So I have been entertaining myself trying to learn LSL (the pseudo C++ language that is the heart and soul of building stuff in Second Life). And trying to learn to 3D model properly, too.

My sax nears completion. I built it with some somewhat suspect 3D modeling techniques. It is 5 pieces: body, neck, bell-rim, keys, and mouthpiece. As you can see it needs a much better brass texture but I just can’t find one that maps onto the thing in an appropriate and shiny way. Then, visual stuff was never my strong point.

When you click on it it will play a selection of songs. This was also annoying to code as the longest sound clip you can upload is 10 seconds; thus if you want to play a proper song, you have to ’stitch’ the clips together via LSL. But I think I’ve got it down… now to find some good sax solos to chop up and upload! I’m not good enough to upload myself playing

I’m not wholly happy with the pose/animation I made yet either, but heck, it’s my first try.

This experience has been most interesting. I’ve also mucked around building slideshows and playing with the HTTPRequest method to pull things like live web feeds and try to display them in-world: rather difficult, actually, given that there is no way in LSL to actually WRITE upon and OBJECT, oddly.

Blabber, blabber…

I was reading a very interesting article from work today about population growth. In the beginning of the article it gives the figure that (assuming the earth currently has 6,000,000,000 people in it) if you put everybody into England (and I think that is just England not counting Scotland, Wales etc. etc.) each individual person would have a space of 20 sq metres to stand upon. Thus the earth is not nearly so populated as we tend to think.

So, given that obviously much of the earth’s land area isn’t arable/useful, I was inspired to do a little math. I looked up Earth statistics in Wikipedia, and using those figures for the presently used amounts of useful cropland (1.3×107 km²) and useful pastureland (3.4×107 km²) I got the following results:

if each of the 6,000,000,000 people living on the earth today were to get their own little plots of cropland and pastureland, each would get 2167m²/23325ft² (~46m/153ft to a side) of cropland and 5667m²/60999ft² (about 75m/247ft to a side) of pastureland.

My house/garden, located on a pretty typical suburban plot, is about 600m² (6458ft²). This means that Mike and I would **each** have 3.6 of our house plots to grow food, and 9.5 of our house plots to graze animals. So as a married couple potentially raising a family, we’d have 7 house areas of fruits and vegetables and 19 house areas of cows/goats/sheep (no pigs, ick).I don’t know about farming, of course, but that sounds like a fair bit to me! How much land area does it take to feed an average family per year?

Hmmm. Fascinating.

Well, it’s Monday and I’m still at home, because Zaubi forbid me from going to work. It is actually a Certain Time of Month right now and that seems to be wreaking additional havoc with my lacerated insides. So I can’t say I’m sorry to be still resting at home. Perhaps tomorrow… I’m just hoping that awful stabbing pains will leave me alone today. I guess I’ll let that define whether I go in tomorrow or not.

I finally managed to do a bit of laundry but as soon as I put it out is started pouring. It always seems to work that way! Where is summer??

Zaubi has abandoned me to go to Sydney for a few days for a conference. So I’m all aloooooooooooone (if you don’t count the hairy beastlets)…

Ugh. So tired.

…but I’m going to post it anyway.

So I have not, in fact, yet looked at PayPal’s SOAP thing. In fact, in the past two days, I have done no work at all, shame on me. Because (and, well, I’m going to blame V. for this, because she brought it up in the first place when I’d never heard of it) I was messing around playing Second Life.

Like I said I hadn’t heard of this before V. told me the other day and, being a sucker for anything remotely game-related, I went to give it a whirl. In my own defense, if it had cost anything, I wouldn’t have tried it out, but given that the basic accounts are free… and I was stuck at home… well, how could I turn it down?!

So now I have a Second Life person who, while I tried hard to make her look like me (agonizing over the 40,000 sliders you have to slide in order to customize your appearance/coloring/body shape… how long are my arms? … is the upper bridge of my nose high or low? … are my cheeks puffy or flat? …etc. etc.), she has turned out to be significantly more attractive (sadly, that’s not hard).

So I have entertained myself to no end putting freebie clothes on her (and there are a LOT of freebies) and, today, redesigning someone’s photorealistic skin for her (it had abominable makeup attached to the skin). It is actually a fascinating game: not a game, actually, but rather a super modular environment where you can build stuff. I mean, I suppose that most of the inhabitants go there to meet people, but I hate meeting people online. I find it exhausting and annoying. I was won over by the in-game (as it were) builder toolbox which is impressively sophisticated. The game is, after all, just a big empty coordinate plane and all the members use the toolbox thing to create whatever their hearts’ desire, from buildings to animated hairstyles to pets to musical instruments. I’d love to try to build a sax and then attach a bunch of different music and animations to it.

BUT there is a major downfall which I have just discovered: the bandwidth used is quite fantastically huge. Think orders of magnitude greater than any other online game I’ve experienced. Give that in Oz we suffer under bandwidth quotas, I don’t think I’m going to be spending any more time playing SL this month. In the past two days I quite innocently used up 2.5 of my alloted monthly 4GB before I realized what was happening. This is a game where, for example, if you stand in the middle of nowhere, underneath the ocean where there is nothing (no buildings, no plants, no people), with no clothes on (I was working on a skin), not even moving or doing anything, with the game iconified in windowed mode, it still downloads 50MB.

So! Yeah, that’s how I’ve been wasting my time. I’m really peeved about this download quota thing: I wanted to make a sax. Why does Aussie telecom suck?