Dwell On It

Victoria’s mental health professionals

Tateru Nino — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:48:36 +0000

As I’ve mentioned previously, I care for two disabled people, 24x7x365. That’s way fuller than full-time. That’s all the time, and I do other things where I can. Over the years, I’ve had plenty of exposure to people with mental health problems, as well as many GPs and mental health professionals in Victoria.

Now, unlike those professionals, I’ve had no training, nor do I carry any qualification. I just have to keep getting things right in good times, in bad times and during crises, when they occur. Time after time. I’ve had extensive opportunities to compare and contrast how I deal with people who have mental health problems against how the professionals do it.

And I can tell you right now, that at least seven out of ten professionals in Victoria’s Mental Health industry are no better at dealing with a symptomatic patient than any random Jane or Joe off the street.

I kid you not.


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Lumiya 2.0 now with some limited 3D

Tateru Nino — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:42:44 +0000

Now that the Lumiya Second Life viewer (for Android phones and tablets) has hit version 2.0, it features some limited 3D support. That means you can see the world around you.

At least a little.

Six years ago

Tateru Nino — Mon, 14 May 2012 04:27:17 +0000

I have no recollection of saying this, but apparently I did on 28 April, 2007.

Is it fixed yet?

Tateru Nino — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:09:52 +0000

It’s been sixteen days, over which there has been (by my count) 53 hours of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance for the Second Life grid. That’s “drop what you’re doing and don’t touch nuthin’” maintenance, and doesn’t include the outages for in-world Search, payments, billing, the JIRA, or a couple abortive rolling restarts.

During this time, the grid hasn’t been performing well. All this, I know. What I don’t know is: Is it fixed yet?


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The Gaming Session

Tateru Nino — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:40:18 +0000

All my gaming posts (and one new one, to sweeten the pot, as it were) – or at least all the gaming posts that I could find, leastways – have been put on a blog of their own: The Gaming Session. Gaming-related posts? That’s where you’ll find them.

And before you ask, no, this isn’t The Big Secret Project. What with Second Life being so twitchy at the moment, it has been too frustrating to work on that, so I did a little work on this, instead.

20 words or less

Tateru Nino — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:18:18 +0000

Elder Scrolls? Huge fan

Tateru Nino — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:04:51 +0000

As much as I can be said to be a fan of anything terribly much, I’m a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls series of games by Bethesda/Zenimax (even if some aspects of the gameplay have been on the decline for the last three of them).

Now, it’s no surprise that they’ve been working on an Elder Scrolls MMOG – that news has been trickling out of the company for years in fragments. As a huge fan, I just can’t see myself wanting to play the game.

Mea culpa

Tateru Nino — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:53:42 +0000

So, you might have been thinking to yourself “Gee, this blog has been a bit quieter in recent months, hasn’t it?”

Well, you’d be right to think so. It has.

The primary reason for this is that I’ve been working on a big Second Life creative project for… well, months now. Since about Christmas.

And then there’s the bad news

Tateru Nino — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:16:15 +0000

Today, Second Life went through … well, a bad patch. Logins stopped working for many. Then they were shut off “until further notice.” The Web-site stopped working for a while, and for twelve whole hours, the system was either inaccessible, partially online or just plain unreliable.

Users were frustrated and demoralised. Scheduled events, meetings and presentations were mooted. A number of us lost expensive or difficult-to-replace content.

And that’s not actually the bad news.


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SecondLie wants you to hate…

Tateru Nino — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:55:48 +0000

SecondLie wants you to hate cancer.

SecondLie, the premier Second Life Twitter parody account, is raising money for cancer research as a part of the broader Relay For Life campaign.

If you’re a Second Life user, click the ‘love’ button Read more ...

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So, now’s your big chance!

Tateru Nino — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:03:00 +0000

So, you say Linden Lab are a big batch of screw-ups who can’t organise an effective anniversary celebration for Second Life without messing it up? You say they’ve kept getting in the way and the way they’ve handled delicate and sensitive issues is a mess?

You think you can do better?

Now’s your chance.


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Anniversary time. Everything new is old again

Tateru Nino — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:59:19 +0000

Way back when, I organised Second Life’s third anniversary (somewhat erroneously called SL3B). According to what I’ve been told by Linden Lab in the past, it was the single most successful anniversary event, involving more Second Life users (new and old) than any other – and by quite a large margin.

Now, while it was a heck of a job putting it together (I think I spent over 700 hours, just myself, on it) it had two key differences to all of the other anniversary events that have come afterwards. Firstly, it wasn’t centralised, and secondly, Linden Lab was barely involved.


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Impossible software

Tateru Nino — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 06:41:14 +0000

If you produce software – any kind of software – the issue of patents has probably come up. The fact is that it is impossible to produce a piece of software that actually does anything practical without infringing on at least one patent – and for complex systems, probably hundreds of them.

Let’s say you wanted to write a quick program to index music collections. Congratulations, you’ve just run afoul of… umm, let’s see… I count at least four patents for that, at a glance. What about indexing images? Well, depending on how you do it there are at least 30 patents that apply to that.

Think of something obvious you can do with software. There’s a patent for that. Probably a lot of them. You probably owe someone money.

The dynamism of Second Life

Tateru Nino — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:59:39 +0000

There’s nothing really wrong with Linden Lab’s communications… or at least there wouldn’t be, if it was a garden store, or a supermarket, or a hardware store or something like that.

But as Linden Lab has been telling us for years, it is a unique company with a unique service and a unique model. From a communications perspective, however, it may as well be selling mobile phones, or wicker baskets, or maybe publishing video games.

The communications model of the Lab, however, doesn’t match this paradigm (or Weltanschauung, if you prefer), and that’s one of the key places where it all falls down.

Second Life Marketplace troubles continue

Tateru Nino — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Direct Delivery for the Second Life Marketplace clearly isn’t going so well. After a unicode bungle (why does almost every major feature include a unicode bungle?) that prevented merchants being paid for their sales and problems with viewer support (eg: The official Linux viewer’s Received Items folder simply not functional at launch), there’s another wrinkle.

That wrinkle is currently called WEB-4587.

Study supports using virtual environment to teach mind/body techniques

Tateru Nino — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:06:08 +0000

Participants express satisfaction with learning stress-reducing techniques via Second Life online environment

A small study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers found that online virtual communities may be an effective way to train patients in meditation and other mind/body techniques. The ability to learn and practice approaches that elicit the relaxation response – a state of deep rest that has been shown to alleviate stress-related symptoms – in a virtual environment could help surmount several barriers that can restrict participation.

“Our finding that a medical intervention – in this case teaching a mind/body approach that includes the relaxation response – can be delivered via a virtual environment is important because these environments are are richer and more rewarding than simply using interactive web sites,” says Daniel Hoch, MD, PhD, of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at MGH, corresponding author of the report appearing in the open-access journal PLoS One.

Second Life’s new Premium Wilderness in a nutshell

Tateru Nino — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:58:14 +0000

So, today, Linden Lab launched an area called Premium Wilderness, and if you haven’t taken a look at it yet, you’re probably wondering “does this add value to my Premium account?”

So, let’s take a look.


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Why push unconstitutional laws?

Tateru Nino — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:05:27 +0000

Haven’t you ever wondered why States of the United States of America seem to keep sponsoring, voting for, and even occasionally passing laws and bills that they know will never go into effect on constitutional grounds?

I’m referring to various violent video-game laws, Arizona’s HB2625 which allows employers to pry into contraception usage of female employees and fire them if they don’t like the answers, and so on. Often these laws are just rewrites of previous laws which also failed to pass.

And there’s a reason why they happen anyway.


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A satisfying ending

Tateru Nino — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:48:00 +0000

A number of games feature multiple endings to their narratives. Right off the top of my head, I’ll name four: All three of the Deus Ex games, and Mass Effect 3. These come particularly to mind for a singular gaming conceit: The magic pick-an-ending button.

Regardless of what you’ve done, how you’ve developed and defined your character’s personality, who has lived and died, who you’ve befriended or opposed, you’re presented with three choices right at the end. Press the button (so to speak) and get the ending.

In narrative terms, that’s a cop-out. That isn’t even phoning it in.


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Direct Delivery: Received Items a feedback success (sort of) but a communications failure

Tateru Nino — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:45:44 +0000

After quite a bit of negative feedback (for the second time), the scope of the Received Items folder has been cut back to just items received from the Marketplace (for the second time).

Okay, so let’s call this one a feedback success, since customer feedback was incorporated into development…. err, twice. From start to finish, though, it’s been a communications failure at practically every level.