Good advice for Motorcyclists…

Motorcycle Cruiser magazine’s online magazine has posted a whole host of tips on safe riding. It’s geared toward motorcyclists, but to be honest a lot of the advice applies for cagers too. I’m not a fledgling instructor for Team Oregon like my buddy, but I’m always happy to pass along anything I happen to run across in my travels on the Internet.

Keep the rubber side down!

EDIT: I found this while surfing Motorcycle Cruiser’s website… me want!

Why Second Life is stupid

Awhile back I signed up for a Second Life account. I played with it for a couple of days and quickly got bored with it (for reasons I’ll go into later). The other day in a fit of boredom I decided to try logging in again, but I couldn’t remember my Second Life name, so I figured I’d contact their technical support and get it sent to me.

Let’s just say it didn’t go well.

The biggest problem is that to do anything even remotely useful (like contact technical support) you have to log in with your avatar name and password, which is pretty useful if you can’t remember it. I couldn’t find any sort of “contact us” link or even a phone number to call. So I figured the next best thing for me to do would be to set up a new avatar and start from scratch.

I went through the sign in process, got my avatar name, and was informed that I’d be receiving a “confirmation email”. Three days later, I’m still waiting for that so called confirmation email, or even any sort of email from the fine folks at Second Life. Thus far I haven’t even gotten a “Sorry, you suck and aren’t cool enough for Second Life” email.

So I went back on and tried again to find someone to contact and ended up with the same result I had previously. A big fat nada.

I’m mostly OK with it because having played with it in the past I’m pretty confident it still sucks. This assessment comes for several reasons. For starters, once I logged in I found myself in some sort of weird starting area that was just chock full of tutorials on basic things like interacting with objects and other users. That was entertaining for about ten minutes, but once I got through the basics I couldn’t figure out how to get off the stupid starting Island. Its possible there was a tutorial or something, but I probably overlooked it because I was already bored with it.

One cool thing about Second Life is that you can fly. That was yet another two minutes of fun, but it got boring rather quickly as you can only fly into the side of a building so many times before it loses its magic. Additionally, movement is slow. The lag time between the time you press a button to move and the time your avatar actually moves on screen is on the order of seconds, which for modern online applications is an eternity.

Oh, and lets not forget the other people you get to interact with. I had one person decide I must be their best buddy because I said “hello” to them, and another got all pissy with me in some foriegn language for doing who knows what. I guess he didn’t like being accidentally run over with a Segway.

The character creation is rally the best part. Your avatar is highly customizable, and you can be anything from a hot supermodel, to a furry (if you’re into that sort of thing), to doing what I did and come up with some sort of deformed transvestite hooker with an enormous ass and boobs and a five o’clock shadow.

Ok, I admit… playing with the breast size was fun.

Beyond that to call Second Life a game is a misnomer. If it is a game, it’s the worlds most boring MMO. Unless you shell out real money to buy stuff in the game there isn’t much to do, I mean, it’s not like World of Warcraft where you’re presented with a quest as soon as you log in. You pretty much just walk around and try to talk to people. It’s effectively just a fancy chat room, with all the tomfoolery and asshatery that implies.

Overall, I’d say if you’ve been thinking about giving Second Life a try you should give it a miss instead. As if the slow response times and lack of interesting things to do aren’t enough of a reason, the shitty support more than makes up for it. I’ll grant that it might be better if you started getting into some of the paid features, but while I don’t mind paying a subscription for something like World of Warcraft where my monthly fee goes into things like server maintenance and development of new content, I absolutely refuse to spend real world money on virtual property. It just seems stupid to spend my hard earned cash on a couch that only exists inside some computer somewhere.

Yet there are people who do exactly that proving that PT Barnum was right and there really is a sucker born every minute.

Some thoughts…

I was listening to National Public Radio as I often do on my way in to work in the morning. Amid the usual stuff about the war in Iraq and the presidential primary elections there was a short interview with a woman by the name of Martha Conant who had survived the crash of United Airlines flight 232 back in 1989. It’s a compelling interview about what it means to survive great tragedy and how being a survivor has impacted Ms. Conant’s life. During the interview she says,

“That event was like being picked up by the scruff of the neck and shaken and God says, ‘This is your only life. Just be grateful that you’ve go(t) these days and these hours and these wonderful people in your life. Just be grateful for that.”

I find it interesting that often people have these kinds of catharses immediately following tragedies, and I think that’s great, but I have to wonder why we tend to wait until God sends us a wake up call? The truth is that at any moment any one of us can be taken. You can wake up one day and end up being hit by that bus you didn’t see careening at you just before you crossed the street. A loved one can go to the store for milk, only to be killed by a drunk driver along the way.

These are morbid thoughts I know, but the point is that no one knows when, where, or how they’re going to die so doesn’t it make sense to live each moment as if it were your last? Doesn’t it make sense to make sure that the people who mean the most to you in life know just how important they are? Why wait until something big happens to realize you don’t tell your significant other how much you love them often enough? Shouldn’t we be doing these things all along?

That said, I also don’t think we should dwell on what might happen. I don’t believe that we should worry about that bus, or the drunk driver, or any number of things we can’t control in life. Instead I think we should learn to relax, take a step back, and just make sure the people in our lives know how important they are. Then, should the unthinkable happen, there will be no doubt, no regrets that that person will never know just how much they mean to you.

Don’t wait for a plane crash.