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the Second Life metaverse

Listening to:	TWiT
Reading:	GEB
Weather:	60, gorgeous

I loved the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. One of the coolest things about the book was this virtual universe called the metaverse that folks jacked into, with skinnable avatars and real estate and murder and whatnot. There's a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) that's been around for a couple of years and is spiking in popularity among the podcast listening community, it's called Second Life. For the uninitiated: it's a world on the net where you create a persona which is visualized as an avatar, and the world is built entirely by the users, including you. You can buy virtual real estate, build buildings on it, buy and create stuff to put in it, go to a bar, drink, meet people, get your freak on, watch films, listen to podcasts, etc.

There's a free version, and like in Neal's metaverse you'll recognize those slummers by their bourgeois avatars and lack of acoutrements. I signed up for a free account, but much to my chagrin neither of my cheap video cards, apparently, has enough balls to run the program. So I can't give you any cool screen shots or lurid tales of SL debauchery. But it's happening, just ask Adam Curry and Leo Laporte.

And a q: can you use Wordpress's online interface to post in a blog, then have it publish via ftp to your own server space? Like you can with Blogger? I've been using blogger for many years here, but they are down so much, I'm looking for an easy and similar alternative. Blogger is free, too. And my server space is cheap, and includes an email address I've had for over a decade. From my cursory analysis it appears you can publish to a free Wordpress space, or install the program to your own server, but can you use Wordpress on the web to post, then just publish the pages to your own server or rented server space?

How lucky am I? I went to the Aging and Law Conf in DC from Thursday night to Sunday, which I had to pay for out of my own pocket cuz WVSLA has no money for training or travel or outreach or anything. Anyway, my colleague Suzanne went, too, and I drove so she paid for my gas and parking! Awesome. I stayed at my mom's house, which was just a few miles down the road, and I got to ride Metro in on Thursday, also awesome. And they had a drawing for 2 airline tickets on Southwest at the end of the conf, and . . .they didn't draw my number. BUT my colleague Shoshanna had told me before the drawing if she won she'd give me the tix, and SHE WON! And she actually gave me the tix! Yeah, baby, yeah! Ahooooga.

Time to go get the laundry off the line before I go to pick up Liv. "Rent" is sold out at the CAC tonight, dagnabbit, but we're going to show up there with a fistful o'cash and hope for some scalper action. Cross your fingers for us.

And a quick note, sadly my friend Dan's dad died. But he was a very cool guy, lived a good life, and raised at least one awesome kid. Sad to have him leave us, but happy for the groovy person we got to enjoy on the big blue ball for about 80 years. With luck I'll run into him in Second Life.

permalink posted by cat 1:45 PM

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