Slacking in the New Year

I started out 2010 with a renewed vow to try to do all the various hobbies that I have had for years and years, despite the knowledge that each of them constitutes a full career unto themselves. One extra thing is I’m going to try to blog each Sunday about the week’s thoughts and such.

Sticking with my “personal development” schedule was illustrative of a few things. Mainly, I found that the last task dropped off simply because by that point I was too mentally exhausted to do it. There’s a lot of pretty engaged creative tasks in my schedule, and switching from “intensely thinking about writing fiction” to “intensely thinking about designing hermetic self-training programs” to, say, reading non-fiction that needs thought, all in the space of five hours, really kind of did me in. I’m not sure if this is something I need to get used to, or I’m pushing myself too hard or what. I am leaning toward the latter. It’s a lot. Maybe I should do one thing once a day, for longer. Still thinking about it.

December and January have had a lot of time off, and when tired broke things down, I admit that this week consisted of a lot of shooting other people (and getting shot myself) on Second Life. Hella fun first person shooting stuff and goofing off. Sue me. However, I did get some work in on Gaslit. I am about to join my dear little steampunky sim to the massive Caledon continent, by invitation, and am in a mad effort to get the place into shape for that. I finally found my Photoshop master file for the textures, added some more, created a new set for another section of the city, and away we go. It’s coming along alright, in that it’s growing organically, but I’m itching to work on the steampunky details. The furnaces and steam and pipes and such necessarily come after the infrastructure is in, so right now it looks city-like but not especially steampunky.

I’m also having to keep an eye on my bandwidth. The upgrade to 8Mb (which in Kazakh is really 2Mb but it’s better) took effect this month, and I have 20GB download a month before things start costing about USD$2 per 100MB beyond that. Second Life hogs a huge amount. My monitoring shows about 100MB for an hour-long battle, less if i’m just building. I figure 500MB a day will ration it out fair enough.Ah, for the joys of unlimited traffic.

I have discovered that I have a caiffiene addiction. This has happily coincided with the arrival of my personal Keurig at the office, so now I have solid sources of good coffee. The difference between no or little coffee and reasonable amounts of coffee on my mood and productivity is pretty amazing. With good joe, I’m awake and have a lot of energy. Without, I have headaches and feel like blah. I have no pride here. I like my coffee. And I only drink max 5 cups a day.

Get used to this rambling, for this is likely what summary of weeks will be.

Gear Porn

This is a shot of the collection of “gear” I carry on trips with me. It all fits in a bag about the size of a football. There is:

Kensington portable power supply (wall plug, car adaptor, plane epower adaptor, USB extender, PowerTips for 5 different laptops, iPods and Blackberry, looong cord for it), USB hub with power connector, UX90PS port extender, straight through ethernet, plug extender, iPod cable, FM transmitter, camera battery charger, microSD-to-USB adaptor, USB-to-PS/2 adaptor, spare batteries, battery power pack for USB, USB extension cable, mini-USB-to-regular cable, Datexx UltraBattery with USB charging cable, USB wifi adaptor, Bluetooth USB adaptor, two USB RJ-45 ethernet adaptors, 4 port USB hub (possibly redundant, but smaller than the big one), multi-card reader (CF, microSD, MS/MS Pro, SD/MMC, MS Duo, miniSD, SM, xD, MD), portable door alarm, 1 GB USB stick, wall-to-USB charger (output: 5V), car-to-USB adaptor, Kensington USB voltage booster (turns 5V into 6V) with Nokia usb charging tip, bag of plugs (airline headphone adaptor, headphone splitter, all the PowerTips.

I think all it lacks is a handcrank power source or perhaps a solar panel. But neither of those would fit into the bag, as it is now.

Interesting Mental Paragraph

From a friend:

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!”

Steampunk City City

This certainly doesn’t look safe. But it looks cool.

Wandering around the original Caledon in search of a specific script, I noticed this. The city has also strewn pieces farther than the picture shows. Up in the city are shops and a neat glass-enclosed garden area with a fantastic tree, and a lot of random locations. I think Caledon gets even more wonderful with each new feature they add to Second Life.

NaNo ‘08: pwned

Well, somewhere off the coast of Maine on a flight to Brussels, I crossed the 50,000 words mark early on November 30th, and validated it when I got to my hotel on the other end.

My wordcount graph shows the big push there at the end. Even holding back a cold, I managed to break personal records of daily wordcount, logging 6600 on Friday the 28th! I didn’t really keep track of how long that took me, though guess it at about 4-5 hours.

And now… the editing. This is a publishable story! A hearty congrats to everyone who participated in NaNoWriMo this year!