Sunday, August 8, 2010

Beanbag Chairs

Beanbag chairs. Remember how comfortable and awesome those were? I sure do. Tonight I installed Diva Canto’s OpenSim 0.7 distribution on my iMac and after a bit of meditating watching a beautiful sunset, I went back to my Japanese Tea House and sunk really deep and comfy into my beanbag chair.
Virtual life is sweet.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Meta7

If you want a stunning visual experience, create an account at Meta7 (https://www.meta7.com/index.php) and after you get settled in, find your way to the LightShare region. I believe a map search will get it if you can't find an LM or teleporter. These guys Tom and Ben Meta of Magne Metaverse are doing things with server side Windlight that makes me truly question what the heck that other company has been spending its vast amounts of capital and technical resources on. I have never ever seen anything like this on that grid or anywhere else. Tom invented the LightShare technology and I think that a lot of other companies need to take a good hard look at the customer experience they provide now versus what this technology could deliver.

These photos were taken using the Meta7 viewer which is based on Emerald source and my graphics were set to Ultra which I can almost never do anywhere else except on my local OpenSim without crippling lag. In Meta7, the frame rates were astonishing and I never at any time experienced any lag so the whole experience was quite a treat. I hope you enjoy and go there to experience it first hand.

Be sure to try out all of your favorite Torley Linden or other Windlight sky and water settings. I did that with these images and they truly enhance the scene.

I'm really hoping that many talented machinima creators will check this out and in the future incorporate this technology into their work. These still photos don't do true justice and one really needs to see the motion to capture the whole effect properly.

M Linden Ousted as CEO - Replaced by Philip Linden

For me this is wonderful news because I was getting very tired of getting into knock down, drag out donnybrooks with M and having to crawl over his bruised, bloodied unconscious body to get to the Lucky Chair when our letter came up :P 

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Nothing Personal, Just Business

OK.

I am giving fair warning to the reader: this will be a major rant, but it's my blog and I am entitled so if you have problems with that you can leave now. I hope my opinions expressed will have value, but I make no assertions or guarantees. Read on at your own choice.

So, I have been without employment or income except for unemployment compensation for over 1 year now. I was an employee for 8 years and a contractor for almost 2 with a major US based multinational company.  Due to mismanagement and flawed strategy, as has been the case with what seems to be most corporations anymore, myself and many others who had done valuable service to these companies were "terminated". I am quite intelligent, creative and have never in my life had a "bad review" by any of my managers. I have worked on 2 earth-imaging satellites for a company doing contracts for NASA. I have many skills and have yet to find a task I couldn't learn to accomplish any objective, though some may now take me longer to learn as I have gotten older. However in the final analysis, my skills and abilities were not wanted by this last corporation. In the current failed economy, opportunities are no longer extant.

For a long time I was a fervent believer in capitalism. I saved money as best I could and invested hoping that in time I could achieve a safe, comfortable future for myself and my family. I drank the Kool-Aid and believed in the dream. This Greatest Depression has destroyed that.

I have suspected for many years that it is the current distorted capitalist model that has failed. I lay a lot of the blame for this at several doorsteps. Probably foremost is the universities and their business schools. The idiotic stuff that I have seen and have been forced to deal with apparently is rooted in academic institutions such as Harvard Business School and corporations looking for the "secret formula" for success have embraced these totally non-real world theories and implemented them. Instead of focusing on creating products that have value and servicing the customers that want to purchase them, they devote huge amounts of resources and capital to indoctrinating those below them to achieve so-called "goals", "achieve quality", "milestones". "ethics", Kaizans and a plethora of (to me) useless and non-productive activities which ultimately fail to give the customer a product with value and make a profit for the company providing it. Satisfying the customer becomes a low priority.

So if I understand this,  and I'm so goddamned smart why can't those in power who are supposed to be so much smarter? I don't have an answer to that. It makes me nuts trying to figure it out. To get some mental peace I ultimately just figure it is part of some kind of mass insanity. Their supreme levels of greed (which apparently are insatiable) drive them forward taking and taking as much as they can possibly grab in some kind of terrible orgy of acquisition, trampling the people who make it possible and never reflecting for 1 second about the ramifications of their actions.


I feel that the capitalist model more resembles a Hieronymus Bosch painting of grotesquery than an ideal system for human beings to live under.

I will probably post more of my opinions about this in future, but I am exhausted now and very depressed.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Camelback


I made this terrain a couple weeks ago by using USGS terrain data of Camelback Mountain near Phoenix, AZ. I lived for a while in the Phoenix area and I think it so cool that I can have a virtual representation of one of my favorite geological formations. BTW this is one of my OS Grid regions. This is NOT something you can do in that other large MMPORG place. :)


But the really good news is you CAN do it either on your own computer or on the OS Grid using the Open Simulator software.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Cherry Blossoms

It's the first day of Spring (and my 1st Rezzday in SL). And I always think of cherry blossoms when I think of Spring. Pennyroyal entered the April Mystique Modelling Agency photo contest and submitted this her new profile photo. I swear if she doesn't win the contest I will go ape :P
Happy Spring everyone!