What do you know. It seems that I now have a way to blog from within SecondLife. I created a seperate account for my avatar “Dedric Mauriac” to post to this website. So be on the lookout for SecondLife information from him for now.
Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Blogging from within Second Life
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006Second Blogaversary
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006So I’m about an hour away from having my second blogaversary. 7:44 pm, two years ago, I tried my hand at blogging with my first post. The first year was great. I was posting like mad. I tried my best to get a post in about something every day. Now things have changed. Ever since my wife introduced me to SecondLife, I’ve been hooked.
There just seems to be too much time involved with blogging. SecondLife has a larger value for entertainment. I’m able to be just as creative there, but in a 3-dimensional space. Hopefully soon we will get web pages displayed on our prims. For rite now, I can only blog through my watch over on SLStats.com.
Any how, my mother in-law purchased an XBox 360 live for me today. I picked up a wireless adapter for it and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I’m still trying to get the thing to connect to my windows media center. When was it that game consoles became computers?
I don’t know what to write
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006This post is pointless. I have no idea what I should write about. Perhaps just writing about it is enough on it’s own accord. It’s as if I found a way to take advantage of writers block by writing about it. Too bad I can’t do it every day though.
It seems that this post is going to be small as well. I ran out of things to say about not knowing what to write.
Automagic Podcaster
Saturday, May 6th, 2006Since my interest in recording my dreams has been renewed, I’ve started fixing up the code to my audio blog. I mainly call it “Automagic Podcaster” due to the fact that all the end-user has to do is upload MP3 files onto there site. The code reads all the meta data about the MP3 files that have ID3 tags embedded within them.
Some of the MP3 tagging software that I’ve been using lack features such as Unicode support and chapters. I tried doing translations of my dreams in Japanese, Arabic, Chinease, and Portuguise and saving them as lyrics. Most other languages that I translated using google had problems with some characters. I soon fixed that by using html entities to represent the special characters. I sent an email off to the author of a particular piece of software. I’m hoping that maybe he is already working on somethng similar for the next version of his software.
Anyhow, I’m thinking that soon I may just package everything up, clean the code a little, and look into posting it as open source software. I don’t know what all is involved. I’m using a flash applet to read and play XSPF feeds on my pages to play the mp3 files, so I need to contact the author to see if I can distribute it along with my code and what additional requirements there may be.
Remember Spam?
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006These days, most of my comments in moderation are in regards to what appears to be some kind of diet pill. I fear even mentioning it for I may be marked as a splog by search engines.
The upgrade of my blogging software went smoothly last night. I even signed up for a WordPress account so that I could get a special key for a new plug-in called Akismet. I just figured it was a new requirement for the moderation of comments that I used before. Apparently, I was wrong. I got a little message when I logged in today.
Akismet has protected your site from 3 spam comments.
It appears that comments are now differentiated between moderation and spam. I can hardly believe it. Now I just have to view them and mark individual ones as “not spam”. No other requirements are necessary on my part in regards to spam. Gone are the days where I would have to mark spam as spam when moderating legitimate comments.
One day, perhaps, I may forget what spam is was.
WordPress 2.0
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006Tonight I backed up my database and the entire site. The reason was simple. I wanted to upgrade my blog software to the next version of WordPress. It has been out for about a month now, but I’m just now getting around to it. It is a bit easier then I had expected. The hard part was just backing up things.
Once I got everything uploaded for 2.0, I found that my website was just a blank white page. I forgot to leave my content folder that had all of my themes in it. I uploaded the content back into the folder and my site was looking normal again.
The back-end administration is very nice to look at now. I now have a nice editor to edit my posts, but it isn’t too friendly with the Google toolbar spellcheck feature. The spellcheck does work, but once you correct a word, some resizing glyphs appear around it. Once you are done spell checking, the background does not turn back to white. Still, I can work with it.
One interesting feature is the ability to upload files for individual posts. I may have to try that out. I also noticed that you can now have screenshots of your themes. I created one for mine and uploaded it. Just make sure the name of your file is screenshot.png and appears in the same folder as your theme. I didn’t try other image formats.
That’s about it for now. Time to sleep.
Catching Dreams
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006It’s been a while since I posted any of my dreams online. I think I got a little side tracked with a lot of things happening. I got around to posting the last four dreams from last year onto my Dreamy Audio podcast. As always, my dreams are a bit odd. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write transcripts for them. Since it has been a few months, I don’t remember the dreams too well or what I was saying in that half-woken up state. I tried my best to help out. Anyhow, if you don’t have an iPod or another audio player, you can simply listen to the files by downloading them to your computer or using the flash player on the web page. You can always get your own free iPod too and hang out with all the cool kids.
Dreamy Audio 063 – Expensive Networking
Dreamy Audio 064 – Damaged Cards
Dreamy Audio 65 – Barn Renovation
Dreamy Audio 66 – Joke Fighter
Automagic Podcaster
Sunday, November 27th, 2005Today I learned how to pull images out of my audio files. Woohoo! I also started using a free little program called ID3-TagIT to add meta data to my files. So far, everything is working like a charm.
So let me tell you a little bit about the reason I’m doing all of this. Podcasting! A few of you may have known about my Dreamy Audio podcast. Every now and then I wake up and speak into a voice recorder about what I had just dreamt about. Eventually, I get around to moving the files to my computer, editing them, and then uploading to the website.
There are many steps involved in this process. I’m aiming to take a few steps out by automating a few things. With the scripts that I have been setting up, you just upload an audio file into a directory and forget about it. The scripts read all of the meta data and build your feeds, a blog-like website, and it even has a flash audio player on the front page that lets visitors play the most recent audio files.
Once I had an edited file ready, I used to upload it to a separate site and tell that site to publish things over to my blog. I would have to enter data for a few things but was not pleased how it would strip away any meta data that I had already placed in the file.
The ID3-TagIT program is helping out very much as well. I am no longer limited to the fields that iTunes and Win amp permit me to use. ID3-TagIT lets you edit just about every known field. It does not yet support chapters though. You can visit the new podcast for Dreamy Audio or take a look at some of the details that I can pull out of an audio file.
I eventually want to package the script and let the community use it to make there own podcasts much easier.
Nothing Meaningful
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005Nothing to see here folks. Please move along to tomorrow.
Five Minutes to Go
Monday, November 7th, 2005Five minutes left! That’s when I noticed that it was almost midnight and that I didn’t blog yet. I had just walked in the door and had some fruit pastries in my hand. So put two and two together and what do you get? Something meaningless to blog about.
Ya!
Anyhow, Angel says that the microwave is ready for me now. I’ll be sure to try and think of something more meaningful to post about tomorrow.
Update
So I nuked the four pastries for two and a half minutes. In the end, I got to lay on the icing. Once the icing started to melt, creepy thoughts started to go through my head just looking at it. It reminded me of a scene from Van Wilder where a few “special” pastries were delivered to Richards fraternity. My wife and sister in-law had there heads in the sink gagging and laughing at the same time for a half hour.
I got over it and dug in. Yum. Just look at that picture of the box. Those pastries are just full of strawberry “stuff” and loads of cream cheese. The icing is a bright solid white. These things are hollow inside. It looks like someone sprayed a little bit of strawberry jelly on the inside.
It was good, but now it is gone.
