Torley provides helpful insight into some very useful applications from time to time. In fact, her recent posting sent me on a quest for useful Mac utilities. Here's what I've found. They're not necessarily Second Life-centric, mind you, but cool nonetheless.

• For blog postings I've found ecto to be quite useful. Still, at least for accessing Wordpress sites, it's not perfect, but I've found ecto to work much better than a few others that I've tried out.
• I've been working on a fairly large project recently. I'll make more mention of that in the coming days, I'm sure, as it definitely *is* Second Life-centric. But I've also become curious as to how many hours I've been spending on it. Enter The Daily Grind. It's a real simple OS X widget that you can use to track time spent on various tasks. There's no magic to it, but it's cool.
• Another really cool widget I've found is Screenshot Plus. For those not in the know, Apple gives you a real easy way to capture your current screen as well as a portion of the screen (it throws you into a mode where you can drag a box around the area of the screen you wish to capture, and stores that portion to disk). Well Screenshot Plus takes that simple keystroke (ok, I admit, I never remember which key it is) to a whole new and useful level. Now, you simply click the widget to snap a photo, but you can specify whether you want to snap the whole screen, one window (and it will highlight the windows as you mouse over them to indicate which ones will be snapped), a timed full-screen snap (if you need to perform some action, like bring up a menu to be captured) that will wait a few seconds before taking the picture, and once again, an option to drag a box around the portion of the screen you want to capture. But wait, there's more! After snapping the picture, it returns to your widget where you will see a preview of your screen-cap. A preview that you can zoom in and out of to make sure all is dandy before saving it to disk. . Ginsu steak knives not included.
• Finally we have one that comes directly from Torley's post. Scrapbook is definitely the schiznat. How did I live without this one. And it's a Firefox extension, meaning it works across platforms. Thanks, Torley!

There you go. For you Apple folks, a few things which you may find useful.

Why is it I come up with my best ideas during the day when I'm at work?  I can see fairly clearly in my head what it is I want to build, but by the time I make it home all will be lost.  And I'm not such a good graphic artist that I can take the idea in my head and draw it out.  I need the SL world to make it be.

 

I've dropped my Slightly More Advanced Scripting class that was held Friday nights. I enjoyed teaching it, but I never felt like I got the class right. I rushed into teaching it due to some miscommunications after the last teacher had left, but I'd expected to rework the class as time progressed. Unfortunately, I've skipped teaching due to the Birthday event many weeks, and now I've been sick. I'm just not up to the task and have been dreading the next class, so I finally made the decision to drop it. Most likely I'll pick it up again before too long, but having it looming over my head was too much for me.

Along similar lines, I'm thinking of dropping the Thursday Building Shelter game. It's been a fun run, but lately attendance has been poor. I've found myself not as excited about hosting it, and feeling like I've done a poor job when I have hosted. Attendance I can take the blame for. That game has been off and on so much lately that nobody knows whether it's going to be played or not. It'll take more consistency from me to get attendance to better numbers. But I'm wondering if I should really continue with it or move on.

Anyone?

Torley posted a funny picture of a griefer shooting someone in front of a "weapons-free zone" sign. This was followed by a couple of comments about people not reading the signs. Well we know it's not about the reading of the signs, but more about the 'honking off' of others, as it was put. This is why I'm bothered a bit when people start yelling on the various IM channels that a griefer is around. It serves to rile people up, which was the point of the griefing in the first place.

What's of more concern to me is the sign at NCI that says who the officers are and also who is currently online. The problem is, members of NCI don't read *that* sign and don't simply contact someone that is available instead of going the channel route. Griefers I don't expect to read, but the ones trying to help I do.

Of course, the Mentor channel is filled periodically with someone saying 'griefer at so-and-so, please send help' followed by four or five of us saying 'contact Live Help'. I *do* expect more knowledge from the SL volunteer corps. Honestly, if you are there to help, you should have some basic knowledge. Now I'll admit this is a failing of LL which has yet to be addressed in an official capactiy (and a sore spot for me), so I don't necessarily blame the mentors themselves. But after seeing a weeks worth of the same thing, you'd think folks would catch on that Live Help is the way to go. SL Mentors are there to help, but not to solve griefing problems.

Nothing against the folks who are really trying to do the right thing by lending a hand. It's wonderful that they exist and are ready to step up when things go badly. I just think that often times they play into the desires of the griefer by acting rash or panicky rather than thinking things through and going through the proper channels. It would also help if there were more defined proper channels, of course. But as I said, I don't expect a griefer to read a sign, but I do expect it from a playing-nice member.

Then again, I've been sick for two straight weeks and I'm feeling cranky.

Ok you faithful readers you. It's time for you to speak up becaue I need your help.

How in the world do I close my eyes on command? Come on. Is that really so hard? I manage to have my eyes closed in about half of my pictures, but never on purplose.