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| 2008-05-07 09:13 |
| Cannot find STAXMEM.DL_ (Installing IIS on XP Media Center) |
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For the past several months, I have been immersed in the world of ASP.NET and C#. Recently, when attempting to install Internet Information Server on my home desktop, I was stymied by the error message: "Cannot find Staxmem.DL_. Please insert XP Pro Installation discs."
As with many systems, my HP desktop did not come with a separate set of Windows XP installation disks. Fortunately, I stumbled across a useful blog maintained by Steve Novoselic that contained the answer to this problem.
To bypass the error message, one simply needs to fire up a command prompt and type:
esentutl /p %windir%\security\database\secedit.sdb
Bingo. Problem solved. The computer will stop hassling you, and IIS will install without any problems whatsoever. Thank you Steve Novoselic!
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| 2008-03-28 14:34 |
| Teaching job at Trinity University (one-year position) |
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Our dear colleague Harry Haines recently announced that he will be leaving Trinity to take his dream job at another institution. We are rapidly scrambling to fill his classes for the coming year. Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested.
Department of Communication Search for Instructor or Assistant Professor in Newswriting for Fall 2008 ________________________________________________________________________
Communication: Trinity University. Instructor or Assistant Professor of Communication, one-year appointment, Fall 2008, A.B.D. (Ph.D. preferred); teach six undergraduate classes per year (9 contact hours per semester) with primary teaching responsibilities in (1) newswriting; and (2) industrial and/or content/textual analysis. The department is integrated among media specialties and within the liberal arts and sciences mission of the university. The faculty is committed to linking theory and practice in our teaching, research, and service. Trinity University, a highly selective, primarily undergraduate liberal arts and sciences institution, has an ideal student-faculty ratio, and excellent facilities, equipment, and services. Salary competitive. Deadline for receipt of applications is May 1, 2008. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. Send letter of application, curriculum vitae, three letters of reference, graduate institution transcript(s), and teaching evaluations (if not available, additional letters of reference specifically addressing teaching abilities and experience) to Dr. William Christ, Chair, Search Committee, Department of Communication, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200, Fax: 210-999-8355. EEO Employer.
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| 2008-03-06 15:34 |
| Clinton's drive for power will rip the party apart |
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For the past twenty-two years, the Democratic party has relied on the party faithful to back every presidential candidate that they offer up to the American electorate. I supported Mondale (though I couldn't vote). I voted for Dukakis and Kerry, even though I winced every time they opened their mouth. But I simply cannot bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. There was a time when I admired her deeply, but she has consistently demonstrated that her lust for personal power is more important to her than the health of the party. Her willingness to exploit tensions between Latinos and African Americans, her fear-mongering tactics, and her unwillingness to play by the rules in Florida and Michigan are just a few of the reasons that I would refuse to vote for a Clinton ticket.
Posted this clip from YouTube last year, but it is worth re-posting:
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| 2008-03-04 15:07 |
| Gary Gygax leaves this mortal coil... (Rest in peace) |
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From: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/03/04/obit.gygax.ap/index.html
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) -- Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69. He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax. Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
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| 2008-02-18 20:28 |
| Prokofy Neva's best practices for Second Life events |
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In a recent posting to Second Thoughts, Prokofy Neva discusses last weekend's virtual world gathering at Stanford University. As part of the discussion, Neva lists several useful guidelines for anyone who is organizing a large gathering in Second Life.
Paraphrased, with permission, Prokofy Neva's tips for Second Life event organizers are:
1. Remember that, at the very least, four-corner sims will hold up to 400 residents. This isn't the most comfortable approach, but it works.
2. Use a dedicated server for streaming audio/video, and be sure to post visible directions about (a) how to upgrade to the latest version of Quicktime, (b) how to use the edit preferences options to activate and configure video, and (c) techniques for trouble-shooting problems with the multimedia streams.
3. Share the URL of the dedicated server. This way, if it is too laggy, people can tune in from another location.
4. If you cannot share the URL, create several other venues where people can congregate in smaller groups, on less laggy sims, to watch the video streams.
5. If you distribute the groups across the grid, you can still hold them together by encouraging people to chat in a special group created for this purpose. This group can be moderated, to avoid griefers, but everyone should feel encouraged to use the group for "back chat."
6. Be prepared with back-up audio streams in case the video stream craps out.
7. Be certain to nail down bandwidth at your real-life site at the outset. This is often a problem at conferences, as real-life attendees can devour huge amounts of bandwidth. Ask for bandwidth, and get it, in advance.
Readers are encouraged to check out Prokofy's complete analysis, as well as the other insightful postings regularly found in Second Thoughts.
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| 2008-02-13 15:46 |
| Elastic Collision whitepaper identifies seven tips for real-world businesses in Second Life |
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 Over on the Elastic Collision site, Jennifer Henderson and I have published a new white paper: Leave Your Parachute at Home: Seven Tips for Real-world Businesses in Second Life. As described in the abstract:
Media coverage of Second Life typically favors the opinions of industry analysts and naysayers. All too often, the concerns of regular users are overlooked. In October 2007, as part of a larger survey, we asked more than 800 Second Life residents what advice they would give to real-world organizations establishing a presence in Second Life. Based on their thoughtful responses, this white paper identifies seven things that real-world businesses should know before setting up shop in Second Life. We'd love to receive feedback on the ideas contained in this paper. If you have a few moments, please download the paper and let us know what you think.
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| 2008-02-04 13:26 |
| The hidden cost of virtual sociability |
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 “What a bunch of pathetic losers. Don’t they have anything better to do on a Friday night?”
These harsh words caught me by surprise. They came from a colleague. An open-minded, thoughtful, and very intelligent colleague. A colleague who just three days earlier had heard about a high-profile mixed reality event in the virtual world of Second Life where dozens of avatars from around the globe gathered in an immersive, three-dimensional space for an evening of music, dancing, and conversation. “I mean, really. It’s just sad,” he continued. “There’s nothing real about virtual experiences. These nerds are just wasting their time when they could be interacting with real people.” (Read the rest at: http://flowtv.org/?p=1116)
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| 2007-12-20 11:21 |
| 395 +54 days later (Part 2 of 2) |
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As many friends and colleagues are already aware, I left Metaversatility approximately two months ago. Leaving a company that I helped to build was a difficult decision, but it was certainly the right one. This week, I'm happy to announce the soft-launch of a new venture: Elastic Collision.
The new company formally launches in January, but we are already quite busy. News of the new venture started leaking out this week, and Elastic Collision was mentioned in Tech Clicks this morning by San Antonio Express News reporter Laura Lorek. See:
More news on this front in the days ahead. For now, I hope everyone has a very happy and relaxing holiday season.
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In early October, Jennifer Henderson and I designed and conducted a survey of Second Life residents for one of Metaversatility's clients. The findings are fascinating, and the survey sponsors have generously agreed to share the findings and the raw data set with the broader community. More details about the timing of this event will be posted in my personal blog and in Metaversatility's blog.
As a participation incentive, survey respondents were also encouraged to enter their avatar names into a sweepstakes drawing. Tracking down the winners solely through their avatar names has turned out to be a logistical nightmare. Many respondents have multiple avatars, and others went weeks without checking their Second Life accounts. Finally, after much digital leg-work, I am able to announce the first batch of winners:
1. Dakine Weston ($20,000 Linden Dollars deposited in avatar's personal account)
2. Violet Bisiani (Software: Virtual Builder Studio)
3. Zedja Darkstone ($50,000 Linden Dollars donated to National Breast Cancer Foundation)
4. Ginger Glimmer (15,000 impressions on Second Life Exchange)
5. Jayhre McDonnagh (The book Scripting Recipes for Second Life by Jeff Heaton)
6. Duality Kincess (Software: AND Inventory Sorter)
7. Berky Etzel (Software: Inside This World's production holodeck)
8. Xtabber Young (Software: Puppeteer Prim Animation kit)
9. Angelita Pierterson (TBD)
10. Giordana Lane (Software: Damanios Thetan's WeatherSystem)
I will continue to hunt down the remaining six winners. The list of remaining items includes: a half-page ad in The Metaverse Messenger, the terraforming software Land Worker 1.01, the anti-griefing tool Omicron 1.3.3, and music from Frogg Marlowe, AldoManutio Abruzzo, Cylindrian Rutabega, and Jonathan Coulton. Aaron
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In slightly more than a century, humanity has progressed from the motion picture, telegraph, and radio to personal computers, cell phones, and the world-wide web. The speed of computer processors doubles every two years, and this exponential growth is transforming our species in ways we don’t fully understand. Consider the unending emergence of technology-fueled subcultures. Ham radio. Jazz. Beat poets. Personal computing. Hip-hop. Punk. Computer networking. Zines. Indie rock. Raves. Flash mobs. Alternate reality games. Virtual worlds. 
In all of these cultural movements, there is a familiar tendency. The sub-culture starts with a spark: an act of technical or creative genius that points the way to entirely new possibilities. As new minds become involved, they riff, modify, and extend the movement in new directions. During the early days, enthusiasm is contagious and sub-cultural participants are driven by a shared passion that seems unfathomable to outsiders....
Continued in the newest issue of the on-line journal Flow TV.
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| 2007-10-27 09:48 |
| 395 days later... (Part 1 of 2) |
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While cleaning up my mailbox, I recently stumbled across this blast from the past:
9/24/2006
Hi Peter and Adrienne,
Let's start a company. We wouldn't need to quit our day jobs.
I've got some connections with virtual world researchers and people in industry. You guys are very savvy with SL at multiple levels. We could get up to speed on There. We wouldn't need to buy an office or equipment or anything else. We'd be doing the same things that we do for fun, but we'd be getting paid for it.
What do you think?
Aaron
The next step was approaching Matt Daly and recruiting his creative talents: 9/29/06
Hi Matt -- I think my outgoing message did not get sent. Why don't we say 10 am at Twin Sisters? Email me to confirm. If it doesn't work out, we can do it another day.
In addition to just catching up tomorrow, I've also got some news about an SL-related business/creative opportunity that you might be interested in.
Aaron
And finally... I told the gang about my old friend John: 10/4/06
I also chatted with John Plevyak, and he's very interested in tackling the knowledge domain associated with SL. We were in game until 3:00 a.m. last night, and he was already working through the documentation on the scripting language. His info is linked here: http://www.plevyak.com/. Perhaps we can arrange to meet up with John in world sometime.
The rest is history. At the time, who could have guessed what would follow? We all knew that the virtual world space would grow, but few of us could have anticipated just how quickly things would take off. These are exciting times for entrepreneurs, activists, teachers, and dreamers of all types. Can't wait to see what comes next...
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| 2007-10-14 13:57 |
| Second Life resident survey -- Carried over from SL musicians list |
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An interesting thread has developed on the SL musicians list that is related to survey work currently being undertaken by Metaversatility. The survey entry page is posted on the company site. Rather than risk annoying the mailing list subscribers with off-topic clutter, I suggested shifting the conversation to this personal blog. The message thread is appended.
I think everyone had a chance to voice their opinions, but wanted to make sure that nobody felt silenced by my call to take the discussion off the list.
Aaron
Forwarded Conversation
Subject: What do SL musicians think about the community and platform?
------------------------
From: Aaron Delwiche <adelwiche@metaversatility.com>
To: musicdevelopment@lists.secondlife.com
Date: Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 6:51 PM
Hi,
I am one of the co-founders of the virtual world development agency
Metaversatility. From now through October 15th, we are surveying
Second Life residents on behalf of a well-known technology company.
You might have read something about this survey in the Second Life
Insider or the Second Life Herald.
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| 2007-09-16 23:26 |
| Sorry, White Stripes... No hard feelings. |
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| 2007-09-15 23:58 |
| Puzzling evidence |
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Metaversatility
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| 2007-09-08 14:41 |
| San Antonio arts community loses a good friend |
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I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Linda Pace from breast cancer. I had the chance to interact with her at arts-related events over the years, and was always very impressed with her commitment to the local arts community. The appended blurb is from the Austin Chronicle:
 Linda Pace Photo by Bret Brookshire Belated condolences to the family and friends of Linda Pace, artist and founder of Artpace, who died Monday, July 2, from complications of breast cancer. She was 62. The heir to the Pace Foods company was one of San Antonio's leading philanthropists and patrons of the arts. In 1995, she was inspired to create a program for visiting artists that would give them a studio and two months to create whatever they liked. She acquired an old car dealership on Main Avenue in Downtown San Antonio and transformed it into the home for Artpace. Now, three times a year, the Artpace Foundation invites three artists -- one from Texas, one from another part of the U.S., and one from outside the country -- for a two-month residency. One of the first artists to take part, Australian Tracey Moffatt, calls it the world's best contemporary artist residency program. Certainly, it's made its mark in the art world. In a recent Whitney Museum Biannual, 13 winning artists had been Artpace residents. Pace, however, was not just someone who enabled others to make art. She made art herself, most famously creating mixed-media collages composed of stuffed animals, cheap trinkets and souvenirs, and other similar objects. Her work Mirror, Mirror, a fabricated 9-foot mirrored igloo that viewers could crawl into, was featured in the 2007 Texas Biennial here in Austin and nominated for Outstanding Work of Art by the Austin Critics Table. Despite her illness, Pace kept up her studio work, completing a series of drawings based on her dreams that was exhibited in a one-woman show at the Joan Grona Gallery. Following treatment at the Salem Oncology Centre in Houston, Pace returned to San Antonio and spent her last days at her apartment. She was a major force in the Texas arts whose passing will be felt deeply.
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| 2007-06-03 15:19 |
| We built this prison on rock and roll |
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Once upon a time, there was a mighty kingdom. Forged in blood and sacrifice, it was premised on a dream of liberty for all its subjects. It was a land of farms and school houses, barn raisings and town squares. The citizens who could read taught others the gift of literacy, and this brought about books, newspapers, poetry and fiction. Nurtured by freedom and pastoral reflection, a tidal wave of ingenuity and invention washed upon the land. Wagon wheels gave way to trains, and the pony express became the telegraph and soon the radio. Through fits and starts, the kingdom grew and expanded until it had become a far-flung empire the likes of which the world had never seen.
There were many battles along the way, some more noble than others. Eventually, the empire miscalculated, sending hundreds of thousands of young men to fight and die in a futile war on the other side of the globe. Back home, the subjects grew restless. As the war machine marched onward, they gathered in public parks to voice their opposition. If the war had been the spark, the insurgency it ignited voiced a more fundamental critique of technocratic monotony.
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| 2007-05-26 10:40 |
| Herding cats (very funny) |
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| 2007-05-23 09:33 |
| Political Correctness 2.0 |
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 Jennifer Henderson wrote a terrific article on the "new civility" for this weeks issue of the San Antonio Current. How can one not love an article that name-checks Peter Parker, Prokofy Neva, Russell Simmons, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in less than eight hundred words? (See the article in its original context in the online version of the San Antonio Current.)
Like the black goo that transformed Peter Parker in the latest Spider- Man movie, a new sticky web of censorship seems to be spreading over our country, exacted not by government officials, but by social and economic forces too large to be overcome by one woman, man, or superhero. Over the past month, a bigoted radio announcer lost his job, the most powerful man in all of hip-hop called for his artists to avoid using words that degrade women and minorities, a virtual-world community conference banned a member they found to be verbally offensive to others, and I was informed no fewer than three times in professional meetings that we needed to “bring civility to the discourse”.
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| 2007-05-20 09:29 |
| Spike Jonze directed this Gore campaign video (2000) |
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Was excited to see in this morning's newspapers that Al Gore has not ruled out running for president in 2008. Excerpts from The Telegraph (UK) are at the bottom of this posting.
According to the newspaper:
He gave a clear signal that he could join the contest later this year by objecting to the idea that the presidential campaign now under way must last for two years. "Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don't know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given." He criticised those who "want to close the door and narrow the field and say, 'This is it, now let's place your bets'. If they want to do that, fine. I don't have to play that game." Vice-President Gore, whose more relaxed style and advocacy of green issues have won him new fans, said that if he had had the "presentation skills" he had learned while arguing for global warming issues, "I think I'd be in my second term as president." Roy Neel, a long-time Gore aide, said that he had "rejected offers to do any sort of planning". But he had not stopped others from planning on his behalf. As The Sunday Telegraph revealed last month, former aides are privately putting together a shadow campaign team that could manage a new run for the White House. Mr Gore was preparing to launch his new book this week, The Assault on Reason, seen by many as an attempt to keep his name in the headlines. He will conduct several interviews on television and is the subject of Time magazine's latest cover story, under the headline "The Last Temptation of Al Gore". Vice-President Gore regularly attracts 15 per cent support in polls of Democrat contenders for the White House, even though he has not launched a campaign.
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| 2007-05-19 08:44 |
| Bug finally squashed. |
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For the past month, I have been tormented by a recurring error message on my computer: "Your system clock appears to have been set back, possibly in an attempt to defeat the security system on this program. Please correct your system clock before trying to run this program again. If your clock is correct, please contact the author of this program for instructions on correcting this error."
This error dialog would pop up every few minutes with an annoying beep, whenever I tried to open up a folder or perform some sort of basic XP file management. It sounds innocuous, but each of these alert messages required me to manually close the dialog box. Like some weird water torture, the frustration became increasingly unbearable.
I have spent hours trying to fix this. I have Googled high and low. I have prayed to the deities and demigods of countless religions. But the bug has continued to torment me.
This morning, after manually deleting all shareware from my computer, I found the offending product: Flash Capture. The software is published by a company called Dreamingsoft, and I don't actually remember downloading and installing it. The offensive little beast is now removed from my computer entirely, and will never be invited back to wreak havoc on my registry.
In Googling to confirm that this was the culprit, I found that users around the world have encountered this problem with Flashcapture from Dreamingsoft. It is not the only possible culprit for the error message mentioned above, but Flashcapture from Dreamingsoft certainly seems to be a common cause of the problem.
I would be much more forgiving if the author of Flashcapture from Dreamingsoft were to actually post some sort of acknowledgment of this problem on their web site and support page. Perhaps something that would show up in Google when people searched for information about this error? With keywords like "system clock" and "appears to have been set back" and "error code" and "flash capture?"
This simple step would help reduce the frustrations of thousands of users of Flashcapture from Dreamingsoft. Dreamingsoft authors -- if you're ego-surfing the net for references to your name -- would you please address this problem? Thanks!
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