Archive for the ‘Real Life’ Category

Aug

2010

Back into Virtual Worlds

Peeking at my blog I notice I haven’t talked at all about getting back into the Virtual World building scene. Sooo, I’ll do it now!

The being of July, I got a message from Second Life from a person that owns land around the land I own. They wondered if I would be willing to sell my land so they could connect some of their property. I thought about selling and totally moving out of SL, but my Safety Girl store does pretty well, and pays for all my SL needs, and I have relocated too many times already. So instead – I set up a land swap with him, which turned my T shaped property into a straight line, and it let him connect his property. Win Win.

It gave me back my urge to create something…so I started messing around some. Then I noticed that my long time SL friend Jokay, happen to have recently started up her own personal Grid – JokaydiaGRID – I signed up and popped in to see what she was up to. A few days later I caught up with her to do a little catching up…and she handed me my own Sim to play with and mentioned she would like to have me come help her out with some projects if I felt like it.

A little bit of background on Jokay – if you look back in some other posts about SL, I mention her a few times. She is one of the first people I really talked to in SL. We were neighbors for about a year. She works on projects in which educators use virtual worlds to teach students and hold workshops. Something that is starting to snowball into something really cool and I think will evolve into the latest and greatest way to teach…instead of sitting at a desk copying notes being bored to death.

So now I have a new home in the Open Sim world.

Welcome to Mininesse (Also the name of my Swashbuckler on EQ2) My own little island with a hypergrid smack dab in the middle. jokaydia.metaverseworlds.com:9000:mirinesse if you want to hypergrid to me.

The current project on JokaydiaGRID is a build for training students in the hotel and travel industry. So we are making a role play environment so they can demonstrate and act out situations and meet up to learn in an engaging way. Below are some of the builds going on and you can also check out some screenshots at my Flickr Site.

Tags: Azzura, Building, Jokaydia, JokaydiaGrid, Second Life, Virtual Worlds
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Jul

2010

Taverncast Returns!

Not sure how many of you listen to Podcasts, but it seems whenever I’m driving, I have a podcast on. It use to be music, but now I listen to talking! (Does that mean I’m getting old?)

One of the original podcasts I started listening to was Taverncast. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time, and this was listed as a WoW podcast. It was quite impressive. Way above average quality sound and editing…but most of all it’s FUNNY. It wasn’t a 100% WoW podcast and as time went on, it became less and less related to gaming and more of a variety comedy show. It is a bunch of friends talking about their week that goes off on tangents.

They slowly faded away and made a return only to fade away again due to RL issues. Plus the time to create this show has to be 12 or more…they dont just take out the dead air and the Ummmms. Point your browser here and read about it – www.taverncast.com – Then log onto iTunes and grab a few episodes. The later the episodes, the less you will hear about WoW, if you aren’t really into gaming. If you are into WoW, grab the special Lore episodes or the Murloc Attack and a few earlier episodes. The field trips they did into WoW instances were great too!

Other podcasts I like to listen to:
Analog Hole – www.analogholegaming.com – 3 ~~basically normal~~ people talking about what went horribly wrong that week, and what games they have played (MMOs, Console games, D&D) along with current gaming news. These guys play WoW. Listen to episode 167 (might be 168) for them to read my listener email!

Massively – www.massively.com – Shawn and usually Rubi, talk about the news of the current week dealing with new and old MMO’s. iTunes calls it TV Squad sometimes, don’t let that confuse you.

Guildcast – guildcast.wordpress.com – Also hosted by Shawn and Rubi… a podcast about Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.

Others I’ll listen to now and then – Final Score, IGN Girl Fight, EQ2sday

Tags: Analog Hole Gaming, Guild Cast, Massively, Podcasts, Taverncast
Posted in Gaming, Real Life | 1 Comment »

Jun

2009

Hunting for a GPS?

I recently decided to buy a GPS for my car so I can get even worse at remembering directions! I did find a great deal on a good one. It is a Garmin nüvi 760
and it has several cool features.

It has Bluetooth – so when your phone is near the GPS, calls are received through that and keeps you from having to find your phone and answer it which could lead to you having an accident.
It can play through your radio using an FM transmitter. It also has an SD card slot and 440 MB of memory, so you can use it as an MP3 player.
It receives constant traffic updates and will automatically adjust your trip to get around the problem areas. You can tell it not to of course.

This model is usually $400 but Amazon.com has it for $199. I had no trouble setting it up, entering addresses is simple, adding waypoints to stop on your trip is easy. Finding a restaurant, gas, or store is very simple.

One thing I did get for it was a few new voices. It comes with several good ones to begin with, and they are TTS, which means it will read all the street names and location names. I found a place called Pigtones. While these voices are meant to be funny, they are not worth the price. I downloaded GlaDOS – the computer voice from Portal, thinking it would be humorous. It does sound like her, but she says nothing funny, and all the voices you buy there are Not TTS – so you only get turn right at next exit, recalculating, arriving at destination. It is cool for like 1 day and then it loses its charm. I bought 3 others that are not great also. I feel I wasted my money – at $12-$13 a voice – it is not close to being worth it, plus you can only have ONE of those voices on at a time because it overwrites the plain voice on your unit. If you want to get a strange voice – get the free on from Garmin – Elfrod – it is supposed to be one of santas elves, and he says some witty things now and then.

If you think it is time to get a GPS – Click Here to go to Amazon and grab one before they run out!

Posted in Real Life, Tech | No Comments »

Mar

2009

Second Life Land Sold

Azzura is officially landless in Second Life – She still has 448 squ left in some obscure spot (I have that for sale too). It was just a bunch of 16m squares of land that were for sale and I merged them into one plot before ad spots got put up in them.

Safety Girl, Azzurave, and evolv are all gone. Maybe they will return someday, but by that time there will be soo many new things that what I have will be like stone tools. I do miss SL for the most part, it was a great creative outlet for me.

Looks like I will need to redesign the blog header! Any ideas?

Tags: Azzura, Jokaydia, Second Life, Virtual Worlds
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Mar

2009

From Follower to Leader

If you read down a couple posts, you see I returned to WoW back in July – Joined a guild as an officer and grew it into a raiding guild. That guild broke apart back in September. I floated around kinda guildless for a bit with a few friends from that guild and put all my toons into Silent Lucidity – Star’s Bank Guild. Star is my bestest buddy in WoW and has become so much more in RL.

Star and Tish (me) would get on each night and try to find an instance run, but usually couldn’t find one because I was DPS and she was a healer….never any tanks available. Sooo, my casual DPS warrior came out of the mothballs and hit 70, and I started to learn to TANK. Narcissa wasnt the best tank but I had some tank instincts when I played Tish (my rogue) saving the healer at the cost of my life if things got nasty. The plan started to work.

But….WoW got a little boring again and we tried WarHammer. That lasted about 4 weeks and got boring and we returned to WoW for the new expansion. We tossed around ideas about whether we would start a new guild or find one to join. We had a few people that would follow us to whatever guild we would join but as we investigated different guilds, we knew they werent right for us. Silent Lucidity was a bank guild no more!

Cal was a great guy that was always fun and ran with us whenever we did something. Him, Star and I always got along and always seemed to share the same opinion on things so the 3 of us became the officers for our new guild. A few others from the past guild hopped on board, a few friends of Star’s joined up, and some friends of friends came. We had the startings of a solid 10 man raid guild.

Wrath of the Lich King hit the stores and we all played sick, stayed home from work, and stayed up till all hours of the night. Tish got mothballed and Narcissa became my main. Narc leveled as Protection and Chaton (use to be Star but everyone still calls her Star) leveled Holy and together we hit 80. We ran instances and I learned to tank. Did I ever see myself as a tank…..NEVER! It did help to go from DPS to tank as I saw how much of a pain in the butt I was as a rogue and pulling agro!

So now we helped a few others hit 80 and we now had 10 people able to enter Naxxramus. And now the next thing to happen that I never thought myself ever doing… Introducing, Narcissa the Raid Leader! I was always kinda amazed how someone could lead a raid. They always seemed to know everything. All I ever really did was show up to a raid with my supplies and listen to what I had to do and do it. One Job. But the raid leader had to know everyones job for every fight and deal with questions and yell at people – 50 DKP MINUS!

I do not think raid leading is in everyones blood and it can be stressful, but I really enjoy it. It isn’t as hard as it sounds, and if you use your other officers, it can run quite smooth. Star keeps me focused and whispers things to me to remind people if I forget. While I may be a good raid leader, she makes me a great one. We keep each other calm, feed info to each other, and keep an eye on the raid as we plow through the content. It’s not a one person job and I’d be lost without her.

Silent Lucidity is moving along quite well. Very little drama if any. I think it helps that the officers have been in a few guilds that have failed, getting first hand experience of what can and does go wrong and what things cause the drama. If you happen to be guildless and on the Baelgun Server….and Alliance, check us out and visit our forums. You can check out our Raid Progression here.

Tags: Gaming, Guilds, MMO, Rading, Raid Leader, Silent Lucidity, WoW
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