Coal's Notes

Yeah, it's kinda lame that I'm only at 100 and Dol's at something like 283 (actually, I could go look at the stats to see the exact number, but I'm too damn lazy). Speaking of lazy, I hope everyone had a lovely holiday, if, indeed, they did have a holiday. :)

I had to work this morning, but it wasn't too bad because apparently the holiday had everyone else was in a good mood too. :) This afternoon, I made bread (from scratch for the second time ever, go me!) and did a lot of little online chores, like uninstalling Norton AntiVirus (which hates SL and keeps telling me it's viral, "Hello? That's the point!") and replacing it with AVG. So far so good. I also tried to go hang out on the latest preview grid, which crashed me at login repeatedly (even after a complete un- and re-install). Hrm. Ominous. How do you bug report when you can't actually get to the Help menu?

After being tantalized by the release notes for next week's update, I felt like I needed to poke around and see if I could find any hidden gems in the current release. I'm sure none of those I found are new, but they're still handy to know.

Very "gorillas-no-wait-thats-Coal-in-the-mist" huh? I thought so. :) In the snapshot preview window, choose to capture "depth" instead of "colors". Easy peasy. Doesn't show some objects (like the umbrellas at the Exile stage), or water. Water has no depth, I guess. Strange but true.

Instead of having to improve my mouse-eye coordination to catch my headspinners when I need to edit them, I've discovered turning off "Velocity Interpolate Objects" in the network portion of the client menu makes things not rotate. llTargetOmega (what most rotating things, like head spinners, circling birds and inner tubes use to spin) is rendered client-side, which means that even if I might see the head cattle by my right ear, you could be seeing it by my left ear and Sumar could be seeing it in front of my forehead - and that I can turn it off for just me with no effect on anyone else. It's like particles. Everyone says "particles cause lag". Well, yes, they cause lag as your computer tries to render them all. Tell your computer not to render them. Ta-dah, lag gone. Well, lag caused by that particular thing gone anyway.

Likewise spinning/animated textures (which use llSetTextureAnim) can be turned off in the Rendering portion of the Client menu (animate textures) - which means your computer has less work to do and will do what it does still have to do faster. :D For a fast way to turn animated textures on and off try ctrl-alt-A. Fast is good. Well, except for that bug where everything using llTargetOmega was spinning out of control. My innertubes were not fun at that point - dizzying really. Very glad that was fixed.

I also poked at my stream changer (inspired by the fact that Weasel is offline for some reason - why hast thou foresaken us, o Weasely one?) and a few other coding projects that had been lying fallow for a while. I do like scripting; it's oddly relaxing. Well, except when things don't work how you expect them to. Or your entire script gets eaten by a database burp (like mine did when I was making the stream changer for the Exile stage area).

Speaking of burping... my house smells like fresh bread and it's time to go see if it's edible. Have a triptophanny turkey day!

Posted by Coal Nelson at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One more picture of the Mel Cheeky concert:

She really does have a great voice. :) After the concert I made my way over to the Bighorn Lodge, where my buddy Henrietta Strangelove was spinning world music. :) There were some streaming issues and Joseph wound up giving out the stream's URL so that we could listen using iTunes or Winamp.

I've never been entirely clear (please feel free to add to my comments and 'splain to me, Lucy) on how streaming through SL works - does the music actually get fed through the SL servers or does the client just supply QuickTime on your computer with the URL and the connection is between you and them? I always thought it was the latter, but there's been so many complaints of poor streaming quality in SL of late that I wonder if maybe it isn't the former - Stream Eaten By Packet Loss, News at 11.

Of course, I guess it could be a case of SL hogging more bandwidth than usual trying to compensate for the packet loss, and therefore leaving your poor stream to starve... but then, why does the URL work just fine in WinAmp and iTunes? Is QuickTime really that bad? Or maybe the streaming isn't any worse than usual of late, I'm just spending more time at gatherings where the sole focus is the music.

Regardless of how the music's getting to me, I really do love these events. :) I even like just hanging out at the lake and listening to Dol's stream (which is what I did earlier this week).

The Bighorn Lodge is a good hangout spot - the decor reminds me of my uncle's basement. Has that very "rec room" feel. No matter how infrequent a visitor I am, the people there are always really nice, and I always have a good time. :)

Posted by Coal Nelson at 06:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...and because with me it's either feast or famine: here's the third post of the evening. :D

Mel Cheeky played tonight at the Exile stage (is playing as I type, in fact). I think I may have implied in an earlier post that it was Thursday, but the silly Thursday-holiday has me confuzzled.

Dazed enough to forget to point everyone at Jaycatt's blog posting about Frogg being on MTV. Yes, our very own Frogg Marlowe, the friendly-neighbourhood amphibian-at-large! Wow! Frogg reveals the important fact that he makes his living off our tips! Egad! Tip better! Someone remind me!

Mel's between song chatter is fun - trying to pronounce Jacek (Jay-Sec); her cat that eats toast; she has chocolate wrestling in her inventory... It's a doorway into a whole new world. ;)

And of course, her singing! How could I have got to the end of the post without mentioning that the girl with the guitar kicked butt? Even though she had a toothache and it was 1am where she is!

Posted by Coal Nelson at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Also attended Hen's rezday party this past weekend. :) I think it's really cool that we get an extra event to celebrate! Plus, in SL, growing old gives you street cred, not wrinkles.

Hen DJ'd the party. plum Hartnell has the same rezday and showed up to join in the party. :) I wasn't able to stay for the full thing because of the Wii.... er, RL commitments. Yeah, that's it. Not Zelda at all. Heh.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm not going to apologize for not having time to blog anymore. I mean, what's the point? If I just sat around blogging all the time I wouldn't have anything to blog about.

So, what do I have to blog about then? Um... well... um... okay, there was... uh... and that thing... er...

Heh. Okay, let me throw some pictures below the crease.

We've been featuring a lot of live music at the Shelter in Exile - this Thursday will be our third week in a row. The first week was Jaycatt and Frogg, who were both very patient as we got the quirks out of the new space. The following week was Cylindrian Rutabaga, but I missed that performance due to offline commitments. Mera built such an awesome space up there, and Dolmere has done a great job of lining up acts. My contributions have been a repeater system (which I hope has fewer echo-y and dead spots now) and the stream changer system (which I got all fancy on). Oh and sky-space for the stage in two regions. :D

We got a very good turnout - didn't max any of the three sims involved (although I'm told we maxed Bassenthwaite for Cylindrian's show). Happily nothing crashed during the performance time.

I got new hair. I know, for most ladies of SL this isn't a big deal, but I've had the same hair forever (or for months, which is forever on SL). Yes, it's very similar to my old hair, but more colourful. I also had a RL birthday, so I needed to become a blue-haired old lady. :D I've been changing the highlight colours regularly since. It's ETD hair with bits removed and adjusted so that it looks how I want. I can't make hair from scratch, but I can mod it like crazy! :D

Posted by Coal Nelson at 05:07 PM | Permalink