Wednesday 1 August 2007

Back Again - What We Did on Our Hols

Well Mrs K and I are back from our Grand Tour and before plunging back into my virtual travels I thought I'd share a few piccies with you.

Our first stop was at Arras, in Northern France:


We then moved on to Colmar, in Alsace:

The building in the middle, Le Maison Des Tetes, was our hotel for the night. Cool, huh?

We then drove across Germany and into the Czech Republic, and Cesky Krumlov, a little jewel of a place:




On the return leg we stayed overnight in a charming hotel, the oddly named Palmspring, in the back of beyond in the Black Forest - where it rained:


Our final overnight stop was Bruges (or Brugge, depending on your point of view):




A hectic week: 2250 miles; 43hrs actually spent on the road... but it was great fun, and we saw some amazing places.

+++

And in other news... I picked up a snippet on the IBM Second Life guidelines:
...restrictions could come in the form of such guidelines as the one IBM has put in place for its employees utilizing Second Life. The Associated Press story said that employees do not have an online dress code, but must be “especially sensitive to the appropriateness of your avatar or persona’s appearance when you are meeting with IBM clients or conducting IBM business.”

According to the story, IBM also states that “dramatically altering, splitting, or abandoning your digital persona may be a violation of…trust… In the case of a digital persona used for IBM business purposes, it may violate your obligations to IBM.”

And am left to consider: "What does this mean for my chum, Epredator Potato?"

UPDATE: Epredator has provided some interesting comments to this post. For information, here is the link to the IBM guidelines webpage.

4 comments:

Rhino said...

Welcome back to the metaverse Al! What gorgeous pictures. Looks like you had an interesting trip.

epredator said...

I too am back from hols, and hence catching up on all things bloglike and metaversal.
I am glad ou had a nice time :-)
These guidelines are just that, guidelines. It was a team effort to write them.
It does not really mean anything different. I hope we got across that you appear in an appropriate way for the event or place you are attending.
That does not mean real life constraints still.
It is about sensitivity to culture, just as in RL.
I posted a comment on eightbar, as related this to holidays here
The most important message is that we are trying to help people learn and pick up from where we are at the moment.
I do not always go out and about in the predator av, after all my fabjectory one and more chilled out look just has green spikey hair and an eightbar t-shirt.
So these guidelines are as much driven by eightbar as anything else. It does however try to balance everyones views. You can imagine our first draft may have been "just go for it" or something similar :-)
This would be compared and contrasted with the alternate view of "just dont do anything".
Somewhere between those (but nearer the first statement) is where we have ended up with this.

Timbo said...

I knew of the spikey, green-haired avatar, having seen your posts on other worlds, like Kaneva.

I gather this whole "professional look" debate has got a tad out of hand among some folks. I take the view that business meetings really require a "toned down" appearance, particularly when non-SLers are present. It is a balancing act: too extreme an appearance serves to undermine the value of SL in the eyes of non-SLers. By the same token, overly conservative appearance (trying to mimic RL in SL) inevitably looks false, and this also undermines the value.

As I pointed out to VJ, one may feel there is no need for guidelines - until someone turns up in the guise of a giant set of male genitalia!

PortSeven said...

Or female...

Though I guess you could use the excuse is it's 'dress-down-day'