The reforestation simulation has now closed; the timer is sat at the year 2100 and of the 1681 trees representing worldwide forest cover in 1990, only 711 remain, a mere 42% of the 1990 cover. Some of these trees (54, in fact) are saplings which have been planted as a direct result of your efforts in donating and hugging the trees. In total, visitors spent nearly 16 hours hugging trees; the longest time spent was an amazing 248 minutes!
We managed to raise a total of L$7001 directly from donations to the trees. Converting this into US$ at the going rate of $1:L$265, that's $26.41. I'll be rounding this up to L$10,000 and we'll be passing a total donation of US$40 to Trees for the Future. This converts to a stand of 400 real life trees! Well done everyone!
Thanks to everyone who contributed, not least to thomtrance Otoole, without whom none of this would have been possible, to Bettina Tizzy (of the NPIRL blog) and Kleos Gomes (of the Looking Glass) for their efforts publicising the event. We'll be leaving the trees up until the end of July before rolling out our next exhibit on population growth. Make sure you come and take one last look before they're gone forever.
Contributors (in reverse-alphabetical order because that's the way I pulled 'em out!)
Wandering Homewood
Vadan Ziskey
thomtrance Otoole
Taisie Upshaw
Sylectra Darwin
Steff Ling
solace1369 Tigerpaw
Skul Rhode
Semjase Heliosense
sabra Hemingway
Rodherik Kultus
Rebecca Bournemouth
Pietor Grigorovich
Nowhere Quonset
Misprint Thursday
Kleos Gomes
Jennie Bonde
Jamadagni Lefavre
Freddi Darwin
Finn Zeddmore
Enjoya Doobie
Emi Halcali
DAmanda Bade
Cinco Pizzicato
Ciebird McCullough
Bettina Tizzy
Belicia Bingyi
BarronessSaphire Hausmann
Atiya Masala
Alexi Ayres
I've tried three PCs with three different OS versions on two different Internet connections with both IE and Firefox and still cannot get into Lively. Search the web for "lively joining room". People all over the Interweb-thingy are having the same problem. I know Google have a tendency to label everything as "beta" software, but this...this isn't even alpha software. They should be ashamed of themselves to launch this complete dogpile onto the open market. From what little I've seen, it won't set the virtual worlds scene alight and if companies as big and as media-exposed as Google are doing this stuff and makign a complete hash of it, I don't hold out much hope for the prospect of the 3D web ever coming to light. Shame on you, Google. I don't mind that much if someone brings out a killer app and thrashes the marketplace (including SL), but this is not helping. We deserve better!
I've been working on a problem (well, procrastinating really) which I need to have cracked to enable me to get the Cloudbuster to do what I want it to do. Basically, I need to be able to rotate a linked prim around another linked prim, but crucially, the prim around which we are rotating can itself be at any orientation around the root prim and may itself be moving (or have moved between updates). Now, I could use something like Puppeteer to do the work, but I want all my work to be original and not to rely on others and from what I can gather reading the puppeteer blurb, it won't quite do what I want it to. I started on the problem some weeks ago but got frustrated and gave up. I came back to it tonight and it was one of those epiphanical moments when it all came together.
Oh; I'm not going to reveal the secret just yet...I want to work it through a bit more first; make something a bit more mature and maybe, as Nostrum said in a conversation we had while I was demonstrating it to him, Harold the Sheep has learned to fly...
Following Bettina's NPIRL lead, I swooped on Google's Lively like a thing posessed, only to find that I can't join a room. All I get is a hard-to-control camera and a "joining room..." message. So until I manage to jump on another PC at a different location, I'm a bit stuck for exploring this new world. Still, at least I have my avatar name. (Aside: I note that Sarah Nerd is already in Lively.)
Will Lively be an SL-killer? Well, frankly, for me, so far no (discounting the fact I can't even get in). The main reason is that you can't (currently) generate your own in-world content. Until Google fix that, it's of pretty limited interest to me. What will be interesting is the point made by Mike Elgan here about Lively's two-way integration with the 2D web; that's the direction Linden Labs need to be taking SLtm; providing rich web content in SL and allowing users of the 2D web to easily see content in SL. Let's see some convergence, Linden Labs!
All the points Elgan makes about Lively being a virtual meeting space already
apply to SL, with far richer in-world content, so why would businesses
currently use Lively? I think for the same reasons they'd use SL, although being so much more "cartoony" at present is something of an inhibitor; business users want something more sombre and, well, businesslike!
Today we're halfway through the Reforestation Project; it's now 2045 and only 65% of the original stand of trees remains - 45% of the world's forests that were in existence in 1990 are now gone. On a brighter note, we have raised L$4532 for our tree-planting coffers (that's around US$17). It doesn't sound much, but it is enough to plant a few trees, so thank you all so far. Thanks too to Bettina Tizzy, thomtrance Otoole and Cinco Pizzicanto for their efforts in raising awareness. Please, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your enemies...the more money we can raise, the more trees we can plant.
A big thank you to everyone who attended the carefully-organised party in my honour today at Slackers in Jeogori. Especially to those of you who came bearing gifts. I hadn't expected quite so much, and it touches me to know that I have found myself such a place in your hearts. Thank you all; you sent me off to the rest of my day with a big smile on my face.
Day 8 of the Reforestation Project; it's now 2018 and nearly 17% of 1990 levels of global forest cover are GONE. Will YOU be able to help stop it? Come over
here; hug a tree, or better yet donate and make a difference in SL and RL.
Some time ago I built a safe; purely for fun and put it up for sale on SLX. I've had a couple of sales of this and never thought anything more of it until today.
It seems there's some nefarious activity going on (I think in Toxian City, from what I gleaned by looking at profiles) and I fear I may have become an unwitting accomplice. I was approached by an individual, who shall remain unnamed, who wanted to know a bit more about my safe and whether it could be cracked. So I quickly rezzed a copy of the safe to refresh my memory and started looking over the door script that I used for it. The answer was deep in the script, hidden away in the listen event handler, I found the code that represented the back door into the safe (metaphorically speaking, as my safe doesn't have a back door). The code checks the name of the speaker, not their key.
Fairly simple stuff, I told the robber, just write a script that says whatever door control commands you need on the open chat channel and rename it to the same name as the poor victim you're going to rob. The miscreant told me they didn't know how to script, and in a fit of helpfulness, I dropped them a copy of my Green Text Talky Thing. (Those of you who've hung around at Organica during events probably have a clue as to what that is; "/1 Lonesome Pine:How I wish Becca were here" 
)
The scallywag instantly replied "The Bloodstone will be mine" and I realised just what I had done...someone, somewhere is going to get hurt. I hope the current keeper of this (seemingly important) artefact will not come after poor little me...
Thanks to all the DJs, Andy Moon, Pandora Lane, Clam Destiny, jeangilles Anthony, Mustapha Rau, Armageddo, Kylie Wiefel, Shad Raffke, thomtrance Otoole, solace1369 Tigerpaw, Enjoya Doobie, Shusaku Rhode, Ariel Lednev and especially Qee Nishi.
Thanks to all the clam founders, to thomtrance Otoole for organising; thanks to Nos and Van for the particle flames and thanks to Steff for the burning man sculpture.
But most especially, thanks to all those 67+ avatars who took the time to come and enjoy the solstice celebrations with us. You are the people who make HCI what it is!
"We have spent our long crawl from ignorance and superstition, pushing back our "special" status at every turn"
- thomtrance Otoole
I showed thom this picture showing water ice on Mars which in my opinion should rank with this one for iconic images mankind's milestone achievements. We started discussing the universe and our place in it; on the odds for life to be present "out there". Earthbound as I am, I came back to concern over the way the subject had been reported. This, possibly one of the most important discoveries of our age, stuck away in the science section of the news. What was today's headline? "Boycott by Bishops Divides Church" (all because some clergy are pro-homosexuals and some are anti). This sort of behaviour totally amazes me. Let's please just leave these superstitious men (and women) to their petty concerns (why are they so upset over others' bedroom practices anyway?) and report on the things that really matter, please...items of concern over the future of humanity. Of course the problem is, human strife, drama, moral outrage and, well, good-old fashioned sex just sell well, so maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more. I just hope that you, dear reader, also have your head in the stars (or at least a trench in the martian soil).