Lewies Blog

In the middle of my working day, I ran into a problem. I was sort of going blind. Not completely. I could see parts, but it was like a ton of blind spots in my eye that I kept trying to, but just couldn’t see around. It was horrible. It wasn’t just looking at my computer screen, but just everything around me. I remember just looking at the screen and all of this white space on it. My eyes started to hurt and I looked up.

One thing that I did earlier in the weeky was change the resolution of my monitor to be much higher. Lucky for me, I made all my system fonts bigger too. I was able to make out enough parts to make the resolution smaller. I also turned the brightness down to the lowest setting and turned the contrast down a bit as well. Although it was easier on my eyes, I was still having this problem.

So many thoughts went rushing through my head. Maybe I should just go home. How the heck could I drive home? Would anyone be able to pick me up? What if this is perminent? What if this is a look into the near future? How am I going to be able to ever work on a computer again? Is it something I ate? Is it because I’m not eating enough? Is it from stress? Is it my medication? Is it going to get worse?

So many questions arrise with life changing events like these. Lots of coincidences and paranoia just come to light. I remember a co-worker commenting about how an LCD screen would be better on the eyes then the monitor I have. I thought about my posture, and perhaps a protective screen on the monitor.

The good news is that it gradually passed over 15 minutes. It just shocks the heck out of you. I left my monitor settings dark and in a low resolution for the remainder of the day.

For anyone who is interested to listening to my dreams, you can now check them out over on the PodShow+ Network.

http://lewiesdreamyaudio.podshow.com/

Also, anyone in SecondLife can check out my booth over at PodShow Island. There are a few free props from my dreams that you can grab for free.

So the rumors from over a year ago, and the Dead Like Me set appearing on Stargate seemed to have added up.

Dead Like Me appeared on Sci-Fi last night. It was a two hour special of the first episode from the first season. I couldn’t set there an watch it over when I played it on my DVR. I tried, but my mind was on other things. If it was a third season, then I would have been into it. I haven’t looked into any rumors on the internet, but hopefully Sci-Fi will start casting the third season.

I went outside of my house in search of sounds.  I have been working on creating a dunking both within SecondLife to help support a fundraising event for the American Cancer Society.  As a member of Caledon, I am supporting our team in the Relay for Life.  This Friday we have a “Jail your friends or Bail them out” event to help raise some funds to support the cause.

looking_for_sound.mp3

I did one thing very different today.  I canceled a trial before I was billed for the real deal.  Over at Ancestry.com, I signed up for a trial account.  You can either choose to be billed immediately and each additional month for 29.95, or you can go with a 14 day free trial and pay an annual fee of $155.40 ($12.95 / month).

I went with the free trial.  Usually, I forget about trial expirations and such and let accounts expire.  Sometimes, services such as Ancestry.com will bill you immediately after the trial expires.  The extra hoop to jump through with this service is that I was required to call them within specific hours of the day as well in order to opt-out of the service.

Just 2 days to go and I called them up.  I had forgotten about it for most of the past week too.  So in reality, I just saved myself $155.40 in a service I wouldn’t use.

I guess this is one of the small things that I’m doing that is helping me get that financial comfort cushion in the bank.  I could really use that money on something else - like a set of new computers for my wife and I.  I think a lot when I go grocery shopping like this too.  I could get a snack, or put that money towards something else.  Yes, it’s only $5, but another way to think of it is that it is $5 extra in my pocket if I don’t use it.  It’s like rewarding yourself with your own money you don’t use.  Best of all, it’s tax free.

The other day I saw an auction up on SL Exchange to be in an interview for an upcomming newspaper in SecondLife called SL Times. Auctions are something on SL Exchange that I hadn’t tried out yet and I figured, Why not?

I kept getting errors every time I tried to bid. I notified the sites support and they had it fixed the next day. Surprising enough, I was the only one to bid and won for only 1000 L$ (about $3 US).

Tonight, Luke Birdbrain interviewed my avatar, Dedric Mauriac. I was at a loss at first for what exactly I wanted the story to be about. I ended up showing him the variouse things that I make in the game. Some of the ideas behind the things and how they come about. He was drooling over a few items such as the Game Clock, Comment Box, and my Message Board.

I was starting to wonder who won the auction. I handed a game clock to him free and also gave him my open-source voice box that I am working on.

Usually, my money worries are because I’m in the red.  I’ve been in debt so deep with my checking account, that I’d be seven, or eight hundred dollars in the red each payday.  Now, I’m in the black.  I’ve lent out a lot of money, and I still have a nice cushion in the black.

It has me worried.  I’m hunting for where I may have gone wrong.  Was there a bill neglected?  I rarely read my mail.  I discovered a letter that my wife and her mother laid out for me that was dated back around February about my car insurance being canceled.  I thought this was the second time and that I’d been driving without insurance this whole time.  Last time it was just a day.  It turns out, that this was the same letter from last time, but warning me that my insurance was about to be canceled.

I’ve got a check from my car insurance agency too for the new policy number.  It says that I’ve overpaid my premium and refunded me $80.  I logged onto the website just to make sure.  I still had an account.

So for now, I’ll keep worrying until I find something. Eventually, maybe this cushion will build up enough that I can get new computers for my wife and I to play SecondLife a bit better.

So now smaller updates for SecondLife are comming very often. After installing the program, I’m always prompted with this little dialog box asking “Start SecondLife Now?”. Give me a break! It’s not like I don’t eat, sleep, and breathe SecondLife. That’s like asking a fish if they would like to swim. Well, not really. A fish can’t comprehend what you are asking.

So I’m getting a bit low on money this week and my wife asks if she can have some extra cash.  I told her to send 7,000 Lindens my way in SecondLife and I’ll give her a twenty.  I worked it out later in the day that the conversion rate would be at 6,441.

So any how, she got a friend of hers to give her some Lindens and handed them over to me after she discovered that I was seriouse.  So now my extra lindens are up for sale and she has a crisp US $20 bill in her hands.

So I’m trying out Ancestry.com and having a heck of a time finding info about me and my family. It’s like, you need to rethink the normal way that you search on the internet. Tons of names come back, and the thing is, my name is rare. Or so I thought. How many people have you met with the last name of “Moten”?

Anyhow, I’m looking through some personal records that I have at home and look at my birth certificate. Nothing new there. I begin to put it back in the safe box and notice some faint writing on the back. A closer look gives me some sought out information I have been curiouse about for years.

9 lbs. 4 ozs. 4:40 am.

Woohoo! Now I can figure out a closer target for when I’ll be a billion seconds old this year. I’ll only be off by +/- 59 seconds at the most.

Saturday, February 03, 2007 6:26:40 AM