Have a lot of time on your hands? Figure out a name for yourself in Sindarin Elvish! It only takes several hours and a few web-sites to make an informed guess! If you dig a bit more you could probably come up with a name in the high-speech of the Numenoreans!

To get you started, here’s a good (the best?) lexicon with english to sindarin and sindarin to english dictionaries:

http://www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/online/english.html

Also, here’s a name-list site that gives you clues as to how to piece things together without delving into the nuts and bolts of language syntax:

http://www.realelvish.net/sindarin_names.php

Based on my name and appearance a few work-in-progress names in Sindarin would be:

Thindiel meaning Pale Daughter or Daughter of The Pale
Idhreneth meaning Wise Woman
Idhreniel meaning Daughter of Wisdom
Thindhreniel meaning Pale Daughter of Wisdom

I like Thindhreniel most of all so that is the name I will take for now. Even so, there were no good examples of as complex a structure that I could find readily so the syntax will have to be researched. Then again, often Tolkien’s names were contractions of original words so it would more likely past muster as a name if not as used in a sentence. I’ll render the name in the Elvish script of Quenya today or tomorrow just in case you’re not convinced I have idle time to spare during recovery! :) The only problem is using it in anything like one solid consecutive chunk to get anything really productive done. Blergh!

Jani

This is a very funny video about the rise and fall of fortunes of the typical silicon valley .com set to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” Well worth watching and totally work safe.

As soon as I heard about SLeek I knew I’d find it useful. Notice I said useful, not appealing. Using the official Second Life client is a wonderful and unique experience and SLeek certainly can’t match it. What it can do though is bring a lot of the utility of Second Life to computers otherwise unable to run the official Second Life client. Even if you’ve got a fairly powerful system, running Second Life on a secondary display while trying to do anything else system intensive is likely to result in unacceptable performance all around. On these occasions SLeek appears to offer what we never knew we needed: a relatively light-weight SL chat client that provides additional functionality like the ability to move throughout the metaverse, IM friends or chat with those around you, and generally interact with the grid as if it were a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Definitely worth a look if you’re technologically adventurous and not terribly risk averse. My best advice? Use an alt if possible if you decide to give SLeek a try and avoid the inventory menu as if your inventory depended on it…it probably does!