Today is the first day of winter break for all the schoolchildren here. They get two and a half weeks off from school and do not have to report back until January 4. That is a very long time to be out of school.
I don’t remember ever having longer than a week off for Christmas, If I had kids with that much time off I would plan a nice long vacation out of town. That is long enough to go someplace warm for several days and then also head north and spend Christmas with the family in Maryland and Virginia without having to dash back home so the kids don’t miss any school. When I was a kid we did go to Florida for Disneyworld and visiting grandparents, but it was always a very long drive home, straight through for 20 hours on a Sunday, so we could be home in time for school again on a Monday.
This year we are going out for an Adult Halloween party. Since Halloween is on a Monday night, the adults are taking the Saturday and Sunday nights for ourselves.
I went to the KMart looking for a costume. I am shocked and dismayed. The cheap crap they are selling for $40 is awful. They have the nerve to charge over $20 for little more than a large green trash bag that they are calling a cape. I’m not spending good money on that cheap crap.
Planning my big Labor Day weekend coming up. Everyone here seems interested in a big backyard gathering, with a huge barbecue or at the very least a picnic where we grill burgers and hot dogs and everyone brings a dish to share. We used to go to the beach to celebrate Labor Day, but with the price of gas still so high, we are staying closer to home.
It seems like second life had a bunch of press for a while and then kind of faded in the media, yet there were / are tons of people that are exploring it everyday. This week I have seen two more virtual worlds in the news, and I am surprised that there will be so much focus on making them kid friendly.
From the wired campus blog:
Indiana U. Receives Grant for Development of Virtual World for Children
The Indiana University School of Education has received a three-year, $1.8-million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to expand the virtual world Quest Atlantis, which is designed to help foster creativity, social responsibility, and compassion in children ages 9 through 12.
Watch Sasha Barab, the university director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, discuss Quest Atlantis.-Andrea L. Foster
Looks like virtual worlds will continue to be developed, I wonder how much better they can get? It seems the the VR worlds I’ve explored are already very good, perhaps these initiatives will not be as much about making new VR or 3d technology, but about creating community. I wonder which VR worlds will end up with the most regular users.
and From Techcrunch:
EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.
Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:
There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”
I remember when there were several social networks trying to coral the most users, and it seemed for a while that myspace had won the most people, but wasn’t necessarily the best social network software running. I would have bet that tagworld or me.com would have prevailed in that arena since the user interfaces seems better to me. There were many things that shaped myspace as a popular destination for the majority of users, and I believe a large part of that was myspace staying out of what people were putting on their pages (and by extension their 2d virtual world). With EA pushing to keep it rated E for everyone, I hope that take two will make an adult version and perhaps base it on Grand Theft Auto where it is not for everyone, so me and my friends can have a VR world that is not kid friendly, and therefor more fun to run around in.
Sara just emailed me about a new site that is about to launch, where people will be encouraged to post their disgruntled rants about their jobs, employers or workplaces. I know there are plenty of people who post the corporate dirty laundry online when they have bad experiences, often through their personal myspace blogs, livejournals, and what have you. The idea of putting them all in one place with a site like Disgruntles.com is a good idea. Perhaps it will be easier to do a search about a prospective employer before taking a job somewhere. As it is now you can search around for blogs about different companies, but there is no standard for what to type in to a search engine. I’ve seen people type things like xyz company+negative+blog, but there is not standard tag or keyword that people would be typing, so the research can be tedious. With this new site I imagine it will much easier to find multiple posts about the bad companies out there.
Once again technology bringing power to the people, let’s use it wisely!
Fun, Memories | Alice Pretchet | 
December 19, 2011 12:29 pm | 
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