2 posts tagged “basecamp”
I'm sitting here warming my hands on a big mugga joe, grumbling about the -43 degree F. temperatures here in the Great White North. I'm simultaneously looking at my Second Life office through my first one, and the irony isn't lost on me that 700 meters below is a tropical clime with a pirate ship waiting in the cove, a stunning example of my partner's design savvy and the day's work before moving on to the next part of a major Valentine's Day campaign in Second Life. Beyond what makes SL a game to some there is a very real economy and burgeoning set of businesses for others, including me.
Last night I wrote a bit about the filing system I've been developing to try to get a handle on my unwieldy and ever hungry inventory monster. This morning I'm working with a different set of tools, still trying to grok how to make them play nicely within the context of my immersive environment.
The first thing I started with in setting up an office with my partner was a very simple bulletin board. I used Apotheus Silverman's open source board to simply drag notecards from my inventory to replace the millions of little scraps of paper that are scattered across my first life desk. Book meeting with Riversong Garden on new media keynote, test Kitto's LOracle trusted network tool again, get the info centre up at Ubuntu, grab Bijorewind 2 HUD by Yumi Murikami, upload the Sea Shanties for the campaign piano, get arse to Tommy Lee concert on time tonight ... you know, stuff like that. I'm never happy to simply leave a tool alone. I have to jack all of the best functionality from my real one into the virtual office, so of course I start to morph the guts and the code until I can post product pictures, have different kinds of paper on the notes, and even have the board read the contents of a notecard and store it straight to a webside log so I don't lose all this heady brainstorming in the next SIM crash and asshat server hiccough.
I stick up a big note that says "Strategies versus Tactics" so it's in my face each time I use the virtual computer in front of me to access our business plan, our milestones, our to-do lists and the writeboards where we plot our next move to take over the digital world ... er, expand our market share and define exciting new virtual niches ~grins~ .
That little computer in front of me looks simple enough, but it's become both my daily curse and the Holy Grail of my quest to mash up my tools so that I can no longer see the seams between web-based apps and my immersible online office environment. At the moment I take screen shots of key web tools we use on Basecamp and Google Docs (balance sheets, marketing campaigns, communications plan, etc.). In my inworld computer I've tucked a nasty little tangle of code that lets me display these screen shots and then click on them to pop open the related application in a web brower window. Not too damned elegant, and a real resource hog when it comes to having the SL client open at the same time as simultaneous browser windows while trying to multitask. When Linden Lab finally releases the functionality to embed web apps directly into our environment, I know my life with both get a whole lot easier, and a whole lot worse. Every new thing we jack in that's chocked full 'o more multimedia simply drags the client down (which is why Santa is going to need to bring me a beefy new computer every year for the foreseeable future).
That little pic of my desk up there shows a few other things I always have close at hand, not much different from my desk in first life: file folders containing notes and collateral from active projects; digital invoices; pictures from AD campaigns to remind me that making new products is essential to keep a business going, for woman cannot live by office systems alone; a journal linking here to Vox so I can pause to talk out loud when I'm thinking of something new I want to spout about; magazines (Time, Ode ...) and RSS feeds from outside, reminding me to stop and reflect on what's going on outside in meatspace to keep it real; a jukebox with a mix of my own compositions (I'm a composer in first life and making a reasonable living with this in my second); a steaming mugga Fair Trade coffee; and a USB missile launcher because it's just not an office without a little random jack-assery to keep it creative and light.
For everything seen on and around my desk, there are another 5 in production, simulataneously, and ever-growing. They are attempts to tame my expanding digital universe as I begin to feel swallowed whole. At heart, I'm a toolsmith, and anal, and never happier than I am when I am gathering the loose ends of things together into some false sense of order to make the matrix seem more real (... red pill? blue pill?).
There are two things that continue to both plague and excite me (and Kitto knows I'm going to relentlessly bug the crap out of him on both until he thinks they are as terminally cool to embed here as I do): jacking "My Brain" into SL and finding a way to use it collaboratively to cultivate a collborative business, artistic and community intelligence; and "Smell-o-vision". The latter, olfactory (scratch-and-sniff) computing, would be a griefer's delight, running amok through the streets and allies of Second Life leaving stink bombs behind, and yet I see a hundred different applications to make something like Elwood Ivey Jr.'s "Trisenx" the next killer mashup in SL (yes, I want my virtual perfume to knock you on your arse as you walk by, and I want to smell that piece of pizza sitting on my desk and feel it going to my digital thighs).
Alas, the final problem: how to shut the head off a night, when thinking infections run wild.
Off to conquer the next frontier ...
It's Sunday night ... alright, Monday morning being almost 1:30am ... and I'm padding around my office barefoot organizing files. I've spent the last few weeks immersing myself in the challenge (read: geeky sweet joy) of creating "Second Life" office systems that rival what I have in my first life. It's not an easy thing to do, as there is no real way of embedding proper text objects let alone web apps into the environment, so this requires a great deal of creativity (bitching, moaning, knashing of teeth).
My business partner and I have two rather successful inworld businesses. As content creators, we'd love nothing more to build all day long, conjuring up the next shiny object to run to. Cut to the rub: when the marketplace you're servicing grows from 20,000 people to more than 3,000,000 in about a year, there are a host of things that make "just creating" improbable. An ever-growing glut of customer service IMs consumes us, and the rather archaic (more bitching and moaning) communications tools that we have to manage this are a constant challenge. Staying on top of custom orders, event builds, 120 global holiday themes to design for, and an inventory of 50,000 objects and counting, there's just a raft of things that make staying on top of what started out as a "hobby" business unmanageable.
Hence, padding around the fileroom barefoot at 1:30 a.m.. I'm standing in a chamber filled with cardboard boxes containing the inventory we've created. This has become a necessary evil because so many of the system updates lately have resulted in what appears to be a permanent loss of our I.P. Kind of frustrating to lose two years worth of business production when you are given no reasonble way of backing up your own data locally. We depend on Linden Lab to archive our creations, and this seems tenuous at best these days. The other thing I'm working with in this chamber is a set of smart file folders. These allow me to archive my core script kits: the lifeblood of many products and office systems. I'm working on a way of having these folders read the contents as I fill them up, and store this data back to my own web server. A kludgy hack, but an attempt, none-the-less, to cobble together a means of backing up the things we depend on most in our core business.
The ability to use HTTP calls in the past months has become a lifesaver, allowing me to come up with various ways of skinning the customer service cat. While there are "groups" that our customers can sign up for, each person can only have a limited number of these, and they tend to be very prone to all manner of spamming and abuse by the customers themselves, making them a new kind of nightmare to manage. So, I'm creating a "smart vendor" to house our products, efforting a more friendly experience for our shoppers, automatic updates when things break (the hours lost in manually sending and walking people through this everytime a system update breaks something else ... oi!) and just basic communications to let people know when new things hit the deck, and to offer perks to loyal customers.
One of the things we're finding most helpful is the use of a tool called "Basecamp". It gives us the ability to manage our projects, set milestones, create to-do lists, and collaborate through "writeboards" when we're brainstorming around new products and services. We're still struggling with finding a more elegant way to embed this web-based system into SL, as is always the challenge. A bit of RSS helps, but in the end, until there's true web-embedding inworld, this remains a bit awkward, and certainly less than immersive.
The challenge of creating an office system in Second Life to parallel the functions of the ones I'm spoiled with in my "first life" don't stop at the archaic toolset at our disposal. I'm also plagued with the reality that in order to create all of the tools we need to manage our business efficiently and profitably, I really need to be able to wear about 20 different hats, when I can manage maybe only 5 of them well. My partner and I have been talking about the kiertsu model as an alternative for bridging some of the gaps in our personal skillsets (not to mention things like benefits for people who've turned their "hobbies" into fulltime businesses). We're brainstorming around the creation of professional communities and communities of artisans, cultivating a set of shared resources to help other content creators and designers navigate the kinds of challenges we ourselves face in creating a livelihood in the digital wild, wild west, with an equally unpredictable virtual -> US dollars economy.
Not sure why I felt compelled to share this here, except to organize it further in my head, where I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. While I'm still excited about the challenge of forging new trails, I'm also realizing that the adage "be careful what you wish for" applies here.
So, back to the file room, to store the scripts I wrote today for two new systems, along with prototypes for the products they support, all the while praying that the SL gods will be kind and put an end to the ungodly lag and the cranky asshat server PMS that's been plaguing us for weeks again.
And yes, for all of my grousing, I really do think it's the Second coming ...
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