Free hugs: free as in beer or free as in speech ?

Stumbled across the Free hugs post from Tymmerie.

The first reaction - "argh. the bloody consumerism. 'come and get yours for free! the next batch is at a discount!'" type of thing, or "Genuine! as shown on TV!" - which is probably convincing to some - but to me is more a sort of badmouthing. They won't show anything all too good on TV these days, imho.

But then, thinking of it - a hug from a total stranger that you would not see anymore is indeed truly "free". Just let them hang around bit more - and you will get entangled into the web of obligations and promises. If you stay longer - you might get even deeper - it would be called "family" then. Totally trapped.

So - since these offered hugs do not have any binding properties (although, take a careful look at the back of the sign - they might have written something in small letters there!), indeed they're free, not in the TV-ad-sense, rather in the true sense.

But for some reason the value of these feels much less.

For some things you'd rather forfeit your freedom...

Why would you rotfl, and what is an IRC ?

As I talk with the less geeky (or, geeky for a less time) people, sometimes they my jargonisms like ROTFL, OTOH, FWIW, etc. are met with the questioned looks. "And what's that ?" - "Well, that's an abbreviation from IRC" - "So, what is the IRC?"

In short: IRC is like SL but you can not build/script/sell stuff and you have to have to cyber (the abbreviation from cybersex, or SL-specific - SLex) with more imagination - since there is no convenient Xcite or sexgen to beef up the imagination in case it lags a bit.

Longer: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, the protocol is described in RFC1459, if you are looking for an even more details.
I would say IRC can easily be called a "proto-metaverse" (remember: it was readily available back in 1990s).

You did have the "channels" (chatrooms), in which there were different social statuses (operator, or "op" for short - who could change the various properties of the channel, and also could control the behaviour of the participants to some extent. Ok, call them the SIM owners, there is no difference. :)

And then there was the same unique "social glue" that we are chanting about these days.
There were stories of love and hate, peace and war, friendship and betrayal.

It was a unique tool to mix the different cultures together. And at the time when just not so long ago a letter from Russia to the USA would take a month to be delivered, realtime communication with someone across the globe did look like a magic.

It is interesting to observe the parallels.

Oh, you do expect me to write what the "ROTFL" is ? You seriously think I would do that ? I was just looking for an excuse to bring up some nostalgic reminiscences. :) If you really wanna look up those acronyms, there are sites that do that much better, for example netlingo - I won't try outdo them. Besides being just plain silly, it's a lot of work... And as you all know, I am a terribly lazy neko.

Virtual identity as a form of immortality

I came to a conclusion today that a small collection of random scratches on the napkins, grouped under a common name of "Dalien", is a pretty stable and powerful formation on itself, without me or RL av, already.

Here're the couple of reasons:

- If the SL av would cease to exist in SL for whatever reason (be it the disappearance of the av, or the disappearance of the SL), this blog, and hence the existence of the identity would continue.

- If the RL av would cease to exist for whatever odd reason, then the identity would not disappear still - captured in a finite, but more or less long "forever" blog.

Pretty surely I am not the first one to come up with such an obvious thought, but the sensation that with a little bit of stretch this entity might be called an approximation (weak and incomplete, but..) of soul was so odd, that I decided I'd write it down.

Immersives and Augmentists: any other choice ?

Alidar Moxie wrote an interesting post dissecting the whole virtual community into two parts, augmentists - who view the VR as a tool to extend their real self, and immersives - the ones that "live separately there".

I think I like the idea, it does have merit, even though there are probably bit more facets to it.

I'd probably belong to neither of the two groups. Call me immersive augmentist, please :-)

I do not make illusions about the privacy - instead putting the administrative border (like the one on this blog), that whatever is written on behalf of this SL avatar, is not to be considered as written on behalf of the RL avatar driving the SL avatar :) - this allows me to at least make an illusion of decoupling the two things. On the other hand, on my blog you can more frequently than not see various things leaking in from RL - those are not really the area of my professional specialization, but merely some other hobbies, which I think would not hurt to bring into the mix - after all, maybe it is useful for someone :-)

I do view SL on one hand indeed as a possible tool - if a bit tweaked, it could be an interesting collaboration platform, on the other hand the very reason for this platform to be good is its increased "immersiveness" compared to the "classical" ones.

I don't do SLex just because I don't feel like it, nonetheless, I do not deny that the images and words do have their effect on any human, so I do not judge those who find it fun.

I enjoy the feeling of getting rid of some of the burdens that my real AV has to bear - yet, I think I like it far too much to abandon it all together. It's just too much of accumulated experience to throw away.

And for being someone totally different - I did try being a girl in SL.

Not for long.

Being a girl is too difficult for a lazy me. Gentlemen, try it out - and you will appreciate your other halves much more :-) Besides, there is a huge overhead of maintaining more than one persona's state - this is just too much.

The next post will talk about some of the *new* difficulties in girl's life that I've just learned about...

A recipe of attracting the customers... *not*

If you are an owner of the business that you want to live and prosper, please stop reading here =) - however, if you have an evil plan to slowly and painfully ruin the trust of your customers - this post would be precisely for you - I hope you would find it useful.

I've been always doing a bit of banking in SL - somewhat enough to give me a reasonably steady income which is noticeable, rather than just holding the stuff in my pocket.

Throughout my journeys I've once hit a teller machine which was promising reasonably low rates to consider it not so risky, and reasonably high to bother with this at all.

I've paid L$1 to the ATM to create the account and maybe return to it later, grabbed the landmark and continued with my journeys.

A few days later I received an invitation to join the group, which I agreed with (hmm nice - they remember even the tiny customers!), and figured one of these days I might go and try to see what they have to offer by depositing some smaller 5-digit amount and see what happens.

Unfortunately, this good intention was shot on the spot by the announcement on the *bank* group about a *poker* club. An IM to the person sending this revealed that
the Foo Bar and his partner own both the bank and the poker. My query whether this is appropriate behaviour did not seem to trigger any sort of the apologies or even confusion - apparently the biggest part of their customers would not mind such spam.

Needless to say, I am no longer in the group and definitely not their customer...

But those who know me have always said I can not be counted as an "average customer" for any kind of businesses, except maybe for funeral services - but I'm not very picky on that one, since I would not be there anyway to enjoy it... :-)

SL BDSM as a lab exercise for a RL management training

During a casual conversation with someone I respect quite a lot for the wits and smartness (besides the other observable good qualities :-), kiddingly I've dropped in an attempt of a joke that being a dominating person in the BDSM is like being a manager in love.

Upon further thinking on this topic, I think BDSM could be used precisely as a practical lab in management/leadership courses of what is NOT to be done.

Disclaimer: all of the musings below are based on my very limited, shallow, and narrow-minded theoretical knowledge of both positions, so should not be treated any seriously, besides, the lack of exposure to both of the opportunities will almost certainly result in some gaping inconsistencies, which you are very welcome to correct. The opinions described here are merely personal opinions of the Second Life avatar, and as such, do not exist in real world, so if reading this causes you to spill your hot coffee on yourself, the computer to crash, the sun to stop shining, I decline any and all responsibilities for the mental and any other possible and impossible damages caused (after all, the coffee is supposed to be HOT - so predicting the results of spilling it is the responsibility of any thoughtful reader and NOT mine!). Besides, any correlations and similarities to anything are fully random and are the sole result of reader's too wild imagination.

In any case, lets start this largely anti-scientific fun exercise...

1) B.: No-No. Tying the people up makes them feel small. The "Small person" syndrome creates discomfort and kills motivation.

The manager should create a sense of responsibility and empowerment in the employees, which is hard to do if you put the handcuffs on them and stick something into the mouth so they do not whine too much :-)

2) D.: Well, this is a lesser evil, in a sense that in any hierarchical structure there is a natural set of "precedences". However, again, the domination carries the sense of free will suppression. Even in the case of conveyor belt - you might want your employees to be proud of their work.

A good manager would make the employee think that it is all the employee's results that are achieved and the employee would not notice the actual efforts behind this(disclaimer: most of the results are the persons' achievement anyway, however, meta-results that result in those results are not necessarily)

3) S.: The affection of persons towards this item could be considered dually. If the said activities do not bring any achievements to the one being tortured - then this is a wasteful torture, and the manager who finds the joy in such, maybe should reconsider the career aspirations.

However, the only well-remembered things are the ones you learn while spilling a bit of your blood - so a little bit of torture which leads to the person's growth should be considered as a very positive ingredient of a leader.

4) M.: is an opposite of S. and practically always coexists - just in different hemispheres. So, too much of S. is also not too great - it means there is a great potential for useless tortures.

However, if one to understand M in a sense of being willing to listen to others' input, react, and improve accordingly - then indeed that is an immensely useful quality and should be observed in all the candidates of the lab.

CONNECT 2400

Thanks to Tiessa, Veyron and Vint for reviving my old habit.

All of this has started from a visit to a friend with a few beers, to check out his newest self-assembled from totally separate parts shiny hi-end 386.

Somewhere in the very beginning 1990s. Summer, white nights. Friday has just become Saturday.
Two geeks in the kitchen, sitting in front of a 13" screen.

---

AT
OK
ATDP9999999

---

The sound of the pulse dial (the tone dialing was a strange luxury at that time at that place), then the sound of the connect.

If you heard it once - you will never forget it: "...baaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeepshkrchkrspspkr".

Well, maybe not exactly, but something similar.

---

CONNECT 2400

the funny name FrontDoor shows up, then the screen explodes with ANSI graphics and we start exploring the new and mysterious world. Look! you can download files! Many files! Wow, various programs.. too bad it will take a long time to get them here, even though 2400 is quite fast - it's almost 800 bytes per second!

Let's see what else is there.. oh - look! - there is a command "Yell" - we try it ? - ok!

The PC starts to emit the bleeping sound, and we see the message - "Chat started".

"Hello?" - the letters appear one by one, not too fast, and suddenly we realise it's well well past midnight!

"Did we disturb you ?" - "Nah, not really, what's up"

The next 2 hours of geekspeek are omitted for brevity, if you want the details - find the nearest BOFH and ask.

The end result was that we got full access to the files, and agreement to meet with the beers one of the following days to finalize the balance sheet.

I came home at 6am, by foot, all excited to have talked to another person, complete stranger, using the computer. Ain't this amazing ?

---

P.S. I've tried to locate the screenshot of such an antique, but found a couple of fun sites, and appears some BBSes are still running over the TCP/IP... try telnet to
woibbs.org. All the details, including the ANSI graphics detection and screen setup. Feel nostalgic yet ?