Yes, I know I’m a geek. But my lure to Second Life is more about interest in marketing and social networking opportunities than the designer to have sleek, pixel-scripted hair (my avatar has freckles, poor muscle tone and pale skin). SL has been featured in CSI:NY and The Office on TV, and in a number of new sci-fi books, and is getting major pushes from the media. The company is making a fortune and I wanted to know why.
Start-up Commandments
Todd posted this on his Facebook group (Wannabe Entrepreneurs) so I thought I’d include it here. There’s some interesting points to this, a lot of what I’ve already learned the hard way.
CBCtv – Second Life Intraspective
Seadragon and PhotoSynth Demo
According to Microsoft (labs.live.com/photosynth), "the Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor. "
Photosynth Technology Preview
Download Browser Plug-in
Download Browser Plug-in
Filtered²
So we were playing a game of euchre on Friday at Alt.Coffee (in the E’Vill) and I mentioned an invention I was thinking about where I would affix the top portion of a filtered water pitcher into (or on) my automatic-drip coffee maker and create a sorta hybrid between the two. Hoboken’s water isn’t, shall we say, fantastic, so I figured this little genius idea of mine would make my mornings a modicum more pleasant. Considering the fact that I’m certainly not a morning person, I need all the help I can get. I took both appliances and sat them on my table and walked around them a few times scratching my chin and realized that it would be fairly easy to make a Frankenstein contraption out of the two. Read more
Microsoft Does it Again…
I knew about this happening a while back but pretended that if I just ignored it for a while, it would go away. Needless to say, it didn’t. With the release of Outlook 2007, Microsoft has decided to change the rules on html-formatted emails again and while it wouldn’t affect most people, it has become a thorn in the side of designers everywhere. The reason for this issue is that Microsoft decided to use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine where previous versions relied on Internet Explorer’s. And while I don’t think anyone could say that IE is a superior browser with a straight face, it was worlds better than Word’s.
With my company, ERA404, our quarterly newsletter fell to pieces as it relied quite heavily on <div> background images. Our original design, found in the ERA404 Newsletter archive (link below), is entirely illegible in Outlook 2007. The new version removed some of the limitations of the new rendering engine. Sadly, most people wouldn’t have noticed because Outlook 2007 isn’t heavily adopted yet. However, with the hope of staying ahead of the curve, we decided to redesign the newsletter for the small percent of readers who have made the unfortunate leap.
If you’re subscribed and are unable to read the newsletter, try the online version, which uses Internet Explorer‘s rendering engine or request this newsletter resent as Text-Only. Incidentally, here’s a handy widget for testing how the new rendering engine destroys code in Adobe Dreamweaver. Previous newsletters can be found at: http://www.era404.com/lists/.
Floyd X-Ray
Floyd recently was diagnosed with a motility disorder so I had to bring him in to the Animal Infirmary of Hoboken to have them take some X-rays. Since putting him on a prescription to reduce inflammation, the little guy has been chipper as a kitten. For your viewing pleasure, here are his x-rays:
(Click for Larger Images)