Second Life Viewer 2.0

This morning I decided to check out the new Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta with my new account, Entrepreneur Mistwood. Here is what I experienced with it this far.

If the goal of the new 2.0 SL viewer was to make the SL experience easier to navigate then I have to say that it has failed terribly in that goal. Everything that the usual viewer does that is so familiar to long time users of Second Life has been mixed around into an almost completely alien structure to accommodate the "browser-like" look and feel of the new version.

Among my complaints with this new viewer so far include the following:
* No FLY button
* No MUSIC CONTROLS (the only way I've found to turn off music is to disable the streaming music or mute all sound entirely)
* MAPS are difficult to find (Only accessible through the "World" drop-down menu at the top of the interface, as far as I can see.)
* SEARCH has been re-named back to FIND (a real throw-back there! circa 2005)

Admittedly some of these complaints are due to the unfamiliarity of the new interface and I may simply not be seeing the complete functionality of this viewer yet. I will say however, that it will definitely take some getting used to.

Webpage Creation?

Words can barely convey the level of frustration I'm experiencing after spending more than four hours trying to set up a good webpage. It seems like hand coding HTML has become a forbidden craft. I have tried going through Google Sites and Comcast's personal webpage services.

On the Google site, I accidentally selected the wrong site layout template and couldn't find how to change it. Since the template I selected was for non-profit fund-raising type of site, it was not at all a good fit for what I was trying to do. They might have had an option to edit HTML there, I'm not sure. Every edit I attempted would pretty much only let me at the body of the page.

In Comcast's webpages, it would not let me use any hand written html in any shape form or fashion that I could discover. I was able to upload a hand coded page, but it would not allow me to link to it and it changed my file name to something long, complex, and difficult to remember.

I miss Geocities so much! Even Tripod had an option to create your own HTML. I wonder if that's still available or if they've baby-fied their webpage creation tools also. Where can I hire a 5 year old to make a webpage for me? Because I sure can't seem to figure out how this new stuff is supposed to work based on my decade of experience and acing two classes on webpage creation and design.

Heck, I'm probably just having a bad day. Maybe it will all look brighter tomarrow.

Virgin Mobile's Kyocera X-tc

I just got this phone today. I had a lot of trouble getting it going. The simple instruction of "Turn the phone on" had me completely baffled due to the power on/off symbol having been modified to no longer include the formerly familiar circle with a vertical line in the center to simply being a red telephone-ish icon.

So anyway, I was trying to get started using the User Guide that came with the phone. I installed the battery without any problem and charged it up enough for the phone to (at least in theory) be able to turn on.

The next section in the Getting Started section of the User Guide said to Install the Memory Card.

Memory Card?

I didn't remember seeing a memory card in the packaging. I looked back through it again checking the fronts and backs of all included plastic and paper packaging. I thought I had read the packaging, but obviously not well enough. After double checking both the Virgin Mobile USA website and the packaging of the phone I determined that there had not been any kind of memory card included. The Getting Started section didn't tell me that this is an add on that must be purchased separately nor that I would also need an adapter for it to download mp3's from my computer to the X-tc which is also an mp3 player. Upon further investigation I found that the memory card, more properly called a micro memory card (MMC) or MicroSD, and the adapter could be purchased for a little bit under $30(usd). Since I didn't know this was something I'd need if I wanted to use the mp3 player fuction of the X-tc when I bought it, I didn't look around in the store for it. Therefore I don't know how the pricing compares off-the-shelf as opposed to online ordering. It turns out though, that the phone works just fine as a phone without the MicroSD.

I thought this would be a helpful topic to blog about since none of the top sites that came up on Google search seemed to fully answer my question about the memory card.

After an hour of research to track down what this memory card was, what it was for, and if I needed it for my phone to work, I finally managed to get the phone powered up with a little help from a buddy. The camera works well and seems to take clear shots even in dim light, so I'm looking forward to resuming my amateur cell-phone photography hobby.