Second Life

Finally gave it a try. I’ve called myself Mitten Beaumont, which seems like a porn name to me, but best as I can tell that’s appropriate to the content. I didn’t find adjusting my appearance too hard to do (I now have a grass shirt with flared cuffs), but as a newbie with no experience and no one sitting over my shoulder telling me where to go, moving around and visiting places was completely unintuitive and totally unproductive. I still have yet to find much of anything but porn, even when I tried to search for popular places and newbie places.

I’m amused with the weird ’sitting’ functions that let you strike a sunbathing pose or kissy pose, but beyond that, the image resolution and the frustrating lack of interesting, non-porn purveying places that can be arrived at easily and intuitively make it kind of dull. I’m guessing it’s more fun if you know someone there. Or have someplace specific you’re trying to go to and know where it is. Or are looking for low-resolution porn.

Plaxo

Plaxo is a kind of online contact management thing and I guess I’ve had an account there for a while, but it seemed pretty boring and non-useful. They have recently rolled out a new version and it’s now more useful.

They have a neat feature called The Pulse which pulls together a list of recent feed updates from your contacts. I like that a lot. It will also pull in all your contacts from other systems, like Gmail, and will display your existing calendars (including Google calendars). And I guess the whole backbone of the system is that when you update your own contact information, it gets propagated out to all your contacts who also use Plaxo. That’s pretty nice, too.

Big complaint is that it doesn’t look like you can export information. What if I want a Christmas card list? But if you can stand that major failing, it’s not a completely horrible little system. Almost makes a nice homepage.

The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton

I’ve mentioned the book to at least a few of you out there, and I’m still not done reading it, but that’s mostly because I’m savoring it. Oh, am I savoring it.

He’s going through the history of how we talk about architecture and why we should bother to talk about architecture and the pitfalls of style and subjectivity when we talk about architecture. It’s so well presented and thought out - talking about human needs and desires and how architecture can fulfill some of them - and oh, I’m just going to have a write a whole post about this when I’m done reading. In the meantime, go get it and read it yourself so we can talk about it together.