Early attempts...

Some know I am happily working my way thru many tutorials for the various elements of CS5.  One thing I know for sure is I've always been a better cookbook user than creative chef.  Yet it is my goal to move from being able to follow directions in a tutorial to a more genuinely creative process.  A few weeks ago when staying at the coast for a few days with family I had the opportunity to take a ton of photos.  Now that I've had a little time to go thru them I've put together these two triptychs, the first of Newport Harbor and the other of our beautiful rocky North West coast line.  I thought perhaps you would enjoy seeing them and more to my point they were fodder for exploring and pushing myself just a tad beyond cook booking something beautiful.  While I certainly have a lot more to learn, see what you think…

Fishing Fleet

Northwest Surf

HELLO WORLD!

OpenSim on a USB stick...
Many may have seen the post below yesterday (or the one from Tateru Nino)

John "Pathfinder" Lester Runs OpenSim, Transfers Objects From a USB Key & Explains Why It Matters To Educators

Here's an amazing innovation explained by metaverse consultant John Lester, once known as Pathfinder Linden during his days as education evangelist with Linden Lab. Using the Second Life compatible Imprudence viewer, which can easily log into numerous OpenSim worlds and save back-ups of objects you create within them, John was able to make an object in one grid and then move it to another OpenSim grid. Which is very cool, but that's not even the best part. This is: He did it with a USB memory key, even putting his own OpenSim grid on it, and explains how he did so here.

Quoted from http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/10/opensim-on-a-usb.html:

It really worked. Today i was able to get an OpenSim up and running from my USB drive on my laptop. See pictures below. Some have asked why? Free full sim (full prim) developement sandbox is one thing. Anything created there could be uploaded to SL (of course at a cost of $10L per assest, but no more paying for trial assests).
I will be interested to explore this further. Is it possible to have friends access your usbSim remotely? Possibly not. But there is much more to learn about this. Folks have had clients (viewers) on usb sticks for long time, but this is the server side as well. It sets you up with MySQL and Apache server... I then loaded Imprudence onto the stick... and both ran flawlessly (well... after some tweaking) on the 6 yr old laptop running with Vista. 
 

Hello World

Truly Ruthed!...

I probably didn't need to black those out... I freely admit my ignorance there... but all you need to know to set it up, can be found by following the links from New World Notes and Dwell On It listed above. 

And for more info (certainly over my head at this point) try this link you can also read from Pathfinder himself at
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks.
If nothing else... I learned a lot and look forward to exploring the potential of my Sim on a Stick

Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Linden Lab Raises Prices for Non-Profits and Schools

This is very disturbing news (see Dusan Writer’s Metaverse post below) ... & I can't agree more with Dusan.   Even if you don't work in the non-profit world... it is time to look at our alternatives. It sure looks like SL is walking away from education and other Cause based customers. What about .gov sites?  How do these new rates compare to the alternatives?  Once this ‘weeding’ out is done will they be raising prices for us lowly ‘regular’ folk?  Just who do they want for customers?  If I were responsible for my non-profit's media presence I would be looking closely at providers such as rezzable.com or Reaction Grid, etc.  In the mean time I will be checking out pricing at inWorldz for my personal plot… I’ve felt the need to do some remodeling anyway… I can just as easily do it there as SL.  This increase in pricing to Education and Non-profit organizations sure erodes my already faltering trust in Linden Labs.

Quoted from http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2010/10/04/linden-lab-raises-prices-for-non-profits-and-schools/:

Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Linden Lab Raises Prices for Non-Profits and Schools

Instituting a 200% price increase, as Linden Lab has done today, seems to me more akin to what a company would try to do if they were looking to exit a particular market and does nothing to change the narrative that the company is ripe for a sale, takeover or meltdown.

 

We do limited work in cause marketing and education. But without any reason given I’m left to guess what’s motivating the Lab, and I can’t for the life of me think of anything other than falling profits, a wish to be a pure consumer company, or some sort of insight into the appetite for higher costs from these communities that I don’t have (a latent desire to, um, spend more?)

 

Regardless of which of these reasons it might be (or is there some reason I’m not able to guess at?) the move by Linden Lab represents nothing short of a blow to their credibility and judgement, and while I’ve long been a supporter of the community and possibilities of the virtual world, it’s clearly time to start dusting off the blog posts looking at the alternatives.

 

While a move in the education market might not seem to have implications for enterprise, my feeling is that this move erodes trust in the viability of the Lab’s strategies and indicates they are taking a lowest common denominator view of who they think their target Second Life user should be.

Dusan writer,Metaverse,Reaction Grid,Rezzable.com,inWorldz,Non-profit,Education,Linden Labs.

Inspiration discussion...

There is a very intersting discussion about what inspires an artist, or more to the point how can you answer unanswerable questions... My contribution is reposted here...but head over to read many other interesting comments. 

" I very much enjoyed this post. Of course I ask those questions of others and myself. Yet they are indeed unanswerable questions… this is why I often refer to myself as a tool user rather an artist.

When confronted with a piece that thrills me, I find I am most often thinking about 3 questions…

1. What are they trying to say to me?

2. What does it remind me of?

3. How did they do that?

Of course the more important and often most vague question is the first. In the postmodern tumult of a crashing wave of creativity (Nothing new… old stuff just mixed up and rearranged, washed and re-washed) the other questions seem to be attempts at attaching vague and amorphous meaning to our concrete material lives.

Which is really all just fancy talk for trying to describe what happens when you get that “Wow” feeling when you see something that moves you emotionally, whose beauty fires off a refreshing wave of neural activity, causing us to want more. It is that Spark that is art… in both the indescribable act of creativity and in the moment of seeing (an equally mysterious moment). "