This is actually the third run of "Local Ad": 9PM Thursday, April 3. Its first rerun was after the state of the union speech in January.

The Dunder Mifflin group in Second Life, created for the filming of the episode, has grown to over 1000 members based on word of mouth, and Clear Ink will once again open up its backlot on Channing for fans of "The Office" to gather after tonight's episode airs.

In October, the original airing of "Local Ad" followed by a day the premiere of Second Life as a major component of a story in CBS's "CSI:NY". That episode was the first of a two-part story that was to have concluded in February. Due to the WGA strike, the concluding episode did not air until last night, once again the night before "The Office" episode. However a funny thing seemed to have happened on the road to part to of "CSI:NY". For the most part, the Second Life tie-in went away. There was no mention of Second Life or virtual worlds, and the brief scene of the villain in a virtual world was very un-Second-Life-like. This may have been planned all along, or the conclusion was revised. I won't speculate here, but that story will probably be told (link to follow).

If you missed the "Local Ad" episode of "The Office" on April 3, you can always catch it here on hulu.com.

You can also catch part 1 or part 2 of the CSI:NY episodes at cbs.com.

It’s been a while since I’ve been as disappointed in a consumer electronics product as I am with my new Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Disc Player.

The setup was smooth, and the picture is great – really great.

However: I have certain usability expectations in upgrading from an older standard DVD player, especially given that this is a second generation Blu-ray player. From the “Powered by Java” on the box and the 4 page GNU license in the manual, this is a computer in a DVD player enclosure and doesn’t do a whole lot to hide that fact.

It takes about 3 minutes to boot this particular computer when I hit the power-on, and then another minute or so before I can watch a movie. It also seems to power itself off after being in pause for a bit – helping to keep us green I guess. But it doesn’t remember where I was in the movie, so coming back in the room after a phone call, it takes another 4 minutes to reboot the “computer” and use chapter search (once I’m allowed to do that) to get to approximately where I left off.

Maybe I need to RTFM, but unfortunately, it really is a FM. It looks like it was written circa 1988, and it’s one of those manuals where you wonder why they left 2/3 of the relevant info out of the manual, and then 2/3 of what’s left can’t be found in the index. At least it’s replete with notes that say essentially, “This may not work”.

My guess is that the format wars caused everyone to be a bit too hasty in product development and rollout because it shows.

[updated in the comments - Nov 23, 2008]

One of the highlights of TED 2008 for me was watching “visual cartographers” David Sibbet and Kevin Richards capture the essence of the presentations with their amazing illustrations, sketched, posted and shared in real time using Autodesk’s BIGVIZ system. From a practical point of view, a lot of my post-TED blues is trying to sort out all the ideas from my scribbles. BIGVIZ is a perfect transactive memory because it is a clear notation of what I remember from the talks.

Thanks to Autodesk, the BIGVIZ document is available for all to download as a PDF (along with a movie).

I was familiar with David Sibbert’s work through his work as Sunseed Bardeen at “The Grove” in Second Life, where he’s using yet another remarkable canvas for visualization. It’s worth a visit to see what he’s done there, as well.

One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.

You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....

And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.

Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!