NEVER Trust Your Friends

I stand before you a sadder but wiser woman this morning. I broke one of the great SL rules last night. SL and alcohol do NOT belong together. Especially for one such as myself, for whom a glass of white wine can pretty much be my limit. Yeah, I know – world’s cheapest drunk date. My coworkers used to LOVE going on business trips with me – I could never drink my share. Of course, that was in the days when corporate travel was allowed and when people were allowed to admit they enjoyed a drink now and then. Good grief – I even knew people who – GASP – smoked!!!!

This story actually starts the night before last. I met someone new and stayed up WAY too late chatting. It was lovely, but I really do need more than 3 hours of sleep. I relied on a super-large iced coffee, turbo’d, to get me through the morning at the office. By lunch I felt like I’d been kicked in the head. I actually left the office by 3:30 (omg – and the building didn’t collapse without me in it!!! rofl). But of course I logged back in to work when I got home. The rest of my family was heading out to the movies. I poured myself a glass of chilled wine, sat back and dealt with emails and such. A coworker contacted me about business – we ended up testing code, installations, etc. Poured myself another glass of wine, expecting to get some dinner when we were done. Oops. Moved into SL and floated in my pool chatting with a friend. Sipping wine, floating, chilling. It was truly lovely. Said friend left. Okay – time for dinner! But first – I went to answer a plea for help at an MM board. *grin* How could you NOT want a Toblerone chocolate sword?????

I tp’d to the board. Saw Dale logon just then so I tp’d Dale over for the sword too. *grin* Dale likes chocolate. As we stood there clicking the board – WHAM. That wine and the fatigue just came right up and slammed me. I truly could not see – my eyes simply teared, couldn’t think, and knew that I was way way past any coherent or reasonable behavior. I threw myself on Dale’s mercy. Explained that I was done-for. I needed rescuing. LOL. Dale actually had to remind me how to get back home. Once there – how to climb onto my bed. Which I seem to recall missing about 3 times before I got there. Oura had logged on in the meantime and said Hi. I said – I’m trashed, contact Dale. And that, dear readers, was my mistake.

Dale and Oura. OH, how ye have BETRAYED me. /me lets tear run down my cheek. My property is protected. You must be in my group to rez objects on my land. Only MY FRIENDS are in that group. I logged in this morning to get my MM winnings. Which – by the way – I never got because I was so stunned when my house rezzed. THEY TRASHED MY ROOM!!!!!!!!!! OMG – they stole my bed, they left garbage piled up (with FLIES no less), they obscured my artwork, left empty bottles. I recoiled in shock and horror. eeeeewwwww It was so GROSS!!!!! I still can’t quite figure out what is under my bears. or the big white waving things (toilet paper streamers???) I’m SURE I did not have a ceiling fan. Is that from the pool table downstairs????

Hell – here’s a public apology to you. *grin* I saw your plurk yesterday about being bored and wanting to party and live it up. When I saw my room – I thought you and Nat had been there and done that. *grin* I guess you were too busy doing whatever to Prad’s floor. *hugs*

So dear reader – learn from my mistake. SL and alcohol don’t mix. Never trust your friends. Don’t give anyone rez rights.

Um, Dale, Oura – could one of you PLEASE give me back my bed??????

Building “Do”s and “Don’t”s

This morning I was set to declare that perhaps I do indeed have a bit of a builder in me. Tonight….*grin*….another mishap that sent me IM’ing to Bailey! Bailey is simply wonderful. So kind, so patient, so helpful. No matter HOW many times I try to destroy my house, she is there to help me get it back.

Return with me now, however, to happier times. I need an office for a demo next week to my manager. I’d hoped to use an existing office in an existing world. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, that option no longer seems viable. I looked about at all the worlds in which I move and my eye fell on Bedrock Boutique, my mall in OpenSim. The economy has been tough on everyone – we still have empty stores in the mall. I decided to build an office in one of the empty units. Only one little problem: I don’t have any furniture in OS. Actually, I don’t have much of ANYTHING in OS. LOL. Ah, but I DO have hair!! Anyway, I contacted a friend and asked if he would allow me to move his furniture into my store and he graciously agreed. So I set up a table with chairs, some sofas and end tables, put the corporate manual on the table along with a cup of steaming coffee (or whatever). But the setup seemed a bit stark, not to mention too public. I thought that what was needed was a way to indicate that this unit was not open to the public, not for general admittance. I decided that posts and ropes and perhaps a sign were needed. I had a few false starts thinking about the rope, but the posts were a breeze. As was the sign. All in all, creating the posts, rope and sign took me less than 30 minutes. For someone who doesn’t know how to build and has darn few textures, I was quite satisfied.

Now we all know that you shouldn’t work on things when you are tired. I should REALLY know not to try to edit items in or near my house. How many times now have I managed to TAKE my house and have to get it restored??? Two? Three? I think that Hell, Bailey and Shenlei have all had to restore my house at one point or another. Well, some people (me) never learn. I was floating in the pool in one of the inner tubes (hey – it’s HOT here – temperatures were over 90 for the last 3 days) and working on scripting a book. The book was on the side of the pool. All of a sudden – the book was in the water. The pool was twice as big as normal. What??? A very long story short. I “missed” when I was clicking on the book to rotate it. *grin* I clicked on the concrete around the pool and flipped THAT. I KNEW that I’d messed up the rotation of SOMETHING. I IM’d Bailey to ask advice. As we talked and I tried to explain what I saw – that’s when I understood what I had done. In other attempts to undo that, I had also managed to flip the entire pool section upside down. *grin* No, I didn’t get a picture. Silly me. It was actually quite funny. And I’m not about to do it again just for your entertainment. You will have to take my word for it.

And now for the lessons I am learning. First – I simply do not understand rotation. I have a plea in to the script wizard to explain to me WHY what worked for a door does not work for a book. llGetPos, llSetPos, llGetRot, llSetRot. I have used these functions in nearly every scripting assignment from Hell. And STILL I can’t make them do what I want. Grrrrr.

I also learned something important about llRezAtRoot. I don’t know why I thought llRezAtRoot lined up the new prim with the bottom of the existing prim. No, it lines up the new prim with the geometric center of the existing prim. For simplicity – I have a 4m x 4m square. I want to rez a .3m sphere in the upper-left corner of that square. *grin* Should have been very simple. If you read documentation, that is. I, of course, just kept playing with offsets and such. I think my coworker found this approach a bit maddening. But I got the answer (geometric center) just as he found that in the wiki documentation. Cheater! Honour is always telling me to learn by trying. Is THAT what you meant, Honour? So much of this rezzing/scriptig is math. All formulas and calculations. I’m lucky that my coworker is EXTREMELY good at math. I tend to make careless mistakes. Gee, I do that editing also. *grin* Must be a character trait. But I have to say – it is fun to finally make the prims appear where and when I want. I wish I could have that power in RL too.

Just for fun….. here I am in OpenSim:

House Arrest

Lucky me!!! Lucky you!!! Oura is taking over this blog today to tell you how to deal with your inventory. And how to make your friends crazy. Both are EXTREMELY necessary skills in SL!

Inventory out of Control? What to do about it? Well the only thing to do, buckle down and clean it out, get organized, or get an alt and start over.

I decided to buckle down – I put myself on House Arrest. I decided I was not going to leave home until I had some semblance of order. Priority #1: I could at least FIND the new stuff I had just bought. Otherwise I’d just have to buy MORE new stuff. And if I couldn’t find THAT stuff, I’d have to buy MORE new stuff and… well – you see the problem, I hope.

While cleaning my inventory, I found lots of things that you would expect: clothing, landmarks, notecards, skins, hair, shoes, and boots, chairs and more. But I also found all this stuff that I had no idea why I had it: old tires, dirty mattress, boxes (omg at the boxes), tents, trailers, lawn chairs, bean cans that make a gassy sound “Hmmmm, now why would I have THAT?” I asked myself.

After about a week of doing nothing but staring at my inventory, I got really bored. After all, while sorting inventory can be soothing, too much soothing simply numbs the mind. I found a nice T-shirt in my inventory that read “Under House Arrest (You didn’t see me here)”. I decided it was very fitting for the occasion. So what to do when cleaning inventory, at home under House Arrest? Plan a diversionary prison break. Trash your sim of course!! I set up a Tent City. LOL. The only problem with trashing my sim – I shared it with 2 other friends, Sam and DL. So I was trashing THEIR sim, too. You’d better watch out when *I* get bored!

Luckily I happened to get an IM from a good friend Rickk Shippe. He felt sorry for me, lonely in my house arrest, and came to visit. I was going a little crazy having no contact with the outside world for so long. He was quite surprised to see my tent city and decided to join me in my ‘creating’. Rick was a huge help. He had many things in HIS inventory that I can’t imagine why he would need them, either. We had old Christmas trees on fire in a ‘huge’ camp fire. Wild horses started showing up out of nowhere. More mobile homes, fire barrels, bouncing tires everywhere. Seemed like a good idea at the time. WE were having fun.

When Sam and DL ‘noticed’ the new additions to the parcel, they were less than thrilled. SL was pretty new to them at the time, and some obvious methods of determining the culprit had not become second nature to them as of yet. They didn’t know how to inspect items and determine the owner. They didn’t know their land tools. So it was a great deal of fun to push them a bit with this practical joke.

Cleaning it all up was very easy and quick… but alas, it seemed to just add more BACK to my inventory. What will I do for this next week of “House Arrest” to entertain myself? Maybe prepare a big folder of STUFF and give it away?? Look out…. it could be coming YOUR way!

Thanks, Oura!! LOL. /me makes note to refuse any inventory offers from Oura in the near future…..

Housewarming!

I love when my friends do fun happy things. This time it was Nat & Hell throwing a house-warming party at their new home. I got the invite the day before, which was great. I had time to block it out on my calendar. Lately if it’s not on my calendar – it doesn’t seem to happen. I’d not partied or socialized or relaxed all week. I knew that I had to be with this group of friends to kick off my weekend. So an hour before party time I packed up my stuff and actually LEFT THE OFFICE and went home.

Of course, I left wrapping the present til the last minute. But I’m getting good at this! I’d already practiced wrapping a gift so that it would give a card and the present smoothly. So I grabbed my handy-dandy gift box, modified it a bit, wrote up the card, and made TWO packages!! One for Hell and one for Nat. Hey, everyone likes getting presents. And since I had 2 gifts (one high prim and one low) I figured they could each have the fun. I am quite impressed with myself. I managed to change the color and texture of the box. I reminded myself of what the script did (Okay – honesty compels me – the script was so easy to understand because Hell wrote it for me the other day. LOL. That’s also why it works!). I packed up those 2 boxes and called for the taxi. To my great joy (and a little surprise) – both packages worked exactly as planned. Yay!!! What were they? Plants of course. I’m a gardener, remember? I love flowers.

I arrived at the party to find that we were starting outside. Some beef on the barbecue and a bit of brew. I’m not exactly sure why Hell was wearing the cooler, but he was, so that’s the big brown thing you’ll see in the pictures. Also – a word of advice to you all. Should you be invited for dinner – I’d ask for sushi. Or take-out. Or anything that does NOT require Hell to fire up the grill. As Phin found out, Hell has a bit of difficulty getting that grill to light. A flame-thrower is NOT the answer to this question. You were supposed to cook the food on the grill, dear, not the guests…..

After a bit we all moved inside to see the place. Since it would not be a party without being bombarded with “things”, we had the obligatory beach ball blast, with newbies thrown in for a little variety. We all had our own little ways to avoid being buried. Some rose above the mess, some of us waded through to a quiet corner. That would be me, actually. I found a spot in the corner to sip champagne, to watch the craziness and to take a zillion pictures. Go see them on flickr.

More folks came in to join us and we had the usual banter and fun that we always do. We ran out of seats fairly early on so Nat and Hell rezzed out a bed. I know that this is your first house together. Let me give you a word of advice. You feed people, you make them comfy, you amuse them – the next thing you know they’ll have moved in. Like stray cats. You may not want to be such accommodating hosts, you know?

Housing Disaster

Oh dear. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, I do something amazingly stupid. Did you know that textures need to be rezzed onto a prim? Maybe I knew that, but maybe I didn’t. I have several photos that are defined as textures in my inventory and I open them up just as if they were photos. So until Sunday morning, I never really paid attention to the differences. Oops……

Saturday night I went to an art show opening. Callipygian Christensen, Sysperia Poppy and Trindolyn Beck are showing their work at Chosen Misery. Calli had shown me some of the current pieces a few weeks ago. I’d fallen in love with one of them. I didn’t know that I’d fallen in love until I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about the face and the lighting and the mood. So I told Calli that I thought I was in love and wanted to see the picture again. Sure enough, when I saw it Saturday night, I was still in love. So I bought it. My first artwork for my beautiful new house. No – I’m NOT posting a picture. If you want to see it, you have to come visit me. I also fell in love with a photo by Sysperia. In for a penny, in for a pound – I bought that one also.

Sunday morning I decided to hang my new artwork. I was quite excited to put them up on the walls, see where they would look best, how to size them for best viewing. I started with Calli’s. I rezzed it, sized it, put it on the wall next to the fireplace. It looked wonderful – just as I’d been imaging it all these weeks. So without thinking much about anything, I rezzed Sysp’s texture, to hang on the wall. Oh dear. It was a texture, not a texture on a prim. It GLOMMED onto the wall of the house. Full size – covering the wall upstairs and down. Okay, no big deal, I thought. I’ll just take it back and start again. Except……. It’s like this, for you RL friends…. the texture becomes part of the wall. Not only that, but this particular texture – it’s “no-copy”. That means I can use it only once. So….. my wall now had this picture all over it instead of being wall texture, and I couldn’t re-rez the texture onto a prim to hang because it was already in use. So I’d damaged both the wall and the texture.

And then it got worse…. As I said, I figured I’d fix everything by “taking” the texture back. So I did. But I “took” the wall. That is, I “took” my house. Suddenly I was up in the air with no house. I was falling. I looked at my bare empty land with my furniture floating 3 stories up, and my pool where it should be and my heart stopped. Oh My Word. I destroyed my house. I didn’t put it in place – Rez and Shenlei did that for me!!!!! Oh my. Oh no. Having RL pains in my chest, can’t breathe. My house…. Frantically I look at my friends list. No Shenlei. Bailey!!! Bailey is on!!!! I IM Bailey, hysterical. Bailey tells me to start breathing again and she tp’s in to my rescue.

I give Bailey all rights to my inventory, I rez my house again (floating detached from the pool now) and stand back to watch. Bailey nudges and tugs that house right back into alignment – perfectly!!! I don’t even have to fix the furniture or the flowers or anything!!!! My house is BACK!!!! She made it look so easy. I think she accomplished the whole process in less than 10 minutes. I think it took her longer to stop my hysteria than it took her to move the house into place. The wall was still textured with “Still Waters” (the Sysperia Poppy work), but Bailey needed to get back to work. I did not have the texture for the walls, so Bailey suggested that I contact both the architect who built the house and Sysperia, to ask for the textures. So I sent off notecards to both.

As I caught my breath and settled in to wait for replies, Shenlei logged in. I IM’d her to tell her of my latest fiasco. Shen, like Bailey, immediately jumped to help, despite being up to her chin in her own work. She tp’d over. She has a house similar to mine and she gave me her wall texture. Then she began to teach me how to retrieve that texture out of the wall. The woman has the patience of a saint. LOL. I’m sure there is something ironic in that sentence, but you KNOW that I adore you, Shen. Anyway, I was still being incredibly stupid (maybe I shouldn’t attempt SL until AFTER I drink my coffee??) and we must have gone through the same set of instructions five times before I understood how to get it right. Bingo! THERE was that texture within the content of the wall prim! I dragged it from there back into my inventory. YAY!!!! Shenlei trusted me to fix the wall texture and rez “Still Waters” correctly at that point and so returned home. I did indeed apply her wall texture successfully and it was a fairly close match. Not exact. But at that moment the architect IM’d me and sent me the correct texture. YAY!!! My house was in place and textured properly!!!!! Next I rezzed a prim, textured it with “Still Waters” and hung it above my bed. It looks fantastic!! And while I was doing that, Sysp came online and IM’d me to help out. She too was very kind and comforting, saying (as did all the others) that everyone makes mistakes like this on occasion.

Everyone was wonderfully helpful, kind and supportive. Each one of them took time from their busy lives IMMEDIATELY upon hearing of my distress. I am always so touched by the kindness and generosity of the people that I meet in SL. I know that some people blog about rudeness and incivility. I have been extremely fortunate in the people that I know and meet.

So….. it seems to me that I need to repay the generosity and kindness of my friends. Some big, dramatic, tell-the-world gesture. I don’t think that simply giving an object as a gift will suffice. I think that something more personal may be required. I am thinking over how best to implement my idea…….

Making a House a Home

So I spent a good part of the day trying to make my house into my home. Planting flowers and trees. Shopping for benches and beach blankets. Adding some greenery for the ducks. Adding some fish in the tidal pool. Not sure how much of all this will stay, but for now things feel a little more comfy and cozy. The swimming pool still needs LOTS of work. I’ve already used up a third of my prims, so I will probably have to toss some of what is here. Shades of work – too many flower prims!!!! Arrggghhh!!!!! But I am having fun and enjoying myself. And after all, that’s why I’m here.

Election Night ‘08

So last night I was hanging about inworld, listening to RL news about the election results. I was by myself, thinking about landscaping, planting some big trees. Darcey logged on and I invited her to join me. She tp’d in and we planted another tree. Then we decided we’d worked hard enough so we changed into our suits, stretched out in relaxation chairs, poured ourselves some iced lemonade and listened to the waves and the sea gulls. Oh- maybe I should tell you where we were? We were hanging out at MY house. That’s right – I now own land. With a house. With 3 trees. LOL. With WATER!!! But no ducks yet. That stupid work sim is holding my ducks hostage. I’m going to have to login there today and WEAR a duck and hope that I can smuggle it out that way!

But in the meantime – here are Darcey and I enjoying my new Home Sweet Home! Notice that I’ve not really figured out how to landscape. Although after we’d sat there awhile I realized the shore line was a little too stark for my comfort and I didn’t want to burn. So I rezzed some palm trees and banana plants.