’ve had no reports of blindness or death.
The last bit of party fun for which I was responsible (i.e. those things having nothing to do with food or decoration) was the train track. Every year we alter the track layout a bit and this year, frankly, we might have overdone it. For years we’ve had the traditional living room and tree base interlocking loops. But that’s for amateurs we decided. And by we I mean, me and my two sons. Nah. I just mean me. So we devised the trans-dining room spur. Since we were cramped for space I laid out a single track that would head into the dining room, loop around a side table, and then return on the same track. Silly me. Electricity (which flows in the tracks and powers the engine) no likey being made to double-back on itself. So that was a colossal failure. “Daddy, why can’t you make the train run?” [heart rends] I didn’t realize you had to be an electrical engineer to build a toy train.
This set off a quest for two reverse loop track thing-a-ma-bobs. Inserting these into a loop of track basically segments off a stretch of track with reverse polarity so that the electrons may once again be happy and your train may run … until it gets to the junction point of the original polarity whereupon it stops and you have to go over to the control panel and reverse the direction manually. Way too cumbersome and not at all fun. So, we had to pitch the spur idea. But did we pitch the trans-dining room express? Hell no. We just made it bigger so that we could have a full fledged electrical physics-behavin’ loop. This was a source of great displeasure for my wife. (“Do you know how many drunk women in high heels are going to trip on that?!”) Chugga-chugga choo-choo.
Let’s end with the stats:
76 people drank …
2.5 handles of vodka
3/4 bottle stoli vanilla
1/3 handle gin
1 bottle scotch
4 cases of beer
2 bottles champagne
1 liter coke
1/2 handle bourbon
3 bottles merlot
3 bottles red zin
2 bottles chardonnay
1 bottle pinot grigio
1 bottle pinor noir
16 oz. homemade cider
1/2 gallon homemade applejack (god help ’em)
and ate …
9 lb ham
36 rolls
1 9×13 spinach squares
50 bacon-wrapped dates
1 bucketload of queso
2 mega-bags Fritos scoops
1 plate asparagus appetizers
2 loaves pepperoni bread
2 dozen mini-cupcakes
1/2 recipe goat cheese torta
assorted Twinkies, Ho Ho’s and cupcakes
1 apple cake
1 9×13 gooey toffee butter bars
dozens of sausage bites (1.5 packs of puff pastry)
1/2 recipe Oreo truffles
1 bag hugs pretzels
prosciutto swirls
and did not eat …
choco-covered fruits
my sister’s cookies
fudge
pralines
brownies
Until next year, happy holidays!
Dialogical
In watching Attack of the Clones again (painful indeed, but my boy asked) I noticed a strange line of dialogue. Obi-Wan at the clone factory is trying to establish a connection back to his peeps at Jedi HQ. He asks his droid to send the message “care of the old folks home.” Seemed odd, so I Googled it. Passionate discussions like this, friends, are why I love the Intertubes so.
Speaking of shows my kids watch, I’m still enamored with the Challenge of the Superfriends on DVD. Here’s one reason why. The word “doom.” It is said often and always with subwoofer insidiousness. Doom! (Actually anything the narrator says is pretty cool. I’ve had the line “Deep within the gaseous core of Saturn …” in my head all day.)
When the metaverse is your town hall
Tuesday in Beijing I was part of a team that did something truly bizarre and unique. We helped the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, deliver the results of IBM’s Innovation Jam to an audience inside of Second Life. The virtual venue complemented the 8,000 IBM’ers in China he was speaking directly to as well as the hundreds of thousands of colleagues watching the event via internal webcast.
The reason Palmisano did this was to highlight IBM’s commitment to virtual world technology, one of ten new focus areas coming out of the Innovation Jam. (Roo’s got a bit more detail on the other Jam ideas over at Eightbar.) So, rather than just say we’re committed to the space, we figured we’d have Sam show it. Sam carried on a conversation with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who was at a supercomputing convention in Tampa, via Second Life and phone line while a few dozen IBM’ers from around the world milled about smartly.
It was truly challenging to pull off, though not for the reasons you might expect. The execs were very positive and open-minded about showing a live interaction in Second Life. Trouble was, preparing for doing so in China was a nightmare of failover and logistical planning. Basically every shred of what we hoped to do live had to be filmed machinima-style as a backup in case we lost the connection. Thankfully, it stayed stable at showtime, but the virtual filming easily consumed 95% of our prep time. You just try corralling talented, curious, script-wielding colleagues in Second Life to serve as virtual extras. It is like arranging toddlers for a photo shoot. Everyone wants to show off their latest set of wings or ability to make it rain. It took forever. Still, we had to have the video. So much easier than trying to explain to 8,000 people that the grid’s down.
For the actual event, I was in Beijing with small group of colleagues to anchor the Sam-side interaction. We too were organized for failover. One colleague served as the vitual camera person, another was her backup and video triggerer. Others maintained contact with the IBM crowd, directing them and prepping them for the moment when Sam would “enter” the virtual world being displayed to the real audience in Beijing. Virtual webcasting.
The setting for all this was Thinkland, a private IBM island in Second Life that serves as a testbed for the Forbidden City project mentioned here previously. While the project itself will not ultimately live in SL and only launches in 2008, having a ready virtual environment so clearly China-themed was too good to pass up. Thinkland became the “stage” for the virtual event.
The press response has been strong. BusinessWeek had the exclusive (I believe) with ZDNet, Reuters (and their SL bureau), and a slew of others following closely behind.
Can’t wait to see what happens now. IBM’s ad hoc Virtual Universe Community accomplished a stunning amount of work as a non-organization. Let’s hope the new funding and focus doesn’t squelch any of the passion that has fueled the group to date.
UPDATE: Irving blogs this in much greater detail.
Spot the wall
While the debate rages about whether The Great Wall of China can or cannot be seen from orbit, I can confirm that it can at least be seen from an airplane on a clear day. What a treat on my approach to Beijing.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
