Cafe Bucky

The countryside beckons.  Worn out roads need their picture taken.  They aim to put on asphalt makeup and cover their bots dots for a “Roadway Pinup Monthly” centerfold (daring Cornwall cliffs shed retaining walls, show you all!).  I aim to see a few roads.

I love to travel, and so have been mulling over dastardly plans on how to do that and get paid.  Snicker not, kind reader, for I am armed with a skill or two!  I shall Dance In The Country! Techstyle!

Perched in the midst of Getaway Central, Somewhere in Europe.  Perhaps I am in Tuscany.  Go with it, y’all…   Some people cant make it that far, ya know.  They have boring jobs and soccer brats and mortgages and neighbors with habits that scare them slightly and one too many frikken meetings to go to this week, and, yep, looks like the next one after that.  Their life is living them.

However, some people love to live vicariously….  We’re not just talking about the Peeping Toms and Tanyas…

And therein lies the country wheat germ of a hint of an idea.  Somewhere in this post I will spell it out, but I am going to my damnedest not to crystalize it in one sentence.  This is a post about the country, where paths meander.

Back to Tom and Tanya and their Peepers…

Would they watch an irreverent slidecast that shows the beauty of Dancing In The Country?  Which country?  Which part of the country? Well, send me money and I’ll alter my travel plans!  I sense that there is an opportunity to cater to the wannabe traveler.  Ok, well a subset of them.  I aim to displease those who would look down their nose at anything less than a high minded exhaustive treatise done by thee Almighty BBC.  Think of David Letterman and Monty Python pulling into town in a noisy oil smoking 1969 VW Bug with a grinding clutch and rusted shirt hanger antenna. Whoa there, move it, we have weak brakes!  Park, grab camera, some cafe coin for coffee, cheerful attitude, and a hankering to satisfy the insatiable desire of Jonathan Livingston Armchair Traveler Seagull.

I love to write and photo and video.  I also enjoy talking to the locals and getting the sense of things.  As it turns out, I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Second Life for the last 2 1/2 years.  Yeah, and the experience surely does spill over to the Real World.  Something about SL has made it much more comfy to strike up conversations with strangers.  Amazingly, most of them do not recoil in horror when I do this.  Could be all of the free Lindens I give em.

So the threads are  .. travel, take in the gist, write and photo it, and …

Omg.. is he going to talk about yet another fucking Social Networking Website?  Bucky!  How could you?  It’s almost 2009 you big smelly gorilla!

Now hang on there pardner.  We have the advantage of history.  We know what doesn’t work (like Sarah Palin applying for Mensa), and we know the world economy is on brink of collapse.  What a great time of opportunity!  Nobody can afford to travel, so we’ll do it for them!  We’ll mash it up on a web site with commentary, supplement with local feeds, point to Amazon Associates items that actually talk about the locale in question, and laugh all the way to the credit union.

So that is the thought .. how to mash up skills and local feeds, and turn the situation of traveling into a self sustaining gig.  It would be a side project.. a weekend here and there to start.  The two keys would be the power of the mashup info (content from elsewhere), and the irreverent look at things (local discontent :)

And that is the Dance in the Country.  Cha cha cha.

So I am in my fave chinese lunch spot, Jennie Lows, laughing to the point of tears at my David Sedaris book between bites of Mongolian Beef, trying not to spit up my Tsing Tao …

My cookie comes with the check.  For just once, I want to see “Today you do not have to pay!”.  Wouldn’t that be a hoot?  I would do a victory lap around the joint, waving my precious slip of paper like Mr. Bean with a First Class Ticket.  They’d give me a key to the city and a massage.

But my fortune was altogether different, and very, very, wrong …

“For better luck you have to wait till spring”

I blinked.  Wait, someone got paid to write that?

“For better luck you have to wait till spring”

It was real.  WTF! …  It’s not even October!  Maybe they meant when Spring comes in Australia, but I checked with my friends there and it’s still cold.

It couldn’t be serious, right?  Someone bored in Fortune Central?  Perhaps this could have been worse.  They may have had extensive editorial meetings on this one:

(boss) Jenkins!  What da ya got today!

(jenkins) Well…. How about “You may as well give up till the groundhog says so” ??

(boss) Ohhhh.. no we cant use that, we’d be liable if someone got upset and choked to death on their egg roll

(cathy interjects) How about: “Your blood will run cold till the leaves turn green” ??

(boss furrows brow) Noo.. too Gothic.  And the Red Cross wouldn’t like it either

(jenkins) “Oh! I know!  — “For better luck you have to wait till spring”

(all)  Oohhhhh yesssss!!

(peterman, the wise sage in the corner)  Yes!  It gives a ray of hope but does not really promise a thing!

(all) Ha ha ha ha!

I am staying offline tomorrow, Saturday August 30th.

Why?

To switch gears a bit. Think of the last 20 years, and all of the change that has snuck up on us:

• cell phones
• blogs / facebook / myspace / linked in
• web
• twitter
• IMs
• email

It’s amazing when you think back to the 80’s.  In terms of communication, and the sense of being ‘always on’, they seem almost tranquil by compare…  It will be good to stop for a moment and reflect a bit.

So I will do my best to play hooky from the online world tomorrow.  One of the best parts is that I wont be checking online to see if anyone joins me.  It is a switch off day.  I’ll apologize on Sunday :)

I am in the midst of getting my Second Life Portfolio together.

After 2 years, I have quite a bit of scripting, building, and management experience with in-world projects.  It seems like a good complement to the resume.

Although it is in the process of being written, I’ll put some pressure on myself to finish it by pointing at it now!

Pictures will come soon.  If you want a tour of some of my work, contact me and I will take ya in-world and show you around :)

Many folks know me from Second Life.  I’ve been in that wonderful Virtual World since March 2006, and have done many projects and have met many great folks.

(more…)

“put the wax on the table / let the dj spin it” -BBoys

I am back y’all! Rusty and shakin it off … It’s been a long while since February 2007.

Resurrected the blog from a noisy 1U rack server that I used to have hosted at sonic.net. Got all of my postings (March 2003 onward) here for your amusement.

Looking back, some of them are not what I would write now. It would have been cinchy to just start from scratch. On the other hand, it’s more fun to have the history (almost 4 years!) and show some evolution.

Evolution — I’ve made it out of the newbie blogging waters and am up on the warm beach dunes. Off in the distance is a shiny plastic city of one-track blogs on multilevel marketing. Over to the left is experimental artsville, rickety blog tents that amaze for a moment and then blow over from the wind of ISP overage charges.

I see a couple of other destinations — one of them is rural, with a beautiful barn studio full of computers, musical paraphernalia, and a video / lights set. It’s the blog of creative and tech that is the grounded contrast between nature and tech overload.

The other view from the dunes, of course, is the city loft in the midst of graffiti sprayed subway signed watch out for that speeding taxi high volume pedestrian hubbub. Get into the freight elevator, go up, stream some dub reggae, and write.

Back to the hot sand on the beach burning my paws … I dont head for country or city just yet (although I can certainly indulge both in Second Life). I have my for-pay work (3D Web), an amicable divorce to go through, a house to sell, and lots of connections to refresh. Time to get out of so much hermit mode!

Feels good to be back into it. I had flitted with tumblr and some Pownce, but this is really my home.

Unlocks the door, steps in, opens the double hungs to air out the blog room. Brews coffee and ponders the updating and tweaks to make.

Another one for Woody Allen, Bette Midler, and Carol Alt! (and me :-)

I wasn’t ready for this one. It kind of snuck up and tapped me on the shoulder. “psst!”, it said. “more age for you! a big tablespoon of it! .. here it comes!” And I dont mind. What am I gonna do? Take my birth cert back to the hospital and have them change a number?!

Nah, I really dont mind that much. I think age is more of a state of mind. It’s a “how open are you to keep learning new things?” kind of deal. The ones that shut off their mind when they get out of school bore me, and the ones that keep adapting, learning, and creating enthrall me. That’s the nutshell …

You wont generation gap me. I take pride in being on web early, and being in Second Life in the first few hundred thousand. I wont sit around and wait for developments to make their way to Readers Digest :-)

So, Age 46, let’s see whatcha got!

“One .. Two.. You know what to do …”

So begins “Elevator Music” off of Beck’s new album “The Information”.

One, Two, I know what to do. Back and bloggin’. I never quite left. Tuned into Second Life and dropped out of the web for while. Needed the break, now comes the balance. How to tie my newfound love into my oldfound profession?

Much of the following will not make sense if you have never spent time in Second Life …

2L Builder. 2L Scripter. I have a one-man photo exhibit. Own land. Happy in many dimensions. Lovin’ Second Life. It appeals to my creative and technical bents. Web 3D.

And there are wonderful people and flakes. Wow, just like real life. And there are great places to see, and virtual strip mall big box regurgitations of suburban fucking hell.

Most Second Life builders do what Desktop Publishers did in 1985. Prims are tortured. Textures are stretched. Real estate and virtual buildings are The Wild West – some people here and there seem to know what they are doing. The landscape of Prefabs reminds me of Gary, Indiana. I’ve seen gaps and overlaps; rooms too small and doors too tall. You want how much for that? Ya must be jokin’

And there is no sense of day. If you dont like the sun, make it midnight. There’s a menu for everything, if only you can find it in time.

So what happened in Web 2.0 while I was gone? Suppose I’ll catch up. Suppose I’ll blend these worlds somehow. The 2.0, and the Web 3D. I’ll even put up with LSL until we get Mono. Not like we have a choice on that one :-)

Yeah, I’m back. Hi there. I want a gig in the metaverse. See ya on the grid.