GREYBON

Just an Ordinary Chaotic Saturday

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• posted: Mar 17th, 2007
• under: Daily Life

I’m cleaning house today. Ooh, exciting, I know. My apartment has the worst heating system. There are vents in the walls and when the heat kicks on, dust spews out of the walls and coats everything. Sometimes I picture there being a demonic creature down in the basement, spitting ash through the vents. But then that’s how my mind works. Hah!

I shoveled out my car (barely), but decided to go nowhere. I have a stack of magazines that I’m behind on reading (EW, Wired, Writer’s Digest, probably some others around here too…) and decided to sift through them for interesting tidbits and possible references for drawing. I came across this article by Stephen King called Television Impaired. I found it amusing, especially as I was flipping through the channels and finding similar things as he did.

Although, I did happily stumble upon Enemy of the State. I don’t know what it is about that movie. Any time I find it on, I must stop and watch. I do own the DVD, yet still, there I am watching it. It’s a thing. I tried to convert this movie to a file I could play on my iPod, but I never could get the audio to line up with the video. I think the Universe stepped in and said no to that one. I’d be watching it every day. <

My hands are bothering me today. Both of them. You all know I’ve been working on strengthening my writing hand, but then I got this idea. Contact juggling! What a way to strengthen my hand and have a little fun too, eh?

For those of you that don’t know, contact juggling is not like your standard juggling of tossing things into the air. With this style, the ball must maintain contact with you at all times. It rolls over your hands and arms. You may have seen it in the movie, Labyrinth.

I don’t have any of those fancy schmancy acrylic balls yet. I’m using some old lacrosse balls from my college days to train with. After a little research, I discovered they are about the same size and weight of the standard acrylic ones, which is cool since I’ve already got a bunch. Right now I am working on balancing the ball on each hand. I hold it in place for a while, then move my hand up and down and try to keep the ball in place. I’m not all that good at it, but I’ve only been working on it for a whopping two days. Hah! In time and with practice. I hope!

And well that’s that. I plan on staying in and watching Kim Possible and Robin Hood tonight. Plus some sketching, learning the contact juggling thing, and hopefully getting back into some serious revision work since really, it’s time! Time, indeed!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Drink an extra beer tonight for me since I won’t be venturing out.

Enjoy!

Checking out the Dean Koontz Event in Second Life

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• posted: Mar 16th, 2007
• under: Daily Life, Entertainment

Been a while since I went into Second Life, but last night I went back in for two reasons. One was because it was a Dean Koontz event and I am a fan. I haven’t read his recent work, but when I was a kid and found myself bored in school, I’d usually pull out a Koontz book to read—until of course the teacher would tell me to put it away (more than once). Although, actually…thanks be to a few free audio book downloads I got when I bought my iSkin eVo3, I have Odd Thomas sitting in my iPod now. Anyway, the second reason was for work research.

Now that I am sucking down some caffeine, here’s hoping the rest of this post is less rambly.

Last night The Bantam Dell Book Cafe & Shop had an event with Dean Koontz. He did a reading and there was a Q&A section. I believe there was a chance to win something too.

I want to point out that the island the event was hosted on was noted as “Mature” which means no kiddies. I’m not sure how that would effect younger fans. I started reading Koontz as a kid and you can bet that if this had been around when I was younger I would have either found a way in, or made my dad have an avatar so I’d have used his. I’d be curious to see how these age ratings effect volume of fan participation, if it matters.

Once inside I got a message from Bantam Dell asking me to join their book group. I accepted, and the words “Book Junkie” promptly appeared before my avatar’s name. I’ll not sure what happens if I am part of multiple groups. Through the group I will get notices about other author events and goodies like that.

Inside the book shop. I “touched” the Koontz book to see what info would appear. A blue box showed up in the right hand corner and it turned out to be a link to the book page on Bantam Dell, which is where I can learn more and buy the book if I want.

Next I wandered into the café, where I picked up a free coffee cup for my avatar. Here, they had a bar with stools, small tables and chair, and book tables too. Up front there were couches and the chairs, one of which was where Koontz sat.

I read the conversations going on for a while. Most were sharing what their favorite Koontz books are. One conversation actually shifted to other authors for a blip, as they talked about “RJ being the man.” Turns out they were talking about Robert Jordan and one of them was even speculating him making an appearance. I really don’t know why they thought that, especially at a Koontz event.

The place started to get packed, which can and did become a problem last night. The program can’t handle too many people in one location. Each avatar has animations and clothing items associated with it. You get too many of these in one spot and the lag time for loading things becomes a nightmare. The host for the event came on and asked for people remove “bling” and any extra animations. I dropped my feathered wings my avatar wears.

She also pointed out there were remote locations set up to view the event and a message appeared giving you alternate locations. This created some problems because people didn’t want to leave. Everyone wanted to be in the room where Koontz’s avatar would be. Some had been there for hours supposedly staking their spot. But that’s not how it works in Second Life. They didn’t have a restriction on number of people.

I decided to check out one of the alternate locations to see what they are really about. I went next door to Sundance’s Island. In a café there they had a similar setup, but instead of chairs where Koontz’s avatar would be, there was a video screen with Bantam Dell’s logo on it.

The video started but it was really tiny and I couldn’t figure out how to make it bigger. Then it froze and turned back into the logo. I ended up only getting to hear a blip of the reading, so that was kind of disappointing. The lag time became a problem again with everyone entering their questions for Koontz, which I gathered were being collected and would be filtered to the author in some way. I missed how. Lag time problems. Eventually my screen froze again and I lost patience with it, so I logged off and watched the rest of Grey’s Anatomy.

Well that’s that. I think the lag time issue is a problem with these kinds of events. With all the freezing up happening, I watched others drop out before I did. I see that they tried to help with that by having alternate locations. Realistically though, watching the event on a tiny video screen is like watching TV through somebody else’s window. I think Second Life on a whole is going to need to address these sorts of problems as they move forward with trying to feature more events of any kind there. Now I’m curious how bad the lag time would be at a concert with all the avatars dancing around. Hmm…perhaps I shall check that out in time.

Later!