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.