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Geek Heaven

Okay, before I was a geek, I was a guy. Now I'm a guy geek. This movie with the contrast between Jolie's fab stab at retro and Leah's stylish way of looking like she doesn't care what you think mixed in this white room with nice rays hitting walls and subjects makes this the closest thing I've seen to geeky cinema d'vive. Yep mark me down as fanboy. Props to JO one of the best writers at RWW one of my fav online reads.

Programming the Real-Time Web with Leah Culver from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Google’s New Wonderwheel

Just cranked up a Google search to get this new sidebar – not like the one I had been prepared to get. This one let me narrow the search to the most recent results, the past hour, and more.  Under all results was this new option called the “wonder wheel”. Which in it’s own wonderful way links “twitter tools 2009” to “bible verses.” Interesting for sure, but wonderful? Hmmmmm.

Microsoft When Will You Learn?

I set up a laptop with Windows 7 last night. Man, I love running a clean install. Super fast. I've been thinking maybe Microsoft is learning to work and play well with others. The next thing I installed is my FireFox which I have to have. I then decided to install Windows Live Writer which is a great blogging tool. I also installed Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker.

Run my Firefox afterwards and Microsoft has installed a ChoiceGuard add-on, changed my home page, and changed my search provider to Bing not inside IE which I wouldn't care - but inside my FireFox. None of which I asked for or wanted. Don't remember Microsoft explicitly saying we will change your homepage in your Firefox browser either. Not surprising though, that's the old Microsoft that I remember.

I've really wanted to like Microsoft for years. I've tried harder than anyone I know and defending them in a full on nest of Macabees. But they keep doing this kind of crap which is a complete turn off. Would your bottom line really suffer that much if you just did it straight up and made a great product and let it stand on it's own merit?

I guess for payback I'll have to put the Chrome in IE and speed up my Ubuntu testing schedule.

Bug In Google Toolbar?

I’ve been getting tons of these…

It’s not always Hungarian, sometimes it’s Croation and others, but it’s never right. The page is in English.

Hmmm.

Fun with Google Sidewiki

I don’t know if I am thrilled or disappointed yet with Google Sidewiki. Google’s new public “slambook.” I like the disruptive, democratic aspects of being able to “tag” anyone’s web page but I’m not thrilled about having yet another thing to check on all my pages. I did discover a little twink too that I’ll share with you. When I first discovered Sidewiki, I went to the site and claimed our primary site so I could put a permalink at the top of the page. You do that with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done it yet I recommend doing it now. By putting a meta tag you can write the always topmost sidewiki entry.

The hiccup I ran into is I originally added www.netfishbowl.com so when I accessed it at netfishbowl.com the comments weren’t there. A little quirky, I can’t check if deleting the www still covers the subdomain just yet. It takes 24 hours to kick in.

I also went to other pages, I’m NOT the webmaster of and tried to add the first sidewiki entry there too. Just in case some clever chap wanted to bash me secretly. This brings up my other “scary” moment with Google sidewiki. On my Xackr twitter page I wrote a banal “hi there” entry. And when I went back I got this…

I hadn’t seen this before on the other posts I made. The yellow block suggesting my entry “may be less useful” was new. I would guess because it is short and maybe at some algorithmic lower reading level, it doesn’t meet up to their standards maybe?

Which leads to the bigger question. Someday in the near future will I be adapting what I say and do to please the robots at Google? I know we already do to get our pages ranked higher but me on my own twitter page? Seems a tad F’dUp.

On pages that are “mine” but I’m not the webmaster on – like http://www.twitter.com/xackr. This could be source of concern. You can’t really choose to opt out because you have to manage your “brand”. And technically they could say they are not modifying the page. The only recourse I can imagine at this point is that Xackr is my copyright and they must be using it to tag their sidewikis but I can’t imagine how I could (or even if I would want to) pursue that.

Again, I’m not opposed to sidewiki. I’m not even down on Google yet. I love and use a lot of their stuff. Xackr.com is a Google app. I do pause at the idea of being so into it, that I don’t step back and keep perspective on it.

Finally, if you really want to help me, are a Firefox user, have the Google Toolbar and have sidewiki – go to http://www.twitter.com/xackr and rank my comment useful. It will really help my sagging self esteem.

I Get The Feeling I Haven’t Mastered Squidoo Yet

Twitterpeek makes Adam’s brain hurt..Awwww

Adam Frucci has a problem. He says the TwitterPeek is so dumb it makes his brain hurt. I might suggest, Adam, that if your brain is hurting maybe it's not the TwitterPeek that's dumb. Just saying. His recent Gizmodo rant starts out with why the hell would spend $200 on this? He then neglects to do some very simple math. He asserts that you would be nuts to spend $200 on TwitterPeek when you could just use a smart phone. As a proud owner of TwitterPeek, I'll be more than happy to help Adam do some basic math since my iPhone recently became an iBrick when the battery stopped holding a charge. That smart phone cost me $399 to purchase and approximately $106 a month for the two year contract. Even if we substitute the new price for a iPhone of $99.00, the total still comes out to be $2643 for the life of the contract.

Now feature for feature no one is going to argue that the TwitterPeek competes with the iPhone. For someone who purchases the iPhone to twitter with and just to twitter with is certainly overkill. Even if you just add unlimited texting to a regular cell phone it will run you, with AT&T, $240 a year. A regular cell phone has less features than the TwitterPeek. You're not able to download your followers. You can't easily do a search for @ mentions. And since you're under a two year contract, the total out of pocket is going to be $480. That's double what the TwitterPeek cost as a one time expense for the life of the unit. Besides that the batteries user replaceable and the extra battery only cost $9.95 at the Peek boutique. So the question " why would you want to carry a single function device that is compact, cool looking, works anywhere without purchasing Internet access, connects to the social site ranked 13th in the United States of America, and cost half to one 10th as much as the other options?" Seems a little bit easier to answer.

Let me give you an example of use for the TwitterPeek that I've found in the peek forums that I think is a good example of an application of this device. A mom is concerned about giving her daughter a cell phone to text to her friends with. Text messages can be deleted. It's hard to know who she's talking to and a cell phone has ways they can run up a bill they can be a real burden if not kept in control. This mom can give her child a TwitterPeek for a one time $200 investment and because the child's tweets are public and who she tweets to is public Mom can monitor and protect her child. Also now her child can communicate with all her friends as easily as texting. If she buys this device for child in seventh grade and the child manages to take care of it until the 12 grade, even with throwing in three replacement batteries (yeah you can replace the battery). She's spent $230 vs. $1440 for the near equivalent of unlimited texting. That'll pay for her textbooks her freshman year.

One of the ways that I plan to use it, is to keep his sitting by my computer while I work so that if I get a tweet, I’ll get notified. I don’t have to stop working and switch over to my browser. The TwitterPeek will chirp and I’ll know I have tweets. I just grab up the TwitterPeek and read and reply. This way I avoid running a program in the background that pops up constantly like TweetDeck which I use to monitor tweet and FB. By staying in the program that I'm working in and using the mono functional TwitterPeek, I avoid all temptations to get distracted by the big bad wonderful Internet. In some cases not being able to do something means you get something else done.

Also, while I’m tweeting away remotely, I’m NOT draining the battery on my mobile phone. I’ve got double power.

I'm sure there are plenty of other valid situations where the TwitterPeek makes sense as an economical solution and maybe some of the other TwitterPeek owners will add their own uses to this blog.

The ensuing comments in Adam’s public headache progressively got more and more vicious attacking both the TwitterPeek and then Twitter itself. I think my favorite comment of all was:

"I still can't believe twitter exists. It's a blog site that ONLY lets you post 140 characters at a time."

Ironically that comment is only 104 characters long.

I would have to say that any one that doesn't see the value of a global asynchronous conversation that makes the speaker get to the point and allows you to mark keywords, resend the message, share links, or directly communicate with people of interest to anyone who has a cell phone capable of text probably would have a brain that hurts trying to grasp the Twitterpeek and should just stick to debating whether or not Superman could beat up the Hulk in the forums.

What’s Up With That Guy?

UPDATE: The smart ass ending of this blog post was clearly misunderstood and like many things, as this has aged I question the intelligence of this blog post. I'm going to leave it to remind me, if you are just criticizing someone else's gig you are NOT necessarily doing anything youself. I.E. you are disreqarding my productivity rule No. 1 "If you aren't filling time, you're killing time." I do want to end with an old Italian proverb which says "only a friend will tell you when you have something on your face." Which I believe is what I was kind of going for.

Original Post>>>>>>>>

Full disclosure: earlier in my life I went through a Guy Kawasaki fan boy phase. I can clearly remember chasing him down at a printing equipment show in Atlanta to get him to autograph a copy of his book “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”. So I’m not void of emotions like a Vulcan when I write this blog.

So I installed TweetDeck and was learning how to use it. I highly recommend TweetDeck by the way if nothing else it’s a good example of what Adobe flash programming can do. Part of the TweetDeck features is that it recommends people at random for you to follow. One of the people that flashed on my screen was former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki. I’m not sure why but I’ve always liked Guy, and I think I’ve bought all of his books though I don’t thing I’ve ever actually read a single one. Anyway I felt confident I could actually read 140 characters generated by Guy Kawasaki at a time. Especially if they followed tweeter etiquette and represented the occasional, personal, insight into how Guy sees the world.

So I was a little surprised…wait…make that really surprised, when over the next 45 minutes I received no less than 15 tweets from Guy Kawasaki all with pithy small mind digestible slug lines and a bit.ly compressed URL pointing to a page on his Alltop site. It only took me about 10 minutes to realize I was going to have unfollow Guy. While I was trying to figure out where all the compressed links went I dug around a little bit on Alltop, which is YACAS (yet another content aggregation site).

One thing I did find that I’ve found interesting was an article by Guy on the Art of the Repeat Tweet. In it Guy Kawasaki explains why his tweets (which as it turns out are not really his tweets after all) are frequent and repeat. Guy has timed his repeats 8 hours apart with each tweet being sent three times. He repeats his tweets because he found he gets as many clicks on the second and third as he does on the first tweet. What he doesn’t really mention is, but is clearly in the subtext, that he doesn’t want to tell you anything - he’s just wanting to get you to click on the links. I.E. for him as a social marketer, tweet is just a traffic building tool.

There’s a couple of things the trouble me deeply about the strategy.

First, the golden rule of new marketing is that you have to bundle something of value in with the message. If you’re not going to give something away that’s useful to your audience with your communications they’re going to ignore you. Being ignored can be good but ultimately it’s a lot less satisfying than being the center of attention.

Second, and this is the one that really bakes my cookies, Guy has a secondary tweeter account called @Alltop that post these spamlike links just once. He encourages people that hate the repeats to follow it instead. What really flips me out about this is Alltop is a brand that may come and go but Guy will be Guy Kawasaki forever. So maybe Guy’s forgotten that he is his own brand. And while he may be pimping out his new venture, he is surely chipping away at his eternal one which is his own credibility. After snooping around Alltop, I’d say that’s not a good trade. Yawn.

Let’s face it, if you’re a man in the middle, meaning you are not generating the original content or you do not control the channel through which it disseminates, you got nothing except your sense of humor or your good looks to distinguish you from 10,000 competitors who are competing for the same eyeballs. When you’re deciding what’s signal and what noise is, you’ll definitely be noise.

Now Guy Kawasaki can a probably afford to be that (for a little while anyway). Let’s face it though the top spots in content aggregation are taken and for the time being they don’t look like they’re going to be dethroned any time soon. Nonetheless I wish Alltop all the best in their venture (Annie should just post more tofurkey pics).

I would like to offer a new name for what Guy Kawasaki is doing. I think I’ll call it “Social Persistent Alltop Marketing”.

Guy is pretty unapologetic about his strategy. He suggests to me that if I can’t handle it that I should just unfollow him and have a nice day.

That sounds like a plan to me Guy. You have a nice day too. Oh and if you want to buy my signed copy of “How to Drive the Competition Crazy” it’s on eBay.

I Can Finally Make Videos Without Tearing Out My Hair

I have several video editing packages. I have Sony’s home version of their Vegas Studio, Adobe’s Premiere Elements, and the movie editing software I’ve been using most lately Windows Live Movie Maker. I don’t have anything against Windows Live Movie Maker because it’s what’s gotten the job done lately. I loathed the idea of ever trying to use Adobe premiere elements again. Aside from the fact that it always crashed trying to create an HD video because it was making the files so huge the system couldn’t handle it, it decided frequently to just quit working in the middle of an edit. And as it is with most Adobe Elements brand products there are no bug fixes, that’s not because there are no bugs – far from it. It’s because Adobe’s idea of a bug fix is to buy the upgrade version of the next release of the product. Now any other software company in the world, especially as small struggling one, could not afford that luxury. I’d get pretty hacked when I think about it, because all I really want to do is make an HD video and upload it to YouTube simply and quickly.

I had gotten Windows 7 and the new Windows Live Movie Maker has an addin that allows it to upload directly to face book. I’ve found this quite handy. I did however encounter formats that the program could not handle but for the most part it worked just fine. Many of the videos that I wanted to make would be screen captures showing our customers and my students how to do things that they had done in class. A friend had recommended tipcam which turned out to be a pretty nice product. The problem with tip cam was that it made an 800 by 600 video and that resolution turns out to be quite fuzzy compared to 1280 X720 HD video which is crystal clear.

So when I got an email offer from Serif software to buy their Movie PlusX3 software package at a bargain price with a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I own a couple of Serif software’s $10 packages that they sell and then try to upsell out to the current version. Both of them, while not being flashy or glitzy, do a respectable job of getting done what I wanted to do.

When the software arrived from merry old England via the United States postal service, the first thing I noticed was I had gotten a Manual along with my software. There was no cardboard box to throw away thank god. I loaded the software and initially it seemed to think something else was being installed in my system but after ignoring that, it installed just fine. The software ran quickly and when I drag files from the explorer to the media bin a couple of times it crashed at first. It would also try to recover and automatically restart when it happened. While that was a little disheartening at first, it was easily circumvented by just saving my project when I first opened it and occasionally as I was working. The crashes seemed to vanish after about the fourth movie I made.

One of the nicest things about Serif software is they have a live Owner’s Manual in the left most pane of the software. So I went from installing the software to using it in a matter of seconds. It’s contextual too so it has a list of what to do based on what view you are in. As luck would have it, my favorite screen capture program Fraps had released an update that was compatible with Windows 7. They had also made several improvements to the program which included compressed video storage. So I was now easily able to make HD screen capture video. The question was would the Movie PlusX3 three package be able to handle it. Premiere couldn’t handle it. I created a screen capture clip and dragged it into the media bin of Movie PlusX3. The preview block was grayed out. Not looking good but then the software asks me if I wish to pick the correct encoder for the file and told me which one to pick. Boom. I was making HD quality screen capture videos complete with titles, and background music. Total time spent on task from walking back to the house from the mailbox to posting to YouTube about 45 minutes which included a lot of reading the wizards that won’t be necessary next time.

Not only did Movie Plus X3 render my video really well, it took a 400 MB Fraps file and after adding titles and background music rendered the whole clip as a 49 MB file. It uploaded in less than 3 minutes. If I had tried to do the same thing with Adobe premiere the file would’ve been over a gigabyte or most likely crashed altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a package that would compete with a high end video editing products but if you’re wanting to make videos and do it quickly and just get it done, you really can’t beat this package. You can pick up your copy by clicking here:

MoviePlus X3 from Serif - offers everything you need to produce outstanding movie masterpieces, photo slideshows and DVDs.

There is no demo version but there’s a 30 day money back guarantee and I’ve talked to customer service twice and both times they were extremely helpful and while I didn’t have a problem they helped me accomplish what I wanted to do. I also checked the web site and much to my delight there were many updates to previous versions of programs meaning they go back and fix bugs not make you buy the fix.

Having used about three of their packages now, I’m wondering if small companies like Serif won’t thrive in an environment where the monolithic companies play a numbers game and go for volume over customer service knowing they’ll lose a few customers here and there like me. The real-time connected web could create several new contenders.

After having such success with their movie package I went ahead and took the plunge and picked up their web software WebPlus X4 as well. I’ll let you know how much it I like it is well but for now I can recommend Serif software’s Movie Plus X3 package with two enthusiastic thumbs up.

What Happens When Your TV Has a Web Browser?

HP is marketing a new printer that has a built in web browser, it’s called the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer. What sets this printer apart from the rest is that it has a “web browser” in it.The price point for this item is $399. I saw a touch screen picture frame yesterday for $299 with WiFi. Same price as a netbook really. I didn’t dig enough into whether or not the browser in the printer was a full featured browser or a crippled browser that was limited to choices predetermined by Hewlett Packard.

Regardless, the implications for the future are pretty clear. It’s very likely that everything that we use in the future will have a web browser built into it. Just as the Java mavens at Sun predicted. If everything that we use has a web browser then what becomes the point of having a PC as a standalone device? The biggest danger of course, is when your plasma screen TV also has a functional web browser that allows you to access your e-mail, your favorite news, and your voicemail messages what incentive do you have to invest in a virus prone PC that easily already is a fairly large intrusion in our life in that we have to wait for it to boot and shutdown before we can actually do something. So imagine how hard we will be tempted to use it to purchase that coffee we like when we can just touch the screen on the refrigerator and accomplish the same thing.

For the longest time the major computer players have invested millions and millions of dollars in winning the browser wars. Even to this day each major player has their own flavor of browser that they want you to use. While they have scrambled and fought and scratched and clawed for mindshare in that market space, what if the browser itself has achieved ubiquity in a standard form that is easily created and marketed. When that happens, and clearly it is happening, the player who has the most significant investment in computing that requires only a web browser has the advantage. Suddenly, having the coolest or most functional hardware and software that runs locally becomes increasingly irrelevant to getting the day to day work done.

The other problem becomes the major stakeholders in the monolithic systems that have lost their relevancy will feel the pain as the market of their vendor shrinks the cost of the legacy systems will surely increase - creating even greater opportunity for the smaller more lithe organizations that grew up adopting and implementing browser-based cloud computing.

The current price point for anything that seems to connect to the Internet is currently around $300 whether it be a printer with a web browser, a smart phone, or a photo frame with 8O2 .11G. As the demand for a touch screen that also has the ability to display HTML5 standard web pages dramatically increases and the standard stabilizes, you’ll see the price point drop to as low as a $75.00 component and in many many products. Expect your next car, tv set, and possibly clothes dryer to be surf friendly. When that happens, Google will probably be in a unique position to serve the needs of this new environment. So if you’re currently deciding what tech toys you should spend some time learning and getting cozy with it’s probably a good idea to give a hard look at the apps are being developed in the Googlesphere.

My Shakuhachi Yuu

First a little disclaimer: I am NOT a musician, or a Shakuhachi player (yet) giving a review from an area I'm an expert in. I'm, in Kung Fu Panda terms, at Level Zero. I am just sharing my impressions of the Shakuhachi Yuu I acquired for Xen Meditation.

It began when a friend of mine showed me an Asian flute she had in SecondLife. It was a really wonderful thing for a mere $75 linden - you can get your own here (its' on the table to right). It seems to play a random series of patterns and I found it quite peaceful to sit on this mountain top and play it. I found that affordance of SecondLife to be very refreshing. I am working, on a side note, on a collection of peaceful places in SL for people who's real life doesn't allow them access to places you can expand and connect with the universe, or at least feel connected to a natural environment.

After a few days of enjoyable playing in SL, I decided to attempt to learn to play in real life. I went to Amazon and looked for bamboo flutes. I found a bamboo shakuhachi for $14.95 (and $8.00 shipping - yikes!). So I ordered it. I did do enough research to find that the shakuhachi was the zen meditation flute I was looking for.

But it was very superficial research. The flute was of reasonable quality but impossible to play for a beginner teaching themselves. I am in a small southern town so there is no local shakuhachi master to teach me. I searched the internet for instructions and found some help but after a few days I realized It was going to take quite a while and a great bit of effort just to master the basics. I read in one article that someone had found a cheap flute like mine that the instructor could play easily but was very difficult for the student to play. The cheap flute I bought was an EE. That means as Shakuhachi's go it is pretty small. My bottom lip filled the hole. One instruction video on youtube said just try to get a sound out of it with all the holes uncovered. Which I did for about 3 days with wildly uneven results. As I kept looking for more instructions on how to play the shakuhachi - I kept finding more information about the flutes themselves.

One thing I discovered was that flutes sold from $14 (like mine) to $3,000. The majority of what I would call "regular" flutes were in the $300 to $2,100 price range. $300 would be out of the question for me right now, so the $2,100 just seem even more impossible. Then I found one called the Shakuhachi Yuu. It was not made out of bamboo or wood but rather ABS plastic resin. It was less expensive that it's bamboo counterparts at only $125, but the most compelling feature was that it had an adaptor (and additional $27.50) that turned it into a Native American style flute allowing you to play it right away regardless of your ability to make the embouchure (the way you hold your mouth to play the flute). It also was waterproof, a big selling point for me considering the amount of spit I blew down the other flute trying to get a note out of it.

I found where they were also being sold on eBay. So I bought the flute and the Yuu adaptor there. It arrived Express Mail extremely well packed. It looked better in person than it did in the photos on the web site. It's lightweight and feels really solid. It came with instructions on how to put it together and take it apart, a certificate for a free lesson with Michael Chikuzen Gould (worth $50), an end cap for the mouthpiece, and a tube of cork grease.

The Yuu adaptor was a godsend.

There are several dynamics in play when learning to get sound out of a shakuhachi by yourself. One is how to blow the edge of the end piece. Another is how hard to blow since you can bend the pitch a whole tone or more. Still another is how to hold all your fingers correctly as you can make vast changes in the sound by partially covering a hole (something you don't know you are doing until sound is actually coming out of it). By installing the adaptor, you can work on how hard to blow and how to hold the flute without worrying about how to hold your mouth. Now instead of hoping all the dynamics come together at once simultaneously and consistently, you can work on how to blow, and how hard to blow and how to finger separately. I'm practicing longer because the frustration level has dropped and I can spend part of the time practicing actually playing the flute.

The flute itself is really attractive. It looks like a  bamboo shakuhachi. I can also play it without the worries associated with having a $500 flute and I'm sure it will be much lower maintenance over time compared to organic material. And if you are wondering, per Wikipedia, ABS plastic is recyclable - though I can't imagine why you would recycle your flute.

As far as sound goes, it sounds great. I was reading that the sound of the shakuhachi is not created by the material the flute is made from, it's created by the "void" in the flute - the hollow space. That is where the sound comes from. There are several sample mp3s on the website, I encourage you to check them out.

Shown at right the Shakuhachi Yuu with the adaptor installed next to the EE Mid East Bamboo Shakuhachi

You can see the size difference. The price of the Yuu with the adaptor was well worth it considering the progress I'll be able to make with it teaching myself. Also when you factor in the durabilty of the instrument and the mental destressing that will come as my ability to play rises, it's well worth roughly two months of regular cable (no HBO), or one month's cell phone bill, or 8 DVD's.

Learning to express yourself musically will also allow you to tap into new areas of the brain too.

I give the Shakuhachi Yuu two enthusiastic thumbs up. It is one of the few recent things I've purchased that the experience far exceeded the expectation.

Now, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, son, practice!

Or put a more Xen way, how do you reach the mountaintop?

You ride the wind.

SecondLife and the Enhanced You

I attended an interesting presentation on SecondLife (also called SL) entitled "Is there life after SecondLife - Pouring New Wine into Old Bottles" by Geoffrey Edwards at Monash University Behavioural Studies yesterday. Some of the points he made (and I am paraphrasing from a mediocre memory)..

There is a distinction between the body-as-source-of-organic-experience (BaSoOE) and the body-as-performer (BaP) in SecondLife. But the body-as-performer can give back to the organic body. Shift its self concept somewhat. I.E. create new wine (new identity) to put back into an old body.

One of the things that makes this possible is that SecondLife has certain "affordances" available to the BaP. An affordance, in his presentation, was a relationship between the body and the environment. It isn't in the body nor is it part of the environment. He gave some examples of SecondLife affordances:

• The ability to alter your surrounding environment
• The ability to examine the world from a viewpoint that is semi-independent of the body
• The ability to change your physical appearance and avatar
• The ability to change your species or gender and thereby changing others expectations of you
• The ability to have multiple virtual identities (either by changing our avatar or an alt)
• The ability to act and communicate with no fear for our safety
• The ability to acquire new skills that require a great deal of learning or are impossible in real life (such as learning to dance the tango, fly, or do tai chi)

He went on to say that our sense of identity is a function of the "cross product" between the BaP and the BaSoOE. These affordances (and I'm inferring now - not relaying his content) allow us to make discoveries about ourselves, to find what is the essence of us in such an environment.

The presenter had designed clothes in SL and enjoyed it so much when he went back to RL, he learned to sew and to design clothes (I stifled myself from commenting on seeing SL clothes in RL). The point is he found something satisfying in a virtual world that he took back to his real life.

Many people in SL are using it in ways that, to me, are simply another way to pass time. If they weren't going "woot" at a party, they would be watching a DVD. These folks have the right to express themselves in this way.

Others, are using the affordances of SecondLife to overcome limitations that real life (which can be extraordinarily uneven in it's endowments) has handed them.

Of those people some essentially never come back to RL. Not sure why they should if they are truly content in-world. Some however, like the presenter, take the growth experience return to RL and remake themselves incorporating the things learned in SecondLife.

I think this is an excellent application of the technology that so many struggle to understand. Understanding the opportunities is a step toward using them productively.

Where the Economic Crisis REALLY Began

A lot of folks are blaming Bush, and trying to blame Obama for the economic crisis. Some more rightly but not right, try to blame the greedy CEOs on Wall Street. None of those are where the economic crisis really began.

It began when national news became a place where one news reporter started interviewing another news reporter about what's going on in the world. When the mainstream media shifted from peddling INFORMATION to KNOWLEDGE (albeit faulty knowledge) the whole country naturally made many wrong choices that lead us to this situation.

How bad is it? Well it's this bad. The Jon Stewart Show on Comedy Central is the only hard hitting news show left. Recently when Jon took on CNBC and MSNBC as being founts of "bad ideas." NBC had to use the time tested technique of ignoring Jon until he went away. They had to ignore him because if Cramer's illegal trading techniques hit mainstream, he could be looking at AIG Bonus style scorn with the average American.

I've been having a hopefully friendly back and forth with @aptuscollab on Twitter (I'm xackr there) about the concept of a "Knowlege Economy." My fundamental problem is knowledge is a soft term. In the article that started the tweetfest, one of the participants in developing a "knowledge economy" said "we're not even sure what that means." @aptuscollab explained it as "making money from your brains." My critique was it was a buzz word. We have an old term I like better "Information Economy." If we properly manage the information, we can glean the knowledge ourselves. The problem with knowlege is it includes inferences which may or may not be correct until tested.

It's the problem we face with the "news" media. They are no longer giving us information, they are giving us their "knowledge" of the situation. This knowledge is in part based on the facts and in part based on the agenda of the organization, which is funded by the people we probably most need to be protected from.

Now take the bad knowledge and misinform a whole country for a long time, and kaboom! It will eventually run into reality.

We should not be just standing outside AIG protesting, we should be outside NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, etc. raising holy hell for not telling us the facts and giving us bad knowledge instead of good information.

We need more fact-based news programs and not juicy rehashes of gruesome court cases.

It's the responsible thing to do.

Customizing the PortableApps Menu

A video blog today - it's in HD so hope you have a big screen!




Watch it on youtube in HD.

This is food?

One Computer - Many Work Environments

NOTE: Currently this tip works for Windows only.

When dealing with either multiple personas (I'm not just Xackr) or multiple clients it can be problematic to quickly set up your work environment if you use a lot of web-based tools. Firefox can easily be customized to open and be ready to go with your workset, but what happens when you use the same tool such as Gmail, Facebook, or Google Calendar for several of your identities or clients?

One way to address the problem is the use of a portable USB hard drive and PortableApps versions of software. An alternative, albeit a slower one, is to use SD cards one per instance. I use both for different reasons with my USB drive being my backup of my SD Cards.

So we take a standard USB portable drive, I have a Seagate 250GB Go Drive I got on sale for $35. I prefer the Seagate brand, just because over the years I've had other brands die on me. Now we take that drive and we partition into multiple partitions using the Disk Manager (right click on My Computer-> Manage->Disk Management). Find the USB drive in the list.  If the existing partition takes up the whole drive and you have Vista you can shrink the volume, if you can't shrink it - just delete it and start over. You want to create a partition for each of the instances you'll need. Drives have to have a letter so you'll max our at at 26 and you'll probably see system problems if you add much more than 10. If you have 10 online personas you really should consider cutting the computer off and going outside and getting some sunshine. Just an idea. When sizing the drive keep in mind the amount of data you'll want to store if you are going to save photos, docs, etc. related to that instance.

So now you have several partitions. On ONE and only ONE of these partitions you will install a set of PortableApps including Firefox (and Thunderbird and Sunbird if you like). If you want to fast track it, you can download and install the portable apps suite. I also HIGHLY recommend Keepass password keeper. When dealing with complexity, you should get in the habit of opening your password manager FIRST and using it everytime you sign up for an online service.

If you are a web application developer, you can also install XAMPP or XAMPLITE to have an on demand Apache/MySQL/PHP/Python development environment on EACH of the partitions. PortableApps can handle starting and stopping the service with a control panel.

Now you are ready to configure FireFox with your BASE add-ons. Install all your standard ones, I use NoScript, Firebug, Greasemonkey, etc. Add any additional apps you want to use across all partitions into your PortableApps configuration. Once that is done, copy the first instance to the other ones you want to use.

To really expedite things, add a shortcut to the different LaunchPortableApps.exe to your QuickLaunch bar. Once there open the shortcuts up and rename them to something more recognizable.

Once that's done, you can open each FireFox instance and set it up to open with a bookmark folder that contains your most frequently used online tools. If you have developed the good habit of adding each password as you go to Keepass, you can also check the remember me or have FireFox remember the password without fear of finding yourself struggling to remember the password later on.

There are certain apps, such as SecondLife, that are NOT available in a portable form. For SecondLife you simply build a command file (also known as a batch file) that passes command line options to the viewer to startup as that person. You can even, if you have the horsepower, configure it to run multiple viewers on a single machine (yeah you CAN do that).

Soon I'll show you how to customize each instance of PortableApps, so you will know instantly where you are.

Overall, being able to run a preconfigured Firefox for multiple personas/clients should save you a tremendous amount of "getting ready to start" work effort.

One caveat. You can only run one instance of FireFox on the local machine at a time. So to change browsers you will have to EXIT the current instance of FireFox and start a new one. Unlike Flash Drives and SD cards, startup time is negligible on a USB 2.0 hard drive.

One last major benefit is when you travel, you can now easily carry everything on just the drive and use it on any Windows computer. Backing up your work is as easy as copying the contents of the drive to another USB drive.

Enjoy!

Is SecondLife Evolving The Human Race?

In SecondLife (also called SL) the Sun rises and sets every 4 hours. Which means at times it can feel like time lapse photography. It also means a day in SecondLife is 6 days in terms of in-world experiences. Not only are the days faster, travel is instantaneous and effortless. Other than the occasional crash and relog, all of these activities are completely safe to your virtual well-being.

With no fear of actual physical harm and your true identity disintermediated, relationships are accelerated. Things you would never consider doing in real life are easily considered because it's safe. If you are using a free account you can even reinvent yourself if the experiment goes wrong and create a whole new you.

Unlike the streets of New York where people are reluctant to take on other people's problems, it is rare to find a situation where some avatar won't stop and take the time to help someone in trouble or learning the game, often even giving them Linden (the currency of SecondLife).

This faster paced life combined with the freedom to experiment with new things eventually means that the resident of SL will experience a spectrum of feelings that are often stronger and deeper than their real life counter part. Because nothing you can do in SL will cause you to die, you must learn to effectively deal with these new feelings. Some people do so by leaving SecondLife (I suspect many of them come back and start over as a whole new person). The feelings have still been felt and must be dealt with. The same safety and anonymity that gives you freedom also gives some people the freedom to be crueler or meaner than they would ever consider being in real life. I hope so anyway.

There is a line in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes that goes "that which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger." In the virtual world of SecondlLife nothing kills you, so if it doesn't drive you away, it ultimately makes you stronger. You learn to deal with feelings that are foreign yet strong. You gain a lot of "experience" in a very short time. You can lead a somewhat sheltered life in SecondLife but I believe most do so after having at least tasted some of the wilder parts of the metaverse.

In SecondLife, I am constantly around people from all over the globe. I find that they are much more like me than they are different from me. I think I had been in SL about a year when I stopped referring to myself as an American and started calling myself an "Earthling." I have sincerely come to believe that war is the product of governments or those who would govern and not the effort of the average person.

SecondLife also gives you the ability to be and do things you could not ever consider. I can sit on a mountaintop in a Japanese Zen Garden and play the flute while I meditate. It's a matter of just wishing I was at the Zen Gardens of Achemon or Yorokeikoku Teien. I honestly believe that, after nearly 3 years of play, my mind accepts the SecondLife experience of meditating on a mountaintop as being very nearly real. Especially if I put on Logitech Headsetthat disconnects me from my current reality and use by big immersive Apple Cinema Display.

So what?

In SecondLife I have also experienced some of the kindest and wisest people I have ever known. I have even evolved I believe. I am reminded of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. I think Wikipedia sums it up brilliantly...

" Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life – it connotes participation, learning and perhaps knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization. In Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment – Hesse’s crafting of Siddhartha’s journey shows that understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding.

Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves—Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience." - Siddhartha entry on Wikipedia.

Ultimately Siddhartha finds peace. I think those who play SecondLife long enough and do not approach it as a passive entertainment media where you bash system generated monsters or bad guys, ultimately find at least the desire for something more than just the baser activities of life. If you stay long enough, you will eventually find the classes, the discussions, the people who are trying to grow.

I think even SecondLife is feeling that pull, as they try to deal with the more overtly sexual aspects of the game. I think the reason they feel that pull is that SecondLife and it's residents are evolving faster than their real life counterparts.

Eckhart Tolle talks of "A New Earth ," I would be more prone to call it the original earth, but I think the widespread acceptance of his book points to a desire to have a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship to this life. Like Siddhartha, we glean that knowledge from our experiences. With much experience, the ones who are manipulative or delusional fall away and we find that there can be joy in just being what we are. What we are in SecondLife is our design. We can use the tool to remake ourselves again and again, throwing away what is inconsistent with our essence and accentuating what we really are as the sum of our experiences in SL helps us learn what that is. When you take away the option to kill or destroy, you begin to evolve more toward a life of harmony and peace. I sincerely believe such a life has one result - contentment.

I won't go so far as to say SecondLife could save the world. There's no reason to. I do sincerely wonder if the accelerated pace and the opportunity to grow and remake yourself does not create a better person. A better person who will return to reality (hopefully) and make it better too. I think today there are only a few of those people inworld, but I see lots of signs that that population is growing, while the others are becoming stagnant as the long term population grows "wiser" about the game and maybe even evolving as people.

Is SecondLife evolving the human race? I guess we shall have to wait and see.

Could Google Help Solve the Unemployment Problem?

It seems that with so many people unemployed and looking for work there is a real need for an effective and simple training program to turn displaced workers into competent virtual assistants and stop the flow of those jobs to other countries. If anything the displaced workers could be viewed as a resource for new needs and not a problem. The implementation of this has been greatly reduced by the "Do no evil" folks at Google.

Where 4 years ago such a task would have been a large scale undertaking with lots of software licensing issues - Google's suite of zero-footprint apps makes deployment a non-issue. All that is needed to start is an Internet connection and a web browser (use Firefox please). With Google adding Voice to their suite of services they complete an environment that would allow any reasonably competent typist to become an effective virtual assistant.

Google offers:

• Voice - GoogleVoice
• IM/Virtual Calling/Webcam - GoogleTalk
• Word Processing/Spreadsheets - GoogleDocs
• Calendaring - GoogleCalendar
• Web presence/Domains - GoogleApps
• Public Relations - Blogger
• Research - Google and Google Maps

Using these tools (Voice is yet to be released to the public), someone could rather quickly become an effective admin person to a highly mobile worker such as a sales person.

Right now the freelance market is rich with web designers and people who can do HTML pages. The American mindshare of where Virtual Assistants are is India, with American VAs being an expensive proposition. An effective training package could help bring that to a middle ground making it more affordable for more people to use America's unemployed.

Let me say in closing, that I am an Earthling and I think ultimately we should be approaching problems on a planetary scale and NOT providing this idea as an "America First Idea." My thinking here is prompted by something more basic. I have many friends who have lost their jobs in the past few months, so I am thinking more of them than blind loyalty to an arbitrary division of a planet.

Ultimately, I still believe in the viability of SecondLife to even disintermediate even travel but I need the Lindens to catch up with my vision and what they are trying to create is no small task, often limited by the available bandwidth and the power of desktop computers.

The idea of training American Virtual Assistants in the Google Way needs a big push. My experience is American Institutions are slow to adopt and implement. Perhaps, a new venture exists here. Workbook?

Plus with the feature rich Google Voice creating an opportunity to forward your phone to your virtual VA, maybe we should write Google and encourage them to hurry up.

Please comment and let me know what you think.

Is Apple About To Do It Again?

There is no question that Apple upset the Apple Cart (pun intended) when they released the iPhone. While Microsoft pretends to insist it's a numbers game, i.e. more units shipped - the reality is they got spanked. It's not just that the iPhone took a huge chunk of market share - it's that the iPhone is without question one of the most useful pieces of personal tech ever invented. My iPhone is my swiss army knife. I use it to check the temperature outside, check the market, find places I'm going to, buy stuff from Amazon, listen to AC/DC's new album (yeah I had to rip it in iTunes), and -oh yeah- call my Mom. It is the best piece of tech I've bought to date. I base that statement mostly on how beaten up the blue plastic case is.

Now rumors are a-flying that Apple is going to get into the netbook market. But are they? They are ordering Netbook parts according to the gadget sites but what if they are NOT going to make a netbook? One of the reported components is a touch screen. What if instead of making a tiny laptop they are going to make an oversized iPhone? Apple is announcing a new iPhone OS on March 17th. What if that OS is also going to run on the new Apple iPad? Now one final speculation, what if they are going to competively price it?

It could be another massive upset to the apple cart. Especially if they make it as sturdy as the iPhone. My mother can barely work her Windows laptop - it's bewildering to her. I know she could work an iPhone even though she's too cheap to buy one. The iPhone applications are straightforward and easy to use. It's an icon/list based environment that is free of the clutter and constant popups covering the stuff you are trying to work on. It's not overly helpful and very simple and intuitive.

A successful iPad would really rock if it supported a bluetooth keyboard (why doesn't the iPhone?). I can easily see lots of people sitting watching TV and using an iPad to check the TV listings, stay on Facebook, catch up on the news, or read an iBook.

If they make it sturdy enough for educational use, it could be disastrous to competitors. The iPhone is feature complete enough to be an lifelong educational tool but it's too small a form factor for that purpose. Data entry is clunky and no copy and paste. Plus no one knows yet with certainty about the health issues related to cell phone signal (or so the phone companies say).

Apple has a chance to do it again. It's a long shot, in all their years they've only had a few milestones - the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. They also price their hardware above the rest so if Apple makes a regular form factor Netbook at an $899 price, they'll only sell to their regular die hard customers. The netbook is entrenched at the $375 - $425 price point and that even drops some from time to time. My Acer Aspire One had dropped to $319 at Amazon last time I looked.

An innovative Apple product could dent netbook sales, annhilate the Kindle 2 (which will no doubt run on the iPad), and catch new users at their earliest exposure to tech (kindergarten).

So will they innovate or renovate? We will see.

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