Nicholsclan.com : a dimension of mind...

I'll Take Oxymorons for $400, Alex

President Bush has announced plans to gather a measly half billion dollars to fund the construction of his Presidential Library. If constructed it would be the most expensive legacy library in history. Early speculation is that the library would house a first edition copy of "Curious George Goes to Iraq" and a complete set of White House cafeteria menus from Bush's 8 years in office.

I mean seriously, the man brags that he doesn't read, and everything except the lunch menus has been classified as top secret. He doesn't need a library, he needs a shelf. Maybe they could use the rest of the money to open the Dick Cheney Comedy Club.

For the Geek Who Has Everything...

Is there a geek on your Christmas list? Trust me, he wants a USB missile Launcher!! The guy in the next office will never be safe again. Kim Jong Ill, eat your heart out baby.

And if your giftee is of the kinder gentler sex? Well, she needs a Blow Monkey. No, it's okay to click. It's a G-rated link.

I'll Take My PC To-Go Please

Over the long weekend I got caught up trying to build a "PC on a Stick". (This was a level of activity I could cope with while stuffed with turkey.) I've seen a lot written lately about portable applications you can put on a USB Drive and carry with you to any Windows PC. I wanted to see how far I could take that. It turns out, pretty damn far. My goal was to create a functionally equivalent portable version of every non-hardware specific piece of software on my PC. I want to be able to just walk up to a PC, plug in the thumb drive in my pocket, and have my whole environment with me. Oh, and I wanted to do it all without spending a dime for software.

Security was also a concern. After all, I wouldn't want sensitive data in my pocket to get lost or stolen. I was able to easily create a secure vault for data I wouldn't want anyone who steals my stick to see. I then found an application launcher which fires up on stick insertion. I was able to find portable versions of the whole Mozilla suite (browser, email, calendar) as well as Open Office (similar to Microsoft Office). I was also able to find or easily create web page development tools, an image editor, a photo viewer, a CD/DVD burning tool, a complete suite of PC recovery/repair tools, anti-virus and spyware tools, IM clients, scanning utilities, personal financial tracker (similar to Quicken), a PDF reader/editor, Zip file tool, Media player, Flash creators, script language interpreters, P2P file sharing utilities, file sync tools, and even an SMTP, HTTP, and FTP server that lives on a stick.

There are some functional limitations in some areas. The Quicken alternative does not do automatic updates from financial institutions. The calendar tool will not sync with my Palm. The image editor is a bit more complicated. And because all the applications are held independently on the stick, the integration is pretty manual. That is, if you want to watch a web based video using the portable media player, you need to manually copy the link to the player. But tight integration is not feasible without using the underlying operating system, and that would defeat our portability goal. The only major area where I came up functionally short was in the area of video editing. Although I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to get the open source Jahshaka to go portable. However, my enthusiasm was beginning to wane by then. We'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

If you're inclined to try this yourself, start by downloading the free applications suite available at portableapps.com

The project was a resounding success. All this free capability fits on a 2G stick with almost half of it still empty for files, pictures, data, whatever. Very cool - although perhaps I'm just easily amused.

That's a Lot of Cabbage!

I just returned from the annual gathering of the blog's readership. My key readers assemble with their families to nosh on our favorite dlshes at the end of every November. We have turkey, stuffing, and assorted trimmings. And while we eat, we reflect on the blog entries we are most thankful for. It's really nice of everyone to take the time out of their busy schedules for this.

The food was wonderful as usual. Any gathering where there are more pies than people is sure to be a good time.

And people were so kind to make a fuss over how good my cabbage salad was. I get the most kudos from the two women whose kitchens used to provide the sacred salad. A more cynical man might note that shredding a whole head of cabbage is a pain in the butt, so they might be grateful it's someone else's issue. But I'm not that man, 'cause I'd rather believe they just love it. Yeah, I'm going with that.

If you weren't invited this year, just keep reading regularly, and maybe we'll pick you up next year. But only if you make a decent pie... Or like to shred cabbage.

Oink!

I'll bet Two Tone would love me if I had this baby in the back yard.

Dress Protocol

I faced a bit of a conundrum this morning. Anyone who would care to offer advice on handling this delicate situation is welcome.

As I exited my truck to walk into work, I noticed a woman a few cars down who was also headed into the building. She was walking 10-15 feet in front of me, not wearing a jacket of any sort, and her rear-zipper dress was visibly unzipped from her neck by a good foot. It looked very much as if she had zipped it as far as she could the one way, and either forgot to reach around the other way to finish zipping, or couldn't and perhaps didn't have anyone around at home to ask, "Could you zip me up?"

So I began to ponder, would it be gentlemanly to offer to zip her up, or would that just be perceived as some rude creepy strange guy in the parking lot?

I wondered if she even knew the dress was open, but as we walked, the fabric near her neck was flapping in the breeze and her hair seemed to keep catching on it. She had to be aware of her wardrobe situation. So maybe she really did need help. She wasn't a small woman, and the logistics of her reaching to grab the zipper to finish the job might well have proved more than a little daunting. Maybe she just lived alone, or Hubby had already left for work, and this was as far as she could get it. I did think that in that case, many women might have opted for a different outfit for the day - or maybe just a jacket to cover the problem until you could get to one of your girlfriends in the office. The possibilities just seemed to keep multiplying.

I then began to wonder if this was actually some sort of new fashion thing. Maybe she wanted it like that. And finally, given her size and how tight the dress was, I wondered if maybe that was as far as the zipper could go without risking catastrophic failure. This was rapidly escalating from a minor morning misstep to a major fashion emergency.

Gratefully, we were now approaching the building. So I opened the door for her, and quickly lost her in the crowd of commuters. The opportunity to be perceived as helpful seemed fleetingly small. I judged myself to be off the hook. In moments she would be someone else's conundrum. In the mean time, several dozen of us are aware that there was a partially dressed woman coming into the building this morning. And presumably, she knows we know.

Was she embarrassed? Was she hoping for help? Was this some hidden camera 20/20 special to see how long you could walk around with an undone zipper while your co-workers ignored you? Was she just oblivious? Will she be embarrassed at lunch when she realizes she's been walking around half a day that way?

I don't know. I won't know. But I will offer that frequently it's not that guys are thoughtless or not observant. But oft-times we're just scared into inaction.

Report from SecondLife

I'm currently researching some of the recent developments in Virtual Reality for work. One of the hot new VR sites as called SecondLife. There have been numerous articles written about it over the last few months. I thought you might be interested in my findings.

I took the plunge into SecondLife this weekend. It's a very interesting experience. It is familiar and foreign at the same time. It manages to be most of what the real world is: boring, quirky, titillating, disturbing, etc. Although in fairness, I have to confess up front that these sorts of online destinations don't hold great appeal for me. Still, there's no denying that it is popular, and that a stupid amount of business goes on there. On an average day, over $500,000 USD are traded there. It's no wonder the government is wondering if it can tax virtual commerce. It should also be noted that there are real people and real world businesses out there making substantial real world money by doing business in the SecondLife virtual world.

It works like this. Signing up is free, and if you attach your PayPal account (or a credit card) to your SecondLife account, then you get $250 Linden Dollars to start out. Note that there isn't a charge, this just sets up the possibility for being charged. Keep in mind that $250 LD is worth about $1 in real money. And there is a currency exchange within the game where you can trade Linden Dollars for USD and vice versa. There is, of course, a premium service which involves a monthly fee and entitles you to own virtual land and do more than casual business there. Once you have your account set up, you get to choose a name and an avatar (your virtual self). Then you have to download and install the SecondLife client software. This was a pretty easy and benign install under Windows.

So now you're ready to start. Initially you are sent to a brief training camp where you learn how to select/configure your appearance and wardrobe. There's a fair amount of flexibility here. You can choose everything from the width of the bridge of your nose to how high the heels on your shoes are. You can give yourself a receding hairline and a beer gut if you choose, although from my brief experience there so far, no one seems to opt for that. The population of SecondLife is considerably thinner than the population of First Life. Still, the end result is very cartoon-ish.

Once you are primped and dressed, you move on to learn how to walk, run, fly (yes, you can fly!), pick up objects, etc. Object manipulation is primarily through virtual telekinesis. You shoot these "thought rays" from your hand and move the virtual thing. I assume this was mainly to keep the graphics fairly simple. Finally, you are sent to an initial "island" in SecondLife where you can meet other clueless new avatars and figure out how to actually use the skills you just learned. Just to set expectations, it probably took me a good couple of hours to get this far. It's clear to me that you could inadvertently spend a stupid amount of time in these places. Some of that may be because I'm still a newbie and I'm not too good at doing too much.

While on the initial island, I was able to get someone to tell me how to use the map to get to other islands. This is crucial, because aside from a patio sporting a couple of benches and an albino hippo who dispenses free beer, there ain't much here. Although I suppose one shouldn't underestimate the value of a beer dispensing hippo.

Islands are self-contained communities. You travel between islands via teleportation by choosing islands on a map. Some islands are private although most are public. Some islands are also rated "mature", and these are off limits to the under 18 crowd. According to the Second Life rules, explicit sexual behavior is only allowed on mature islands. And violation of the rules may get you censored, suspended, or even expelled from the SecondLife world. There's even a police blotter where you can see recent offenders' crimes and punishments. I know about this because in my first attempt to teleport to a new island, I simply picked one off the map that appeared to have a lot of people in it. I was a bit shocked when I got there to discover that I had teleported into a virtual brothel. I'm honestly still a little perplexed by this. There were actually "services" for sale there. This means that there are people paying actual money to purchase virtual prostitutes to engage in cartoon sex acts. I'm sure there's a sociological conclusion to draw from this, but I'll leave that analysis to Dr. Phil. Returning to the map, I quickly discovered how to identify the "mature" islands, and not surprisingly, there are lots of them.

So next I picked a non-mature island with a bunch of people. It turned out to be a casino / dance club. Are you beginning to sense a theme here? It turns out my avatar does not know how to dance, which is consistent with my real self, so we're okay. In addition to the slot machines and lotto-type games, there were also things for sale here. You could buy t-shirts, drinks, food, and even virtual cigarettes. It's not clear if you can get virtual cancer.

This inspired a little more research. I discovered that there are real-world products leveraging SecondLife content. For example, there's a company that actually replicates the real world equivalent of SecondLife clothes and will sell them to you to wear. I also began wondering how one would go about creating items to sell in this world. It turns out that there is a toolkit available which allows you to create a visual representation of a thing for sale. However, to be useful, you need to create a behavior script to attach to the object. This behavior defines everything from the cost, any animation or manipulation possible with the object, and even whether the purchaser is able to modify the object. The script is written in Linden Script which appears to be just Java with some SecondLife specific class libraries. Not surprisingly, businesses have formed offering scripting services. For a fee, they will build an object to your specifications.

Teleporting to groups of people again, I wound up in a shopping mall. This was a little disconcerting because due to a server lag, I showed up naked. After 10 seconds or so, my clothes materialized. I've seen every episode of Star Trek, and this never happened to them. But no one seemed to pay any attention to my lack of attire, so I'm assuming this isn't all that unusual. Pretty much anything you'd find in a real mall, you could find here. Clothes, a food court, trinket kiosks, delinquent teenagers hanging about, the whole experience. In addition, there was also a car dealership. I also noticed here that some of the backgrounds and displays employed still photos from the real world. This photoreal touch was nice for objects which are hard to depict in the low-res cartoon graphics of most of the world, but because of that contrast, they also stood out as out of place.

I also wound up engaged in a conversation with a small group here. There is a standard chat interface built in, but much like a chat room, it can be a little disconcerting. All conversations within earshot appear in the same window, and threads can be very difficult to follow, especially in a crowded mall. The combination of visual and textual input makes the experience that much harder to keep up with. I'm assuming this is why there is also an IM interface so you can have a private conversation with a restricted group.

According to several articles real companies are beginning to hold real employee and even client meetings in SecondLife. I can see how this could create a better conference sort of experience as there would be a visual representation of all the meeting attendees in the virtual room. The avatars are capable of gestures and expressions, so it could add another dimension to the experience. The ability to project 2D photoreal content on virtual surfaces also allows for real presentation materials to be shared. However, in most cases, the norm seems to be to hold a separate and simultaneous voice conference call which makes great sense as chat based meetings would be insufferable.

In summary, the experience was fascinating. I interacted very little, preferring a take a more Cain-like experiential approach to walking the virtual Earth (sans the Kung-fu skills). But the behavioral similarities between First Life and Second Life are nothing short of enigmatic. This may well be one of the great sociology experiments of our time. It provides both the ability to be who you wished you were in reality as well as the ability to be who you are, but to a wider audience and in more and different places. However, clearly the primitive nature of the graphics is going to limit the experience for the time being. But this will change. Photorealism is the obvious next step here. The virtual world will become more real. People could take or share vacations here, interact with distant friends and co-workers, and go shopping. That last one, shopping, may be the next big development here. You wouldn't require a complete photo-real experience to create a virtual store. Just the items for sale need to be photoreal, and that seems pretty do-able. So I would venture to guess that virtual conferences and virtual shopping will be the big near term drivers in this space. Photoreal environments and photoreal avatars will likely follow, although I expect they'll first need to resolve that teleporting server lag issue so that photoreal avatars are not popping up naked.

The Toothy Truth

Yes, yes... I know that the Republicans got dragged out behind the political woodshed and soundly thumped. I know Rummy was sent packing, and that Bush clearly lied last week about keeping Dick & Don for 2 more years. I know Brittany told K-Fed she was K-Fed-Up via text message. And while all these things make me happy, my joy is overshadowed by the pall my dentist has cast on my rapidly deteriorating self.

Dr. Pain has informed me that I need to have my first major dental work. I need a crown to replace a tooth which has been repaired so often it has more bondo than my old '69 Buick. I apparently broke it again, and he thinks I need to trade it in on something new and shiny.

Okay, so I recognize that this should not be a big deal. I know many readers have undergone far more extensive dental work than this. Hell, my mother's mouth has more bridges than Madison county. I, myself, have had several bones drilled, pinned, screwed, and otherwise surgically reassembled. But I am a self-avowed dental wimp.

I attribute my wimpishness to bad childhood experiences with a drunken three-fingered dentist who practiced in the back room of the local paint & wallpaper store. And no, I don't hold my mom and dad responsible. He was reasonably priced and they subjected themselves to this as well. Besides, having been raised a Catholic, I just assumed this was God's penance for all those impure thoughts.

But the scars remain, regardless of how irrational they are. I still dread having my teeth cleaned. I know my new and competent dentist explained the crown replacement procedure to me. I'm sure his words were professional, clinical, and benign. But what I heard was... I would be called in and strapped to a chair for 3 hours. They would insert all manner of implements of pain and destruction into my mouth in order to grind my poor innocent tooth to a bloody raw stump. Then they'd put a hardtop band-aid on it and send me home to think about what a bad boy I had been. Then I'd be called back for a fitting during which they would rip the band-aid off and poke at the exposed nerve until I passed out. Finally, I'd be called back a third time where they would once again rip off the temporary cap and then hammer, saw, drill, and epoxy the new custom crown in place.

The only upside was that they assured me the new tooth would be the same dingy coffee stained color as the rest of my mouth... unless I wanted it in gold. Hmmmm...

I haven't made the appointment yet. I'm currently waiting for an estimate of how much of this my insurance will cover, and thinking of reasons why I should put this off until after the holidays... or until after I'm dead.

Twins?

It's good to have fun at work...

Christmas Is Coming...

And Dad needs one of these babies. Breakfast will never be the same again. I wonder if it will print a waffle?

Jeepers Veepers

Ever wanted to animate your face? I've been looking at some of the face detection and mapping software out there and ran across Veepers. It gives you that Harry Potter Picture experience. Here's one I was playing with, but you can build your own there as well. This is a computer generated animation created from a still photograph.