Lewies Blog

I’ve just gone through a night mare. I’m still just exhausted from the experience. I’ve recently got my tax refund on payday, so I have over $6,000 to my name at this moment. What better way to spend it then invest in a nice HDTV?

I’ve trodden along with my mother in-law going to different stores and comparing prices and features. I finally settled on a 42″ plasma HD Monitor from AKAI for $1497.76. I went into Sam’s club, picked up one of many tickets available under the television and went to the front to purchase it. I headed over to customer service afterwards to pick it up. Unfortunately, there was only 1 television in there inventory and that was the floor model.

After a half hour of store employees running around and figuring out what to do, I was left with a refund of $1572.65 including taxes. Since I purchased it with my debt card, they could only refund in cash. The cashier started counting money and quickly ran out of hundreds and fifties. I’m there looking at the pile of money dreading the fact that I would be carrying it all out in an overstuffed wallet.

“Don’t worry, we can just call the bank if I don’t have enough”, she said. “More time”, I thought. In the mean time, my mother in-law and niece were waiting outside in the van for me. I came up with an idea and asked if it could all be put on my Wal-Mart card. “Just pretend that you cave me all the cash, and then take it all back as a payment on my card”, I said. After thinking about it, she agreed that it would work.

So in the end, I walked out with an over-paid Wal-Mart Credit Card and a form to file a complaint. It took me a while to find that form as well, as it was well hidden behind a display at the exit. I spent a minute trying to reach back far enough to grab it.

I’ve got such a head ache from this. My wife started rubbing my temples and it helped relax me much. Still, I feel like I went through all of that hell for no reason. Next time I’ll go to customer service first if I make a purchase like that in Sam’s Club again.

The cashiers computer should have picked up the fact that there were not any television models remaining. Even if the floor model was available (which it wasn’t), the computer should have flagged it as such and directed the cashier to confirm that I did want it. Customer service should have been able to issue a ticket of some kind to me to let me come back when the televisions did come in stock again so one would be reserved and paid for in my name. Someone should have removed all tickets under the display model once all available inventory was sold out. I should have been given some form of compensation for having gone through this ordeal.

We didn’t listen! Scientist have been predicting that the Mad Bird disease could mutate and spread to humans everywhere. Several groups from the WHAT (World Heathens And Terrorists) had claimed responsibility for the outbreak. The U.S. is still investigating as to authenticity of the beta max tapes received from the media network OverZhere.

As to what the mad bird disease is exactly, researches have broken it down. Terrorists have combined the Mad Cow Disease Strand #p38 with a mutated version of the Bird Flue TX-780. They synthesised the results on a DANDY 8088 computer. The problem was that the first Mad Bird strands couldn’t infect other systems other then the DANDY on a Thursday at 5:15 in the afternoon (GMT).

Early intelligence reports were gathered about this terrorist conspiracy. Scientists stated that the threat was imminent if the strand would be able to mutate. The warnings were played down through politics, bureaucracy, and animosity . Politicians are blaming the recent changes to the Metacare system and calling for a bipartisan committee to determine if investigations should be started. The rest of us are looking around confused as to what all the fuss is about, but emotionally playing that we care.

At 5:16 on Thursday of last week, the strand mutated. It spanned all over the internet taking over systems. The WHAT has disclosed the virus causes global warming. Members of the WHAT were available for comment, but we choose not to ask out of spite.

In an effort to safeguard it’s population, China as well as a few libraries in the red states have closed there borders to almost all internet access filtering out keywords such as “Mad”, “Bird”, “Disease”, “Flu”, and “Gay Marriage”. What the people don’t know can’t hurt them and will keep them safe. China is known to be an exporter of 95% SPAM mail to the US and will continue to allow its message to be heard, regardless of the outbreak.

“Ouw citizens must be heawd.”, claimed a non-important political figure that no one has heard of. “We awe allowing ouw citizens to send messages to the outside wowld. This is in obsewvance of the Fwee-Speech wites in the U.S. Fiwst Amendment. This is done to pwomote a healthy welationship between ouw two countwies.” Meanwhile, sources estimate that China is reponsible for the speedy spread of the epidemic due the massive amounts of viruses attached to its outgoing SPAM.

Crashing in Second Life isn’t so bad usually, as you just start up the client and go. Some crashes in SecondLife are annoying though. I can simply log in, but my internet worm detection software kicks in and prompts me roughly twenty times if I want to permit a remote system to access second life.

Maybe it is a problem with my internet worm detection software. I wish there was an option to permit or block all access. Instead, I have to manually click through each dialog box. I even tried setting up some filters for IP blocks so that any IP from there location isn’t blocked. I still had problems.

I’ll just pull my hair out for a while until I can get through all of these messages.

So yesterday, I went out looking for some trees. I own a small chunk of the world in Second Life and I didn’t like many of the trees that are provided to me. Lynuor and I headed out and found a place called Fate Gardens. We grabbed a few trees for the lot. I saw a boat while we were there and we both tried to ride it. It complained that we were not the owner. Lynour said she knew of a place where we could go.

We ended up at RiverWalk and CliffHouse. Rite away I was in love with a few wind chimes blowing in the wind. I couldn’t find them until the end. I tried to buy some birdseed to feed to a few birds, but my money was thrown back at me. We guessed that you could only do it during the day time. Lyn walked around the docks and led me down to the swans. You could rent either a black or white swan at 5 L$ for thirty minutes.

I purchased the boat and sat down to drive. She came next to me and we went around the river ever so slowly. The night was so quiet except for a few birds and some classical music. There was no one there but us.

We got off at another dock and causally played with the water. I would swing my feet back and forth while she swayed her hand and felt the water flow past it. She then sat curled up against a wall and started to cry. I offered her my hand and we went to the higher decks for a dance.

There was plenty of impressive artwork to look at. I was admiring some stained glass pieces regarding the knights virtues of honor. We walked through a forest nearby and saw some leaves falling down. Lyn commented how a friend of ours promised her falling leaves, but all he ever ended up doing was working on an artificial life project. It seemed pretty simple and I told her that I would take care of it.

Today we went out and looked around at Serenite Gardens. I showed her the different colors of butterfly bowls that were similar to one that I had bought from there in the past. I picked up a Luminaria bag to light up the place back at home. I started to play with a few animations for spell weaving. I saw my hand was making a sign in the air when invoking, but I couldn’t make it out. I had an idea what it was. To be sure, I started making a particle emitter rite there to see. I attached it to my finger and sure enough saw the sign. It was a pentagram.

Throughout the day I started to work on a small project. I created a mushroom and then I built a frog on top of it. It was a bit hard and I looked at many different pictures on Google to get an idea of what a frog looks like. My favorite picture was of a blue frog with black spots on its back. I left out the spots, but I think he looks pretty good.

At the end of tonight I worked on creating a leaf. It took a good while but I eventually came up with something. After uploading it to Second Life, I was able to put a particle emitter together pretty quick. At first, the leaves were bouncing. It was a funny sight, but I got that fixed. When I put it together over our stone circle, the place started to really come to life.

So what can I say? I’m a bit addicted to this game. I went downstairs to give a good night kiss to my wife and I find that she is having a tough time trying to make horns for a friend of hers. I helped her get a bit closer to what she was trying to accomplish, but we couldn’t do it. We used a torus, increased its revolutions, and tapered one of the ends. It looked great, but the real problem was getting it to mirror itself. I went back to my computer and fired up the game.

I logged in at my workshop and tried all kinds of silly things. As I mutilated my primitives, I kept running into the same problems. Eventually I headed on over to the Ivory tower to see if they had any example of rams horns. I made it half way up and started to play with prims before I found anything. I found the answer.

I sent a copy to my wife and headed on over. I found her with her friend who had some horns made of a ton of spheres. Well, I guess it works. From there I started playing with the horns on my head until I got something that looked much better.

I looked at my clock and saw how late it was. So now, I’m going to sleep.

Last night, my wife informs me that her mother is on the phone and would like to speak with me. As I take the phone from her, I notice something … odd. She and five of her friends were dancing around a toilet that was spewing blood. It was actually quite funny to look at it. Someone had made a bunch of prims everywhere to look like blood on the floor. I’ve heard of being knee deep in water and mud, but blood? Behind them I saw a picket sing that said, “Drama”, with a circle and slash over it to mean “No Drama”.

Another friend of hers was a really tiny reaper who would go around and hack at there legs. There avatars would be animated to fall down bleeding while there legs fell off.

Well, that is Second Life for you. You can do just about anything your imagination can think of. If you can build it, they can worship it. This morning they found a few things laying about that didn’t lead the imagination too far that there was an orgy about after she had left and gone to bed. Certain genital attachments were laying about along with some pose balls for intimate animations in the left over blood. Funny as can be, but had it been real life, it would make me just a tad bit sick.

While I was at work, one of my coworkers sent me an instant message stating that he received his Dead Can Dance live album in the mail. I was excited since I had ordered two of them myself from the concert that we went to.

When I got home, sure enough two packages were in my mailbox. My album is 0286 of 1000. I have another that was meant to be a Christmas gift. These were supposed to arrive in November, but shipping had been delayed for various reasons.

During this time in between, Dead Can Dance had released another album, Memento: The Very Best of Dead Can Dance. Some day, I’ll go ahead and get that one too. I have 10 albums now and they are all fantastic. Ten percent of my five star ratings have been songs by this group alone.

I didn’t like the packaging too well. The case was different in that it resembled the size of a DVD case. The two discs inside were placed together - one on top of the next. This isn’t great for anyone who wants to play the discs often, as they can scratch against each other when you remove and put them back. Fortunately, I have an iPod and get to import the music strait to that. I have a nice shelf to place the Dead Can Dance album on display so that I can see it any time I go into my storage room.

I found that the track list wasn’t available from CDDB just yet so I uploaded some track names for both discs in case anyone else could use them later on. As my luck would have it, the CD-ID on the CD itself is probably unique on each disc.

My vacation has just about come to an end. With that, things are going to progress a bit slower with my projects in Second Life. My primary project is working on the Particle Lab. Zeno had originally made a giant table with which people could interact with different “stations”. I began taking it a step further, practically starting from scratch. My biggest concern was that the old lab wasn’t too user friendly. The other problem was that the particle emitter couldn’t be attached to the table, because Zeno and I wanted to have it moving to demonstrate some of the effects.

The new particle lab has three parts to it. The first is a rotating particle emitter. It does what you tell it to do. The real brains behind the project is in the main controller and its substations. The main controller will change the current control set on top of it to the next set. Each set interacts with the particle emitter, sending it messages to toggle and adjust different features of particles. The main station also has the ability to output LSL script to create your own particle emitter. I also set up an object to be created so that someone may save there work and take it with them.

Some other projects that I worked on in between that was the Easel with Canvas, and the Comment Box. Lynour had made the Easel and canvas for her art gallery. I made a suggestion that I could set it up so that she could show multiple pieces of art on the same canvas. I got the script setup to also display text over top of each picture to let people know the name of the art, and who made it. As an added bonus, I added a feature so that you get a note card about the specific piece of art if one is available.

In the end, I tried to make a small box that you could drop note cards into as comments for the artist. I had problems when it was attached to the canvas itself. I ended up creating an entire new object to let people drop note cards. You can use the arrows on each side to iterate through each note cards name, and the creator of the note card.

There are still a ton of other little projects that I had done such as fish, an aquarium, particles of grass, dandelions and fire flies. I also made a special particle box for my wife. When she runs and flies, it leaves a trail of sparkles behind her. It also makes a trail pointing at someone if she gives a command to look for someone near by.

So there has been so much going on in Second Life. I try to blog, but this game is taking over my Real Life. When it is time to sleep, I’m too tired to do much else, or I would play more. It seems as if my blog is becoming a Second Life blog. I wonder how long it will last.

Anyhow, I’m really addicted to scripting things in the world. Zeno Concord has an artificial life project going on called “alife”. At least, that is the name of all of his objects. The object is that you click on an object that is appealing to you. It spawns an egg and fertilizes it. The egg hatches into a similar object with some changes. Its fun to see how this little project of his has progressed. I met him through Twisted Tardis and Lynuor Richelieu.

Twisted Tardis is of my neighbors in Dagger. I met him while he was building some planets high above the clouds in the sky. It’s amazing to look at them at night. He can go on for a while just talking about the different things that he is working on them with. Down at ground level, Lynuor Richelieu was doing some landscaping for him.

I have a place of my own setup as a laboratory. The place is getting situated, but could use a few more things. I have a room to watch movies, a planetarium to watch my neighbors planets at night, and a regeneration chamber. Since My character is a bit on the sci-fi side, I needed some really cool gadget to make for sleeping.

Lynuor is a really cool woman. At the moment, she lets me build things on her parcel. I’m working on an interactive particle system with Zeno there. I’m also building some fish for her Japanese garden that react to physics. Every now and then her and I will go out to try different pose balls for her landscaping projects. You need to have two people in order to try out the couples pose balls. We found a whole string of them and made up an ongoing story about what was going on as we tried out different ones.

Alika Bertone is another member of Dagger. I was looking around at other houses and she came down and spotted me. I hung out at her place and watched a ton of music videos for a few hours with her. We would joke about what we saw and how crazy the 80’s were. Back then, anything would make it as a music video.

One person I find amazing is Cyndane Desmoulins. She owns a home in the sky that is wonderful. The roof opens up and the shades on almost every side lift up to give you a view of the clouds just below her house. She has an eye for catchy outfits and she has a ton of them. We’ll go on and talk for an hour or two just about anything while she continuously changes and shows off her wardrobe. She has also shown me some really good places to shop for skins and clothing for myself.

If you are interested in seeing what it is all about, head on over to the Second Life website and sign yourself up for a free account. You can build, explore, meet, get a job, join some groups, shop, sell items and so much more. The world is yours to do as you please.

I’ve gotten pretty good at scripting in Second Life. I’ve gotten through the basics for lists, primitives, moving objects and the such. Now I got an odd problem. I’m trying to wag a fish tail. I thought I had figured out how to do it. It looked like it was wagging just fine. The problem came when the fish rotated along its Z axis. As soon as that happened, the X axis changed and the tail rotated 90 degrees and wagged up and down.

Sooner or later, this fish will need to be able to rotate on all three axis (X, Y, Z) and still have its tail wag normally. I will just have to go back to the drawing board and work this one out. This Euler and radian stuff really has me confused with determining how to interact with the local and global axis. All I want to do is wag 20 degrees left and right. Is that so hard to do? Even a gold fish can do it.