Apologies to all for not posting any notification last Friday, but don't worry, there's still plenty of Outdoor Fucking season left!
Google Webmasters Tools: great for vanity reading! See who's linking to your site, who's finding it in searches, how search terms are being misspelled! Obssess about how little traffic you get because you post in your weblog so seldom because you're always Twittering or WoWing or Second Lifing (is "lifing" a word?) instead!
Speaking of Second Lifing, over on the sadly neglected but apparently still functioning Talking Place, Chuck writes:
So explain to me (and perhaps your other readers) the logic behind the Second Life weblogging boycott? I mean, I understand why the bloggers object to Linden's new policies, but I don't see how the weblog boycott is supposed to accomplish that. To me, it looks like their desired sequence of events is:
1. Stop blogging about Second Life
2. ???
3. Linden reverses policies!As long as I'm on the topic of meaningless boycotts, I saw a few weeks ago where Hilary Clinton had called on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. How's that for a mixed message? If the Chinese are doing something morally abhorrent, we'll avoid the opening ceremonies -- but not the rest of the games? I know, it'll be just like in 1980 when Jimmy Carter boycotted the opening ceremonies of the Moscow Olympics! Oh, wait...
I think the idea of the SL weblogging boycott is (was):
2. this generates enough media attention that Linden looks up from its 'omg the grid is about to crash' console alarms long enough to notice that people are upset
Boycotts like this are sort of on the order of turning your website orange for a day or something; attempts to get attention. And it doesn't strike me as all that improbable a notion; all sorts of irrational things get our attention.
And to some extent it worked, depending on what you mean by "worked". The Lindens noticed people were upset, and posted a "clarification" which said that no of course they didn't mean some of the things that people were upset about, but yes they certainly did mean others.
So there ya go.
Similarly (while I'm doing rational reconstruction of questionable strategies) the idea of the Opening Ceremony boycott is probably to embarass the Chinese government enough to express our displeasure, while at the same time saying that being the Chinese government now isn't as bad as being the Soviet government was then, and besides we like the medals and the ad revenue and stuff alot.
Also in the Talking Place, madie writes:
hi how are u guys well its march 25 2007 and the time is 2:23 so ya well bye my cousin is here bye
I hope you and your cousin had a very nice time last year. Bye! *8)
There's a house for sale down the street, right next to the house that we used to live in ages ago before we moved around the corner and up the street to this house. Way back then it was Karen's house, and she was a good neighbor, but eventually she moved off to some other state where she's much harder to visit, and then Dan and Cindy lived there for awhile, but now they've moved away too and it's for sale.
It's a really nice house, unusual in a bunch of ways, but I don't have to just describe it because of course being for sale it has its own website (and its own domain for that matter). Warning: egregious and annoying music what the heck is the realtor thinking.
(Actually Marcia is a really good realtor, who sold our house to us and then sold it to the people that bought it from us, so likely she has detailed market studies showing that egregious and annoying music on the web page actually increases the average sale price.)
(And no, despite being near this house, our own house is not I think worth anything like US$449,000. Unfortunately!)
In the interests of taking up more space on the page I will include the couple of pictures that I didn't put up the other week because I was lazy and using the SL Bloggers' Strike as an excuse.
Here I am dancing in a lurvely spacesuit at a party on Extropia:
And here are three of the leading lights of the Extropia community, boogying on down with us Little People:
(Not that any of them would even remotely think of the rest of us Extropians as little people, but I like to think of it that way; having an aristocracy in SL is fun.)
And here's a Whole Mess of pictures of that same party (most not involving me, hmph) taken by lots of other people: the Yuri's Night 2008 in Extropia pool on flickr.
Entering Ballet Craziness Season for the next couple of weeks, with intensive rehearsals for the little daughter and driving her around everywhere even more than usual. But (bizarre to think) this is the last Ballet Craziness Season ever; when she dances after this, it'll be off at college, and/or she'll be able to drive herself.
Yikes!
