Well.. I'm addicted to Second Life - it's official

Yes, I've now gone onto stage 2 of my addiction to Second Life by buying an avatar with some of my hard earned cash - and yes, I know I've got nothing to show for my money other than a few admittedly nice looking pixels, but it just had to be done !

Here I am, looking very smug after putting on my new "suit" :

Yes, I went for the "furry suit" option when creating my SL self (called Gypsum Kidd by the way !) - more fun than the human option I reckon !! Check out the custom HUD (Heads Up Display) for the avatar on the bottom right of that photo - it controls things like whether I show my fangs, bare my claws, wag my tail and close or open my eyes - all very important in this weird world !

Here's a video of me sitting at a lovely executive's desk in @Home island (kind of like a large electronics store) - I'm still playing around with the video - for some reason it plays very fast and I haven't found a way to reduce the frame rate yet, but bear with me !

Second go at Second Life

Well, I had another go at getting Second Life working smoothly on my laptop over the weekend - updated my XP graphics card drivers, killed as many running processes as I could, and found it didn't make the slightest bit of difference - I still had a frame rate of, at the most, 2 frames per second !!
In the end, I gave up on XP, booted into Vista Ultimate, installed Second Life (with no issues), and started it up. And guess what ? It ran smoothly, and that's despite Vista not being officially supported by Second Life yet ! It seems that the Vista driver for my graphics card can handle Second Life better than the most up to date XP driver downloaded from Dell. All the more reason for me to use Vista as my primary OS (now if only Netgear could get its act together and get the Vista driver out for my SAN device, I could ditch XP altogether....).

So what of Second Life ? Well, I had a look at the various SL Universities, including the University of Hertfordshire which has some land and a building, but not a lot else by the look of it... I also joined the University of Derby's SL group (along with Mat and Mel), but couldn't find any of them online when I was there. I'm sure we'll meet up at some point though !
I was generally impressed with the whole idea though, and am looking forward to buying my first avatar (yes, yes, I know it's money for air really, but I just really want that avatar !!).

This week I have been mostly...

Comparing the possible replacements for the University's current student email system (NIMS) - see my post from the 18th May for more information.
The one I'd go with personally is Google Apps for Education mainly because it offers a lot more for your money (which is no money at all !). The winning features (of which there are too many to mention here) for me are the fact that there's no infrastructure requirement (Google uses APIs to perform user administration and directory synchronisation, as opposed to Microsoft's requirement for an Identity Integration Server and SQL database), there's a 20Mb attachment size limit as opposed to Microsoft's 10Mb, and with Google's solution you have the ability to do a phased user migration from the old to the new using an email gateway. Obviously though this is just my personal opinion, so I've emailed the Student Union President in order to get another opinion and to ask about the best way to conduct a survey of students' current email usage. I'll let you know when I get a reply !

I've also had a look at Second Life. It seems that quite a few Universities have "land" in Second Life, using it to provide distance learning, marketing for the Univerity, and as a testing ground for new ways of learning. Unfortunately I had a few problems with my laptop which meant that my first experience of Second Life was of extreme frustration with the "choppiness" and lag when trying to do anything at all. I'm going to give it another go this weekend though and see if I can move without waiting 2 minutes for the screen to update !

So, not a bad 2nd week in the new job - I'm pleased to say I'm still enjoying myself - here's hoping that it continues !!

Dreamscene

Tried out a Vista Ultimate extra last night called "Dreamscene". It plays (in a loop) any mpeg or wmv file as your background wallpaper. Nice idea in principle, but using it on my 3Ghz P4HT laptop with 1.2Gb of RAM, it was very resource hungry and the video noticably juddered when doing such things as opening an application or moving a file.
Besides, it really does nothing more than rip off Nvidia's NVDVD which was released in November 2002 (yes, 5 years ago !) and plays dvd video as the desktop wallpaper - and from what I recall, Nvidia's application was a lot less resource-hungry, running perfectly happily on an Athlon 2Ghz with 512Mb RAM !
Still, it is only in the preview stages, so hopefully Microsoft will iron out the stuff that hogs the system resources before going officially live with it - and hopefully, they will allow you to use .avi files as well as mpegs and wmvs since these are the most widely used types of video files these days - despite Microsoft pushing their wmv format !

First week at work - here's what happened

Well, the first week's over now and it's been a week of meeting lots of new faces and trying to remember lots of names to go with them.

I've also been given my first assignment, dealing with the replacement of the student email system and have been spending time comparing the various educational solutions from Google (Google Apps for education), Windows Live Hotmail (http://get.live.com/edu) and Yahoo (Yahoo Mail).

First impressions are that Google provides the best overall solution, offering 2.8Gb mailbox storage per user, POP in and out, and only minimal advertising on the page (with the option to turn it off !). Next week I'll be meeting the student president to get an initial idea of the types of things students use email for, along with an opportunity to ask questions about how to gather data from students about their current usage and how they'd like to see it improved (possibly using a web form ??).

I've also had a quick look at the HP Blade solution being considered and was impressed by their Virtual Connect innovation. Looks like it will reduce a lot of the hassle involved in adding new equipment onto fibre channels.

So all in all, it's been a busy week but I'm looking forward to getting stuck into various projects in the coming weeks.

I'm home !

Well, after 6 years living and working in London, I've now returned home to the East Midlands. I can't tell you how good it is to be back in the countryside away from the pollution and filth that's always present on the streets of our capital. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy most of my time in London, mainly because of the great people I worked with down there, but it's no place to live.

Now I'm working at the University of Derby as an IT Researcher and I really believe it's the job I was born to do (cheesy I know !!!). I actually get paid to research new technologies and design solutions for people - something I've been doing for people for years as a sideline to my day to day work. I'm just finishing my first week here and it already feels like the best move I've ever made !

Probably the best thing about moving out of the capital though is the fact that I no longer have to take stinking, slow public transport to work. Being able to get into your car, turn the music up and put the windows down (when it's not raining of course !) is something I've missed for so long. I'm driving my dad's car at the moment (a rather old and clunky P reg Peugeot 106 diesel), but the plan is to replace it in the next few months with a shiny (kind of) second hand car of my own. So in the space of a month, I've gone from spending two hours on buses each day to get to and from work, to 1 hour in a car each day - and that's door to door !