vSide: a perfect example of MMO addiction.

Un-freakin-believable.

So this past…(thinks about what day today is) Saturday???– my Brother-in-law, sister, and her friend go off to Seattle/Olympia/Victoria for a week long photography journey. Around this time we are closing in on our new issue launch for whitespider online photography magazine. And we have a ton of content queued up for our new issue, should be a great one. Normally Eddie(my brother-in-law), who is my partner in Whitespider.org does most of the issue update. I would say as of the past few issues 95% of the work is done by him with me really only working on technical issues with our site and some of the absolutely terrible software we use. With him being gone we tried to balance out the work load for this issue a bit more by making a checklist of things for each of us to do. Sounded like a very achievable task.

Enter the new heroin…

So after their departure saturday morning I decide that the best thing for me to do since I’m not travelling in real life is to escape reality via the web. I go to my normal stomping grounds, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, some games, and IMVU. If you’ve never heard of or used IMVU, it is a 3d chat program where you use a virtual avatar to represent you. It’s not like a sandbox videogame where you can walk freely and play games but there is some movement allowed, customization of your homes/scenes and full customization of your avatars looks and movements. The thing that really keeps me going back to IMVU is the fantastic conversations I have will all of the interesting people I meet all over the world.

One of my friends from India brings up that she just began using Second Life, and that I should join her there. I’ve done the whole Second Life thing, and I never enjoyed it. From my experience it was a network resource depleter that even with a solid connectiong(by my standards) things were always a bit choppy. On top of that it seemed every person I ran into was a total perv. The motions were clunky, there was clipping everywhere, and I just never felt like I wanted to continue. I started off with a negative opinion about Second Life because of the terrible issues with their site and registration process with which every friend I’ve ever spoken to regarding it has confirmed this annoyance.

So I tell my friend, ya, add me on Second Life, I’ll re-install it. For some crazy reason, my internet connection picks up and ZOOOOOOOMS! I launch the network usage widget and to my disbelief I’m achieving transfer rates of 2.77mb/s! That’s 2,777,645b/s! So for the first time in my life, 2nd life isn’t failing to work for me because of my 1.5mb connection and crazy latency speeds. But where it does fail me is EVERYWHERE ELSE. Even giving Second life a “second chance” it does nothing but disappoint me. I tell my friend; “well, I hate 2nd life, you’re tired of IMVU, Google’s Lively is so bad I question googles tactics and well, everything now… Where does this leave us?”

Luuuuke, come over to the vSide!!!

I forgot one small program in this mix, vSide. I had only used vSide for a matter of minutes in the past due to me leaving for a vacation right after installing it. I say hey, this deserves another chance, let’s install it.

9am, Saturday morning.

I decide I like vSide, and I continue to play it. My Indian friend decided she didn’t want to try it, she stuck with Second Life, good for her. I continue to play on vSide. I meet new friends, go to clubs, walk around the city, have my own loft… I play more vSide.

4am Sunday morning.

My eyes won’t stay open, I set myself to away, and jump backwards and into bed.

11am Sunday morning.

I get up, go to the fridge, get some water, and walk back into my bedroom. I notice my laptop has more chat records on screen than the FBI from all of my Instant Messengers. I take a quick glance, and ignore the shit out of them. All of them. I look at my phone, a text message, 2 missed calls, and 9 emails. I ignore those as well.

11:15am, Sunday morning.

I like vSide, I decide to play it.

5:30am Monday morning.

Suns up, why am I. I jump backwards and into bed.

9am Monday Morning.

I wake up, go to the fridge, grab even more water. I walk back into my bedroom and glance over at my laptop. As far as I can tell it’s littered with little squigly lines of nonsense text from just about everyone I know; I shut the lid. I like vSide, let’s login to vSide.

6am, Tuesday Morning.

My eyes won’t remain open on their own. I hold them open with my hands, but then I cannot type or control my avatar. I fall asleep on my floor under my desk for a while, then crawl into bed.

8:30am Tuesday Morning.

Well thank goodness for seeting an Outlook reminder on my phone with an alarm, otherwise I would have missed an appointment to do some work. I get dressed and get in my car and remember that I don’t have very much fuel, and my car needs new brakes in the worst way. I also think a bolt from the exhaust is now missing because the car is vibrating very violently. Good, it woke me up. I go do some work, and I head home.

11:30am Tuesday Morning.

I pass out on my bed with my shoes on.

1:00pm Tuesday Afternoon.

My laptops lid is still shut. Good. I wonder who’s at my favorite club on vSide. Did I mention I like vSide? Oh water, I need some water. Leaving the house reminded me that the sun still exists and that he’s still an asshole. Thank goodness for air conditioning.

1am, Wedensday Morning.

The club has cleared out and there are but a couple of idle friends in the world of vSide. I’ve found all of the hidden things in Tyra Studios clubs. I don’t want to go to other islands by myself, my legs and back kind of hurt. I sign out of vSide.

1:30am, Wedensday Morning.

Things look a bit differently. The color yellow is everywhere in real life. My dogs are staring at me. Air tastes good… I’m freakin hungry! My head is starting to hurt. I think I’ve lost some weight. I smell less than amazing. I need to check my email. Oh ya, Eddie and my sis are on vacation, let’s check his blog. Wow, they’ve done some amazingly cool things. Holy shitballs, it’s Wedensday! Just over an hour ago it was Tuesday the 9th. The new “The Sounds of Animals Fighting” album came out, I was really excited about buying that. If today is the 10th, and yesterday was the 9th, that means that the 7th has already come an passed? Wow, there went the whitespider deadline.

Current time, 2:12am, Wedensday Morning.

I’ve missed my deadlines. I’ve neglected my family, my friends, my pets, my health, my clients, IRC, IM friends, and any normal day to day life experiences. Do I regret doing so? Do I feel like life has passed me by? Do I feel like I’m a waste of skin and advanced biological engineering? Yes, to all of those, but I like vSide.

You might be asking yourself things like; what is vSide like? What do you do? What’s my name on vSide?  What’s great about it? What’s bad about it?

I could write a very thorough review on it. There are good things, bad things, speciffic details. But that would cut into me going right back into it, right after hitting publish, so I say goodnight.

Today Google officially released its newest Open-Source web browser for beta testing.

What is it?

Open source (modern) web browser currently available for windows as Beta.

What is it supposed to do?

One box for everything

New Tab Page

Application Shortcuts

Dynamic Tabs

Crash Control

Incognito Mode

Safe browsing

Instant Bookmarks

Importing Settings

Simpler Downloads

Where can I get it?

http://www.google.com/chrome

What’s the install like?

First a small exe that opens to a download while installing method. Very straight forward and smooth.

Review:

First glance: It is extremely clean. No options pull downs above the address bar means tabs go right at the top so there is no fight for screen real estate when viewing pages. But there isn’t an option to go entirely full screen, which will be missed by those people who like to showcase their work for clients without any browser clutter.  Also lots of very cool “ajax style” animations for everything Chrome does like downloading things.

If you look in the address bar, Chrome does a very neat thing with your URL, breaking it down in contrast from black and light grey so you can tell what the actual domain is seperate from your paths.

For example: http://www.johnux.com becomes  http://johnux.com/


First page I attempt visiting: gameinthemaking.com | That is exactly how I typed it in. The htaccess file for that site forces auto www. for all pages in order to keep search engine data consistent. So in a modern browser(not IE) the url will change to http://www.gameinthemaking.com without any issues allowing me to visit my site. Internet Explorer does a search for the term “gameinthemaking.com” instead of sending me to my site. That’s okay because I among countless other people are trying to wean people off of IE altogether. Google Chrome handles this type of url request just as poorly as IE does in my opinion. Chrome takes the url, adds http://www. to it, and deletes the .com and sends you to this page.

Now click to the page chrome KNOWS you meant to go to! This honestly bugs me. Sure the htaccess file on that site is probably not perfect, but Firefox, Safari, and Opera don’t seem to mind. There might be some reason I don’t know about that explains why it does this, but I’m going to compare it’s actions to the 3 most respected browsers out there and voice my complaint.

Similar to Opera, but kind of smart, and kind of silly: Google Chrome seems to be really building up their Tabbing ability and new tab layout quite a bit. It’s similar to Opera where you have lots of little previews available to you on your new tab, but instead of being your choice of previews, it’s your history and most visited sites. Take what you want from it, but I personally don’t enjoy what comes up:


History like this can be cool sometimes, but what if you don’t want your history displayed? I have a friend coming over who is having a birthday this week. For a half prank/half serious gift I was thinking about getting him an Easy Bake Oven. If he comes over he just might need to go on the web and what would he find? Right off the bat, easy bake ovens under my recent bookmarks and my Most visited pages.

This is where Incognito mode comes in. – Incognito mode can be selected from the option panel by going to the menu and choosing, open Incognito window. This allows for completely clean browsing that leaves no traces of your page visits in Chrome. VERY COOL!

Plugins: ? 3rd party content? Alexa?….: Not yet. I know this is sad, but what else can we say, it’s brand new and I honestly don’t know what Google plans to do about this, but at current I’ll live.

Performance: This is where Google Chrome really excels. By default it seems to have fully working support for flash player which is always nice. The problem with flash being closed source is every plugin for every browser has it’s own quirks that take some getting used to. With Safari I often have trouble getting all kinds of multimedia to work properly unless it’s Quicktime, so I’m not even going to go there. Internet Explorer has tendancies to throw page content over my flash so I can’t view pages as the designers intended. Firefox likes to work a lot, until you have multiple tabs or pages open that all have flash on them, then we have issues not being able to playback more than a few seconds of flash video without manually scrolling ahead a few seconds.

So here is my test. I’m going to keep google Chrome open all day. 10 of them. Each with 10 tabs. All displaying flash on all tabs either video or just animated content. I’m doing this on my laptop(2ghz, 2gb ram XP), and my Desktop(3.6ghz quad-core, 4gb ram, Vista 64) I will attempt to see if there are ever any issues with the flash or content not displaying properly.

What will I use to monitor this?

How about we try the built-in task manager?

And for a more enhanced view? The Stats for nerds option in the bottom left hand corner.

Google Chrome comes with some VERY awesome performance monitoring tools available through it’s task manager that allow you to close things that are using too many resources, monitor pages individually and close them if you need to. THIS IS AMAZING!

You know what? I’m sold, download and install it today. I haven’t got it to crash yet and I’ve been trying fairly hard, watch for an update soon.

I give it a 9.2 out of 10.

Internet Explorer

Doubles the amount of work I have to do every week. I absolutely hate it as much as one person can hate a non living thing. To me Internet Explorer is a metaphor for everything that is wrong with our planet. If you are under the age of 30 and you still use internet explorer, we are NOT friends.
Further more, if you aren’t currently using:

Avant Browser · Enigma Browser · Maxthon · SlimBrowser · NeoPlanet · NetCaptor · Netscape Browser 8 · iRider · Smart Bro · Sleipnir · Tencent Traveler · UltraBrowser · AT&T Pogo · Beonex Communicator · Camino · Conkeror · DocZilla · Epiphany · Fennec · Flock · Galeon · K-Meleon · K-Ninja · Kazehakase · Madfox · Minimo · Mozilla · Mozilla Firefox · Netscape (6 to 9) · SeaMonkey · Skipstone · Sleipnir · Songbird · XeroBank Browser · ABrowse · Arora · iCab · Epiphany · Konqueror · Midori · OmniWeb · Safari · Skipstone · Shiira · Swift ·
Opera · Nintendo DS Browser · Internet Channel · HotJava · Lobo · Opera Mini · X-Smiles · UCWEB · Alynx · edbrowse · ELinks · Links · Lynx · Net-Tamer · w3m · WebbIE
OR

Mobile browser’s
Blazer · Deepfish · Doris · Fennec · JOCA · Minimo · NetFront · Obigo Browser · Opera Mobile · Pixo · PlayStation Portable web browser · S60 web browser · ThunderHawk · WinWAP

AND EVEN 3D Browsers & Misc.
:
3B · abaco · Amaya · Arachne · AWeb · Charon · Dillo · Emacs/W3 · IBrowse · Mothra · NetPositive · NetSurf · Oregano · Sleipnir · Tkhtml · VMS Mosaic · Voyager

Then download and install this:

Foxkeh

IE users and web developers can’t be friends, sorry.