Bye for now

I am four and a half years old, and I am going to retire...

The Present :-

For some time I have found SL draining, and it's also starting to become dull, I just can't find things to do and I just feel I'm wasting my time.
I don't know if this is because the people I grew up with are gone, or I'm just not making new friends, or both.

Possibly for me SL has lost it's sparkle, and the novelty has worn off, while there are great builders like AM Radio, and brilliant stuff like Greenies Home, most of what I see is not pleasing to the eye, with lots of tacky advertising, and lots of lag even on empty sims.

As I type this, I learn that Greenies is leaving.....bum :-(

I used to read lots of blogs, but most of those bloggers have stopped writing, sometimes their blog stays, sometimes people delete it, and I think of all those experiences now lost, and again it makes me sad, as does the lights on my friends list, steadily...slowly going out.

I note I am in the good company of Ordinal, Zonja, Jacek and Honour, all of whom have put lots more time into SL than I, and they have for their own reasons have become frustrated with it all. Not enough to commit Avataricide, but just to leave and spend time elsewhere.

While my feelings are not connected to the mass sackings of the last few days from the lab, this event doesn't give me much confidence in future of the SL platform, I used to think this was the next "Big Thing", and I would be hopefully getting in on the ground floor, and possibly make some money from it. But this never happened, as the RL job takes lots of time, as do children and family.

My current thoughts on SL and the state of Linden Lab are echoed by Rob Knop on his blog

But basically I think we could see the Linden Lab opinion of it's customer base with the OpenSpaces issue, and it's gone downhill ever since.

While we are always quick to attack Linden Lab on it's policies and it's customer service, I think it's important to recognize the great work it has done in actually getting the Grid to work, and how it has brought the concept of virtual worlds into the public consciousness. This is quite important, and I thank Philip Linden for all the work he put in and for his vision to make it all happen.


I have met some really great people (and a few idiots) from all over the world, and it's been wonderful to hear about peoples lives in the USA, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, etc.

Part of the VW experience is exploring your own mind, and I think I have done well with that, but not as far as Botgirl has done ;-)

Looking in to the Past :-

I'm old enough to remember when my copy of the Mosaic web browser was posted to me on a 5 and quarter inch floppy disk. This was when a 10meg file being FTPed would almost bring the Internet to a stall.

I once thought that :-

This WWW thing will never catch on.
That VRML was going to be the future of the web.
My first ISP job, I was registering Domain Names, I thought no one would register one more than 10 characters long.
That Usenet would be the best way to find news ("What's Usenet you say?")
That normal people wouldn't spend 100s of dollars on a computer just to get email and look at websites.

As you can see I have been fantastically brilliant in my predictions


So for the Future I Predict:-

That OpenSim will be part of the future of the Internet.
That the Australian Government will never stop trying to censor the Internet.
Linden Lab will surprise us in a good way...then mess it all up.
IPV6 and Internet everywhere will give you IP addresses in your powerpoints
Everyone will have a personal DNS.

For me in the Future :-

I'm moving back to my old home, and there are things I need to get involved with, such as curbing the increasing Government censorship and the influence of anti-vaxxers, and other anti-science types who are trying to bring on the Counter-Enlightenment, I don't want the Dark Ages to return.

Hopefully there will be time for virtual worlds, I will have an OpenSim running, and I think it's really is going to be a major innovation when they got the Web browser interface working. Why? Simply due to it's ability to pull in live data and then present it in 3D in a constantly updating display in a way that's easy to understand.

To my mind Reaction Grid are leading the way with the scientific applications and Heritage Key are showing how to do it in the educational field, and I wish them all the best with their endeavours.

I'm not deleting my account, there may be special occasions that I will want to go see things....and I have all these clothes....

The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings - Dave Weinbaum