2007-08-12 Ting, 18:00 UTC
After the recent disk-crash the gobby standalone-server and the web-preview weren’t up yet. Sheep and Mattis decided to ting nevertheless. Sheep hosted the ting on his gobby-client.
participants
We tinged about: A section “what resulted from this ting” in the summary. Several summary-levels already during a ting (summary-queue). Back-to-top links survey. Second life: camps in it, how commercial are they and is second life? The »hearing the music of the spheres«-favorite state of working. Polish and German music. The principle of drawers. Wiki-nodes and walled garden. Scribble-wiki-hive. Calling in wiki-hives to collaborate, emotions.
ma: It’s a different ting situation this time, no web preview. Interes-ting. I could write about private things and cut the passages out later.
sh: we don’t really need much to get a ting going, it’s good to remember that the people are the most important ingredient.
ma: true. I liked last ting with SamRose a l o t! I did not do the summary of it yet. It should have a “what resulted from this ting” section with a link to your “sheet music to midi program” on it (http://oink.sheep.art.pl/Music_Wiki). Different levels of summaries are important. Like in the sl-camp-wiki: A “larger summary” for the local crowd, sl-camp-fr Paris, a page or two, including a participants list (the sl-camp-Paris feed) and an ultra short one for the events-feed.
sh: hopefully the file is still somewhere in the backup copy of that crashed server.
ma: I’d only seen that you started to write a summary during that ting, didn’t read it. This second level summarizing could also be done already during the ting.
sh: well, that’s one of the advantages of a collaborative editor. You can even put things you want to talk about in there, so it turns into a sort of a queue, like in that ting with Lion.
Mattis, I’m doing a little survey out of curiosity, tell me, you have seen many of those “back to top” links on various pages, right? Have you ever actually used any?
ma: seen some, the mouse-wheel takes me up. For no-wheel-mouse users useful maybe (I heard there are five of them left). If the page is too long and you realize you’d get a warm finger til arriving on top you angrily grab the scroll bar and pull up to the top. It’s easier to hit than back to top (which is anyhow not visible anymore as you already scrolled).
sh: Thanks. Gotta ask someone without a scrolwheel 
ma: wonder if there are some. Even touchpads have a scrol-functions aside mostly now (hates touchpads).
ma: I’ve been looking on sl-camp activities. I might be in the wrong surrounding, I admit. It’s all about this sponsoring and a lot about attaching commercials (not on crao beach, but in the German Corecon convention center). It’s a pretty different thing to meet physically: you need a room, wifi, a beamer, food, drinks, stuff than to only meet virtually in second life. I divided into camps with and without an accompanying real life event. This seem to be two pretty different cups of tea to me.
sh: yup, one has to be careful to not turn it into an advertisement fest like so many conferences.
ma: On the re:publica this was pretty present too. Wikimania two years ago too, though mostly for Wikimedia Foundation. They owned too many wikimedia plastic banners and attached them all over.
sh: Seems like all the events with wikimedia involved are pretty “commercial”.
ma: It feels like a flood of VoIP is coming up, out of a sudden they all support it: SecondLife, pb-wiki, coccinella, bla. As if we’re »supposed« to talk (learns to use «»»« now, just recently discovered). I’d like to meet language learners in sl, but didn’t up to now - I’m not spending that much time in it anyhow. Also jamming in second life would be a beginning. I disturbed some talking with honking my harp in between already. I don’t want to get too deep in it, an open source beginning (the meadow to meet on) would be highly appreciated actually. Well, you’d be alone in it - but I’m mostly alone on second life even. It’s a pitty you’re blocked.
sh: It doesn’t matter, they changed my account to a paid one and I canceled it.
ma: can’t you just reappear with a new one? The crao beach is cosy, really. You should take a look. There is skydiving even but no parachutes. One little thing for fun and sl-physical entertainment is ok, I think.
sh: Well, I’m also still blocked. And the IPs on the uni are blocked too – I begin to suspect they might have blocked most of Poland or I’m doing something terribly wrong. I did some skydiving in SL, so-so.
ma: hmm, or something terrible.
, hihi. Quite a task for a little company like Linden to handle the free intelligence of the planet.
sh: There was a time when whole China was blocked from Meatball…
/ma: remembers. Felt very unpleasant.
sh: I don’t think I want to deal with Linden anymore.
ma: I repressed the memories of the commercial sukkerz asking me for my CC-number before I even had been able to try it out. Bad beginnings carry forth and are quasi impossible to eliminate later. That applies to relations with women and to membership in bands at least.
sh: That’s not a problem, I don’t even have any access to any credit cards
There is some major fuss about money frauds in SL now. http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/07/25/world-stock-exchange-hit-by-l32-million-theft/
ma: gaah. People creating means of such potential and spoiling the thing with small-mindedness. Pueeh.
sh: Note how with money, voice, land property, etc. the Second Life becomes more like the first one, or even more constrained, as you can’t really override the rules that are programmed. In a game, you could play a thief – with appearance of money and working economics, playing thief is not a game anymore. Without voice you could play any avatar. With it, you must match it to your voice. Wonder when they will introduce webcams to map your face expression to avatars.
ma: they might do such, and, in the right environment with the right people it would be great, k, but not under these circumstances. Open, we have to start that, I say. Sam mentioned his friend’s effort on a virtual world since the mid nineties. I remember having seen and tried it when I was looking for alternatives a year ago or so. It bugged me a lot that I “could not” enter second life. I mean lion said it’s like not looking at the garage they put the first mac together in.
sh: but the lack of voice, money, property, face expressions, etc. are the advantages of virtual worlds! They stop being virtual if you connect them too tightly!
ma: not true. I wanna communicate with this Pakistanian guy without having to spend 10 hours in a plane. The magnetism of gathering crowds, that’s what works in sl. Dunno why, you see: There are people => that’s where I go. That’s why.
sh: SL was more than just communication, and most virtual worlds are. I was attracted by that aspect mostly, I’m not really that attracted to meeting random people. Dunno why. I’m claustrophobic in crowds, too many emotions around.
ma: maybe. We had a writer’s circle back in the 90ies in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Once a week we met in a pub and read stuff and “criticized” each other. Not really, often it was ripping each other to shreds. We had people dropping in completely on LSD - this guy told one of the best stories out of the blue. It was not pleasant, often. A little sometimes. But it helped my writing enormously. When you are really convinced of a text and then you read it in front of the hyenas you know where it is weak and you know what to improve. That’s almost impossible without such.
sh: I think it’s more the phenomenon that Lion was writing about with that house of his – just meeting other creative people and spending time with them gives you a lot of ideas and motivation.
ma: Yes, I saw that. It’s a bit what ting is about too. Just without face-expression and such super fluid stuff. 
sh: I have so many projects on hold, motivation is the worst problem. Once in a while I find my old muse and squeeze a day or two of work from her, but she’s a sneaky bitch – most of the time I can’t get myself into the state of mind I love so much, when there is only the work you do and nothing else, you don’t have to eat, sleep, you don’t feel tired, you understand everything clearly and know exactly what to do, and you get a lot of fun from doing it. Used to happen often, now it’s rare.
ma: oldmuse, lol. If it would be called moinmuse I might be on moin.
Yesterday tuning the sl-camp-wiki, feeds for different local camps, transcluding day-page-sets into other day-page sets, I thought, man how come you are so tired? I thought it’s nine thirty but it was long after midnight already. That STATE, YES!
sh: I miss it. The music of the spheres. Can’t hear it anymore. I feel envious when I see others hear it.
ma: It’s an »ether hard to make sing«, true. For me it comes periodically with growing distances between occurrences. Last decent freak out was my novel.
sh: They are also shorter and shorter, one doesn’t actually finish anything.
ma: Mine get longer. The waiting for the next one in between is the real pain. It stopped waiting when discovering wiki, 2003-08-02. The novel lasted for six years. So I’m confident.
sh: I feel like there is nothing else left for me to do
I got my master degree almost a year ago but I still didn’t go to get the diploma, for example – there is no reason to bother. There is that polish song by Grzegorz Turnau:
Whether you say a round sentence Or write a wise book You will always have in your head The same emptiness and silence A word is a cold gust Of a sudden wind in the sky It can maybe refresh you But will never help you get anywhere You can be tricked by the crowd on the street, Vodka drunk in the park or a sunset, But remember that in reality there is nothing happening And nothing will happen until the end. But remember that in reality there is nothing happening And nothing will happen until the end.
Trust only in the twisting of lips, Uncomprehensible babbling, Gestures stopped halfway in void, Imperfect.
http://kajot.wrzuta.pl/audio/9waIclugf6/grzegorz_turnau_-_naprawde_nie_dzieje_sie_nic
ma: listening. Cutting sax, yeah!
Lyric translating sessions on gobby. Pick a song, the url with the lyrics and then go in six languages and see if the Brazilians are faster.
sh: Might be fun. Turnau’s songs are usually very moody and make me cry 7 times out of 10.
ma: I like her voice, the mix is strange though. Doesn’t really sound together, like recorded one by one and put together then. Mix is a high art. You’ve seen the band life?
sh: It’s him >_< No, but I’ve seen several transmissions from live concerts: http://youtube.com/watch?v=K5xX6wmQTIQ Here is some really dirty recording: http://youtube.com/watch?v=IRnr4bNl8Qk Mattis, you have any favorite german singers?
ma ui, I’m out of music, really. It’s too intense, hardly ever listen to any.
Recently, when I dropped on my story »The black man«, I tore the Schumann Cello concerto. Such happens every six months maybe. The bands I played in sang in English, always. You did so in my time, we lost the war, you know? In the 80ies it was Nina Hagen and in Berlin Max Goldt (a writer now) who dared back to sing in German, without it being unbearably embarrassing. Die fantastischen Vier - Stuttgart - made great stuff in German in the 90ies. I dropped out then. Mutante made me listen to Schmollmund. I liked it. My Audio is boken on the laptop, can’t check.
sh: I listen to music almost all the time, the same songs over and over again, when the kid next doors has worse nights, I even sleep with headphones… Nevermind.
ma: my audio is broken in my head too, it seems. Nevermind.
sh: Schubfachprinzip, funny name 
ma: Funny thing too. The principle of drawers.
sh: The pigeonhole principle, also known as Dirichlet’s box (or drawer) principle, states that, given two natural numbers n and m with n > m, if n items are put into m pigeonholes, then at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one item.
Hilbert’s Grand Hotel can accommodate more guests without doubling up on rooms even when it is already full. Just move the person occupying room 1 to room 2, occupying room 2 to room 4, occupying room 3 to room 6, and so on, and all the odd-numbered rooms will be free for the new guests.
ma: Is there a fork evenmuse already?
sh: nope, there was one fork of oddmuse I think, with a large set of patches Alex didn’t have time to review and merge – so they forked, but nobody heard from them since then. In a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will have the same birthday. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, although it cannot be exactly 100% unless there are at least 366 people.
ma: more than 23 people - ma gets dizzy. Maths teach-tings might be a good idea too. I’d look in, there’s some magic in math’s, good teachers know to transport it.
sh: My math got very rusty. I remember the basics and the general ideas, but I’m lost in details. I should probably pick it up one day, and maybe even start a PhD?. It gets harder every day.
ma: made the 27th center-wiki on another wiki-hive today. center-scribble-wiki, a Mediawiki hive, a nice, open concept. Sending a mail approval and you got it, no questions. I have no time to make home pages for all the wikis, wiki-nodes on all of them and call them in on one center and then the 27 centers in to talk to each other. Maybe later, I’ll see. The feeling of concurrence between hives, between engines is disgusting. I mean it’s wiki. People don’t like wiki-nodes “as readers might wander off immediately”, I read that in discussion of important wiki makers. How many come in wandering off from other wiki-nodes then, eh? People are so dumb sometimes!
sh: Shouldn’t these pages be managed by the actual wikizens of the particular wikis? That’s just silly, a wiki with only internal links and no incoming or outgoing links is a WalledGarden?, in C2 these were hunted down and killed mercilessly. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WalledGarden
I have some hopes about the “gift economy” (the more you give away the more you have), if the marketing blockheads pick it up, it might be not so bad. Of course, they still won’t understand it, but at least they will follow the buzz.
ma: That’s the way to get them.
sh: It still feels bad to use this trick. They did this with “web 2.0” – now every bisenessman and marketing droing start to drool at the sight of “dynamic content” and “pretty gradients”, but at least the net effect is that the pages follow the standards more and are easier to use. Of course, they still don’t get it that this was the actual goal, not a side effect.
ma: tomorrow I’ll put the center-scribble-wiki on 26 wiki-nodes (with partly horribly different syntax) and the 26 on [center-scribble-wiki: wiki-node]. Maybe the day over tomorrow I should mail the admins of all 27 (k, odd, kabo, obm, diki, eArt need no mail).
sh: what would you mail them about?
ma: That they likely have some wikis in their hive that something similar exists on other hives too and that it’s silly that these folks likely do not know about the others and that it would be kinda wiki to connect them. That stuff. Better not seem too clever in the beginning. Anyhow the “edit today’s talk button” is tabu, so what?
sh: such a letter should be well thought out I guess 
ma: I’ll let more days pass, you are right. Not mail, rather make a page on all the center-wikis. Propose a hive-ting to them, maybe in sl, voice, to meet a first time. I mean if only two of the 27 come it’s a beginning already.
sh: That’d require them to take some action, people don’t like when someone comes and tells them to get up, even if they were considering getting up since an hour already.
ma: lol, no, true. Except they’re bright and the one coming is right.
They want advantages. Some might see them.
sh: Intelligence doesn’t stop emotions from working. There was an article about social networking and linking, you might like it, let me find it… Can’t find it now 
ma: Emotions come in, true. The limbic system rules mercilessly and shoots out emotions impossible to ignore. But these calm down. It’s a process.
sh: Some fun movies instead, watch them when you have sound (you do have a box with working sound, right?) http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/07/flash-animated-philosophy-from-south.html
ma: nice ones. Interesting effect when you start a new while the pentatonic Chinese music still plays and mixes with the new intoducing one.
sh: hehe, well thanks for the ting, a pleasure as usual, good night
ma: buona notte, sheep.