Yeeeey! We have reached a dazzling 5000 comments - that does include track- and pingbacks, but not the 30.000 spam comments Askimet caught for me - here at vintfalken.com. Yes, I know, vintfalken.com is not a group blog, so why am I saying ‘we’? Well, none of those ‘conversations’ on my blog posts could have taken place without YOUR input, so thank you so very much! ;) Yes of course, some might say I just like to listen to myself speak, but I must point out that is not the case, and I utterly love people commenting here, sharing their thoughts and opinions, tips, solutions, complaints, dreams, hopes, good and bad jokes, … .

So as a big ‘thank you’ I’ve asked some kick ass Second Life creators, if they were willing to hand out some merchandise to the persons who made comment 5000 - 5005. As both Stephen Venkman and Kailie Quinn could not keep their mouths shut at the time I reached 5k - hey, I’m not complaining, please continue commenting here! ;) - and I got more than 5 things to give away, I’m just going to give something to everybody featured in the top 5000 to 5010, minus myself.

This means that:

Stephen Venkman - known for his Second Life photography - gets Miss Juliet Ceres’ beautifully created ‘Fitz’ avatar. Fitz was my favourite avatar to run around in during the last week. I just could not stop looking at myself walking when wearing Fitz and I would just *smile*. I’m sure Mr. Venkman will look dazzling as a mechanical steam-powered kitty! *purrrrsss* Read more on the Fitz avatar on the NPIRL blog. If you want one of your own, Miss Ceres has more of them available in-world.

Kailie Quinn - aka Katarina Malthus - gets Miss Ceres’ skilfully sculpted Wastelands Armour, an all time favourite of me. Perfect for wearing when you are in an hostile environment, or just want to look ‘though’. Maybe she can use it to collar Mister Venkman in ‘Fitz mode’ and take him for a walk? ;) As said before, Miss Juliet’s stuff can be found in-world at Virago.

Wordfromthe Wise - who participated in the ‘10000L$ bounty for best trademark parody’ contest - will receive CodeBastard Redgrave’s marvellous Machinimacam, which enables you to make better, more interesting machinima. You don’t have to limit yourself to filming your own avatar walking anymore! ;) I wonder if his - or her - next entry for a contest will be a machinima now?

Kanomi Pikajuna - ‘Kanomi is important. Kanomi is special. Kanomi matters. She is the friend to all. Everybody likes her! Everybody likes the nice girl who is the friend to all. She is nice and important and she is special and important and the nice special important friend to all! Kanomi is important! Kanomi matters!‘ - receives not one, but three different prizes, all created by virtual fashion designer Sofia London. Soon Kanomi will be the proud owner of a lurveBite after glow dress, a guy beater tank top and the black ink dress.

Notorious clothing collector Veyron Supercharge - well, as long as the clothing does not reveal to much, that is - has won famous designer Rebel Hope’s awesome Cleopatra outfit: ‘Cleopatra is a 23 piece costume including bodice, pants, skirt wrap, two options of snake arm bands, prim shoes with jewels w/base, jeweled ankle bands, scarab jeweled bracelets, ankh and jeweled staffs (one with a crossed arm pose), lighting system to cast a beautiful light on her upper body, crown of jewels with sculpted prims, sculpted jewelled necklace, Cleopatra cross arm pose separately also, and the box is Cleopatra’s Needle and is included in the package.‘ The throne she will have to buy herself, though. Or… does anybody feel like being her Marcus Antonius? ;)

Last but not least, Mister Tao Takashi will receive a an exclusive beta version of ‘The Ordinal Wilks&Co Vertical Clock-Loading Pistol’, created and donated by steampunk creator Miss Ordinal Malaprop. Rumours go that the pistol refusing services, or misbehaving occasionally is intentional. As this is an exclusive beta, I do not own one of myself, nor could I supply a photograph. So I’m very curious at seeing the ‘Ordinal Wilks&Co Vertical Clock-Loading Pistol’ depicted and tested. Mr Takashi, fire away! ;)

(As all winners were unaware they were entering a contest, they will be notified by email and asked if they want to receive the gift before they are being shipped.)

Tags: contest, vintfalken.com
Categories: Contests, Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com
8 Comments »

For those that did not put 1 (photography proof) and 2 (a week at Rezzable HQ, London) together yet, and because Sered Woollahra wanted to hear more: I joined Rezzable ranks. For those that do not know Rezzable yet - although that’s hard to believe - they are responsible for amongst others: Greenies, Carnival of Doom, Surfline, Crimson Shadow, Toxic, Stratos, Black Swan, The Cannery, King’s Rezzable, … sims. The best overview of what nifty, new things they are up to you get by reading - and subscribing to - Rezzable’s newsletter.

Ok, so now that we’ve established that Rezzable is creating, building and organising a lot of quality stuff, what will I be doing? As sims constantly change - nothing is static in a virtual world, the Dino Destroy as a recent example of that - I will have some main things to focus on, and some constantly revolving ones. But there are:

1. Rezzable.net/rezzable - Know of someone who did not join SL yet and you want him or her to join up? He or she is curious what virtual worlds is all about, but thought the whole avatar thing to complicated? We’re glad to help out!
2. Greenies - Cutest extraterrestrials in the whole metaverse. All who thought they were limited to just being cute to look at, will soon be proven wrong. Finally, Greenies are mine! All mine, I say! I am allowed to help think and do with Greenie stuff. They’ll stay just as cute, but will become way more engaging. I bet my ears and tail over this.
3. Rezzable Art - SLart at the Cannery and Miss Melodious upcoming show. Helping out a tiny little bit. Does anybody happen to have fig - Ficus carica that is - leaves in their inventory?
4. Second Life for Relay For Life Fashion Show - Rezzable donated 4 sims and of course also takes part as a designer team. According to Vint, very interesting: virtual consuming that actually has a real and touchable First Life good cause. Or how virtual worlds, actually can make a difference. We’re not all about pr0n and ‘look how dirty those virtual minds are’ newspaper articles.
5. Tunnel of Light - Mister Spiral Walcher’s amazing WindLight build. For ages, tweaking the client menu to get some kind of glow effect, it is now officially ours. It became high time that someone showed the possibilities of WindLight glow to all. Besides, this renders the use of PS filter diffuse glow totally unnecessary. Yeey! Generaly tiny bit helping out. To go and visit there, IM me, and I’ll be your date for the ride. ;)
6. … - Yet more and much more to come.

Curiosity satisfied?

Ok then, let’s hop to the next subject: virtual ‘independence’ of Vint and vintfalken.com. That is a hard one, even for me. I always blogged - and will continue to blog - about things I was either busy with doing my self, or thought noteworthy, interesting, … for all of SL residents, or virtual future or just for my readers. ;) Of course, I’ll continue to do so. But now a lot of stuff I will be doing, will be Rezzable-related things. For reasons of being clear, things tagged ‘Rezzable’ and put in the ‘Rezzable’ category will have to do with Rezzable, the others will not. I see some logic in that. ;)

An example of this: If I blog about an upcoming Rezzable event I’ll be partaking in, I’ll tag it ‘Rezzable‘. If I blog about Veyron Supercharge’s latest affair, I’ll tag it ‘Veyron‘ and not ‘Rezzable‘. If I write that I don’t like Age Verification and am not planning to take part in it because it will solve nothing and I tag it ‘age verification’ and ‘rant‘ but not ‘Rezzable‘, then that is clearly my - Vint’s - opinion and not Rezzable’s. This can’t be that hard to ‘capiche’. ;)

Hoping this clears things out,
yours truelly,
who is very happy with the fact that she joined Rezzable ranks,

Vint Falken

PS. RaR is not going to like this, but I already found a great excuse for being late for work that is neko-worthy: ‘Help! On my way to work, I fell in the bottle that says ‘Milk’, and now I can’t get out.‘

Really, they should make those builds kitty-proof. ;)

Tags: greenies, real life, rezzable, vint falken, vintfalken.com
Categories: Rezzable, Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com
17 Comments »

I was going to code 2008’s New Year wishes. Really! I had it all written out. The code was to take all great things from 2007 and to that, was to add some more positive variables. Then all bugs & crappy stuff would be filtered out, et voila: 2008! But such a great coder as I am, of course, no way I could get the LSL to validate.

At that point I decided to stick to what do am good at: the new year’s wishes are thus wrapped in a bit of photoshop. ;)

To all: have a great, kick-ass, w00t! 2008 filled with *purrrs* and happiness!

Tags: vint falken
Categories: Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com
6 Comments »

I was already wondering when Sweet Second Life would not only - attempt at - indexing the SL blogosphere, but also be a topic for that blogosphere. Not that I was awaiting it. When they first launched and started spamming blog comments, I asked for a bit more info. Although I did send it to the email address they supplied, I never got an answer: i just figured they did not want people to write about them.

Now they finally get noticed, it’s not in a way that calls out for a lot of applause: Crap Mariner is wondering if Sweet Second Life is full of Crap. Well, it isn’t. Although he did submit his blog, and that is exactly why it _is_ full of crap. Yes, this kinda confuses me too. Also Tiessa Montgolfier, having submitted both mine and Veyron’s blog - which never showed up - finds they have a strange way of ranking blogs or a lousy crawler.

Yet, at the Social Rank headquarters, they have their answer ready:

Hi there. Thanks for your feedback. I have added both of the blogs that you mentioned into Sweet Second Life so you will start to see them being added over the next week or so.

In terms of the ranking, it is based on links and comments. So, in that sense it is more advanced than either Google or Technorati because we really look at who is talking about which blogs and we do that over time so we can have accurate rankings.

However, at times we may miss a blog so thanks for suggesting that we add these into our index.

Geeh. Lady or Sir, I wrote you an email to ask for info, and you never replied. Back at that time, when I got a beta or alpha or zero or whatever account, I also submitted multiple SL blogs, where amongst mine. Other blogs included were for instance Zoe Connolly’s, October Hush’s, Kisa Naumova’s, Dolmere Talamasca’s, Codebastard Redgrave’s etc. All rather popular and active blogs. They never showed up in your rankings. A few months ago, I submitted mine again. It still did not show up. You say you index - I still doubt you index at all - based on the amount of comments and incoming links? I must say, that the last quarter, I had a lot of both. So someone needs to work on their algorithm a bit? I agree with Dandellion, don’t boast about being more original than technorati, or google. At least, they index quite thoroughly. And they drop by if you ask them to!

One thing learned: the link-love theory is bullshit. Best way to be blogged about: not linking to people! Although I still assume, you do not want people to write about you, and you did not list my blog, so I’m not linking. Nah. Yeah, I’m rather good at holding grudges. And I now second the full-of-crap-theory, in stead of the link-love one. ;)

Tags: blogtools, sl blogs
Categories: SL Blogs, Vintfalken.com
7 Comments »

As some might - or might not - have noticed, VintFalken.com looked terribly unbalanced, highly confusing and a bit f*cked up last night. Noticing that did not make my yesterday’s state of being terribly unbalanced, somewhat confused and highly disappointed in society - real life one’s, don’t worry - any better.

VintFalken.com’s main page (the blog entries) were not showing at all, and as for the other pages, the center column jumped towards the left and the side bar was scattered all over below of the pages. Unreadable, to say the least.

Questions that sprung to my mind:

Does it look this terrible to everyone?
After consulting Loki, I could answer ‘yes, definitely’ to that question

What went wrong?
After consulting Loki, I still did not have the slightest clue.

Defeated, I went to bed…

Then suddenly the imaginary electrical light bulb above my head started to glow very brightly: ‘Shit! I left the chmod permissions for some of my template files to 655! Now.. somebody or something wouldn’t have..’.

Actually, I did not _really_ forget about those permissions. I just though nodoby would be interested in the template files. As I - of course - don’t have a backup of them in the state they are to be - that is, not with the changes I made to them - the easiest way to test this was to select another theme. So I took the one I initially planned to mod… and VintFalken.com is far from pretty, but at least readable again.

Now it’s either:

• More or less restoring the old vintfalken.com to it’s classical looks.
• Starting over again with a new theme to Vint’s liking and mod that.

Dunno yet. Do know whichever I choose, it’s time lost I can’t spend on the tons of other things I want to do. So shortly put: this does suck. :(

But if anybody knows a not-so-much time consuming way to find out if it was man or machine screwing me over like this, and which IP address finds itself behind that evil creature, do let me know!

Tags: vintfalken.com
Categories: Vintfalken.com
19 Comments »

I was one happy Second Life blogger when on August 21 2007 VintFalken.com reached 2000 comments when Shockwave Plasma hit the ’submit’ button on this post, pondering her return to Pownce. As I do not reach 2k comments each day - or week, or month as a matter of fact - it was worth doing something extra for this:

Now, originally this is a rather big file, so I do want to give Shockwave a real life print - if she is interested in having one, that is. But: this one is on me (on my google adsence revenue, actually ;)) and I don’t want her to feel obliged to give out her RL address / data to me. So I’m looking for:

1. A good online photograph printing service
2. that allows to give out gift certificates by e-mail or code number for an amount I choose
3. and allows Shockwave to use that gift certificate for a photograph I upload
4. and delivers to that part of Earth where Shockwave Plasma’s owner resides.

Suggestions, anybody? (Or any other solution, of course.)

PS. Next celebration of important milestone in my Second Web Life is 50k views - 44,778 as I type - on the Flickr stream. Codie is waiting for me to reach that as she promised me we’d celebrate ‘50k’ together in ‘Par Tay’ style. =)

Tags: portrait, shockwave plasma, sl to rl, vintfalken.com
Categories: Portrait, VintLabs, Vintfalken.com
10 Comments »

Name: Mil McMillan
Nationality: Main grid resident
Age: 2 months
Last seen: Second Life, main grid, half an hour ago
Was heading to: Open sim
Skin & shape: unknown

Mister McMillian, I hope you are ok? Please let me know something in-worlds (OpenSim or SecondLife), in the comments or at e-mail at info@vintfalken.com. I’m really worried you’re stuck between these two virtual worlds and I have no other means then this to try and reach you.

If you’re in neither, and are trying to get back to SecondLife, make sure the target of the shortcut says just this and that the -loginuri http://ruth.petitbe.be:9000 is gone.

“C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe” (You might want to ‘type’ this, not copy paste, because of the quotes, but make sure the quotes are there!)

If the problem persists, just drop me an email at info@vintfalken.com and I’ll try to help by e-mail or chat or I’ll supply you with a Belgian support number. ;)

I’m sorry if I explained something unclearly,

Vint

Tags: open sim
Categories: Vintfalken.com
7 Comments »

• Very busy working on the website for SLart at the Cannery, thus neglecting vintfalken.com for a day. ;) PS. I’ll never claim WP makes an excellent CMS again! :p)
• Gave AdSense a second change, although planning on trying this ‘let users hide ads’ thingie out. With a CTR of 0.54% I think I might as well not have ads, though. =) Like, you’re all to smart to click those things? Damned! ;)
• Spam is annoying me and probably causes me to smoke two extra cigarettes a day. Askimet - although doing a good job - can’t handle everything, so the comments on vintfalken.com switch to ‘moderated’. Don’t worry, comments from people who previously commented on this blog should get through without a problem - if not containing any urls. But new visitors will have to wait a while for their comment to be approved and to appear.
• VintFalken.com has reached over 2k comments now. *applauds to self* Trying to arrange a date for an in-world photoshoot with the lovely lady that made comment n° 2000. And no, it does not count the spam.

Tags: adsense, cannery, vintfalken.com
Categories: Vintfalken.com
20 Comments »

Added the following plugins to my WP install:

1. Subscribe to comments : allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
2. Comment email responder : emails commenter when an admin replies to the comment, if commenter is not subscribed to email updates via Subscribe-to-Comments.
3. TimeZoneCalculator : Calculates different times and dates in timezones with respect to daylight saving on basis of utc. For my own convencience the below of all my pages are now showing current CET and PDT/SLT time. In 24 hours format that is! But I was actually looking for something that would allow me to tag the blogposts with both CET and SLT time. I think that might be possible by tweaking the ‘time of the day’ plugin.
4. Wordpress OpenID(+) : Wordpress OpenID Registration, Authentication, and Commenting. Disabled again because it is not working at the moment. Need to beg the hosting company for this and/or this first.
5. Random Words : adds the ability to play with ‘random’ lists without to much hassle. I’m sure I shall think of some neat ways to use it. Either that or it stays ‘disabled’ until eternity. ;)
6. Pownce plugin : Displays your public Pownce messages for all to read. I figured as Myg got me an invite for Pownce and it seems to be Twitter ‘evolved’, I should give it a try.
   At first glance I like it: better ‘conversation’ functionality added, the special link & events format is neat, no more being limited to 140 characters and file sharing possible. I don’t know if I will end up continuing to like use Pownce - I liked Twitter for about 3 weeks too - but as long as I do, you can find my latest public Pownce message in the sidebar. *points to the right* Just click the comment number to reply using Pownce.
   I have two invites for ‘Twitter evolved’ Pownce left, so let me know if you want one. And Myg had/has some leftovers too. And for those already on there: feel obliged free to add me. ;) Now let’s wait for the API and a PownceHUD?

Mozilla Firefox addons installed:

1. Technorati Rank in status bar : shows a webpage’s technorati rank in the status bar. Out of curiousity and as an extension for SearchStatus 1.20.
2. Split Browser Window : This splits the content area of the browser window as you like. It will help you in various cases. You can split browser infinitely, as many as your RAM and your screen allow. Enjoy split and split to your heart’s content! Ideal for blogging. Use the upper part of the browser window for writing, the below part for browsing through the (re)sources. Although alt+tab and/or ctrl+tab work fine too. Let’s just call it lazyness. *grins*

Tags: blogtools, vintfalken.com
Categories: Vintfalken.com
11 Comments »

I already mentioned on the BlogHer conference that a lot of my blog’s traffic comes from Google and other search enginges. But this *points at the Google Analytics composite* is even for me a lot of hits for only two keywords: 266 from sexgen and 263 from sexgen platinum in one day. And almost all those people did not leave the blog immediately. The same trend seems to continue today: HitTail - which I only installed recently - shows a total of 451 hits for ’sexgen’ and 400 hits for ’sexgen platinum’.

At first I thought it was just some sort of mistake by Google HQ. But then the hits wouldn’t be coming from 48 different regions - California, Texas and Florida on top? So, what happened?!

1. I - severely - underestimated ranking good in Google for sex related Second Life keywords.
2. Some RL USA news thingie wrote a story about Stroker Serpentine’s SexGen bed and non-Second Life people got really curious.

Betting my L$ on option number 2, I’m very curious what news thingie wrote what kind of news. =)

Tags: copyright, second life
Categories: Vintfalken.com
9 Comments »