Author: admin

Creating in SecondLife

Thanks to Uncle Dave Wallace (to the left), I now feel properly attired in SecondLife:

professional_geek-SL

Hanging out on the The Podcast Network island, where the Australian Twitterarti drop in and out. Donated some money to Cameron so he’s not taking food from his family’s mouth to create a place to visit.

Duncan Riley from Techcrunch posted his thoughts on meeting in SecondLife, especially the new voice/talk interface and the intersection of methods of interacting with each other.

As I stated recently, I was wrong about SecondLife. It’s a social environment.

More experiments to come.

Hello, Melbourne!

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Another month, another visit to Melbourne.

Nice weather up until about 11am, sitting having coffee and using Telstra NextG to work and communicate with the outside world.

Then the clouds arrived and chased the warmth away. Just gotta love Melbourne.

You know you are getting older when…

You know you are getting older when you read stories about history, and have played a very minor part in them.

  • Apple sales staff were in Hawaii in 1996 when Gasee came to visit Gil Amelio (it was the Asia-Pacific Sales Conference). We didn’t see him as he "flew in under the radar" of the media and employees.
  • I remember Ellen Hancock asking the internal crowd about OS alternatives. I spoke positively about Unix, and Solaris. Re-reading the history… I didn’t help out much!
  • Seeing a photograph of Rhapsody running on a Power Mac from the NeXT campus in March 1997.
  • WebObjects. What the RoR crowd now think of as the pinnacle of MVC (model-view-controller) on the web just echoes NeXT’s OpenStep UI development from the late 1980s.
  • The 1997 MacWorld conference in San Francisco (which I attended, including the now-famous keynote) with Woz and Steve Jobs as guest speaker was a major love-in

@dnwallace, SecondLife Engineer

Everything I’ve learnt in SecondLife, I’ve learnt from Uncle Dave Wallace.

There’s a whole bunch you can do that is better done collaboratively (like testing your objects, asking dmb n00bie questions)

And you can also laugh at each other, too.

I mostly hang out in the TPN island. Mebbe I should get a sign and sponsor part of the rent or something. Let’s see if anyone notices this blog entry.

Warping Text using Illustrator CS3

Strangely, the most hit page during the most recent week has been my “how-to” warp text with Adobe Illustrator 10.

Adobe, in Illustrator 11, 12 and 13 (aka CS, CS2 and CS3) have dramatically simplified the process of warping text:

Firstly, you have some text in a Text Frame:

IllustratorCS3-warp-1

Whilst the frame is selected, there is a new button on the Toolbar:

IllustratorCS3-warp-2

If you select “with warp”, a new dialog box appears:

IllustratorCS3-warp-3

By clicking the “Preview” button, off you go!

I was wrong about SecondLife

Last night, a bunch of Aussies met up in SecondLife at the home of Cameron Reilly. Cam owns The Podcast Network, and is always good for a chat.

As a SecondLife n00b, I really hadn’t anywhere to "call home", and the constant typing of conversation left me cold. Heck, I can type and converse in Twitter.

As SecondLife have the voice-chat enabled, suddenly the concept changed. You could sit and converse (or in my case listen, then crash out) with people.

The rebirth of 3D worlds as an immersive social engine might be just around the corner?

Using your name wisely

Des Walsh, the doyen of Australian Blogging, is now using his strongest brand: his name.

Your parents give you a name. Most people live with this name for the rest of their life. Unless you are Reginald Kenneth Dwight, now Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE. (Oh, there’s a whole Psychiatry conference in that name change alone!)

As alpha bloggers and all successful people know: all you really own is your name. This is the label to your reputation. Own it, defend it, market it.

Successful blogging is composed of authentic personal voice, from you underneath your name. Use it wisely.