Lyon is dragging my sorry carcass over to the airport this morning where I will attempt another takeoff and landing and end up in DC once again.
It might be a few days before my next entry; I’ll be picking up a new laptop and having to get everything settled before I can get back online.
Wish me luck!
Today I tossed my worldly posessions into Wolf’s car and am leaving Avon for the unknown. I’ll be at Wolf’s place for a couple of days.
Friday I get on an airplane to Virginia, and Monday I’ll be reviewing class materials before classes start in early March.
I’m giving Wolf my PC as it doesn’t fit in a suitcase. I’m supposedly getting a new laptop when I get there, but I’ll be offline for a few days while I get it and get it set up.
Wolf is also keeping a couple of small boxes for me until I either send for them or return to get them… Luckily I don’t really have very much, and what I do have is just small senitmental things that pack easily. So I’m not taking up a lot of room.
It’s depressing that this is what I’m used to; since I left home for the Navy in 86, I’ve essentially lived out of suitcases. I don’t expect this trip to Virginia will do anthing to change this, but I’m willing to give anything a try.
I took a few photos of my mountains the other day for something to look at when I get homesick…
Today’s my last day at the shop. It’s just me here today and there probably won’t be any business – so I’ll do like I usually do and put on one of the hundreds of VHS movies we have here as background noise.
For posterity, here’s some pictures of the shop and some of the work Jack and I did to turn a garage into a store:
More snow today which is good not only because I like snow, but they are saying that due to Denver’s summer thirst, we pretty much need it to snow every day till the middle of June to break even.
Well, I got the call last night from the school and everything is a “go”. Some time here shortly I’ll be back in Virginia (shudder) and teaching people everything they need to know to stand in an unemployment line because all of the tech jobs are on the eastern rim.
Actually, it’s not that bad I guess. Right now the tech sector is re-igniting there in the VA/DC/MD area. Maybe a few corporate overlords are becoming disenchanted with the lack of either creative or QA ability in the eastern rim software sweat shops, I don’t know.
It is a fact though that the average $20 a day eastern rim programmer can only perform whatever programming function he/she trained for. They aren’t a very “out of the box” group of people; things like communist dictators or a rigid caste system will do that to you. The exception to this rule is if they actually manage to get out of the box and move here to the US.
Basically, if one were to equate programming with animation, the eastern rim software sector is much like a large group of cheap tweeners… They can churn out lots of base code, but there is no design element there. There is also little to no QA in the system either and a lot of the code bought from there needs a lot of refining once it gets back here…
I don’t know. I guess it’ll all boil down to costs – like everything else.
Well, outside the real world I managed to make 9th level in both crafting and adventuring with my little dragon last night between phone calls, emails, Second Life stuff, and all of the other projects I have going on here. One more level and I’ll get out of the “hatchling” phase and start to get some real undead stomping power. 🙂
Well, I have to run and get breakfast and get to work.
Take care out there in ‘net land…
I took the plunge on another 3D, computer based time waster yesterday; Horizons.
So far it’s a lot better than Shadowbane simply because it has a lot more depth. Shadowbane excels with the combat aspects of a MMORPG, but they seriously overlooked everything else “RPG”… Some folks have taken to calling Shadowbane “ShadowQuake” for this reason. The game has a lot of promise, but it appeals too much to the twitch gamers out there who could care less about back story, detailed race histories, or political strife… They just want to run around and kill people.
Enter Horizons, a true RPG world accessible by thousands of folks simultaneously. Really, you can advance your character just by making things and selling them… No combat needed. Though it helps to be familiar with which end is the sharp one on a sword as the world is being over run by an undead army and they don’t care if you are the best mason anyone has ever seen.
Oh, and dragons are a playable race. (yes!)
Fortunately they did dragon’s justice by making them;
A) Hard to play well as pretty alien to anything people have played before, as I would expect from a sentient, winged, weapon breathing lizard.
B) They start off pretty weak as hatchings and take a long time to “grow” into the 60 foot long monsters they are capable of becoming… This keeps the average dragon “wannabe” from playing one for very long before moving on to a Dwarf or something.
C) They are physically a bad choice for “combat gamers” as they cannot wear armor other than their scales (which mature as they do into tank-like plating later), and use no weapons other than tooth and claw (which improve with age as well)… So for the first 60 or so days of play, you’ve gotta learn your enemy real well before engaging them in combat.
So if you don’t have the patience to tough it out being one of the weakest races in game for a good long time, dragons aren’t for you.
The game is new and no one has managed to get a dragon past “adolescent” yet so no one really knows what we’re capable of. There are theories that it will take an accumulated 60 days of playing to reach “adult” and it’s unknown how long it will take to reach “ancient”.
So far, after one evening of play I’ve achieved 8th level in “Adventurer” and “Crafter” which are the two basic schools one can learn before 10th level. After 10th, there are something like 20 different schools one can train in, though Dragon kind are bit limited in this respect (we don’t use tools as bipeds understand them, so their classes mean little to us)… I think I’ll either become a lair crafter or a scholar of the healing arts, not sure yet.
No one is exactly sure yet on how far one can advance either… In beta some players managed to get beyond 100 levels in a class. Of course this took months of single minded dedication to said class. But for all practical purposes the game is limitless.
Mechanics aside, the game is also quite beautiful to look at… For example, one of the dragon cities, Dralk, is set in the cone of an active volcano and consists of massive floating rock spires held down with immense chains with links three times my height. The lava flows and glows, the paths around the city steam and fissure, and the crystals that hold the spires aloft glow faintly and are translucent… Even the occasional small rock falls from overhead and can be heard splashing into the lava pool below. Pretty amazing really… And it’s probably a lot better than this as my video card is on the far edge of “suck” these days.
All in all, I’m pretty impressed. I’ll report more as the days progress and I manage to squeeze a little more free time out of my day to play.
As of 6:07 this morning I’m officially half way though the warranty on the average twenty first century human; I’m 35 now. I suppose I should go get my tires rotated and my oil changed. 🙂
On my annual ‘trip around the sun’ date I like to look back and see where I’ve been:
Thirty years ago on this day I was five. Those who raised me and I lived in this tiny little trailer in west Longmont Colorado and I went to Lincoln Elementary. I got my first bicycle today, but the mother unit was far too overprotective to let me go anywhere outside the postage stamp yard with it, though I was smart enough to know that I had to stay on the sidewalk as long as I had those goofy training wheels… My favorite toy was what was called a “Zip Racer” which was this plastic dragster with a rip-cord operated gyroscope for a rear wheel… Well, my stretch Hulk was pretty popular too till I cut him open about a week from now to play with the viscous goo they filled him with.
On this day, twenty five years ago I was playing AD&D with my next door neighbor, Philip Pike, in his mom’s basement. Flinthorn was already three years old at this time. Philip was probably the best friend I could have ever asked for as a kid and I spend so much time over there, usually in the hopes that his mom would adopt me, that I was an official part of the family. Ah, the adventures we had in that basement would fill a full length novel… There were periods of days where the walls of the basement weren’t there and all we could see was the vast horizons of our imaginations. The computer of choice was a Sinclair zx80 and later a Commodore VIC20.
Twenty years ago today I got my learner’s permit and six months later I got my driver’s license… This means I’ve gone 20 years with only one accident; a very strange collision with a speeding auto-parts delivery truck while picking up my future ex in New London (some say this was a sign), and only three speeding tickets. Not bad I guess considering how I used to drive… There are a few folks out there who still remember “Highway Moshing” and Doug Aubenque was once in the car with me when I pulled 2 360’s and a quick reverse into a driveway on a busy New London street in Brian Dorricott’s little red Toyota Corolla GT-S. Hehe, how the mighty have mellowed. The computer of choice was an Atari 800xl and my first car was a 1969 Toyota Corona.
Fifteen years ago today I was serving in the US Navy on the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735), living in a one bedroom apartment in New London Connecticut, had recently met my future ex-wife, was spending most of my waking moments gaming, and things were looking pretty good for me. My birthday event this day was a lazer-tag battle over at the New London Arboretum with about seven other people. It was a cold, miserable day but we all had a lot of fun… It was a lazer-tag event similar to this one where it was determined that Unicorn’s aren’t really extinct; we just learned to hide in trees. I used a highly modified lazer-tag rifle fitted with an IR intensity strength meter (for detecting near misses), a stereo “bionic ear” system for hearing enemies out in the brush, and a fully custom glass optics system with an insanely powerful IR emitter. My ex was mistress of the lazer-tag pistol and carried two of them in holsters… She was bad news in that game and could eliminate trained green berets in field exercises. The computer of choice was an Amiga 500 and the car was a brand new Chrysler Le Baron.
Ten years ago today I was coming back up from four years of hell. I had been laid off so many times I couldn’t count them all, I had been living on the good graces of friends on and off for a long time. It was just generally a shitty time for everyone involved. Anyways I had recently gotten a maintenance and management position at a big apartment complex on the corner of Federal and Colfax. Those of you familiar with Denver should have just shuddered uncontrollably. I had just separated from my ex about a week earlier and had recently discovered this BBS called “Empire of the Dragon” which was operated by Aryntha (back then it was Icedragon). I’ve known Aryntha now for over ten years. The computer of choice was a home-brew 386dx-33 and that Amiga 500 which was then known as the Franken-Amiga due to all of the mods that had been preformed upon it. The car was a1977 Fiat X-19.
Five years ago today I was living on a 40 acre farm in Rhoadesville Virginia with ZeZe, Neme, their two kids; KKB and Shebub, the great and powerful Pegasus (who lived in the apartment above the horses), the horses; Frencheska, Widgit, Thing, Chinaball, Tuffy and Lana, the dogs; Orpheus, Buddy, and Tatter, two cats, a ferret, and the rooster. The place was immense with a back yard/forest you could get lost in which included a 2 acre lake. I was making ridiculous amounts of money at this time and my life style showed it… I traveled to England several times just to visit a good friend, Findhorn, for a while and I jetted off to Amsterdam for ten days and drove around Western Europe. I had my 28 foot Scarab offshore racer, a hopped up 1967 mustang, a T1 line running directly into my bedroom for my internet connection, and the computer of choice was the absolute latest in technology; a home-brew dual 1.13 Ghz PIII that was just insane for the day.
Today I live in a roughly 8000 square foot mansion near Vail with Larry and Vivian who seem to have adopted me. I’ve known Larry for the better part of eight years and I work with Larry in his various pursuits from the shop over in Eagle-Vail to his consulting firm down in Denver. I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but my income is completely unattached as all of my bills are covered… Basically I get to have all the perks of being a multi-millionaire without the tax issues and my friends can make the drive and enjoy it too. My computer is still a top of the line PC, a 3.2 Ghz P4, and my 1991 Caprice I just gave to some friends who needed it… Much like how they gave me a roof and a bed when I needed it.
All in all, I’ve had a very good life. I can look back at all of the bad times and realize that I’ve learned a lot from them. I’ve fallen in love and been heart broken, I’ve traveled extensively and seen a lot of the world, and I have a lot of really good friends who I can count on and who can count on me. I have no enemies that I know of, except perhaps my ex who admits she has issues with forgiveness of anyone, not just me.
All things happen because it is time for them to happen, and looking back I can see how it all fits together… I’m thankful for all of it, the good and the bad, because it is what makes me uniquely “me”.
Ok, I’m back. It’s been a long, hard week up here in the thin air.
There’s nothing of any real merit to report, so I’ll just babble incoherently for a while; which I tend to do even if I’m not writing in the old journal here.
It looks as if it is school season again for just about everyone I know. Aryntha and Rai are both in classes down at CSU now, Lyon is deep in his medical training, ZeZe is in training for a teaching position, I’m heading back east to do my teaching gig again, and now Lynx is heading off to a technical school for CCNA and MCSE.
I wish him luck. This will be tough for Lynx, but I think he’ll do well.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, I got a new digital camera yesterday… The story behind it is pretty good. See, a few days ago this guy came into the shop wanting to sell me a brand new Sony MVC-CD350, still in the box. He’s a ski-bum and had bought the camera from Wal-Mart, tossed the receipt, and run out of money for a lift ticket. Wal-Mart wouldn’t take the camera back without a receipt so he was screwed… Well, I bought the camera off him for $100. He wasn’t extremely happy with this as he bought the camera for $400 and wanted at least $300, but he went for it anyways. It’s not like I was purposely trying to screw with the guy, all I had on me was $108 dollars and some change.
I played with the camera a bit and while the “picture directly to CD” thing is pretty neat, Sony really should add some ram to the cam so that you can take more than one picture before waiting the 30 seconds for the CD to finish writing.
Cut to yesterday; I took the Sony, in the box, over to Wal-Mart. The Wal-Folks know me pretty well because I’m always buying big ticket tech stuff from them and continually having to return it because some ape in the back dropped it off the top shelf or something. So I trundle in with the box, the lady at the customer service counter sighs audibly, and I get a $400 credit on the camera without having to say a word. So I turn around, add $100 from my wallet and buy a brand new Casio EX-Z4 complete with 256meg SD memory card…
$500 camera, $200 cost.
Now, if things hold true for me, because I got away with this something bad will happen to me to counter the effect… At least I know it’s coming though.
That’s about it from the Colorado High Country Unicorn Sanctuary and Flop House. I’ll talk to you later.
Take it easy out there…
Still kicking. Been real busy the last few days with no immediate end in sight.
Will post more soon.
Ok, my renter-imposed travels have abated for the nonce. They left yesterday after the football game and the house is in shambles.
To recap what has happened since my last missive:
We left Aryntha and Rai’s place at about noon Saturday with grey skies and very light snow falling, and journeyed across Denver to the north. We got to the Longmont L-CXR facility as the blizzard of ’04 started, took a few quick cold and wet photos and pressed on. After that we went about 7 miles further north to another site that wasn’t there anymore. It was unanimously decided that the day was a bust and that we should return to the apartment.
Aryntha returned to bed, Rai and I used the TV computer in the living room to research some other old phone stuff. Later in the evening we went over to “Breakfast King” to meet up with Korn, Keyler, and “The British Guy” who I can’t remember the name of.
“Breakfast King” is a really cool place with good food (as long as you don’t get the fish), good prices, and a very unique atmosphere… It was voted the best place in Denver to get eats and feel like an unpaid extra in a Quinton Tarantino flick. It’s also open 24/7 which is very handy for us. We stayed there till about midnight talking about software, then returned as a group to Aryntha and Rai’s apartment to continue software talks… All I can say about the software is that it involves a lobster, a robot, sputnik, and a lot of very existentialist imagery.
We all crashed at about 3-4 am. I got up at 7am as usual and as Aryntha had a lot of work to finish on Sunday for a contract he’s working on, I decided to stealth out and get the things I needed to get done in Denver done.
I dropped off the big pile of paperwork to the accountant, gassed up the Wag, and then as it was 9am and Lyon and Wolf always seem to be up and running at about the same time I am, I called them to see what they were up to.
I woke them up.
Lyon spent about fifteen minutes getting it though to me that it was ok and that he needed to be up anyways as I drove over to their place. I got there and as they got a look at my bedraggled continence I was given a few cups of coffee, a nice bowl of chicken noodle soup, and a lot of worried looks from Wolf.
I had no idea I was so run down…
Once Wolf was sure I was fed and would survive we got down to the stuff I needed to do before I went back up the mountain. I got the form filled out for the car I gave them, got their new digital camera hooked up to Wolf’s computer, and got the new router configured… See, Lyon and Wolf have a new semi-permanent guest by way of “Scales” who has moved in and he too has a computer, so the old router just wouldn’t cut it anymore… The new router is a Linksys 54G job which should work ok now that it has the new v.2 firmware.
As I was taking care of this Vivian called from her daughter’s place over in Cherry Creek and wanted to know if I could come over and make her laptop work with their network.
So I said my goodbyes, fired up the Wag again, and bounced down town to Carla’s house which is valued in the 4 to 5 million dollar range… It’s a nice place, but they’ve got so much wrapped up in it that it’s not functional as you can’t touch or use anything in it.
It took me less than a minute to get Vivian’s laptop running on the network, and this includes hacking the WEP key for the house router… I really need a new field of work.
I talked with Larry briefly as he was sitting down in the living room to watch “The Game” on the 60-something inch DLP 1080i TV which is surrounded by custom speakers that are powered by a full Harmon-Kardon set up, which is all in a custom made entertainment center… Seriously, there is more money wrapped up in Carla’s living room than most people have in their entire house; and they’re never there to enjoy it.
I don’t understand rich people.
So with all of this accomplished I snagged a bottle of designer water out of the fridge (still had the $8 price tag on it), fired up the Wag once again and made for the hills.
I swung though Golden to get some pictures of the North Table Mesa AT&T site, then followed highway 6 west though Blackhawk canyon for a change of scenery. I stopped in Georgetown to get some lunch at Raymond’s Place (best burgers on I-70) then pushed on though to Vail.
I pulled up in front of the house, snuck back into my room which appears to have made it though the siege without much injury, took a long hot shower, and then fell into bed.
Thus ended my Sunday.
Today begins another week and I’m off to the shop early to make sure everything is clean, polished, and working just in case Larry visits when he gets home later today.
I still need that vacation…
I’m still on my tour of guest rooms and couches of friends of mine due to the evil “renters”; spent last night on Aryntha and Rai’s couch.
Fortunately it is a grand and comfy couch! 😉
As always I was instantly the best buddy of both of the cats, especially Mina who spent the night sleeping on my butt and is right now curled up next to me purring away.
So far this has been a less than pleasant week. The night before last, when I was at Tina and Rick’s place, Tina was exceptionally drunk and was hugging all over me all night… Tina gets very “love-y” when she’s drunk. This unfortunately pissed off Rick and they got into a fight that night… This of course prompted me to head out before sunrise that morning and catch myself another nap at the shop.
Maybe I’ll just buy myself a cot and keep it there at the shop…
So, since the renters came the only decent sleep I’ve gotten was last night, and I had to drive two hours for that.
Fortunately for me I’ve got some really cool friends. 🙂
Today we will be heading north of Denver for some more fone-phun. I have to stop by the accountant’s place on the way out and drop off a big pile of paperwork, then tomorrow I have to swing by Lyon and Wolf’s place to install their new router, configure Wolf’s computer to access the Sony camera I gave them, and fill out some form for the car… Then I head back up the mountain just in time for Larry to return wherein my days will get several hours longer due to some project he’s got brewing.
I need a vacation. 😉
It’s morning for me, for the third time.
These creatures sleep in shifts, probably for safety in an unknown environment. Now while it’s easy for me to sleep though a continual high level of noise, a sudden and loud sound in silence will awaken me. Therefore I was awoken at 3am, 5am, and 7am as each shift changed.
Add to this the fact that I’ve developed a full-on head cold and that my sinuses feel as if someone filled them with quickset concrete, and it’s easy to see why I’m not in the best of moods this morning.
Another thing I have noticed about these creatures is that they seem to spend a great deal of time either making fun of something they don’t understand or griping about the same. An example of this was the half an hour of laughing as one of them discovered Vivian’s “Shalom on the Range” cookbook. This prompted all sorts of “jewish” anecdotes in regards to the house and the people who live in it.
The biggest gripe so far seems to deal with the fact there are no computers set up here anymore. See, Larry advertises the house as having three computers set up with high speed internet access and hasn’t changed this yet. We don’t do that anymore do to the last few groups of primates who managed to screw them up to the point that one was thrown out and the others needed several hours of maintenance that I’m just not willing to do, so that I can do it again in a week.
Now it appears that one has successfully broken into the garage, which is off limits even according to the papers they signed, and has been going on about the “old Austin Martin down there.” First off, it’s not an Austin Martin, it’s a Jaguar XJ12. Secondly, get the hell out of my basement.
I’m trying to figure out how to punish these apes for breaking the rules. I think I’ll come blasting up in the Wag here in an hour or so and run into the garage. When asked, I’ll mention that the alarm went off and I just drove up from Denver to check on things.
It’s 5pm and the “guests” are here…
I’m in stealth mode right now as I’m feeling a bit under the weather and I really don’t want to deal with them all; so I took a nap for an hour or so with the help of some big Sony ‘whole ear’ headphones and four years of Naval Training which taught me that I could sleep quite nicely on top of a running steam turbine.
I feel like some kind of anthropologist studying a tribe of apes from a blind somewhere… They don’t know I’m here so they’re acting ‘normal’ and that is giving me a lot of insight into the activities of the middle-american ape in its natural environment.
There are 17 of them, 8 adults and 9 children, consisting of three family groups interlinked by a common parental unit. The remaining two adults are rogue males who appear to be attached to one another.
So far the topics of discussion amongst the adults for the last 3 hours have ranged from “what was the best episode of ‘American Idol’” to “what was the best episode of ‘Friends’”… These are serious TV watchers; reflected by their first half hour here of finding all of the TVs and making sure we got local channels. The young appear to be incapable of sustained communication and usually resort to assorted whoops and screeches.
That and these creatures in general are *loud*; really, really loud. I would assume it’s from spending 6-8 years talking over the volumes of their young which, according to my sound pressure meter, have peaked at an ear-shattering 94dB through a wooden door… Just a few points shy of a running jet engine. And of course the young generate all of this noise while rampaging through the nesting area in something akin to a 7.5 Richter earthquake. Just about anything sends the young into spasms of screeching. For example, one seems to have touched another wrongly and this has elicited about an hour of uncontrolled flopping and screaming.
As I don’t want them to know I’m here, I have my door locked. This has prompted each of them to try the door knob at least twice and two of the adult males have tried the main house keys on it in hopes that it would open. It didn’t, and this prompted them to bang on the door handle repeatedly for a while, then go around on the deck and try the sliding glass door a few times.
Right now they are engaged in a dinner ritual. Preceding the feasting three of the adult males sought out the local Wal-Mart hunting ground which was seen on the way to this nesting area. There were a few minutes of elevated hooting and hollering as the adult females attempted to instruct the adult males on how to get to their preferred hunting ground, which seemed to aggravate the males by insinuation that they couldn’t handle it.
It sounds as if the communal dinner ritual has about ended. There have been murmurings of “Super Bowl” from the males over the last hour. I will assume this means the nesting area will become quite a disaster area come Sunday. I should probably make plans to not be here…
That’s all for this missive from the outback of humanity. I’ll continue my observations and post my findings in the morning.
It’s one of those beautiful Rocky Mountain days up here today with weather you can only find here. The sun is shining and it’s pleasant outside even as it’s snowing about a thousand feet up the mountain from here. Seriously, you can stand in my driveway in a t-shirt and look up at a blizzard…
I reloaded XP Pro on my desktop last night so things will be a little weird for a while as I get everything re-loaded, re-setup, and running again.
No matter what Microsoft might say, you still have to do a clean install of your OS about once a year. Especially if you install and uninstall a lot of software or use Visual Studio like I do… It’s just impossible to clean out everything over time.
So far the re-load is going well and the system is back to it’s zippy self again. I was getting a bit concerned as Second Life was really bogging things down and I didn’t figure this system would be all that easy to bog down.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, there are more renters coming tonight and staying though Sunday I believe. That means I have to put on my “I like humanity” face and be nice to a troop of complete strangers that I will most likely not have *anything* in common with. No worries though, I can play just about any part I’m handed. 🙂
And with that I think I’ll get back to the re-loading of the computer… I have all of the network software I use re-loaded; SimpleMU, SL, Shareaza, Bulletproof, etc. So now I need to work on the art stuff like Photoshop and Painter, and all of my music stuff like Soundforge and MPTrack.
Fiddled around a little bit more with Second Life last night… I guess I’m learning the system fairly quickly as I’ve already been stymied by functions that don’t work as advertised in the manual… No matter, I’ll figure out a workaround.
The next step in my SL adventures will be the building of a place to live… SL is really just like a muck in most regards.
You first deal with how you look in SL which is very easy for the basic things like hair color/style, clothing color/style, and body and face details, etc. On a muck your looks are text-based and handled by describing yourself which is probably the easiest thing to do. You eventually, as you learn the in’ and out’s of the system, graduate to more and more complex descriptions and other tricks… On SL this is the design and scripting of your avatar beyond the built-in facilities.
Then things progress to the procurement of a space and the descriptions of it. On a muck you have to learn a bit about how the underlying system works so that you can link exits to rooms and whatnot. On SL it’s a similar learning curve as you need to have a passing familiarity with some of the deeper functions of the system such as alpha channels in textures and some basic scripting.
The biggest difference between mucks and SL is money in both a good and bad way… Everything on a muck is usually free as far as real-world money is concerned and you can have in-world money that is really only used to control the flow of new objects into the world. Meanwhile SL costs a minimum of $10 which gets you a character in the game permanently, but that’s it.
Now to get some land costs anywhere from $10 a month for a basic yard on which you can build your house to $200 a month for your own “sim” which is basically a city. You’re also limited in the number of objects you can have based on the amount of land you own. This is to keep things running smoothly on your computer by ensuring that no one gobbles up all of the ram in the sim you live in. You want more objects, buy more land.
Now SL can, and does, pay its users. There is in-game money called “Linden Dollars” ($L) of which you get a weekly stipend of based on how much land you own. Right now I don’t own any land and only get $L 500 a week as “income”. It costs $L 10 to upload a texture or graphic, and in game items that other people have made cost $L to purchase… Yes, SL has its own economy.
Now you can also earn real-world money from SL for hosting events, donating time to teach other folks how to do something, or other “big” things. You can also earn $L for the same things from what I gather… I’ve not done any of this stuff (yet) so I’m not completely clear on it, but I know that someone Aryntha knows got a $40 check from SL a little while ago for some in-game activity.
All in all SL is the best parts of a muck (building, limitless possibilities, etc.) mixed with a really nice 3D MMORPG. Based on the time I’ve spent with SL over the last three days, the name “Second Life” is really quite appropriate. 😉
I’ll post more as I find out more… For example; the other day I discovered that if you own your own sim (or by the consensus of the residents) you can change the “rating” of your sim from “PG” to “Adult” and along with this you can decide that avatars can take damage… I saw a light saber sword fight last night that was pretty spectacular.
Well, off to “First Life”… I gotta get to work. 🙂
Matt and Rai came up Saturday afternoon. We spent the evening goofing off and watching Aryntha quiz folks on Second Life to determine their “’leet haxor” levels. It was pretty funny actually.
Sunday we were going to go and do another phone trip to some sites located up here in the mountains but once again nature showed us that Climate is what you expect and Weather is what you get… We got up Sunday morning to a very pretty snow fall, but this also meant that we weren’t going anywhere and that Aryntha and Rai needed to head back down the mountain before the roads got bad.
I spent the rest of the day modeling stuff for my avatar in Second Life; Aelfyre Twilight.
Here’s a picture of how he appears right now…
Of course it was night time on the server when I took the picture, so everything is dark, but you get the idea.
I’m currently working on his tail-swish, blinks, a horn glow, and other effects which have to be scripted, but so far I’m pretty happy with the Second Life system and I think my avatar looks pretty spiffy. 🙂
I guess I have to recommend SL to folks at this point. The people online are of a fairly high caliber overall and it’s been a pretty cool experience so far. Besides, you can get involved for a one time fee of $10… Cheap!
Things move forward…
I just signed my Caprice over to Wolf and they just left to take it down to Denver. This takes care of two problems:
One, Lyon was recently involved in a car accident and totaled his bronco. He’s fine but the bronco is porked. So his insurance will pay off what he owes on the bronco and as the Caprice is paid for, that frees up some extra cash per month for them. This is a good thing to be sure.
The other thing this fixes is the fact that I no longer have to worry about the Caprice just sitting here rotting in the driveway or have to worry about all of the associated expenses that come with each car you own; namely tags, taxes, insurance, maintenance, and the zillion other things that go along with it.
So, that’s two less things to worry about just by signing a piece of paper. I like it.
Wolf and Lyon got here at about 10pm last night to pick up the car and as they were both exhausted, they spent the night here. We went over to Denny’s for dinner and here’s where things got surreal…
The local Denny’s here now has a fine dining section called “Denny’s Uptown” which serves amazingly good food with all of the presentation and texture one would expect from a place costing three times more to eat at. This section of the Denny’s was resplendent with white table clothes, candles, nice piano music in the background, indirect lighting, and expert service… But it was still *in* the Denny’s, they had just turned the “party section” into a fine dining establishment.
Wolf had a Tuscany salad that she says was extremely good right down to the caramelized walnuts. Lyon had a big t-bone that was prepared flawlessly and I had lemon-pepper chicken that was really quite amazing. The meals were complete with a large selection of excellent sides which for us were seasoned steamed veggies and mozzarella topped seasoned red potatoes in Lyons case and excellent garlic mashies in mine.
We really had to keep checking that we were still in a Denny’s during the meal and this is what made it very surreal; we were actually sitting in the back area of a Denny’s…
The price is nice too… We had eaten fare that was on par with places like The Broker or Black Angus, yet for the three of us, including deserts, it was a mere $41.
So there ya have it. Be sure to swing by the Denny’s in Avon on a week night (it’s right off the highway) and try out this new idea. Sam, the new manager there (and all around nice guy), has bet his job on “Denny’s Uptown” succeeding. I know the three of us sure hope it does.
Other than that it’s another weekend up here in the thin air. I meandered over to Glenwood Springs after work yesterday to take some pictures which are up on the OMFUXS web site now.
In the “major life changing event” column we have the offer I recently received from a rather prestigious tech school in Virginia. Chances are I’m going to go for this position as it sounds like they will pay well and are even throwing in a town home to live in. That and I like teaching and it’s intellectually stimulating.
While work at the shop here is fun and it does manage to keep me busy, I’m not going anywhere with it. One can only learn so much by selling snowboards to the local knuckle draggers day in and day out. Sure, there is the fact that I’m tech support for most of Vail Valley, but the really hard things to fix take all of about 10 minutes and even then it’s nothing new.
It’s become stale and I’ve been feeling the urge to move on again…
What’s got me bummed is that I’ll once again be leaving everyone I know behind. Sure, a round trip flight from DC to Denver is only $169 so I can drop in and visit all the time, but…
As a wise man named Otis once said, “Things change. Always do. You’ll get your chance! Important thing is, when it comes, you’ve got to grab with both hands, and hold on tight!”
Good morning!
Well it was an excellent weekend down in Denver. To recap quickly:
I got to Denver Saturday evening and we went to the local camera store to look for parts. While at the store Rai mentioned that she had a feeling we’d be needing some really long lenses on the trip tomorrow… Sunday morning we got off to an early start and made it to the Pueblo area at around 11 am. On the way Aryntha spotted a tower off to our east, which turned out to be “Pinon”, and we could only get about 2 – 3 miles from it thanks to all of the no trespassing signs and locked gate, and Aryntha didn’t bring his 300d and 400mm lens set.
We should listen to Rai…
We drove on to our first target for the day; the two sites near Boone. We drove around the tower for Boone R for about a half an hour without being able to get much closer than about a mile and again we wanted the long lenses we decided to leave behind. We finally decided that we’d return with a better idea of how to get to it and move on to the next site on our tour when Aryntha suddenly asked “What’s that?” while pointing to the north.
Aryntha led us to Boone RS, a true relic of the Cold War. Boone RS is an underground facility designed to survive a near miss with the best bombs the Russians had in the 60’s. As we pulled up there were no signs anywhere as to who now owns the site or that we should stay away, and the front gate was wide open… So we did what anyone would do and just drove onto the facility proper.
Boone RS has a rather immense parking lot which is actually the roof of the buildings several feet under ground. We took about a zillion pictures of anything on site that didn’t move too quickly to photo including the neutron detector that signaled “the end” to the rest of the network.
After ensuring that we could reconstruct the entire site, life sized, from photos we moved on and headed back south…
“Cedarwood” proved to be extremely difficult to find and had us driving around in the scrub brush and cacti for about three hours. After the first hour and a half we could finally start seeing the tower on the bluff to the south of us which let us home in a little easier… Tower hunting would work best with a helicopter…
Anyways as we were trying yet another road that should take us to the site Rai, who was referencing maps in the back seat, asked what road we were on and Aryntha replied “A.T.T.A.V.E.”. This prompted us to wonder if there was a road out there named for the tower site that was on it.
Well it turns out that Aryntha was right because about a mile up from where he mentioned this we saw the sign for “AT T rd.” I swear he’s a phone psychic.
We pressed on another mile or so until we came to the locked and “no trespassing” sign covered gate for Cedarwood and took some more “sunset and tower” postcard shots.
We returned whence we came, stopping at a Mexican joint in Colorado Springs that was really quite good. We even got some freshly-made-just-for-us signature hot sauce which was really impressive. It’s a recipe from the sister of the fellow who was our server.
We got back to the apartment, did the data-dump, and did the sleep thing.
Monday morning we were back at it and off to a few more local sites including some suspicious stuff down near Martin Marietta. This day Aryntha brought the lenses and 300d for long shots… See, we learn. 🙂
We opted for some close-to-home sites due to the fact that Aryntha and Rai have to head back to school today and needed to make sure they were prepared.
We got some photos of what we believe to be the Kessler Reflector and then took off for a short mountain hop to the Critchel site.
Critchel is about a half hour drive up 285 towards Evergreen, then another half hour jaunt out into the hills. We got to the site and took our photos, then took pictures of the view from there… A nice thing about tower hunting is the places AT&T put them lead one to really nice views.
We left Critchel and headed back to the apartment for the data-dump. I took off for the hills at about 4pm.
Today it’s back to the day-to-day. 🙂
Well I went ahead and paid for a years worth of LiveJournal. I wasn’t sure if I would be using it all that much when I first got involved, but as I’m over one hundred entries and the journal has been active for around five months, I guess I’ve met the criteria for being a “user”. Besides, it’s only $25 for a year and you do get some neat extras for the fee.
Gotta run, take care out there.
I had a great weekend down in Denver. I got to Denver at about noon Sunday and Aryntha, Rai and I chugged over to the Denver Zuni AT&T complex for some photos shortly thereafter. That’s a *big* place, let me tell you… We’re still trying to get a tour of it.
We went from there to a restaurant called “Noodles” that serves, well, noodles. I had a really great chicken stroganoff bowl there and it’s quite tasty and amazingly filling for being turtle-neck type yuppie-food.
From there we swung by Aryntha and Rai’s place to get a different car. We then took off to the East to go look at an old AT&T long lines facility called “Strasburg” which is right near… Strasburg. We got our photos in the fading light and headed back for Denver.
On the way back to south west Denver we were driving by Wolf and Lyon’s place so I called and we stopped by to introduce everyone. We spent a few hours there chit-chatting and going over plans for world domination then finished the trek to Aryntha and Rai’s place.
We spent the rest of the evening compiling our images and data from the day’s adventures.
I crashed there for the night. Monday morning Rai and I went over to a hole-in-the-wall breakfast place while Aryntha got another hour’s sleep then we all took off to follow Parker Rd (hwy 83) from Aurora to Colorado Springs. We’d had reports of old telephone sightings on this road and went prepared. I drove so that Aryntha could employ his new “light vacuum”; a Canon DSLR 300d with this monster 200mm zoom lens and a 1.4x teleconverter… The g’zinta hole on this lens is about four inches across and the whole rig is about a two feet long and is an arm numbing 7-8 pounds. It’s impossible to deploy quickly and is a bit quirky yet, but it takes mind blowing photos… Of things in other states.
Really, the zoom on the thing let us count beams on a tower nearly 20 miles away on a mountain… Amazing.
So we toodled on south and found our target, a facility called “Black Forest”, got some photos and headed back. On the way Aryntha’s phozone detector started tingling and he lead us over hill and dale to this ancient tower that was decommissioned some time before 1994. From highway 83, some 10 miles away, “Hilltop” looks remarkably like a high tension tower, but Aryntha wasn’t fooled.
So we returned yet again to their apartment, did the data-dump from all the cameras and I headed back up the mountain to work on the web site and get to the shop Tuesday morning. Once again the web site is: http://www.badpixels.com/~omfuxs/
This is only for those of you out there with a dangerously high geek quotient. 🙂
And with that I’m gonna head out. Have a great day out there folks…
I’m on my way to the bright lights and big city today. I haven’t been to Denver under my own steam for a few weeks now and I feel like I’m ready to deal with it for a day.
Today’s activities are most likely going to be phone oriented as Aryntha, Rai and I head over to the old Denver main building called “Zuni” to take some pictures. I’m also going to attempt to social engineer us a tour of the insides as we’ve had reports of the original 50’s and 60’s equipment still being there and in operational condition. That would be something to see. 🙂
“Why phones?” I get asked quite often. Well, it’s fascinating to me because it was all so ‘hush-hush’ back when it was running and it’s still pretty darn high-tech even as the systems we research are over 40 years old… Basically the old AT&T long-lines system is a lot like the SR-71; both are “relics” of the cold war, yet both are the pinnacle of the era and are still, in many ways, more viable than the “new and improved” stuff out there.
That and the Bell System engineers are some of my heroes… See, once upon a time there were these two very large monopolies…
The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.
The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic “bubbles”, electronic switching systems, microwave radio, telephone, and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.
Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
So I’ll be blasting over the Rockies in the Wag in about an hour. There’s no stereo in the Wag as it’s too loud to hear one anyways and after about an hour you can’t hear much of anything anymore. This’ll also be a $50 trip as it takes a full tank of gas each way… The up side to the gas-guzzling aspects of the Wag is that I can do 90-100 over the passes though four feet of snow if I have to or pull H2’s and small semis out of snow banks easily. Fortunately I shouldn’t have to deal with that today.
I think I’ll stop in Frisco for breakfast as there is a fantastic breakfast joint down there. I’ll also gas up in Denver where gas is $0.50 a gallon cheaper… So I guess I’ll get my shoes on and get rolling.
Have a great day out there in ‘net land!