Kento's Blog

Last night we held our dance party in Istania. Being part of the group, I got to take some great shots.

Dr Tapia had a great outfit. Think she has a shot in the contest.

The glowsticks made a great addition to our dance moves.

Paul makes his grand entrance to the party.

The music was great enough you could headbang to it.

The part I had to contribute was that I built the main section of the building. The walling and ceiling were all of 10X10 prims with glass texture. Then, I found a free script dance floor and put it down. Later I also added the chairs off to the side for resting. The music stream I found is Pulsradio. It's a French drance/trance station the streams over the internet. I found it using SHOUTcast, which searches for online streams. We picked a lot bitrate, MP3 format and put it in the "speaker" object in order to play it in the world.

It was fun. I hope this night shows that virtual worlds can serve some purpose. Though Second Life is a very primative of what is yet to come, I don't think we can push off the impending future of these types of virtual worlds. Something's bound to come along and make a huge buzz.

So before I make a quest to comment a few more times to ensure I have more than enough, I'm also going to make a posting quest to put up some links, but in a post that makes things really random.

I'll begin with stuff that actually apply. First I've been spending time putting together stuff on Second Life, though right now I'm awaiting other classmates to take down old prims from the last assignment still. Garrett and I have been working to put music in Second Life, and we think we'll use this stream. It is a 32 bitrate AAC+ feed that we hope will be able to be played in the world the night of the dance party. It's much better than the 24 bitrate MP3 format in quality.

I should be studying for a German test, but I'm not the study-the-night-before type. If I don't go to class and know the material, I'm as good as done for the test. This means i usually don't flip before a test and a simple looking over the material.

Another accomplishment is getting all the way through Lost's first two seasons. Now I'm getting caught up on season 3. I was never one who watched the show until someone plopped me down to actaully watch it. Getting hooked, I have been watching all the episodes while the Writer's Guild keeps striking.

For one last uplifting thing for all those cramming for finals, here's a pretty funny thing to laugh at:

To combat the stress of the final weeks of the semester, here a video to release some of it:

300 - PG Version

Yes, the fun of Second Life has led us to learn how to make some cool objects out of prims, and we most recently made one concerning IST. To see the details, click the image to read Josh's post.

To save my precious bandwidth, I went down to the computer lab to explore Second Life for all it was worth while completing the assignment for today. I began by heading over to Sun Microsystems. Their island was very interesting, sorted by into buildings of different parts of the company. One building even had a section for employee gatherings or spots to interview prospective hires! They offered a guided tour, so I rode the machine around the island to see what all they had to offer. I almost got all the way through when the computer decided to freeze and throw a blue screen of death at me. Changing computers, I revisited the island and stocked up on the best things there: freebies. Just like the group in person, they had out nice freebies. The organization from what I could gather has been constantly working to make the island work better and keep it updated with the most current information. The calendar was up to date with information, and keeps getting posted with each press release. Overall, it was a great island to get familiar with Sun Microsystems as a company.

The freebie shop.

The tour chair

I then jumped over to Microsoft Island. This place was a bit more visitor unfriendly. It had some buildings, but it was pretty empty and had nothing of importance to give to visitors about what Microsoft really is. There were really neat structures, but mostly the only significant places were lounges and lecture halls for people to hold meetings in. Most likely, Microsoft gears second life more for employee use while Sun interests outsiders. Microsoft could improve by building things to interest general users.

A large lecture area inside a class sphere

A cool sphere shaped structure

Both islands had eloquent design in order to make it look neat and interesting. Though Microsoft reserved more space than Sun for it, each island also had places to sit and meet either with staff members or scouts from the company. Each has its purpose, but I think Sun’s Island is more important because it is outreaching instead of a more cliquish place. This means I would recommend someone else to visit Sun’s Island to learn about them and not Microsoft’s.

Well, for one, I'm about to get started on my second life homework, so i'll probably post again today. But, for now I will relax in the success of finally getting my spring schedule ironed out for what it will be. Here is my schedule for spring 2008. Alright, now back to second life (but not in my dorm room cause i'll smoke all my bandwidth.)

Since i'm currently loving this famous quote from Admiral Ackbar, here's a nice parody robot chicken did:

Unlike IST Celebrity Jeopardy (which was a great video,) I know how to place an embedded object on my blog site. Our video talked about the evolution of PC Games by highlighting key games released over time. Here’s the video:

Most of it was filmed with simple digital cameras and then edited with Adobe by Tim.

It arrived! My dad came up Sunday and we installed both a new power supply (400 W) and my new video card: the GeForce 8600 GT. Here is a photo of my computer internals after it was all inserted.

Now playing Counter-Strike is a lot better than with integrated graphics!! Haha.
Our group is now getting the ball rolling and will be filming out digital imaging project tomorrow.

There are good things that can happen. After watching today's episode of Webbalert, they highlighted how a student's video of the iPhone made him big bucks. After Nick Haley posted his video, Apple executives saw the video and decided to use it as a big selling commercial instead of slapping him with a copyright infringement. This video will appear during the World Series. Talk about quick fame!

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