Out of the water she comes. Terrific blow here on Friday night made me nervous at the thought of her weathering more storms alone in the harbor. Since we only need the boat for the occasional clamming trip, I can easily pop her in and out with the trailer. So, on go the waders, and down to the beach we go for one final harbor cruise before calling it a season.
The harbor has a penchant for freezing over and I have seen what the ice can do to those boats that stay in too long.
Sciatica sounds so 19th century, like dropsy, consumption, and shingles. A quack term for something that today would be referred to as neuromyathomalgia or “demeaning plebney.”
I have it in a bad way, have had it for the past three weeks, and it feels like a javelin has pierced my left buttock and emerged somewhere deep down on my leg. It makes sitting a total torture, bringing tears to my eyes. Muscle relaxants don’t help it. Advil is my new vitamin. Stretching, hot baths, lying flat on my back on the floor do nothing to help it.
The chiropractor, a diminutive woman, tried to “unlock” it on Friday by folding me into a pretzel and then leaping on me; but alas, she wasn’t hefty enough to produce that satisfying cosmic knuckle pop from spine that always makes paying the chiropractor fee so easy. Lying in bed won’t help it. So, it’s off to work I go this week, hunched over, my posture like a human S, standing in meetings, lying on the floor of my office with the door closed, avoiding sitting and therefore avoiding my keyboard unless I absolutely have to. Three weeks, and according to the online experts, maybe three weeks to go. This sucks. My productivity has gone away, I hate making people wince when I try to stand up, and I haven’t had a stitch of exercise since it first occurred while sculling three weeks ago today. So, with teeth gritted, I am trying to recover something productive other than trying to read the Sunday paper on my back with an ice back shoved down the back of my pants.
While pulling dead flower stalks out of the ground yesterday another Second Life thought came to me. Here it is:
Second Life is, unto itself, an island, and islands sink in the big ocean of the Internet.
Hit the wayback machine to 1993 — Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL are at their zeniths. None of them interoperate. To participate in a chat with a celebrity on CompuServe, one must subscribe to CompuServe. Their mail systems didn’t speak to each other. Their content didn’t flow. They were islands — the metaphor in those days was “walled gardens.”
Now, back to where we stand today. I use TCP/IP to get to Second Life. I don’t have to spend a dime to get an account or avatar. I only part with money when I want to upgrade to a premium account which gives me the right to buy “land” and become an economic operator. But, and this is the key “but” — I can’t host that “land” on my server. I can’t develop it and maintain it and profit from it on my terms, only Second Life’s.
Yes, Linden Labs is a very “open” company, building Second Life atop a lot of open architectures, and yes, Linden is trying to open up its APIs. This Linux Journal article is a good place to get the background.
“More than the blip of CopyBot, there are deep problems that need to be addressed in the context of creating an open source version of Second Life, notably as far as security is concerned. Most of them have to do with how open source clients would interact with Linden Lab’s servers, and how it might be possible to allow users to run their own Second Life servers – effectively creating separate virtual worlds based on the same protocols.”
When and if the 3D equivalent of HTML emerges (wasn’t it supposed to be VRML?) then I would be very interested in the development of a 3D presence for myself or my company. Until then, Second Life feels eerily similar to Prodigy, a 3D walled garden.