Second Living Bay Sweetwater @ home

. . . now is a crumbling virtual ruin.

It seems as if the wonderful Second Life replica of Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall at Harvard Law School is being dismantled on Berkman Island. Brick by brick, it is disappearing. When I went there today, it looked like a bleak, decaying urban landscape: a hotrod car parked out front, a fire burning inside where the fireplace used to be, and a helicopter abandoned where the students used to attend class. And the only avatar around, appropriately perhaps, was a ghost of an avatar asleep on the steps.

And the amphitheater is going away as well, with just an open meadow left where all the seating used to be. That’s where we all used to sit and listen to live-streamed lectures from Harvard. Back when there was a university here! How sad to see a grand institution crumbling into virtual ruin. But, there’s good news: the trees around Berkman Island are fall-colored, so apparently somebody is doing something. Maybe it is being transformed and not abandoned?

Sob! All of this is heartbreaking for me. I consider Harvard my first real home in Second Life. It was here at Harvard Law School in 2006 where I first heard of virtual worlds at all. I was sitting in on classes with the “at large” community in the historic CyberOne law class conducted by Harvard’s Extension School jointly with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Lectures were live-streamed into Second Life, and many of us gathered to listen in the amphitheater here, right in front of Austin Hall.

Where has it all gone? I’ve scoured the Berkman Blog and found nothing. It’s true that there has not been much activity going on at Berkman Island for quite awhile — just a few luncheons live-streamed from the Berkman Center. But I still used to come by faithfully and hang out in the sandbox, hoping to find a meeting or a class that I could sit in on. And then one day I saw legendary Professor Charlie Nesson’s virtual Vespa parked outside Austin Hall. But he was nowhere around. I e-mailed him and Harvard Law School at the time, but the e-mail I received back said only that things were being “scaled back.” Btw, if you want to know why Charlie Nesson, aka the Dean of Cyberspace,  is “legendary,” check out the youtube video here entitled “Harvard Prof. Charles Nesson Is Insane” about the CyberOne class. Hahahahaha. The good ol’ days. (Keep in mind that all of  that video is history, long gone and over. Don’t expect to find that class offered to the at-large community now.)

I’ll e-mail some people and let you all know the scoop as soon as I find it out. And meanwhile, if anyone reading this knows where Harvard has gone, will you please ask it to come home? And please also leave a comment here.

Nuance Communications released version 2 of its speech recognition software for the Mac September 20, and I’ll be reviewing it on this blog soon. They’ve changed its name from MacSpeech to Dragon Dictate for Mac 2, and it’s the first major desktop product for Mac OS X from the Dragon line following Nuance’s acquisition of MacSpeech earlier this year. Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0 uses the new Dragon 11 engine released over the summer in the Windows version. I can hardly wait to try out the new Mac version!

Nuance promises big things:

• Accuracy and performance boost over MacSpeech Dictate 1.5
• More streamlined set-up and  revamped Mac user interface
• New voice commands for dictation, editing, navigation, and proofreading.
• Better “learning” than any previous version of Dictate
• Faster response to spoken commands
• Voice shortcuts for searching the web, email, and Mac desktop by voice

You’ll recall that I did a four-part review of the Dragon Dictation speech recognition iPhone/iPod app beginning with my post here. I tweaked the app for voice-to-text blogging from my iPod Touch when I injured my hand and had to minimize keyboarding. The iPhone app has allowed me to keep blogging when I might not have been able to otherwise, and for that I am very grateful. However, I find it a bit clunky to use and expressed my wishlist for an upgrade here. Let’s see if Nuance took any of my suggestions! rofl.

As Nuance explains on its blog and in its product announcement here, earlier this year, Nuance acquired MacSpeech, and Dictate became an official Dragon application, along with Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the PC and Dragon mobile apps.  Since then, Nuance has worked to provide the same accuracy and features in the Mac version that the PC version has.  And now they claim to have done it! Hooray for macophiles!

Dragon Dictate for Mac is the first major Mac product release from Nuance, and the first to use the new Dragon 11 engine introduced previously in the PC version. IMPORTANT NOTE:  Dragon Dictate for Mac requires an Intel-based Mac, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or greater, and a Nuance-approved USB headset.

Since the new Dragon Dictate for Mac is a desktop version, I’m expecting it will be much more robust, accurate, and easier to voice edit than the iPhone app — at least I’m hoping this is the case (and so is my hand!) I’ll let you know all about it real soon!

Until then, have a laugh at David Pogue’s spoof on “Dragon Mind Dictation” below.

Identity equals love. That’s what it all seems to come down to.  I’ve been talking to a lot of avies about identity lately while playing on the test grid with the SL Display Names beta build. Everybody is so passionate about it! (There were over a thousand comments on the SL Blog Display Names announcement this week!)

I had to ask myself, why? Why do people care so deeply about this issue? Certainly, there are a lot of good reasons:  financial, business, content ownership, and fear of griefing and plain old identity theft in all its forms. Having been a Notary Public IRL for 8 years, I spend a lot of time verifying people’s identities. And let me tell you, it sure brings up the strongest feelings imaginable when you make a person prove who he or she is — especially if you have to turn them down when they don’t have “satisfactory evidence”!

What I hear the loudest in the current SL identity crisis is the love is that users have for their avatars. I know I do. As a funny experiment on the test grid one night, four of us all named our avatars “Bay Sweetwater.” Then we started chatting, and in the chat window everybody was identified as “Bay Sweetwater” LOL.

Then we all sent IMs to another avie, who was surprised to receive four very different IMs from what looked like the same “Bay Sweetwater.” LOL (sorta).

I was horrified by all this, even though I knew it was just a joke. My wonderful avie was being taken over by a gang of doppelgängers!

Bay is my better side. She is all that is wonderful and creative in me. I have never been able to write in real life as I do in our SL Bardic Circle, nor have I have never been able to design artistic landscapes in real life the way I do on my little parcel of SL land. And I know it’s all because of Bay. I don’t understand exactly how she does it, but she does.

I think Night Flower said it best, writing recently in a guest post on New World Notes. She left SL for 17 months for personal reasons and recently returned. After much soul-searching, she realized why she had come back:

“I came back for her. For Night . . . it is the strength I found in her, as her, that allowed me to find and claim myself in the real world. With the passion I found as Night, I re-lit the fire in my marriage. With the confidence I found as Night, I took my writing into the real world. Night began as a way to numb an aching void within me, but ultimately became the strength to fill that void with a life that I can only describe as REAL.”

Today I’m going to tell you three important things I’ve learned about configuring the Space Navigator for Second Life in my past week of experimentation. I found it a very easy device to use out of the box, but an extremely complex device to configure. And the Second Life interface makes it doubly so! (If you want to see something scary, open Preferences, Advanced, Other Devices in SL. There you will find the Joystick Configuration menu, which is where you configure the Space Navigator. Looks like tons of fun doesn’t it? LOL)

This post will be short — just to let you in on three underlying concepts I discovered that I really wish I’d known when I started out with the Space Navigator. It would have made the learning curve so-o-o-o much shorter. These are basic things, but not even Beast Linden’s video here or Torley’s videos here make them clear — at least to a novice space traveler like me. (Those vids do give a great introduction, however.)

It’s true that you can use the Space Nav out of the box pretty easily without much configuration at all — just use the defaults. But if you’re going in for specialized building or machinima, or if like me you’re trying to use it for physical reasons such as decreasing hand use — you’ll want to do a custom configuration.

Continue Reading “Three things I wish I’d known earlier about the Space Navigator and Second Life”

Update Aug 19

This morning, Nuance announced the release of an upgrade, Dragon Dictation 2.1, here. It is being announced as the restoration of the app’s VoiceOver compatibility (Apple’s screen access technology for the visually impaired — a keyboard driven interface with speech accompaniment), which was degraded in the 2.0 upgrade. So I don’t expect any improvements to the  voice-driven editing interface in this upgrade along the lines of what I discuss below, but . . . well, maybe I have just a teensy hope. I’m off to download it in iTunes and take it for a spin on my iPod Touch. Back with a report later . . .

Now that I have used the Dragon Dictation iPhone/iPod app for a couple weeks, the honeymoon is over. I have found its weaknesses and come up with a wish list for an upgrade. I still think Dragon Dictation is the best voice-to-text transcription mobile app — but if you do any editing, it is a w-a-a-a-y too slow a process for blog posts or much of anything beyond a paragraph. But, then again, at least it provides a possible way to keep blogging if, like me, you have a hand injury and would be out of the blogosphere otherwise.

Continue Reading “Second thoughts on voice-to-text blogging from my iPod Touch with Dragon Dictation — and my Wish List for an upgrade”

Wow, chickadees am I exhausted! I just finished migrating my hosted WordPress blog over to the wide open spaces of my brand-new website and transformed it into a self-hosted blog.

Sitting here in the middle of all my packing boxes (LOL), I thought I would take a few minutes to document the process of this migration — from hosted to self-hosted WordPress blog — in case any of you are contemplating such a move. WordPress offers its own suggestions here, but this post will be more of a personal account.

Continue Reading “Good Migrations: Blogger’s Checklist for moving from hosted to self-hosted WordPress blog”

Oh, yawn, Bay has listened to the Lab’s “big announcement” about open source this morning and is going back to sleep now . . . hoping for a better dream of what real open source could be. (See my earlier open source daydream this morning here.)

Before I nod off again, here are my notes on what Oz Linden said about an hour ago in Boston at the 2010 Second Life community convention  (SLCC) about changes/goals in open sourcing the SL viewer code (Q Linden and Esbee Linden were also on the announcement panel).

Sadly, it’s about what I expected — not because it’s awful, but because it needs to be so much more! See my earlier prediction about a “collaborative Viewer 2 fix” here. (I’m not gloating, just crying myself to sleep.)

Oz Linden talks about open source viewer code, inworld live feed

Here’s my summary of what I heard from Oz (desperately hoping I missed something):

• New team at the Lab will develop the Second Life Viewer in the open.
• Viewer to be named “Snowstorm” [Let the snarky jokes begin!]
• Share code and process publicly — this includes backlog and discussion about it.
• Will engage with the open source community and accept work the community does into SL viewer version by implementing community work directly into SL mainline Viewer, rather than routing it through Snowglobe first.
• Will release new ‘Development’ Viewers frequently — initial target is bi-weekly.
• Will make continuous improvements to design/implementation of the Viewer’s user interface.
• Will import desirable patches and features from Snowglobe and other Third Party Viewers.
• Will add small features and fixes frequently.
• Promises rapid response to feedback and patches from community.
• Will engage continuously with community to develop new project proposals
• Will provide resources to developers.
• Viewer development has moved to a single open source model.
• No more internal private and external public versions of viewer. Viewer integration will happen in Development repository at ‘http://hg.secondlife.com/viewer-development’ to give community developers greater freedom to use the viewer code (including incorporating it into products that also include closed source).
• “Accepted contributions” will go directly into the official Second Life Viewer
• No more a two-step process of contributing to Snowglobe and then hoping that the contribution is imported to the Linden viewer (some changes may be left behind or modified in order to fit into Viewer 2)
• Lab will publish both (1) what it’s working on (in public Jira issues and on Sprint Backlog) and (2) the projects they’d like to see.

UPDATES

• Home page of the Snowstorm team is on the public wiki at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Snowstorm_Team
• The Snowstorm Team will host an open inworld meeting Mondy August 16 at the Hippotropolis Theater Noon to 2 pm SLT at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hippotropolis/239/28/24

I am sitting here inworld at the Hatch Amphitheater waiting for Sunday’s  big announcement about open source from a trio of Lindens at SLCC, set to start in about 25 minutes! (The Linden trio is a panel including  Q. Linden, Oz Linden, and Esbee Linden. The notice on the SLCC website doesn’t give much away, so I am sitting here dreaming of what might be.

Although my reasonable mind says they’re probably just going announce something like a collaborative Viewer 2 fix, I can still dream — for another 45 minutes at least! LOL.

So here is Bay’s dream announcement [cue dreamy music and rippling virtual water]:

“Ahem, welcome everyone. Today we are very happy to announce that we are opening up the source code to our own servers so that anybody can create their own virtual worlds! Just think of it! You will now be able to build your own world that is compatible with SL,  just as real world colonists share the same language and cultural heritage as the home that they left behind. SL and the new lands will share a common codebase, a shared implementation of avatars, a shared transactional framework for shopping. We are also proud to announce a secure transaction platform that will enable trading among all the “New Worlds”, similar to global trading IRL.

Poof! I suddenly wake up! Just a dream!

But wow, would I love to hear that! [only 3 minutes to go now]

With an announcement like that, the Lab would transform itself from the owners of a walled garden to the founder of a multi-world financial institution to rival Bank of XXX. Imho, this would be a revolutionary announcement, rather than — what I sadly suspect is coming — further steps in the lab’s evolution to oblivion.

Bryn Oh had an intriguing post today asking for input on her machinima proposal to produce a further machinima that would accompany a museum display of a Canadian painter’s work. Her idea (if I understand it correctly) is to produce a machinima that is a virtual 3D portrayal of one of the artist’s paintings. The idea of “walkabout art” where an avatar can stroll around inside a virtual build of a famous work of art -- be it a painting, poem, story, song, or any medium really — has intrigued me ever since I moved to Second Life.

Along these lines, I create walk-in “Poem Parks” on my parcel of land in Farhaven in Second Life, which you can visit directly by clicking here. I love visitors! These are virtual parks I build where avatars can wile away the day exploring the famous images of the great poets. For example, I have created parks for the Wordsworth poem “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” Sadly, these parks have gone the way of all Second Life ephemera, and they are no longer there. But there will be more! I am in between poems at the moment — dreaming up the next park — but you’re welcome to visit anytime. There are always animals and creatures to meet, and paths to wander.

Second Life offers an incredible opportunity to create walk-in art. There are several amazing examples that I know of. My favorite is Robbie Dingo’s unforgettable “Watch the World” machinima from 2007 in which he builds the Van Gogh painting “The Starry Night” in Second Life. Settle back for a real treat as you watch it, whether you’re watching it for the first time or, like me, watching it for the hundredth time or so. I’m embedding the Youtube version below for ease of watching, but if you can, watch the blip.tv high-quality presentation here.

You can read Robbie’s original presentation notes from his 2007 blog post here, including his provocative invitation:

Ever looked at your favorite painting and wished you could wander inside, to look at it from different perspectives? Spend a single day in one of mine, from early sunrise on a new day, to dusk when lights come on in cosy homes; through a peaceful night, till morning.

Robbie’s “Starry Night” sim is long gone, but his machinima remains a masterful demonstration of what it can be like to walk around inside a work of art. As one of the Youtube commenters says, it’s tons of fun when some SL critic asks what you could ever do with a silly game like that, you just cue up Robbie’s video, toss your head and say casually, “Oh, something like this maybe.”

Another great example is Farley Crabgrass’s machinima “A Second Life Winter’s Night,” portraying the Gordon Lightfoot song “Song for a Winter’s Night” (sung here by Sarah McLachlan) — filmed in my poem park of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.”

And for a final example, here is Tracechops’ machinima exploring Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child.”

All of these have different capacities for interaction and exploration, but I find each one a masterpiece in its own right. Perhaps you know of others? If so, please post them in the Comments to this post. I’d love to see more!

Hello, chickadees. Here I am sitting in my jammies, with my cup of coffee, and my hurt hand. In case you are wondering why you haven’t heard very much from me lately, it’s because I need to rest my hand. I thought, sadly, that my blogging days were over for awhile. But guess what? I’m ba-a-a-a-ck!

Today I am going to tell you how to blog even if you, like me, have a hurt hand and cannot type very well. All you need is an iPhone or an iPod Touch, a WordPress blog, a microphone-enabled earphone, plus a newly revised totally cool — and free! — iPhone app called Dragon Dictation 2.0, available through the Apple iTunes store. Or read more about it and download it at the provider Nuance’s mobile app site here and more info on their blog here. The revised version of this app was just released two weeks ago — perfect timing for me.

Continue Reading “Blogging by Voice: Part 1 – Voice-to-Text Blogging on Your iPod! (via Dragon Dictation 2.0 mobile app for iPhone/iPod)”