I mentioned in the past that one key component to managing indoor air quality is managing relative humidity.  This so true, and it can be a challenge to manage in some homes. 

When humidity is not managed effectively, resulting excessive moisture can lead to yeast, mold and other biologicals growing on surfaces in a home and subsequently contaminating the indoor air.  While most homes face excessively dry air in the winter, condensation on windows or even doors can be a winter problem for some homes. 

If relative humidity is not something that you intuitively understand, there is a great video on YouTube that visually demonstrates the concept.  Even if you thoroughly understand the concept, I’d encourage you to take a look at this science instructor’s explanation at Chattanooga State:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL5cgXwKUXc

Recommendations for “good” relative humidity levels in a home vary, depending on who you listen to.  It may be that the various information sources have different purposes in mind as they make their recommendations (comfort, health, building maintenance, equipment performance, etc.).   Depending on temperature ranges, relative humidity between 30% and 60% are best for reducing the likelihood of mold and bacteria growth, and keeping it on the lower side will be important to reduce window condensation. 

If you do not know how the relative humidity varies in your own home, purchase a hygrometer or an inexpensive relative humidity logger.  It could provide a lot of insight and better equip you to make smart decisions as you think about the air quality in the home.  Consider the recommendations from sources such as your window manufacturer/installer and the National Organization of Remediators and Mold Inspectors (NORMI), use your own common sense, look at condensation and do what you can to get relative humidity to an appropriate, non-problematic level for your specific home.

Indoor air quality / mold inspectors can be very helpful in assessing not only relative humidity, but the other factors that combine to produce the quality of air in a home.  Each home has a unique indoor air quality profile and requires a unique indoor air quality management plan.  A key component of every IAQ management plan will be managing relative humidity, so get ahead of the game, and make sure that you are proactively managing the relative humidity in your own home.

[Update 20091216: ZOE v 0.1 has been released. You'll find a manual and the download link here.]

…and some filtering too

Opensim Archives (OARs) are nowadays the standard tool to share and interchange full Opensim regions. Justin Clark-Casey, the core Opensim developer in charge of OARs, has lately added merge functionality to the loading of OARs. This means that you can merge (i.e., add) the contents of an OAR file to an existing region, without deleting its contents. This opens a plethora of interesting possibilities, but it also is the source of a lot of new problems. What if I’m very interested in merging an OAR with one of my existing regions, but I’d prefer the new contents to be placed differently from their original position? For example, I can be given an airboxed level at 1000 meters, but I might want to put it at 2000 m (for example, because I already have contents at 1000 m). Or I might be interested in an OAR with (say) some nice palace and gardens, but it’s located in the NE corner of the sim and I’d like to install it in the SW part of the sim.

At present, the “load oar” command does not allow for this kind of transformations. Indeed, it’s debatable whether Opensim should include code for this kind of application at all, or whether such manipulations should better be handled offline.

In this article I present a very simple (and highly experimental) OAR manipulation tool called ZOE (for Zonja’s Oar Editor ) that implements some very basic forms of filtering, relocation and rotation for OARs as a whole.

Motivation

I have been preparing (with the help of Ludmilla Writer) an exhibition of virtual worlds sculpture and photography (I’ll blog about it later). At first I was thinking of setting up a permanent art exhibition (i.e., an exhibition that would never close, and where the artists would rotate), but then I realized that Opensim technology allowed us to do something different and much more interesting: since there’s virtually no prim limit in Opensim, I could set up an “eternal” exhibition instead. By “eternal” I mean the following: the exhibitors would continue to rotate, like in a permanent exhibition, but before removing the old pictures and substitute them for the new artist’s work, I could take a snapshot of the exhibition and put it in an airbox. That way, visitors should be able to look at the “current” exhibition, but also to go “back in time” and look at all the previous exhibitions by visiting a set of airboxes.

Now I was confronted with a problem: how to make the task of taking a snapshot of the exhib and putting it in an airbox as automatic as possible? Linking the whole exhib into a mega linkset was out of question: objects have different creators, and the creators change when a new artist substitutes an old one, and besides, large linksets are difficult to manage. What would be ideal would be the following: a tool that allowed me to 1) take a snapshot of the whole of Condensation Land (the region where the exhibition is located) — this is currently doable using the “save oar” command of Opensim; 2) apply filters to the OAR so that (ideally) only the prims belonging to the exhibition are left; 3) relocate all the remaining prims to an airbox level by adding (say) 1000 meters to each linkset; and eventually 4) rotate the exhibition 90 (180, 270) degrees so that I could put four snapshots in each aixbox level (the exhibition occupies less than 1/4 of a sim).

Since to the best of my knowledge a publicly available tool that implemented points 2, 3 and 4 above did not exist, I decided to write one myself. I’ll describe first what I implemented, and then I’ll discuss briefly how I implemented it.

OARs are gzipped tarballs

Since OARs are gzipped tarballs, I needed a tool to extract the information from the OAR, to be able to manipulate it. Following the instructions in the Opensim wiki, I downloaded and installed 7-zip, a freely available program that is able to extract (and create) OARs. I started by looking at the structure of some OARs, by reading the (scarce) documentation in the wiki and by manually inspecting the xml files for the stored linksets. My first idea was to write a tool that worked directly on the directory tree of the extracted OAR, buy then I realized that I had to manually pack and unpack OARs many times to be able to test the tool, and I ended up by incorporating 7-Zip support to my program, so that now I could choose whether to work directly against an OAR or against its unpacked filesystem contents. I designed the program to be interactive, i.e., command driven, since I did not want to design a gui (who wants a gui when you can use the command line, anyway? ).

Filtering

The first thing that I needed was some way to get rid of (most of) the prims unrelated to the exhibition. To make the tests, I downloaded release r11651 of the Diva Distribution of Opensim, which includes support for the merge option of the load oar command, and installed it locally. I then went to the production console of Condensation Land, took an OAR of the Condensation Land region, and loaded it into my local machine. The OAR loaded itself in the SW region of the standard 2×2 megaregion:

The exhibition is located in the SE part of the region (it’s the inverted “L” to the bottom right):

Clearly, I needed a way to get rid of the zeppelin, the rotating balloon, my home, Arrabal, etc. I logged in and saw that the leftmost prim in the exhib had an X greater than 129, so I programmed a little and implemented a “delete” command:

    delete where x < 129

Here’s the result:

Now I saw that all objects that interested me had an Y lower than 127, so that I now used:

    delete where y > 127

and got the following:

which looked pretty good! There were some remaining unwanted objects (including a carpet and some few plants), but one thing is to manually delete ten objects and another one is to delete almost a whole sim. Here’s another view of what was left after the two “delete” operations:

Moving

Now I needed a way to move all contents up, so that I implemented an “add” command that added a (positive or negative) number to any of the X, Y, Z coordinates to each and every linkset in the OAR. Then I wrote

    add 30 to z

to test whether raising worked properly. Here’s the result:

Moving and megaregions

Since I didn’t implement any kind of control about the quantities you add to X, Y or Z, I asked myself what would happen if I added 256 to a whole OAR, and then load-merged the resulting OAR into a megaregion. I tried it, and here’s what I got:

That’s the result of using the following command sequence to CL.oar:

    delete where x < 129
    delete where y > 127
    add 256 to x

then saving the resulting oar as “two.oar”, then loading CL.oar, then load-merging “two.oar”.

This was an unexpected application of ZOE that looked very promising! It allows to take a normal OAR, and prepare it to be loaded at any sub-region of a megaregion. Unfortunately, the terrain does not load, but, although this is nuisance, the terrain can always be loaded by other means.

I then checked whether the insidious red error messages appeared by using this novel method of loading OARs, but unfortunately they still appear, so that resorting to the use of the “fix-phantoms” command is still mandatory.

Rotating

I finally needed some form of rotation. Rotation is more difficult to implement than translation, so that I opted for a simple approach: I’d implement first a rotation of 90 degrees (clockwise), and learn from there. I had to learn how to use quaternions, but after a short while I had a “rotate” command working:

The above is the result of filtering CL.oar and loading it, then rotating the oar 90 degrees and moving it 256 meters to the right, then load-merging it.

The “rotate” command only rotates prims. It does nothing to the terrain files — you can always edit them with some other program and rotate them yourself.

As an aside, and quite interestingly, Second Life “does not have the ability” to rotate regions It took me less than three hours to program the 90 degrees rotation, and I had to learn quaternion arithmetic and investigate the (undocumented) structure of the xml files contained in an OAR. Makes me wonder…

The program

Now I’ll describe how I wrote the program. Unfortunately, the documentation for OARs is minimal. Particularly, there’s no documentation, to the best of my knowledge, for the structure of the xml files representing linksets: linksets seem to be stored in the XML2 format, but XML2 appears to be also undocumented. I inspected several of the XML files by hand (using the notepad application and also opening them with IE, which shows best the xml structure).

Linksets are stored as a long line containing the xml representation of each and every prim composing the linkset. Particularly, there’s a section called “GroupPosition” that stores the position of each prim in the linkset relative to the region, for example:

    <GroupPosition><X>120</X><Y>118</Y><Z>22</Z></GroupPosition>

would apply to a prim at <120,118,22>. There’s a “GroupPosition” section for each prim in the linkset, but all the sections have the same values. This is so because the child prims store their position relative to the root prim and in a different section.

Therefore, to start with we don’t need to do any complicated xml parsing — we just have to load the xml file, parse the first “GroupPosition” block, and we’ll get the X,Y,Z coordinates of the linkset (Opensim-generated OARs contain a rounding of the linkset’ coordinates to the nearest integer coded in their filenames, but this information can’t be used reliably, because of two reasons: it’s not accurate enough, because of the rounding, and it can be changed without making the OAR invalid, i.e., you’re not guaranteed that the values stored in the filename will coincide with the real “GroupPosition” values).

Now implementing filtering is trivial: each linkset is inspected in turn, and the ones that don’t satisfy the filtering criteria are deleted (from memory and from the filesystem too). Similarly, implementing moving is easy: in this case, we do have to parse all the occurences of “GroupPosition” blocks and substitute the new coordinates for every prim in the linkset, then rewrite the xml file. Note that the xml files representing linksets can grow quite large when the linksets themselves are large: for example, the linkset for my 2889 prims Klein bottle is > 10 MB — and, unsurprisingly, moving it means that we have to perform 2889 coordinate substitutions in a 10 MB string, which is relatively expensive.

Rotating is a little more involved. We have to calculate the new <X,Y> coordinates for the root prim, and rotate the root prim. This is done using the “OffsetPosition” and “RotationOffset” blocks — these come immediately after each “GroupPosition” block, and are easy to parse. The “GroupPosition” and “OffsetPosition” values have to be recomputed using simple trigonometry, and “RotationOffset” is a quaternion, which has to be multiplied by another quaternion of the form <0,0,sin(alpha)/2,cos(alpha)/2> for a Z-rotation of “alpha” radians.

Finally, to implement support for automatic handling of files (in Windows, I don’t have access to a linux machine), one has to download and install 7-Zip, and modify the PATH environment variable so that the 7-Zip executable (7z.exe) is accesible from the command line.

The program is written in Open Object Rexx, a language I’m very familiar with and which allows me to write code very fast. Here’s a test run of ZOE:

Now I only need some time to write a short readme file, adjoin a license, and upload it all to some public place, in case somebody wants to play/experiment with it

Some final remarks, and some things to do

I would have loved to implement some form of filtering by creator and/or by owner, but unfortunately the current version (0.2) of the OAR file format does not store the avatar names — only their UUIDs are stored. It would be really handy and convenient if a simple UUID <-> Avatar name mapping could be added to OARs, this would greatly enhance the possibilities of offline OAR editors like ZOE.

Linksets refer to assets, i.e., they refer to textures, scripts, notecards, etc., either used by the prims themselves (textures) or stored inside some of these prims (scripts, notecards, …). ZOE works by brute force, i.e., it leaves all the assets in the OAR intact. The right way to proceed would be to keep a reference count on the assets and delete those assets that are no longer needed.

I’m currently loading all the linksets in memory. Even for a moderately large OAR, the Condensation Land region, a 70MB oar file containing 10,000+ prims collected into 1000+ objects, the memory footprint is very small (50 MB on my Windows machine).

I’m amazed at how easy it has been to program ZOE. I’ve invested more time learning how to multiply quaternions and writing this blog post than in writing the whole program. I see a great future in tools like ZOE — there are some things that are better done offline, rather than doing them in-world. In this sense, it would be good to see the “load oar” and “save oar” Opensim commands directly supporting the filesystem, like some posts in the Opensim-dev lists have already suggested.

It was the end of a day. An ending that came at the beginning of a cold, long winter. When you step outside you can feel it, you can see it, and you can breath it.

I stepped outside and almost instantaneously, you’re taken aback by the frigid air. You’re breathing and it exhales almost like smoke, except this won’t kill you. It was almost dark. I had forgotten how “late” it had gotten, although it was only quarter till 5. We don’t have it nearly as bad here as they do where I’m from in Canada. I’m a nocturnal kind of guy anyway, I really enjoy being out when it’s dark

Amidst the glow of the setting sun, I admire the way that it looks outside. It was warm enough today to melt some snow although the field was still white and our side of the street still had 75% snow. Even though it was almost dark, it didn’t seem that dark outside. The setting sun gave the snow covered fields life, a life that exists only at this time of the year.

I had started to shiver even more. Even though I had only been outside a brief moment, the cold air surrounding me made it feel as if I had been outside for hours. I was captivated by the moment and I just wanted to stand there. I got walked down the stairs and got into my car. I had to let my car warm up before I was able to drive anyway. The hues of the sky, seeping through the clouds that had covered the sky most of the day were all different shades of oranges, purples and reds. It was a tease. Cotton candy skies always do a good job of taking your breath away but this tease was planned as if to not take away from everything else I had been admiring upon stepping foot outside.

I like winter time. You forget all about your problems after the first snowfall. Everything is pure, everything feels clean. I wish it was like this all the time just so I know I wouldn’t take life for granted. I’ll just have to remember to cover up more warmly next time!

I was hoping to find and post some cute stories about Jack Frost, but I ran out of time.

So I will just share these lovely pictures of his handiwork.

Enjoy!

Images from the Internet -

My children asked me what Jack Frost looks like. I think this is a plausible enough likeness.

Jack Frost’s handiwork on my front door -

The children found feathers, foilage, and even a Christmas Tree with a lopsided star.

I didn’t load a picture of the Christmas Tree –  it didn’t turn out on the camera. But this grass and foilage is lovely, eh?

I got into my car the other day. I noticed that condensation had collected on the wind shield. I naturally assumed this condensation had collected on the outside of my car. Upon the failure of my wind shield wipers to remove this condensation, I soon realized that the sheet of condensed water droplets were located inside my car.

Years of sense collecting suggests I should buy a dehumidifier for my car. I think a dessicate is in order. Visibility is what can be described as, “key” in driving. Yes, I do believe. Old cars, you really are a source of endless surprises.

Chilly last night, huh?

So far the combination I’m using is working well: 3-4 wool blankets, flannel sheets, a toque, one candle, and last night I even had a sheep skin over the bottom part of the bed. I woke up warm and toasty, except for my nose. I don’t like having my face covered, so I had to use the blankets and my arms to build a little warm cave for my nose that still got enough fresh air. I was able to fall asleep again, but eventually I moved around and my cold nose woke me up again.

There’s a more serious problem from the cold though, which is condensation. The air I exhale all night is full of water that condenses on the cold surfaces: glass and metal. I was mainly worried about the window panels getting musty and mildewy, but I’ve learned that there’s a bigger problem that I can’t even see. My van wasn’t intended for camping, so it isn’t insulated, which means behind the plastic wall paneling is bare metal, which will quickly start to rust from all this moisture. Moisture is the enemy!

So the idea of getting a heater felt like cheating at first, but I accept it now

The top of a coke can, always coca-cola……gotta love it

What’s your favourite fizzy drink?

L’influence du climat sur la formation des montagnes et leur évolution tectonique est une vieille idée. Elle vient d’être validée par une belle expérience de laboratoire, menée par Stéphane Bonnet de Géosciences Rennes, sur des maquettes de montagnes. Basée sur des critères inédits, l’hypothèse a pu être vérifiée dans les Andes.

La présence de montagnes modifie les conditions climatiques d’un lieu. Si la variation d’altitude affecte bien évidemment les températures,

Température:Grandeur physique liée à la notion immédiate de chaud et froid.
Deux corps en contact ont tendance à égaliser leurs températures, par échange de chaleur (équilibre thermique). Les thermomètres fournissent une mesure de la température en utilisant des phénomènes comme la variation de la pression…’)

d’autres effets peuvent entrer en ligne de compte : l’effet orographique et l’effet de Foehn.

L’effet orographique est la conséquence d’une chaîne de montagnes sur la circulation des masses d’Air

(Mélange de gaz contenant 78% d\’azote, 21% d\’oxygène, environ 1% d\’argon et des traces de néon, de krypton, de xénon et d\’hélium.)

Lorsqu’une chaîne de montagnes est perpendiculaire aux vents dominants et d’altitude suffisamment élevée, elle perturbe les circulations atmosphériques, qui s’élèvent au-dessus d’elle. Cet effet orographique engendre l’effet de Foehn, d’ordre climatique.

En effet, l’élévation des masses d’air en altitude provoque leur refroidissement et donc la précipitation de son Eau

(L’eau (en latin aqua, qui a donné aquatique et en grec hydros, qui a donnée hydrique, hydrologie) est un élément sous forme liquide en conditions standards (température et pression ambiante), composé sous sa forme pure de molécules qui associent deux atomes d’hydrogène et un atome d’oxygène accompagnée d’un réchauffement : la Condensation

(La condensation décrit le phénomène physique du passage d\’un gaz à un état solide. Par abus de langage, la condensation désigne aussi le passage d\’un gaz à l\’état liquide, mais le terme exact dans ce cas est liquéfaction)

de l’eau dégage de l’énergie. A l’inverse, de l’autre côté, les masses d’air asséchées mais échauffées redescendent, provoquant un climat plus sec et plus chaud.

Cliquer pour agrandir. Schéma de l’effet orographique qui provoque l’effet de Foehn. Le versant face aux vents dominants est caractérisé par un climat humide et froid, celui de l’autre côté possède un climat sec et chaud. © Pierre cb, domaine public

Le Contraste( Le contraste est l\’écart de luminosité entre les hautes et les basses lumières) climatique, et plus particulièrement hydrologique, de part et d’autre de la ligne de crête devrait, selon les modèles, créer une différence des vitesses d’érosion entre chaque face de la chaîne de montagne et donc faire migrer la ligne de crête.

Mais comment le vérifier ? Impossible de se planter en face des montagnes et d’attendre… Il faut donc trouver des critères qui prouvent et caractérisent ce phénomène.

Une montagne…. minuscule

Stéphane Bonnet a créé un modèle réduit en laboratoire pour étudier l’érosion de mini-reliefs artificiels. Alors que l’équivalent d’un soulèvement tectonique est appliqué au modèle, les très fines précipitations produites artificiellement génèrent une migration de la ligne de partage des eaux (shrinking) qui subdivise les bassins versants (splitting) de la face aride. Chacun forme alors deux bassins versants indépendants. La réorganisation des réseaux de rivières qui en découle se fait en stades évolutifs.

En haut, l’observation expérimentale des effets du climat sur la ligne de crête montre une migration de celle-ci vers la face aride. En bas, on peut voir la séparation des cours d’eau et la multiplication des bassins versants au cours du Temps(Grandeur physique continue permettant de situer la succession des événements dans un référentiel donné. L\’Unité S.I. est la seconde.)’ © Géosciences Rennes (Insu-CNRS/Rennes 1)

L’expérience montre que le degré de division des réseaux hydrographiques et des bassins versants de la face aride est fonction de la migration de la crête d’une chaîne de montagnes. Non pris en compte jusque-là, ce paramètre caractérise donc l’évolution des montagnes, en sus des phénomènes d’Orogenèse(Ensemble des évènements aboutissant à la formation d\’un système montagneux caractérisé, entre autres, par des plis) déjà reconnus.

En conséquence, l’étude géomorphologique des bassins versants et de leurs réseaux hydrographiques peuvent servir de critères et caractériser la migration de la ligne de crête. Ces expérimentations ont été corroborées par l’observation des stades évolutifs constatés au niveau d’un relief tectoniquement actif du front est des Andes, la Sierra del Aconquija.

Les calculs ont montré que la ligne de crête de ce relief migrait à une vitesse de l’ordre du millimètre par an depuis 3 millions d’années. C’est donc bien prouvé, le climat affecte de manière quantifiable la géométrie et la cinématique des structures tectoniques responsables de l’orogénèse.

En d’autres termes, les nuages déplacent bien les montagnes !

Awesome weather here in Wisconsin so far this November – highs around 50-60F this week – can you believe it? The cold temperatures are coming, though, and typically the relative humidity in our homes drops for the season. But that is not always the case. If moisture from cooking, bathing, respiration and other sources gets trapped indoors, it can become a problem, especially where it contacts cold surfaces like windows and doors.

Researchers at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) said that repeated exposure to indoor allergens and airborne particles could lead to respiratory symptoms and conditions. Doug Garrett, CEM, CDSM, building scientist and president of Building Performance and Comfort said, “If there was just one thing I could do to fix buildings, it would be to change the relative humidity.”

Moisture can lead to conditions that degrade indoor air quality. Yeast, mold and other biologicals sometimes become a big problem in a home with excessive humidity, and the winter months can be even more problematic than humid summer months.

If condensation on your windows is frequent in the winter it is important to address that issue. Health issues and property damage could result if the problem is not corrected. I learned first hand the importance of this in my own home. Make sure you are addressing the sources of excessive moisture, and make sure you have adequate fresh air in your home (your house needs to breathe).

Certainly upgrading your windows may be a good idea, but at the very least be sure to wipe any condensation to prevent mold or other invasive organisms from becoming a problem in your home. There are also a number of green, highly effective, enzyme-based cleaning and mold inhibitive solutions on the market that can help with this.

Try to keep your relative humidity to a reasonably low level, especially when the temperatures plummet outdoors.

If you do suspect mold or other potentially harmful organisms are growing in your home due to window condensation or other moisture problems, you can take a brief indoor air quality survey at www.iaqscreening.com/03289.  The survey may give you added clarity and ideas. Doug Hoffman’s book Mold Free Construction is also a good source of information along these lines, with 36 explicit and straight forward steps home owners can take to improve indoor air quality.

Phone: 954 603 8772.
Please leave a message and you will be contacted ASAP.

A/C not fixed = $20 (diagnosis/service)
If your air conditioning (A/C) is not fixed, the charge $20 to diagnose the problem.

A/C fixed + No parts = $50
(If your A/C is fixed and no parts are needed, the charge is $50 total.You will not pay more than $50 unless parts need to be purchased.)

A/C fixed + Parts = $50 + Cost of parts.
If your A/C is fixed and parts are needed, the charge is $50 + the cost of the parts.

Please note: Freon/refrigerant is a part and is not included in the service fee.

This is not an hourly fee – the labor fee is $50 no matter how long the repair takes. The charge is $20 if the A/C is not fixed.

Please note that the following services are not currently being offered: 1) coil change-outs, 2) compressor change-outs and 3) installations.

Here is a list of cities currently being serviced:

Boca Raton
Coconut Creek
Coral Springs
Deerfield Beach
Fort Lauderdale
Hillsboro Beach
Lauderdale Lakes
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea
Lauderhill
Lighthouse Point
Margate
North Lauderdale
Oakland Park
Parkland
Pompano Beach
Tamarac
Wilton Manors

South Broward, West Broward and Miami-Dade County are not currently serviced.

Here is a list of some of the units that may be repaired…
- Commercial A/C units
- Residential A/C units
- Split A/C units
- Package A/C units
- Wall A/C units
- Window A/C units

Please note: Personal Checks and Business Checks are not accepted as payment at this time.

If you can’t call, feel free to email your phone number to the email address at the top of this listing and you will be contacted ASAP.

Any and all air conditioners have a possibility of repair.

Here are some (but not all) brands that repairs are possible for..
Goodman, Trane, Carrier, York, Rheem, Ruud, Fujistsu, American Standard, Lennox, Mitsubishi, Bryant, Payne, Duchane, Fedders, Heil, Janitrol, Armstrong, GE, General Electric, Honeywell, Amana, Comfortmaker, Tempstar, Briggs & Stratton, Kohler, Guardian, Generac.

License # CAC014666

Hi All,

Well with the weather being amazing in the hills today, we thought would inspect Goldie to see how she was going.  Its been a couple of weeks, since we have checked out the Goldie Girls.

Well, findings were that that there was a lot of condensation under the lid of the hive so we left the lid off to dry while the weather is sunny.

The Hive has ten full size frames, and seven out of ten have been drawn out with wax.  Great to see the frames that we built are being used by the Girl’s.

Very exciting ! …we were able to identify the Queen in the one of the middle frames.

We also spotted some new young Bee’s.  Spotted capped brood and capped food we think….still learning!  Also spotted a strange creation of wax that doesn’t look like a queen birthing area, maybe it was new drones ? …we’ll keep you posted.

Overall - OK : )  …. forgot to look for eggs in all the excitement, but evidence of new bees so looking good.

Off to buy some new hives …planning inspection of Honey 1 ….

Next Inspection 7 Nov 2009

See ya…G & M from Kiwimana

Condensation is a relatively new phenomenon resulting mainly from changes in lifestyle and our desire to keep heating costs as low as possible.

Condensation is related to the way we heat, ventilate and insulate our homes. In days gone by, most homes had one or two chimneys; allowing up to four air changes per hour. Doors and windows were generally less well fitting than they are today. This natural ventilation was the very process, which prevented condensation.

To cope with increased fuel costs came the trend to insulate. This resulted in loft insulation, cavity wall insulation and double glazing.

However, it is also a fact that energy-efficient homes are more likely to suffer from condensation – because anything that keeps warm air in will also keep fresh air out, creating the ideal conditions for condensation to form.

Before we tackle the problem, we have to understand exactly what condensation is, then find the best way to deal with it.

Condensation is merely the air’s natural moisture content settling on cool surfaces. The amount of moisture in the air is called relative humidity. If the humidity level rises about 70% mould and mildew will be encouraged to grow.

Astonishingly, the average family creates up to 20 pints of moisture every day, simply by washing, cooking and breathing. This moisture must go somewhere and be dealt with to avoid condensation.

What is Condensation?

Condensation is water vapour suspended in air. Where does most water vapour come from?

The most common sources of water vapour are cooking, drying clothes on radiators, washing up, in house plants, moisture in newly built properties and extensions and from the breath we exhale.

Where can condensation occur?

Due to the thermal currents within a house, condensation can occur in a number of places, usually at cold spots i.e. an unheated room or a conservatory without any form of adequate heating.

Condensation forming on the room side surface of a sealed unit indicates a high water vapour content present and that the temperature of the room side glass surface is inadequate.

Condensation within the airspace of the sealed unit indicates the unit has broken down.

Statement

I did not have condensation before my new windows were installed. There must be something wrong with them.

This is a common assumption but, unfortunately, it is also incorrect. Windows cannot and will not produce any water. This ‘water’ is produced by our normal living activities. Therefore we, the householder have created the problem.

How do I know if I have condensation?

Condensation will take many forms, the most common being steaming windows and puddles of water on the window sills. In extreme cases, dark spots of mould will appear around the windows, wall coverings and mastic seals throughout the house.

If you have a non-condensing tumble dryer, make sure it is properly vented to the outside of your home. Remember, tumble dryers can create 16 pints of water vapour during one cycle.

How can double glazing help?

Sealed unit replacement windows act as an insulator which will reduce heat loss which under normal circumstances, would be conducted from the inside of the room to the outside. Please remember that sealed units act as an insulator and are not a source of heat, therefore all rooms should be adequately heated – especially conservatories. The likelihood of condensation forming on a warm surface is therefore reduced.

How do I reduce condensation?

Condensation can be controlled by providing natural ventilation to change air on a regular basis and by maintaining an even temperature. This is achieved through ventilating units which are controlled by humidistats, an airbrick, or by opening a window. Please remember that the airbrick must be open to achieve good results. An effective way of controlling condensation would be to install a dehumidifier. This cost could be avoided if the problem is one of ventilation, by installing an airbrick thereby creating ventilation or controlling those causes of moisture, that result in a build up of moisture in the air.

Breathing. Two sleeping adults exude two pints of moisture in 8 hours, which is absorbed as water vapour into the atmosphere.

New property. The bricks, timber, concrete and other materials in an average 3 bedroom house absorb 1500 gallons of water. The same principle will apply to a conservatory base and the construction materials used. As with any new building work, please allow a period of drying out to ensure problems are not encountered in the future.

DOUBLE GLAZING CANNOT CAUSE CONDENSATION

By acting as a heat barrier and providing an inner pane which is considerably warmer than the outer pane, the likelihood of condensation forming is reduced.

Conclusion

Condensation is the result of a build up of moisture caused by our normal lifestyle and the continual improvement and modernisation of our homes.

Replacement windows cannot produce condensation. Double grazing will act as an insulator if there is sufficient heat within the house in the beginning. Therefore it is wise to attempt to control the amount of water vapour displaced within the household and to provide controlled ventilation to dispel this moisture before a problem arises.

Bathrooms & Kitchens

Prevent water vapour finding its way into the other rooms of your house by closing the adjoining doors and leaving a window open after cooking or showering to allow a change of air. Extractor fans and cooker hoods work well for this purpose.

If you find dark mould spots forming, treat the affected areas immediately with a solution of household bleach or Milton fluid. This will kill the mould spores and prevent them from spreading to other areas. All new houses with improved insulation and replacement windows are likely to trap moisture build-up. This can be identified and dealt with, as long as all the rooms are heated throughout the house, and the air is changed on a regular basis.

Remember it is far easier to treat the cause than the effect.

1856-1939

Integrated theories of the mind in all aspects of theory, culture, history, and knowledge.

In his Outline on Pyscho-Analysis Freud describes two complementary mental energies that are the driving force behind personality and the mind. The first is “libido,” which seeks to create or become part of the life forces at the work. The second is “thenantos,” which seeks to destroy or connect to “death forces.” More often than not both of these energies are at work in human will and action. This could easily fold into Kennedy’s rhetoric of energy or Durkheim’s energy model. In this context, the ego is the third power mediating between the id and super-ego.

Interpretation of Dreams
For Freud, wish-fulfillment is the most accessible aspect of the dream work, though dreams tend to be far more complex. In Chapter Three, he examines mostly child dreams, because in his mind, they are the most simple.

The most interesting aspect of the “dream work” that Freud examines is the element of “condensation” (313). The meaning of dreams are usually located in “nodal points” of connection that are not immediately obvious to the rational mind (317). Dream content does not directly reveal the actual dream thoughts (318). Dream thoughts make use of displacement, collective and composite figures, and nodal points to construct meaning (330). In some ways, Freud describes the “science of concrete” in more specific terms than Levi-Strauss.

Freud applies his dream method to analyzing religion, find the motivation through wish fulfillment. Religion is a universal human neurosis.

Condensate

Cold meets hot yields precipitation or condensation on the hot side. Also brain freeze.

give my regards to the world in recess
greyed out like an unselected player:
since we haven’t the devices to control you
we simply wrap ourselves
in our own interior reflections
and disable your muted passing

Electronics need health care, too!  All are vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. Some of them are obvious, but here are some that you might not know about with suggestions for doing something about them.

Circumstance: Heat
The actual electrical/electronic parts of electronics is actually not very sensitive to heat; it’s the other parts of the thing that succumb. Plastics, in the connectors or the case, are particularly prone to melt when in the heat and perhaps more electronics die on a car dashboard in the sun than anywhere. There is no fix for this, only prevention. Some electronics devices will even die on the beach if left out in the sun. Look on the device or in the instructions to see if there are warnings about this. If you have to put a device in the sun, try placing a piece of aluminum foil on its sunny side. Lastly most hard drives die because they are running to hot so if you want them to last, cool them with a fan or two. At the very least don’t block them from getting air.

Circumstance: Falls
Just like the elderly, electronics are prone to fall out of your hands. Although some devices may survive one or two falls, you are tempting your luck. If you can afford to replace the device don’t worry about dropping it, but for expensive laptops, you could consider using a case designed to protect the laptop. It also makes it easy to carry with all its attachments.

Circumstance: Condensation
If you thought your computer would stop working after being under water for any period of time, you would be correct. Water is the arch enemy of all electronics. Perhaps the subtlest way that this manifests itself is the condensation that develops on electronics when brought in out of the cold. Just like the droplets that develop on an ice cold glass of your favorite beverage, water can develop on the outside and the inside of cold electronics in a warm environment. The good part is that as long as you don’t turn them on while they are wet, they should survive, at least in the short term. The solutions involve waterproof housings to contain the electronic device and just letting them dry out for a day before you turn them on.

Circumstance: Electrical Surges
Invisible but significant variations in the power supplied to your delicate electronics. These are more and more common as we begin to stress the electrical grid and as storms increase in frequency. There is usually no way to know if your device is designed to withstand surges so the best way to protect yourself is to buy surge protection either in the form of an electronic surge protector, an insurance policy, or both. There are even surge protectors that claim to be so good at this that they come with insurance should any devices connected to the protector die in a surge.

Circumstance: Noise and Glitches
If your electronic device is going to be powered from the grid most of the time, these glitches will shorten their ultimate useful life.
Although not the only way, the best way to prevent this is to have an electrician install a whole house energy management system – one that has a power conditioner or filtering included. Reasonably priced ones may be hard to find but they do exist.

A lot of things bother me.  You’ve probably already noticed this from my posts (I started to link to my posts that had a theme of being bothered but it was basically all of them so instead, just see any post denoted by the category: mondoo).  Honestly, even I realize that the fact that the following things bother me is severely misguided.  Sometimes when I get so bothered by these neurosis, I just have to laugh.

Multipurpose Professional Playing Surfaces:  It happens every year during this time, when baseball and football seasons run concurrently, you have to look at this monstrosity while watching a game.  It looks just plain awful.  The last thing that I want to be reminded of while watching an exciting football game is a boring game of baseball.  Build two separate fields, Pittsburgh did it.

Condensation:  Ugh!  I hate, hate, hate when I’m drinking an ice cold beverage and condensation forms on the outside of my cup, I pick up the cup to take a sip and BAM!  Water is now ALL OVER me.  My shirt is wet, my pants are wet and condensation inevitably means that my ice is melting, watering down my iced tea, which I also hate.  While we’re talking about water, I am also bothered by the word moist… and panties (although I find that many people are bothered those words so this one may be justified).

Shaving my husband’s neck: Once upon a time, when my husband and I were dating, I drove over to his parents’ house to pick him up for a date and his mother was shaving his neck with an electric razor.  She said “Pay attention, missy, you’ll be doing this for him someday.”  I was so grossed out, I considered not marrying him when he proposed (not really).  Sure enough, we get married and here I am, shaving the mini-mullet below his hairline every week and a half.  He walks into the room with a hand towel and his trimmer and I whine and writhe in my chair, it’s so bothersome but he can’t physically shave his own neck, so I reluctantly comply.

Being helped: All the women, who independent, THROW YOUR HANDS UP AT ME!  I don’t ask people for help and it really bothers me when people insist on helping .  I’m kind of a loner by nature so I’m used to doing things on my own (you should see how many heavy grocery bags I can carry at one time!)  I realize that people are just trying to be nice and sometimes it does make things easier, but seriously, I can do it on my own, thanks!

At the end of June 2009 I was interviewed by Alyne Dagger for the online magazine Bad Girls Magazine (BG Magazine). The interview was planned around may, and I received a draft questionnaire by email at the end of June. I wrote a first working draft with my replies, and we interchanged some emails until we both were satisfied with the results. Working with Alyne was fantastically easy, and the interview, first appeared on the portuguese edition of BG Magazine, no. 19, and later in the english edition, no. 19, was very nicely presented; big thanks to Alyne for her wonderful, careful work  I reproduce the interview here in its entirety, with permission. Text in italics is from BG Magazine, while my replies use a normal font; image subtitles, when present, are also from BG magazine. The images are all mine; some of them where proposed by me, and some of them were chosen by the interviewer.

Most of the material covered in the interview can also be found here and here, but the presentation is different — being in an interview format, the reading is probably more agile. You’ll also find two arguments about why Second Life cannot scale; these were previously published, in a similar form, as comments on other people’s blogs.

When speaking about virtual worlds, two months are like two years in RL. That’s why I include, at the end of the post, a small section with some corrective remarks; these were not part of the original interview.

The interview

HERALD OF DIGITAL FREEDOM

Intense and passionate in every project she’s got herself involved, ZONJA CAPALINI was a mix between muse and investor of the Metaverse when the Openspaces crisis blew up in 2008.

Revolted, she’s began to try to revert the price policy through mobilization and protest, but seeing doesn’t worry with the investors and residents like her, she went to the fight and had searched for solutions for her business in other metaverses, before to begin her own grid, using the Opensim as a tool.

She tells us with exclusivity how was this painful process which can have opened horizons and frontiers for the age of the free metaverses.

BG Magazine: How did you come to SL and what you did in your first SL year?

Zonja Capalini: I was captured, as many other people were, by the hype about Second Life at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007. I first created an avatar in december of 2006, but I had some difficulties with it and did never log in. Zonja first rezzed on february the first, 2007. It was a pure adventure. Complete immersion from the first second.

At the time the process was more complicated than it is today, and it was almost not localized. I spent several days at Orientation Island, then Help Island, until I found a way to get to the mainland. I first teleported into a german-speaking infohub (all europeans seemed to be routed to that hub at the moment), and started to socialize.

I was feeling awkward, was very shy, and besides I didn’t control my avie properly, I was crashing against all the walls I found, flying unexpectedly, etc. — as everybody else. I had the impression to have landed in the recovery area of a hospital specialized in brain injuries

One of my main customers is a company dedicated, amongst other things, to education.

I saw that LL was announcing voice in SL, and I thought that creating a campus for that company in SL could be a great way to allow them to have students from all over the world. I talked to the executives of the company and showed them SL, and they agreed that it looked as an interesting platform to evaluate. So that from the beginning my SL experience was dual: on the one hand I was living my own second life, experiencing the universe as a “resident”; on the other hand, I was learning to master SL as a technological platform.

Zonja, the noobie

From the experiential side my life was as everybody else’s. I slowly learned how to customize my avatar (I remember believing that my avie was very pretty when I was a noob, to buy skins, hair, prim skirts, prim shoes… I met people, made several friends, was invited to dance and to explore, and in general socialized a lot. It was extremely fun!

From the business side I learnt how to build, where to buy textures, how to script, etc.

I bought my first parcel at Aglaia (a sim that does no longer exist), and my RL friend Ludmilla Writer soon bought a parcel there too. I was using my immersive life as a way to learn about the platform too.

BG Magazine: Why did it became so important to have a state for you? And how did the Condensation archipelago grow up?

Zonja Capalini: One day the owner of Aglaia, the sim I was living in, suddenly decided that he’d be leaving SL, and sold all his sims to a new owner. All the tenants were given a deadline to leave; we lost the setup fee, and we became homeless. I realized I could not have a stable place for my experiments and my creations unless I was the owner of my own sim. The same was true of the company I was working for, of course. So my company bought a sim, and I bought another one, Condensation Land. In SL, if you want to be able to control your experience, you have to own a full sim (which is far too expensive by the way): if you’re in the mainland, you’re subject to griefing, and you can’t be sure that your neighbours won’t create a really ugly building, or open a freebie shop, etc., so that your experience will degrade horribly. And if you rent space in a private estate, you are subjected to the arbitrariness of the sim owner, without an effective way to complain if you are mistreated or plainly scammed.

To be able to finance Condensation Land I started by sharing it with my Friend Ludmilla and some refugees from Aglaia, then rented some land to several people I had come to know in SL. At the time I was a Second Life evangelist, so that I brought several friends from RL too and convinced them to rent a plot of land in Condensation.

When Condensation Land was almost self-sustaining, I bought Condensation Beach, another full sim, and started to rent some plots there too.

Then the Lindens announced that you could get openspaces in a number lower than four, and that you could place them anywhere. And shortly they lowered the price to be prim-equivalent to a normal sim: a normal sim allowed up to 15,000 prims and costed US$ 295, and an Openspace allowed 15,000/4 = 3750 prims and costed US$ 300/4 = US$ 75. That seemed very fair, and allowed you to terraform more beautifully, avoiding the crowded landscapes you found in most of Second Life. So that I decided to keep Condensation Land as a full sim and move the rest of the archipielago to openspaces.

First version of Condensation sim, february 2008

I first ordered the Condensation South openspace, and moved some of my tenants there. Then we had a long talk with Ludmilla and we agreed that she’d be getting her own Openspace too. The problem was that her parcel was in Condensation Beach, which was a full sim, and at the time converting a full sim to four openspaces was taking a lot of time, because the new Openspace product was extremely successful and the ticket queues were collapsed; Ludmilla was a very active resident at the time, and she could not stay homeless for an extended period of time, so that I bought the Condensation SouthWest openspace, cloned the terrain from Condensation Beach, and moved all of Ludmilla’s stuff to Condensation SouthWest in preparation for the conversion of Condensation Beach into four Openspaces.

This conversion took a lot of time to effect, and during this time the landscape in Condensation was awful, to the point that some of my tenants left, but finally we got four new sims: one was Condensation Beach itself (zilched in the conversion process, which is ridiculous btw), another was Condensation North, and the other two I sold in the open market.

Then I re-cloned back the terrain from Condensation SouthWest to Condensation Beach, moved all of Ludmilla’s stuff from SW to Beach, terraformed SW and N, and offered to my remaining tenants to migrate to ampler, more beautifully terraformed parcels in these openspaces.

Then the openspace crisis started.

BG Magazine: How was your reaction when the Openspaces crisis came? Did you believe you could make change or start a movement to change the Linden Lab price policies?

Zonja Capalini: Well I joined the protests actively. The outrage was immense. It had taken us months of time, a lot of money, and a lot of hours of hard work to migrate to the openspaces. The announcements came approximately one month after we had been able to do our inauguration party. I simply could not believe what was happening. The Lindens were increasing the fees by a 66% just six months after announcing the Openspace product, and, to add insult to the injury, we were being called abusers! The notion that one can abuse a program is simply ludicrous: think about “abusing Excel”, for example — it sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The Lindens were treating us as retarded children. They were calling us “abusers”, when clearly they were the ones abusing us, making use of the fact that at the moment there seemed to be no clear alternative to Second Life. If there had been a clear competitor they would have never dared to take such a step.

BG Magazine: When you understood they would not come back, you started a migration. How was the process?

Zonja Capalini: It was a very, very bitter experience. Till the openspace fiasco I was a strong believer in Second Life, and a big evangelist, I had brought several companies into SL and a lot of RL friends too. Now the Lindens had made me look as a stupid fool by convincing enterprises and friends to make business with a company, Linden Lab, which proved to be unreliable, to have a maddening and erratic price policy, and to be completely out of contact with their user base.

My first reaction was to open an account in Open Life. At the moment many people were doing the same, going to Open Life was an illuminating experience because you’d find huge crowds of frightened Second Life emigrees. I prefer not to reproduce here literally was being said about the Lindens in Open Life at the time. Everybody was explaining their personal drama, telling how much money they had lost due to the price raise, and swearing they’d not trust Linden Lab anymore, never.

I bought a private cluster of four sims in Open Life to get some experience in the new world, I cloned the terrain from SL, and I started to migrate stuff using Second Inventory.

Condensation recreated in another grid: victory

I learned a lot in the process, but at the same time I realized that Open Life was not the place to be: there was no serious company behind (indeed most of the time it looked like a one-person project), scripts behaved erratically when they worked at all, and, above all, you were substituting the Lindens by the Openlifes, which was no improvement at all (indeed it was worse because of the above: there was no real company behind, etc).

I tried Legend City Online too, but it was performing so poorly that after some few attempts I stoped caring. And finally I also tried OSGrid, but OSGrid is not intended to be a stable grid, but as an experimental grid for technical pioneers.

Since both Open Life, LCO and OSGrid were based on Opensim, I decided to give it a try myself. I downloaded Opensim and MySQL and installed my first Opensim. Here’s a blog article I wrote about it.

I discovered that Opensim is a charm to work with! You can make a backup of your database and some few control files, and clone your micro-world anywhere else, avatars, inventory, terrain, scripts, objects, everything! After having lost inventory in Second Life (not to speak of Open Life too), feeling that you can always go back and recover inventory or assets if you need it is really invaluable. Besides, Justin Clark-Casey, a core Opensim developer, was developing a very nice tool to zip a whole region to what’s called an “Opensim Archive” — you can pack a region, terrain and all objects, into a relatively small .oar file, and unpack it in the same or in another world! Once you get used to regularly backing up your stuff, you realize that your property in Second Life is sequestered! You paid for it, but you can’t take it with you elsewhere, so you are in fact bound to continue using Second Life if you want to make use of it.

After quite a lot of work, I completed the migration of the Condensation Land archipielago to Opensim, and abandoned all the sims in Second Life except the Condensation Land sim itself. The process is described in detail here.

BG Magazine: What’s the main differences between SL Grid and Opensim grid? What’s the cool things and the ones to be improved?

Zonja Capalini: Well indeed there’s no such thing as an Opensim grid. Opensim is a program, a 3D application server, in the same way that Apache is a 2D application server; you get your web pages from Apache (or some other server brand), and you get your 3D spaces from Opensim.

Then using Opensim you can build grids, or host your own sim and join it to a preexisting grid, like OSGrid, for example.

I opted by creating my own grid — I thought I would learn more this way, and, above all, I wanted to have full control over my inventory, my objects, etc.

To me the coolest thing about Opensim is that you’re the grid owner. This means that you decide who’s to have an avatar there, you can use arbitrary names for the avatars, and, above all, you are in full control of your grid. You can backup the database where mostly everything is stored and recreate your grid somewhere else: no more inventory loss. You can create a full backup of a region and clone it in some other grid or give it to somebody else. You can make a full backup of your inventory and clone it in somebody else’s grid (that’s experimental at this time). And you can decide whether you run your grid as an isolated walled garden or whether you want to open it to the hypergrid, so that effectively you’re participating in a worldwide federation of grids, the Opensim metaverse.

Recreation: Zonja works her hypergrid

Another cool thing about Opensim is that you have easy access to the developers and to a lot of very helpful people. You can post your questions to opensim-users or opensim-dev, and there’s a big possibility that somebody will quickly answer your question. I’d call that a really excellent support. And in case you need a particular feature, you can offer to pay for it and find somebody who’ll implement it for you. Compare that to Second Life, which is extremely stagnant as a software platform: since the latest big changes (i.e, voice, Windlight, Havok 4 and Mono) they have added absolutely nothing to Second Life.

Hypergrid Condensation

The not so cool thing about Opensim is that it’s an alpha product, and therefore you can’t expect it to be as stable as Second Life is. And at the moment it’s a product for people with a somewhat strong technical background, if you want to do serious things with it. But anyway some of the latest releases are quite stable; indeed, if you take care to build things carefully, being in Opensim feels no different from being in Second Life.

But the real challenge for the Opensim grids is how to get access to quality content. At the moment you can find tons of freebies in many places, including Second Life, and some of these freebies (i.e., the ones that are full perms) you can move to Opensim. Most freebies are garbage, but some are not, so that if you’re careful you can get a pretty decent collection of stuff into Opensim. The problem with this approach is that it is extremely time-consuming, you have to be very careful and systematic if you want to avoid ending with an inventory which is a completely unusable mess, and not everybody has the time, the patience and the meticulousity to spend a lot of hours making this migration.

My guess is that the first quality merchants that find a way to sell their stuff in Opensim will make a lot of money. I wouldn’t have cared to pay again for my favourite stuff if I had known that this time it would be really mine.

BG Magazine: You still have a full sim in world. Why didn’t you leave completely Second Life after disappointment with Linden Lab policies?

Zonja Capalini: Second Life is still very interesting as a place. Nowadays, the biggest problem of Second Life are the Lindens You can’t set up a world, tell people to create it, and then manage it as if it was yours. I’m from the time where the slogan was “A world created and owned by its residents”. Well, I took that very seriously Second Life is still the place to be if you want to shop, party and socialize. But Opensim is growing and bettering very fast, so that this might change sooner than most people expect.

BG Magazine: Do you believe that other virtual worlds can someday be bigger than Second Life? Do you believe we can someday use an avatar in more than one world?

Zonja Capalini: Second Life is based in a model which cannot scale properly — not because of technological problems, which can in principle be overcome (although I have serious doubts that Linden Lab can effectively manage it), but because in the end it’s a model which is absurd. Think about the web: you can choose to host your web anywhere, including at home if you don’t have a lot of traffic. There are huge webs which get millions of hits a day and have access to huge bandwidth, and small, home based webs used by small communities, or even families. If somebody suggested to create a single, all-encompassing web where all the pages in the world would be hosted, you’d call her a fool. The same is true of the metaverse. The idea that there should be a single provider for the metaverse is absurd.

Still another comparison: back in the 80s, there was a big network called BITNET that offered a lot of the services we’re nowadays used to: it had email, a form of IM, file transfer, and some primitive forms of file servers (the predecessors of the WWW). This network died and was substituted by the Internet not because of the technology, but because it was centrally administered.

When a new node joined the network, the network administrator had to compile huge routing tables, which were customized for each node, and each node administrator had to install the updated routing tables. Of course, most node administrators were lazy or incompetent, the tables did not get installed, traffic was lost, etc. The internet won because it does not have a central authority and because it autoconfigures. The same is true of the metaverse: people want freedom, not to have to submit a ticket and wait an undetermined number of days to have the simplest of tasks done. People want freedom, not to be told what to do at their own homes. People want freedom to choose how they will use their sims; if they want to place 30000 prims in a region and have only three concurrent visitors, that’s their choice. They don’t want to be imposed arbitrary prim limits, as they don’t want to be charged for a 100 avatar capacity sim when they will never get more than 20 persons in their island.

Zonja at Hypergrid metaverse: new life

Regarding your question about using the same avatar in different worlds, you can already do that right now using Opensim. There exists a mechanism called “hypergrid” by which you can teleport between worlds, keeping all your inventory. This or a similar technology is clearly be the future for the metarevse. Here are some blog articles I wrote about hypergrid: [1],  [2], [3], and here’s a video showing an hypergrid travel from OSGrid to my own grid, the Condensation Land grid.

BG Magazine: Do you still have plans and projects for Second Life or do you believe it is better migrate to other worlds forever?

Zonja Capalini: Well we have already migrated to the hypergrided Opensim metaverse I have no plans for Second Life at the moment, and I doubt I’ll have them in the future. Second Life is technologically stagnant, run in a very unprofessional way, you’re subject to arbitrary price changes, and the content you buy is really not yours, because you can’t take it with you. In Opensim there’s very quick technical change and evolution, you can run it yourself, it’s much much cheaper, and you own what you create and what you acquire. Second Life is a nice place to shop and go dancing. For serious projects and for the enterprise, Opensim is the tool of choice.

SL Zonja: Now only for socialyze

[The interview ends here]

Some final remarks

Things move fast in the virtual worlds scenario. So fast indeed that in only two months, two of the statements contained in the interview would have to be revised.

On the one hand, Linden Lab has lately added HTTP-in LSL functions, taken its Avaline offer out of beta, announced the LLMedia API, and showed interesting prototypes of other technologies to come, apart from completely redesigning their web and spreading rumors about new improvements in 2010. One cannot continue to  sustain today that Second Life is a technically stagnant platform — a very welcome change indeed Anyway in other areas they continue to be hopelessly incorrigible: the umptenth price policy rectification for Openspace Homestead sims is a pathetic case of “too little, too late” — and they continue to treat their customer base as retarded children: putting a title that starts with “Good News” to that blog post looks like a weird mixture of sadism and blatant marketing inepcy

On the other hand, OSGrid turned two at the end of July and announced several improvements: a General Store, a completely redesigned web, including an achievements system, and a focus broadening to include new, more user-friendly continents apart from the traditional, test-oriented core. Therefore, my statement that “OSGrid is not intended to be a stable grid, but as an experimental grid for technical pioneers” should also have to be revised, at least partially — and that’s also a very welcome change.

Problem: Atmospheric moisture produces condensation (“sweating”) on cool surfaces in the basement, particularly walls, floors, and cold water pipes.

Solution: Insulate the water pipes. Promote good ventilation–sunlight and free movement of air can quickly dry out a basement. Ventilation should be regulated according to the weather conditions.

During hot, humid weather or long rainy spells, windows should be closed because the outside air will probably contain more moisture than the basement air. Heat the basement during the winter. During hot weather, use air conditioning to cool and dehumidify the air.

Insulating your pipes will also decrease your energy costs and save you money! Watch the video below to learn how to properly insulate your water pipes…