eMarkLee

What is this Second Life phenomenon that is printed in every other BusinessWeek and Economist? What is this Matrix that people keep talking about?

Let’s find out.

I had the chance to attend a talk by Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale on how he started Second Life, what his vision was, and what the F it is. It looked great when he busted out his classic character that you can see on the front page of the Second Life website:

Phillip basically went over his vision for what Second Life could be, which admittedly sounded fascinating. He gave us a demo of his character doing some stuff in God-Mode (what I will never have) and showed us some interaction with other SL characters. He also showed us Circuit City and IBM as they exist in Second Life. All in all, it is interesting….but I still don’t really get it.

There’s only one way to find out….I’ll give Second Life a second try (I tried it a little while back but couldn’t figure out wtf). So first things first, I edit my character. I had a black shirt on, but then lost it when I decided to take it off…couldn’t figure out how to put another shirt on…oh well

Ok, I have a character now (Beastman Magellan). Now let’s go somewhere cool in Second Life. I click on the Search button on the bottom of the screen to give me the list of most popular places:

The most popular destinations pretty much look like the rest of the Internet. Pr0n, Pr0n, Gambling, Pr0n, Pr0n. I guess that’s to be expected…ok let’s try the club:

There is streaming techno, there are characters dancing all over. It’s actually kind of cool….if I was on shrooms. Probably was I didn’t know how to dance and nobody was talking to me, so I felt kind of out of the party. That sucks. I can’t really figure out what to do in there other than walk around and look at other characters. I guess people ask that same question in their first life.

But what about all the Linden currency that flow through SL? They have a whole currency, the Linden dollar, that is traded, with Linden Lab acting like the Fed. People build items and sell them to others, whether it is necklaces or penises…yeah penises. My character has a 19″ schlong. Apparently there is a good 4 million dollars worth of Linden dollars trading through every day. There are stories of people making 60-70k on SL just opening up shop and selling virtual goods.

I don’t really get it, and apparently neither does an analyst who thinks SL is a pyramid scheme. While I won’t go that far, I’m not completely sure how easily one could monetize on this Matrix. At least eBay still allows virtual Second Life items to be sold, unlike World of Warcraft artifacts.

All in all, Second Life is interesting and a great story, but I just don’t get it. If you are on Second Life and you want to hang with my character’s 19″ penis, let me know.

The brits think cell phones cause brain tumours. My question is how much can you trust a report from people that misspell tumor?

From Wired Magazine:
Retrosexual n. - The opposite of a metrosexual. These alpha males harbor a disdain for hair gel and Botox that’s as powerful as their love of red meat, which they occasionally hunt themselves.

I’m not sure if retrosexuals would call themselves retrosexuals. I’m not sure if I qualify as an alpha male that could rough it out Rambo style in the jungles of Cambodia, but I do own a Leatherman and a nice set of tweezers in case I get a splinter in my finger out in the wild. I do harbor a mild disdain for hair gels, preferring to use a finger-applied pomade to give better texture and hold. I am also totally against Botox, preferring a self-applied treatment of exfoliating cleansers and multi-vitamin night time moisturizers. I guess I am a retrosexual after all.

For commercials to be highlighted by me is quite a feat, seeing as I skip through all commercials on my Tivo. As a matter of fact, I use AdBlock on my FireFox browser, further insulating me from the barrage of advertisements that are intended to attract my demographic.

Below are two of my favorite commercials on TV that have caught my attention as I 30-second skip my way to commercial-free TV watching:

Gears of War
This commercial for Gears of War has been out for some time, but still remains my favorite. The contrast between the content and music is radical. Apparently, the marketing for Gears of War has been highly successful, having sold 3 million games and earning its place as the current best-selling game on any platform.

300
I’m not sure if this movie is going to be any good, but the trailer for it is as good as anything I’ve seen. Good enough where I’ll actually go watch the movie when it comes out.

We had a Taiwanese congressman for the first time, gaining power for the masses before….boo ya….disaster strikes:

Um…I watched Star Trek and Next Generation, but David, I don’t think you’re supposed to bring that up in public. Now it’s going to be another 20 years before another Taiwanese is in position for any power in the white house. Thanks, David.

In case anyone hadn’t seen this one when it came out a while back, it always brings a smile to my face:

All the blurry pictures that I have been posting up under the Mobile blog category have been coming directly from my cell phone in real time…well, 15 minute delay anyway. Welcome to the world of mobile blogs or moblogs.
The way it is achieved is through a couple of different componets as a plugin into the open source blogging software that I use:

1. Create an email address that can be used to process moblogs.
2. Copy a modified version of wp-mail.php available here.
3. Use my modified SprintPhoto plugin, originally available here but doesn’t really work. I have modified the script to work here. Basically, the plugin sucks down all new emails, goes out to Sprint to retrieve the images, stores the images, and creates a new blog with it. My modified version looks for “Www.” as the first indication that it is a SprintPhoto blog, otherwise it will treat it as just a regular text message blog, which wp-mail handles. It then checks for the presence of a “;” to break the content into a title and text after the image. Something like this: “Www.Beer is rad;I heart beer”.
4. Create a script that can be run to process the plugin. I named mine moblog.sh.
5. Set up a cron job on your server to run every 15 mins or so like this.
(*/15 * * * * /…/moblog.sh >> /dev/null 2>&1)
6. Pick up the old celly, take a picture of that beer and Picture mail a text message like “Www.beer o clock;I heart beer”.

This blog should be interesting to about .00001% of individuals out there and about .000000001% of the 4 people that read these blogs, but now you know why you see those lame pics.

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