If there is one thing I hope to take from this journey it is peace of mind, but I am only at the beginning of this chapter in my life, and I still have a number of pages left to write. So I continue forward, stiff upper lip and all that, tissue in hand, it is glorious and foreboding, bliss and agony,it is what I dare not do and what I know I must. To dream a dream of happiness and purity you must first face the nightmares of your past.

The only resl detraction I’ve found in the iPad so far is the inability to click and hold and thereby click and drag. This makes it difficult to interact wi th some web forms, for example anything with a scrollbar, mobile safari basically doesn’t let you fully interact with it. I’ve tried some alternative browsers, but unfortunately none of them can actually become the default browser, so everything still launches in mobile safari by default. Still mobile safari has it’s pluses, unlike 3rd party browsers it remembers what pages you had open when you exit and relaunch the program,allowinv you to continue where you left off.

Ultimately the iPad is a limited device, but I am finding it to be more than capable of replacing my netbook so far. I’ll continue to report on my findings in the weeks ahead.

So for the next few weeks I will be having a little experiment. I will be forgoeing the use of my desktop and even my netbook, to see how I survive with just the iPad As my primary computer. Now to be clear, I’ll still have my Palm Pre, but that goes without saying. So far using the iPad has been pretty fun, and the keyboard is just big enough that you can use it like a regular board. It helps if your a touch typist, though of course you can’t feel the keys, you just haveto know where they are. Stillit will be interesting to see if I go crazy over the course of a month or not, I’m sure I’ll remote connect to desktop once or twice, but that is so not cheating!

I apologize in advance for posting the aweful video above, my readers will have to risk dying in fits of laughter if they watch it…

It seems Linden Lab has seen fit to release a new voice morphing feature for Second Life, an oft requested feature since Second Life first got official voice support. It’s available at a rather low monthly cost of 750L per month, which is about $3 a month. As you can see in the video above, there are several presets you can choose from, there are in fact well over a dozen, but most of them are cheezy crap of course. I find it hysterical, and or course perfect that the first example they show you is to change your voice from male to female. It actually sounds better in Second Life itself, while in the commercial you can hear definite distortion giving away that it’s computer enhanced, in game the voice quality is low enough that you can’t really tell.

Let’s take a moment to “appreciate” that Second Life voice quality is worse that YouTube audio…

I’m sure many people will try out the voice morpher for the novelty of it, but I caution men trying to pull off being a woman from using it. Why? Listen to the video above again, there is a reason they had a staffer with a slightly more up pitch do the demo. If anyone with a more masculine voice such as myself were to give this a try I can tell you you’re not going to come out sounding like a girl, but like a little boy. I here I thought the ageplay days of Second Life were past us… sigh

Still it’s a fun service, as hysterical as it is, and I’m glad to see it being provided by Linden Lab. One issue I take with it though is that while the subscription fee is reasonable, you have to pay a subscription for each individual voice you wish to use. While you can try them all for free, this sort of detracts from using the system for casual fun with various avatar forms and instead puts it into the realm of serious business that only those who really want to pull off the voice morph to pretend to be something they aren’t would use. In other words, people playing other genders and furries.

Good night everyone! ;-p

Tomorrow marks another year for me in this world. Birthday are an interesting time, a time to reflect on the past and think about what one wishes for the future. They’ve always been a bit melancholy for me due to this, but I’m hoping that this year I’ll be able to look more towards the future than the past. One nice thing about the future is that it’s largely a blank slate. I’m certainly considering some drastic changes for my life this year, including a complete career path change, which means I’ll have to go back to school. But they say if it’s what you really want to do, you should just go for it right?

So here’s to another year, and another chance…

Another YouTube video from a series I’m fond of called Tales of Mere Existance by Levni (Lev) Yilmaz, they’re always funny, sometime sin a sad way, and often somehow nostalgic.

Here’s a new song, Another Day from one of my favorite YouTube bands Pomplamoose. They’re best known for their covers of Lady Gaga’s Telephone and Michael Jackson’s Beat It.

Today I have a new piece of artwork for you all, available in handy 1080p for those with wide-screen monitors. I call this piece, clarity of thought, it represents the mind as ideas rain down and are lost in the turmoils of one’s mind. It takes sharp thoughts to pierce through this cloud of disorder and that is what the large point in the foreground represents. Reach up skyward towards the source of inspiration but not quite reaching, relying instead on way an idea is able to fall far enough from the sky that it can be sharpened into a focused thought and utilized. I hope you enjoy this work, I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. You can see/download the full size version of the image by clicking on it above or on the link below.

Download Link.