Month: April 2010

Peep Racing


I’ve noticed, and others have commented as well, that I don’t seem to DO much in SL anymore. *grin* If I am not at a concert/performance, I’m hanging about at home, chatting with friends. Sort of a glorified IM/Email. So when Panacea IM’d me and said I had to come join her, odds were that I’d decline. Except….. Pan has an unerring instinct for those SL adventures that will make me laugh and remember why I love SL so much. She never tells me WHAT she is doing. She simply says “I’m having fun and you have to see this, you will love it.” She’s not been wrong yet.

I accepted the taxi and found myself in Easter Spring Town, in Venice Isle. Pan and Lucy were already there, Peep racing. /me blinks rapidly. “Peep racing”? Oh yes, at Easter Spring Town, they have large Peeps (like those revolting sugar confections that everyone loves to devour at Easter time). You rez a peep, hop on, and race the course. There are even fans in the stands, cheering you on as you pass. ROFL. I swear – you get crowd noises. Of course, you may be laughing too hard to hear them. I was, the first time.

We raced a few times. I had great difficulty holding my lane. Now why is that NOT a surprise? Pan of course flew that course like a fiend, a total Peep-racing natural. *grin* We ended up wandering about into the fields, off course, coming and going, riding our peeps about the sim. There are many other fun stores and freebies. Check out the bunny-shaped smoke from the chimneys. All in all, another fun adventure in SL. Let’s arrange for the SL Peep 500. I’m not sure that the Peeps have as much power as my Grifter bike or some of my flying machines, but they are definitely sillier and more colorful! Thanks Panacea!! You were right – I DID have to see that and I DID love it!!! (more pics on my Flickr account)

Ahuva, Alpha Dog

AKC photo: http://www.akc.org/images/breeds/border_collie/lg_artwork.jpg

In my house, we use 2 different words for that description. Alpha is replaced by “Top” and dog is replaced by… I’m sure you can fill in the blank. *grin* It was all the fault of my pekingnese, Ching Li. I didn’t even LIKE him all that much at the time, and couldn’t understand why he always came to me. The dog trainer explained that was because he considered me the lead dog, the alpha. It is probably the nicest way anyone has called me bitch.

I tend to have dogs that resemble me physically: small with messy hair. My current dog is my beloved Shihtzu. They do say that dogs and owners tend to resemble each other. But if I were to be transmuted into a dog, I think that I would be a border collie. The AKC website describes border collies as “the workaholic of the dog world”. Border collies herd sheep and do this “with stalking movement and an intense gaze known as “eye”. Hmmmm. I think my son would confirm the “eye”. The AKC continues the description thusly: “They thrive when they have a job to do and ” …. “they do best with mature, well-behaved children”.

I am afraid that I can indeed be described as a workaholic. I have a passion for my work. I need goals, going for the prize. I really prefer people who are mature and “get it”. I expect everyone to be as driven as I am. And yes – I know that is a VERY foolish, non-useful, self-defeating expectation. *grin* I work at trying to manage that expectation. Having said all that, this limerick occurred to me the other day. *smile* It made me laugh.

There once was an av named Ahuva
Whose outward appearance might fool ya
But her inside is steel
Her intensity real
And she’ll nag and nip heels til she’s schooled ya.

Lost All Control

Maybe I haven’t lost ALL control. But my inventory has. Not just my SL inventory. My opensim inventory is rapidly becoming a disaster as well. (Don’t look in my RL closets either.)

But this post is a serious plea for assistance. I am doing development in opensim. I have co-developers. We are all working on pieces of the whole. In our regular software development we use a version control system. We need something similar inworld with our prims. It doesn’t even have to be that complicated. We have very few prims and we simply want to remember which is the latest version. Does anyone out there know of something? Has anyone developed their own method that could be shared? We are constantly asking “WHICH one of these is the latest version???” We need to clean up our act. We know it can be done better. As I stood here looking at the boxes, trying to figure out which was the right version, the sun moved across the sky. HELP!!!!!! *watches as all the blue boxes fall on me*
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Locks Cannot Stop Her

You would think that after all this time, after setting the property to LOCKED, that I would stop taking my house. Sigh. I was trying to make some room for more prims, doing a bit of cleanup around the property. I decided the flowers on my side dresser could probably go back into inventory. I clicked on them, did take, got the message that some objects were locked, did I STILL want to take the object. Well, I was multi-tasking. Not very well apparently. Bigger Sigh. Yeah, you stupid application, I don’t know why the darn flowers are locked but YES, TAKE them.

Oops. Was my house. Yet again. A lot of the day went like that. All I will add is that I also ended up wearing a gazebo at one point. *grin* I detached it. I decided it made my butt look fat. *grin*.

Don’t Know Where to Begin

It’s been ages since I’ve posted. Not for lack of topics. Mostly because I’m lazy. *grin* But also….. I’ve been “outed”. It was a conscious decision on my part. I’d actually been “outed” last year, but it was very brief and you had to be listening carefully. I didn’t really think many people were. And the people who WERE listening already KNEW my RL name. But this time I actually walked about with both names displayed. It wasn’t quite as uncomfortable as I had dreaded, but it was still an odd sensation. It did feel a bit like walking around naked. So that is one slightly inhibiting factor now as I try to blog. I’m very aware that people may be able to identify OTHER people in my posts.

Another damper is that someone came to my SL home to spy on me. Oh, call it whatever pretty name you’d like, the fact of the matter is that person tp’d into my land with the sole intent of finding out information on me or on my guest. Since she directed all her questions at me, I’d have to say that I was the target. I didn’t realize all the details at the time, but the whole conversation was “off”. As I thought about it and confided in a few friends, I realized who the avatar was and why she was there. I’m not going into details but the whole conversation was a pretense and a sham. As I don’t really advertise where I live, that person had to work to rez right onto my land. Which means I now feel uncomfortable because someone out there is reading my blog for “information”. Sheesh. Next thing you know they’ll be trying to bribe Drake, Mallory and Bill to steal my friends list.

That’s two things in the same week that threw me off stride. The third was hearing of another sex scandal -the kind the media love to play up. What really annoyed me about this one was my sister’s reaction. And no – I’m not singling her out exactly. The thing is – I KNOW that I am in virtual worlds working. Doing serious business. Business applications. Working with people who are as serious and dedicated as I am (probably even more than I am) to creating successful, productive business environments and tools in virtual worlds. So when even my sister says (upon hearing the latest sex story) “well, everyone KNOWS that people come into virtual worlds for sex”, it just frosts my cookies. I’m trying to decide how to answer that. Something along the lines of don’t blame the venue, blame the people. Shall we get rid of cell phones because governors and senators text sex assignations on them????

I’m also tired of what I hear as “taken for given” presumption that people with attractive human avatars are uncreative, thinking in the box, narrow in their outlook, full of fears of exploration. Oh, take a hike. That one came up in conferences I attended in March and in the blog of someone whose writing I greatly respect. I’m having a hard time writing a good response to that because every time I start on it, I get really ticked off. I’ll grant you that I’m not a visionary. But I won’t stand for being called uncreative and cowardly.

See what I mean? I don’t want a negative blog. Life is basically good at my house. Work is going well, home is going well. Even Simba the cat is doing much better. Yes, he refused the insulin injections. I thought I’d lose him. But I’m getting the pills into him and he seems to be getting back to a healthier life. I can’t really write about my work, even though it excites me greatly and is such joy. I’m not doing much in SL except hanging about at live music and chatting with friends and floating in my pool. *grin* I LOVE my pool. So I’m struggling with finding the energy to write about the above topics in a way that is positive and useful, and not simply crabbing.

I’m open to suggestions, comments. Maybe I should just forget them all and go exploring.