Sungak – Page 24 – The Kind Healer

… And Then There Was One

For those who have not heard, the Second Life island of Telador has been taken down as of last Sunday night. I’ve just checked the map (uploaded image) and it’s missing for now. My list of locations you can normally find me has now shrunk to one: Numbakulla.

From what I heard, the island itself will not be sold, but instead used for the owner’s existing business venture within SL. I’m happy to hear that actually, as at least they still get to keep it (and perhaps be able to have better land controls than their mainland shop has).

There is quite a bit of video and pictures that was taken over the past weekend (as well as in the past). My pics will be up soon (work and family priorities notwithstanding). Video is pending a proper editor – Windows Movie Maker is not liking the raw Fraps files, and is splitting them abnormally. :( I can still use it to create a reduced-size ‘raw’ format, which I could then upload.

–TSK

Video Insanity and Other Upcoming Projects

Well, despite the mystblogs aggragate site down, I’m sending this note out for those who actually are following my feed elsewhere. ;)

I’m in the process of going fraps-crazy in Second Life, getting video and snaps of Telador Isle before it gets repurposed by the island’s owners. Before people ask: 1) I asked about this and they were happy to let me do this, and 2) I’ll have the raw files up at some point, ~~probably Sunday~~.

The eventual goal is to compare the video shot in Second Life with a similar track done in Uru, probably done in movie style. I’ve had a song in my head for over a week now and its the inspiration for the project (that and the 2006 St Pats parade route…).

Once that is done, I’ve got two other things going on that’s not work-related:

– My shells for the Ahra Pahts project came in, so I’ve to fire up Blender finally and start working on that (at least for an initial setup).

– The libsecondlife project (link moving, I’ll add to sidebar later) had a proxy-style application posted to their SVN. Once that appears to be noted as working well enough, I’m thinking of grabbing one copy and trimming it down severely so it can be used as a ‘hook’ for outside devices without needing an open XML-RPC channel. SL Residents can swing by the voting page and look at Prop 203 for the inspiration behind this particular insanity.

*wave*
–TSK

Vacation Week

I had off from work this week, and a brief summary of the fun I had so far follows:

Monday – Empire State Building (102nd floor – really neat since I could identify the nearby work buildings as well as my apartment building) and the Bodies exibit at South Street Seaport (got lost finding the place).

Tuesday – St Paul’s Chapel (across from the WTC Site) and the Museum of American Financial History and its immediate environs – like the famous bull statue there on Wall Street.

Note that Mon/Tue were, last I heard, the hottest days on record around here. Not fun, but I knew ahead of time what was expected and had planned appropriately.

Wednesday – Running errands for myself and my family. On the way home I ended up with a flat tire, but was able to get it repaired within an hour of getting the spare on (GoodYear rocks over at their Somerset station).

By this point I was flirting with a potential sunburn and decided to stay home the rest of the week. ;)

Thursday – Mostly vegging out, and switching back to a night schedule for when I get back to work next week. I also prepared the old desktop case (the Aria) for donation; It’s now packed and mostly ready to go, just need to collect everything needed like manuals and stuff.

Friday (planned) – Continue the migration back to nights, and do some local errands that I normally have only time on weekends for.

And on that note, off to bed. *wave*

–TSK

DexCon 9 – Summary / Fun with downtime

First of all, apologies for anyone trying to reach the site recently. Hoster is having problems that are beyond its immediate control, and has otherwise been a cool place to be running from.

Second, I should have realized that once I finally got in the con, I’d be too busy to post things. :)

Anyway, Friday was interesting. First convention LARP I dealt with since ShoreCon 94 (and there were reasons behind why I’ve waited so long – another story…). Quite good actually. It’s called ‘Grim Tales’ if anyone’s interested in trying this at later Double Exposure conventions.

Saturday was basically one 8-hour event I walked into, but an absloutely amazing and insane one. It was a Babylon 5 minis battle, recreating the big one at Corianis. Pictures of the battle (and possibly me, as I took 3rd place), will probably end up in a magazine called ‘Signs and Portents’ since it was the largest staged battle at 150 mins representing over 1500 ships.

The only downside to doing 8-hour Arena battles is that I had a sore back and two very hurt feet. I spent the next hour down in the hot tub soaking my feet and the next day and a half sleeping off the pain (I went home early Sunday).

My feet still hurt today, but that’s probably since I spent the next two days walking New York on vacation. More on that later as well.

Anyway, onward and sleepward.

–TSK

Bad Behavior v2.0 is out

For those who’ve not heard about this neat app, Bad Behavior is an anti-spambot plugin for WordPress and other PHP-based content systems. I’ve had it on this site for some time now and has worked well; The sister (Uru-IC) site also had it from its first day online. Its quite amazing, never had any issues with it, even from work (which I’m briefly doing this from right now).

Well, this week the 2.0 version made it out to release. I’ve already upgraded (which was relatively painless), and still going OK. This release is currently working seamlessly for WordPress 1.5 and above, and instructions for MediaWiki are also available. Other systems are to be supported as the author has time; It was pushed out a bit early in response to increasing spambot traffic.

I’d suggest anyone using WordPress to at least take a peek at it. Other PHP content systems (his list of known ports as well as notes to do your own porting here) could also be used; In fact I’m considering adding this to the little ‘sandbox’ subdomain I setup for testing things.

Info on the release here.

–TSK