Saturday, 12th May, 2007

Inactivity

ennui secondlife building texture work

I'm sure it's not something that crosses anyone else's mind ecept my own, but I do get very aware/concerned when my writing trails off into irrelevent silence.

It's the time of year, I think Twelve months ago I was having a similar 'out of body/avatar' experience — seeing myself through others' eyes and feeling very male as a result, losing track of the Self that splurges great wads of text onto the web.

This year it's not quite the same — I'm feeling perfectly balanced in my G, S & K existences, in fact, I'm positively revelling in them. An openess at work and elsewhere is meaning that I don't feel like I'm having to package off part of my personality and bundle it away out of sight.

(You know, I must write about that some time...)

It's just that, well, I'm so fucking busy. Web sites need designing, DVDs need compiling, buildings need (um) building.

There's been a shift in focus in terms of my work-patterns. It used to be the case that this time of year was spent in anticipation of one moment — the joys, excitement, and sometimes dismay of the end of the semester. Everything I did was towards that moment when lists of classifications went up on the wall, and three years of work culminated in an emotional climax.

My year used to be a very clearly defined, sharp set of endpoints, but with the introduction of a whole host of Other Things™ to do — both now, and over the summer — it's as if someone's taken my calendar, and whacked 50 pixels of Gaussian Blur on it.

With that in mind, I just wanted to briefly stick my head above the water level for a second, wave, and mention what I've been up to this past week...

Communting

It's been really killing me, a hundred and fifty miles a day. My usual sleep-crashing venues have been unavailable or full, so I've been coming home each night.

Financially, it's crippling — it's about £20 a day — but it's not doing good things to my headspace either.

What I'm doing is hanging on after 5pm, taking advantage of the Superly Bastardly Fast Mac Pros™ and our beloved JANET to really blast through my ongoing SL building. It's so much easier doing stuff when you're getting an average of 70 frames per second (rather than my usual 10fps at home).

(At one point the other day, I got well over 200fps — but admitedly, I was just looking straight up at the sky...)

Staying at work until 7 o'clock means that by the time I jump in the car, all the traffic has died down, and so it doesn't take me 3 hours to get home. I suppose I could go to the pub with the others (and I wonder if they're slightly bemused/offended that I don't), but standing around drinking Coke while everyone else is tucking into pints of Dutch lager isn't really my thing — especially when I'm very aware of how much stuff I need to do.

Building

I really want the Second Life versions of our End of Year Shows to be absolutely perfect — or as perfect as they can be, given my limited skills and the time I've got to do things in.

It's all coming together nicely — here's me sat on the steps taking a break from doing the revolving door on the Second Floor...

One thing I'm particularly proud of, is how I've been using Illustrator to do much of the planning/building work of this project. As well as my Now Linked To Too Many Times™ SVG-based building script, I managed to reuse the floorplan yesterday to divide the floor textures into the right sized chunks — like I promised myself I'd do a few weeks ago.

Basically, what I do is plot out all the lights in Illustrator — how they cast shadows and stuff — then I import that file into Photoshop and whack a Radial Blur on each point where a shadow starts...

You have to use the History Brush a lot to tidy up the results, but it's quite a realistic shadow, no?

Anyway, after about a couple of hours or so, I'm left with two things — an SVG of how the floor is made up of prims, and a TIFF with the whole texture on it:

 

I throw the SVG at a little PHP script I knocked up, which could make the tiled textures, but (me being lazy) just returns a list of commands that I cut and paste into the terminal...

convert H6_floor.tif -crop 500x275+450+3161.25 +repage H6_floor-39.tga

...and ta dah! — a whole desktop full of perfectly fitting textures that I can upload, and fling onto my pre-prepared "0.9 repeats per face" floor prims

The one thing it's lacking at the moment, is a way to identify which texture is for which prim. It does them in the order they're drawn — which might not be top-left to bottom-right. It took me ages to figure it out yesterday, what I need is it to return an image like the one on the left above, with numbers superimposed on it.

On the plus side though, all the floors are the same

...

God, I'm a tedious geek aren't I?

You see, this is where my mind is at at the moment — drawing little sparks of pleasure from finding techy solutions to things. Every second of my day is spent thinking "Hey, I could do this if I just write the right code". I'm finding myself looking into a vast chasm of possibilities — the data I've got, and the buzzes surrounding some of the things that I'm utilising are suggesting all sorts of exciting things to do.

The only problem I'm finding is that I just haven't got the time to do them all.

Actually, maybe not "time" — maybe I mean "energy"

I needs me an assistant...

Moving

My soon-to-be non-Lancastrian blogging-colleague Selina popped round yesterday. The poor girl is moving house today (good luck!), and we chatted a little about that (and Doctor Who, natch).

I'm definately coming to the conclusion that renting a place in Leeds for a year is the way to go

In the meantime though, I'm going to have to ring up a few people today, and try and find somewhere to crash at night for the next couple (or more) of weeks. It'll take a load off my mind if I'm not spending five hours a day in the car...

Travelling

You know, I'm quite glad there's no Doctor Who tonight. Despite being ridiculously busy, and being ever-so-slightly skint¹, I'm about to start packing my usual girl-based bag and trundling down the M6/A50 to Nottingham to visit someone.

Quite excited really. I mean, it's always nice meeting up with people, but apart from all that it'll be good to get myself out of this Lancaster/Leeds cycle for a night — a tiny bit of breathing space (if you like) admidst a sea of franticness.

...

Anyways, sorry — that wasn't much of a 'fluent' post. My brain isn't being very fluent at the moment to be honest — fits and starts of alternating between excitement and productivity, and ennui and procrastination.

Maybe if I get some time somewhere between now and June, I'll write a bit of a Sparkle-based rant.

¹ WTF? How can I be skint? I just had a 60% pay rise FFS. Something is Not Right™

Google may use games to analyse net users

link marketing advertising google

"If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee." — (guardian.co.uk) I find this rather depressing, really