A 7th anniversary

It’s official. My wife and I have been married for 7 years now to this date. The great thing about it is that everyone else celebrates with fireworks and bar-b-ques. Ok, they aren’t celebrating our anniversary, but it does make it all the more special and fun. Tonight I’m hanging out at tuna oddfellow’s OddBall for a special 4th of July party. His shows of visual effects sem to be improving all the time.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Research Center using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

100th episode of Podmafia

It’s the fourth of July and the Pod Mafia is having their 100th show in- world at Destination Station on Corona. The show can be downloaded later via podcast feed or through the site. http://podmafia.com/
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Corona Cay using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Sim Teleporters

After moving the ships bridge out of the way into the sky, I came to the realization that I needed a teleporter. I broke out my old sim teleporter and started working on it to resemble something that you stand in. I’m separating the center piece so that another one may be rezzed as soon as the first one is launched rather than waiting for its return. This would help crowds to move to their destination quicker. I am also working on setting them up to detect all teleporters within the region so that setting them up to teleport to each other doesn’t require any manual interaction. The sim teleporter transports distances greater than 300 meters faster than other long range teleporters.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Building a ships bridge

I’m gathering up some ideas for one of my older domains. Long before I heard of second life, i always wanted to make my own web-based MMORPG. I had many ideas, and interesting experiments to boot, but none of them really made it anywhere. I think I’m going to start building up an idea founded on space exploration. The general idea is to make a podcast discovering new songs (mainly through podshow at first), but some how tieing in the theme with a game simulation of building up a brighter world of your own. Perhaps I’m trying too many things at once. Anyways, here is a mockup of a space ship bridge.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I was hacked?

I’ve just caught on to the fact that my gmail account has been sending out email to everyone who sends me a message. At first, I thought my password was compromised. It actually still may be the case. The first thing I did was to change the password on my account. Then I analyzed the messages. They were all the same:

Hii there, how’s it going? I’ve never tried this before but I’m really
bored lol, my friend said she did this and found a very nice guy so I
figured i will try it, I made a profile with my pics at
http://xolocalsnow.com?browneyes922 if you’re interested send me a
message …talk to you soon xo

Ugh. Everyone thinks I talk like that now. Sounds like I’m a little girl. Searching for browneyes922 lead me to a post indicating that my vacation responder was on with this message.

Gmail Vacation Responder Hacked

Going back through my email, I found that this had started up 3 days ago. What’s even worse is that the earliest message shows me sending a message in a thread with this:

heey there, youre what im looking forr! msg me backkk

A lot of the original activity shows me sending lots of these messages to people on craigs list without an initial email to respond to. It started at around 10PM Friday night. All I can think of is that my wife and I were out grocery shopping at that time, so it couldn’t have been something I initiated with a website. However, I am thinking that it had something to do with one of those websites where they check your gmail address book to find your other friends to connect to.

I am used to the idea that my computer is the thing that needs to be protected from viruses and trojans. However, with applications moving from the desktop to the web, hackers appear to be targeting these very services without worry about getting past local virus, identity theft, malware, and spyware protection.

I think I’m going to become a bit more shady when it comes to building up my connections on social networking sites from now on.

Getting back into the flow

After the new year, I had a project come up at work to bring my company into Second Life. In a matter of 30 days, I was able to train a few developers to become content creators and develop an island, which in turn was cloned into 6 additional islands. There is an 8th island as well. Let’s just say the rush of everything involved behind the sceens and 80+ hour weeks had really burnt me out big time. I became detached from SL; a place where I would often spend 40 hours a week experimenting and enjoying my time away from work.

I’m feeling a bit renewed with energy since quite a bit of time has passed. I’ve also got some new toys such as an iPod Nano 4G for my birthday. Ever since George’s (my old iPod) hard drive became corrupted two and a half years ago, I’ve been out of the loop of things all together. It was a free iPod that I got from a combination of myself and friends completing offers. I’ve tried a few media players, but in the end, the combination of an iPod with iTunes is simpler for me to manage my podcasts and music. I’m hoping to get back into the loop with SL podcasts. If anyone has some recommendations, I’d love to hear them. I tend to prefer shows with two people as the host with a bit of humor. The new iPod has some amazing features. For starters, it has a color screen.

My two iPod's side-by side.

As far as the gadget shop goes, I’m considering reducing the number of products I sell and go into a bit of rebranding. Many products are getting old, out dated, do not sell well, and/or are a pain to provide support.

The island (woodbridge) has been divided up into smaller spots to rent out, but I still need to setup some rent boxes for the additional spaces. Lots of stuff to take care of.

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3 Years ago…

I was reading about Stuart Warf’s rezday post now that he is 3 years old. I was starting to add my memories of the grid three years ago and it turned out to be a post in itself. So here it is … oh, and happy rezday Stuart.

3 years ago … it was more like the servers would break on Friday night or the weekend and wouldn’t be repaired until Monday. Sims would go down and not come up without linden intervention. Think “Relay for Life” as the main event happens on weekends with a track that covers multiple sims. People would just wait for hours hoping the sim would come back up so they could walk. Large amounts of content rezzed on sims would disappear (rarely) for unknown reasons. Logging in would reveal that inventory was missing when it wasn’t. Grid attacks were so destructive that the Lindens would have to disable scripts grid-wide until a resolution could be found. Push attacks occured so often that the best advice was to sit down to avoid the effect. You couldn’t change clothes or attachments while setting down. Weekly die-in parties would occur every wednesday. A grid-wide rolling restart would take a couple of hours, successively. Meaning you could track which sim was next to go down by looking at the ones that were currently offline (red). Sometimes there were multiple patches within the same day. The lindens would have regular town hall meetings and encourage people to give input via skype and/or text. Teleport hubs were removed, thus causing value of nearby property to decrease drastically and the prediction of boxes all over the mainland to create enclosed environments. People avoided groups of green dots on mini-maps to avoid lag. Now people gravitate towards them. Bad geometry wiki was the place to go for scripting advice, but then was taken offline and moved to various websites. Now we have the wiki back and its for more than just scripting ( http://secondlife.com/badgeo ). Hamlet Au was Hamlet Linden and would have yearly events to walk accross the mainland. Today it’s just a little to big to walk the distance. Promises of havok upgrade was a joke for many years. Dazzle and Windlight didn’t exist. Linked prims (joints) still existed (but buggy) and were primarily used for windchimes, revolving doors, and tire swings. People often knew their neighbors on a more personal level when living in the same sim on the mainland. First time land buyers could purchase a 512 sq. m. partcel for 512 L$. The weekly income for premium accounts was 500 L$ (mine still is) and basic accounts got 50 L$ as long as they logged in within the past week. Money trees were a great way to drive in traffic. The lindens paid dwelling bonuses (L$) based on the amount of traffic generated each week. The rating system was phased out since the lindens stopped paying for people to be rated high due to abuse. Flexies, Megaprims didn’t exist. Glow pre existed as “bloom”, but worked in a different way with fullbright objects. Lights existed a bit differently (on or off along with fullbright and based on prim color) but often caused crashes. People were just starting to figure out how to hack the clients god-mode to track where anyone was on the map. If you were friends with people, you couldn’t hide your location on the map back then either. Groups were limited to just 10. Snapshots sent via email would also appear on the main second life web page. The windows client still had a video recorder built into it to make uncompressed AVI movies. You were limited to 10 votes to put on issues that you felt need to be addressed. You could move your vote to other issues. A police blotter gave generic information about social griefing on the grid. The price of a private sim was 1000 US$ and 195/month. The color/texture picker didn’t exist 3 years ago. The list just goes on…

Hanging out with my sis

After talking with my sister about creating content for IMVU, I talked her into checking out SL. I invited her over to the public orientation island so that I could walk through the help stations with her. We met a nice person, Stormie Easterwood who came along to help her out as well. It’s a bit awkward for her to walk around, but she is getting the hang of it. We spent a good while chatting with each other while setting on a sign.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Orientation Island Public using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Buddha Layering

Flix Saiman found an interesting Buddha at Valkyrie Manor in Lime. He explained to me that he first through it was a sculpty until he took a closer look. It turned out to be 39 layers of contoured textures setting in front of the next to give the appearence of a 3D object. It was a bit impressive to look at how it was put together. Alpha clipping didn’t seem to be much of a problem either. We could get about a 90 degree viewing angle before the Buddha became distorted. The creator is listed as Grocon Emoto.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Lime using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]