July 24, 2007

Monday

Yet another monday, I think I allways manage to do more or less 52 of these every year. Mondays have something special, but I'm not really into that "monday of hell" that seems to flood many workers around the world. No, mondays have something special, but also tuesdays, wednesdays and every other day in the week.

I guess that the thing that make mondays special is that mondays are usually full of happenings - lot's of non-brain activity, even if that activity involves using brains. Today I had a full monday - a monday in its plenitude, full of happenings, happenings of all kind. I got happy, sad, excited, tired, irated, peacefull, felt fulfilled, but at another time with a powerless feeling, I had good conversations and bad conversations, it was full, and I'm tired.

With all this things - as usually happens with me - I had a day full of stuff I would like to blog about but I'll probably never will. But there was a sentence that I chose to highlight from this day: while talking with Nuno at lunch time, he said to me something that got me surprised: something in the line of "the thing that is missing on Second Life is a text-based client". Thank you Nuno: you might not have made my day, but you surelly gave me more will to keep on some of my personal projects. So today I'll skip the reading I was intending to do and instead I'll hack some more on that messy libsecondlife code. I just wonder... why do you feel that way and yet you're not into Talkers? You know, mine has an open door and you just gave a good reason to make me push you to go there :-)

I'm in a weird mood - ine of those times where I feel like drinking a glass of Oporto's wine while doing brain-activity stuff, staying waked up late until the body can't resist anymore, and then finally fell on the bed, just to wake up in the middle of the following afternoon. I can't: I have no Oporto, and besides it's monday - and tomorrow's another day at work. But it's decided already - one of the first things to buy to my new flat when I finally move on is a good bottle of Oporto's wine.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:11 AM

    well, believe it or not, in SL, text based communication is prefered by teachers. it is amazing that with all the hype about sound on second life, teachers are ready to rejected it.
    so i think your idea about a text-based client is very good and i can't wait to tried it... :-)

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  2. Well, those are two different things: there's quite a difference between a graphical virtual world where communication is done using text, and a completely text-based world. While most people tend to prefer fancy graphics to a text-based interface, supposedly for immersion's sake (but what is more emmersive, a movie or a book?), there are quite some advantages on text based interfaces... As I wrote in another context,
    hree great motivations I see for this are:

    * the possibility of giving a virtual world for blind people - I know many
    blind people using talkers (no monster killing variants of MUDs) with the
    help of software like Jaws because for them it is the easiest way of
    communication. The problem here is that most people nowadays want more
    attractive clients;

    * Ubiquity part I: connect everywhere - How many work collegues you know that
    have their second life client open while working? And how many of them have
    their IM client? I'm allways-present in one virtual world... text-based. I
    wouldn't be online there in work-time if it was a 3D environment;

    * Ubiquity part II: connect everything - On the subway, on the bus, on
    weekends and vacations, where I don't have a persistent internet connection,
    I'm used to connect myself via GPRS, either with a computer or a mobile
    device (cellphone in my particular case). I wouldn't connect to a 3D world
    via cellphone (hw limitations) or even over a GPRS connection (too slow). But
    with my SSH client I connect to text-based virtual worlds.

    See, text worlds have advantages and disavantages over 3D worlds. What we
    don't have yet (at least that I know of) is a VW where you can connect both
    via a text-based interface and via a 3D application.


    I hope to have an alpha version of a talker-like interface for second life in a couple of months.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12:19 PM

    Alright, already, I'll try getting into the talker! :-)

    Let's see if I can last more time in there than I ever could in the MUDs/MOOs I ever joined.

    And for the record, a book is way more imersive than a movie, for me at least.

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