Whimsy Makes Startup Screen in Singularity Viewer

Anyone Can Ride the Train at Whimsy. It's More Fun Than Pie!

I've not been in world much for the past couple of weeks (I've been preparing a paper I'll be presenting at a conference in a couple of weeks), but Whimsy's little train sends me an instant message whenever someone drives it, and the messages goes to e-mail, so I knew a lot of people had been riding.

At first I thought someone had told their friends about it or mentioned it in group chat, but my friend Petronella told me she saw Whimsy featured on the startup screen of the Singularity viewer. Imagine that!

The ride is lovely, partially in the air and partially under the sea, and the scenery is breathtaking. I have two carries out, each of which holds two people, so a total of five people can ride at one time. 

You can ride the Whimsy train here. Just sit on the engine and touch the boiler.

New Desktop Up and Running!

This isn't my new PC, but it does show how clean the inside of Corsair Carbide 300 can be!

I'm happy to say I now again have a desktop computer!

It took me three months to assemble the components (as I could afford them), and then I made a push and grabbed everything and finished the project.

So, I have an Intel i7 Haswell (latest) 4770 processor which can be overclocked, an MSI gaming motherboard (which allows overclocking), 16 GB of RAM, a solid state boot drive, and a 2 TB hard drive for data (and a second for backup). The power supply generates 850 watts, plenty if I should ever want to run dual video cards. It's all in a Corsair Carbide 300R case with spaces for lots of fans, should I need them. Inside the case is amazingly neat-- all the cables and wires are routed behind the motherboard so no ugly spaghetti mess. There are all sorts of USB 3.0 outlets in the back and two in the front. I'm running an nVidia 520 video card which is a big improvement over the nVidia 9400GT in my old box. An nVidia 760 (which will cost far more than any video card I've ever purchased) is in my computer's immediate future. I even picked up a wireless N router to replace my 10-year-old G model-- for only $19 at Frys! And I retired my 20-year-old Hewlett-Packard Laserjet, replacing it with a Brother all-in-one model with a scanner that works far faster than that of my 15-year-old Brother inkjet.

Even better, I've even installed the many programs I use regularly (I think I'll do a separate post on them in the future).

I planned to put everything together myself, but the great electronics big-box store Frys had a special for assembling new computers. It cost just $49 for them to mount the processor and CPU cooler and RAM and video card to the mother board, put the mother board and drives and an LED lamp into the case so it would be all glowy, route all the wires, and make sure everything worked. And indeed it did!

So yay!

My old Sony VAIO desktop was noisy and tended to run hot. The new computer is whisper quiet and the CPU is staying cool. And it's fast!

The video card is the weakest link in the system, but it's adequate, and as I said, I hope to soon replace it.

My own disappointment was in transporting my Firestorm settings from my laptop to the new computer. Somehow I messed up and wiped out the settings on my laptop.That meant I had to go through some 90 minutes of setting the many switches and buttons in the control panel of the new computer.

Things aren't perfect yet-- my external data drive seems to lose connection with the USB port for a second or two on occasion, and I get an occasional video glitch in Second Life, but for the first time in months I can cam around and move about with ease. That means I can both build and explore more easily-- and I hope to! For six months my in-world activities ,and Sweetie's, have been limited primarily to going to hear D.J. Sparrow Letov spin.

I'm going to take my laptop to the shop to add another 4 GB of RAM and to get the processor removed and re-mounted. When it was new it ran Second Life just fine; it's probably running hot because of dust.

Again:  yay!

Another Quiet Night at Whimsy

It was another beautiful, uneventful night at Whimsy... so of course Sweetie had to disrupt it. She whipped out her motorized bathtub.

I mean, everyone has one, right?

Ski Jump

I've long been a fan of the creations from Jenne Dibou's (?) Mechanical Toy Factory. I once had a conversation there with an automaton that damn near passed the Turing test.

Yesterday Sweetie and I discovered a build high above the Toy Factory's Forgotten City sim. It was a beautiful winter scene with gorgeous off-sim mountains.

Slowly Building a New Desktop

The infrequency of posts here over the past months is directly related to what my laptop allows me to do in Second Life. Everything else is fine, but for some reason I have difficulty with manipulating my camera. It's difficult to move and almost impossible to manipulate prims and photography is difficult. The latter is crucial, since I tend to tell stories here with photographs. Sweetie and I have been going out dancing a lot, but I've done little on Whimsy.

I have a long mental list of things I'd like to do on our sims, but I'm not even going to start until I have a computer that will work properly in world. To that end I've been assembling components to build a new desktop. To date I've assembled a kickass gaming mother board and an i7 processor.

I ordered an add-on cooling fan which turned out not to fit my processor; it wasn't cost effective to send back, so is anyone interested in a Cooler Master Hyper 101i CPU cooler for the LGA 1155 socket? It fits core i3 and i5 Intel processors and AMD's AM3? It's new in the box and it can be yours for just ten bucks plus postage.

This week I retrieved the gamer's case I've been storing in preparation for this day and removed the internals. I loved the case when it was new ten years ago, but it shows years of wear and, although it was wrapped in plastic, the time in storage didn't help. And so I'm off to Fry's tomorrow morning to spend some quality time with the 50 of so desktop cases they have on display. I probably won't buy one, as money is short, but at least I'll come home knowing the features I want.

I have two good 430 watt power supplies and a brand new 500 watter, but I'm thinking of getting a bigger one in anticipation of one day buying two nice graphics cards.

I have other things I need-- cables, solid state drive, 2 tb hard drive, DVD recorder, monitors...

On hand; mother board, i7 processor, DVD writer, cables, SSD, 2 tb HD

Still to buy: case, power supply, 16 gb RAM

I Am Disappointed in the Gorts

Cheyenne Palisades is Disappointed With the Gorts for Not Frying the Troublesome Avatar cinquetti. Since Their Anger Management Classes They Have Been Entirely Too Chill.

A couple of months ago I got an IM from a visitor to Whimsy. He and a friend had stopped by the dance platform at 1850 meters and were told in no uncertain terms by a certain avatar named cinquetti that they were in her home and would have to leave.

Needless to say, cinquetti didn't live there. No one does. She wasn't and isn't a resident of Whimsy. I had noticed she had been frequenting the dance platform and was fine with that-- but I wasn't fine with her appropriation of it.

I banned her from my estates-- so imagine my surprise tonight when I cruised by and saw none other than cinquetti at the dance platform.

I checked the region ban list and she was on it-- and yet there she was! I removed her and added her again, this time copying her name in her profile and pasting it. She disappeared-- I hope this time for good.

Most of the time I tell avatars politely why they are being banned, and only rarely does someone get banned for a first infraction. In her case I banned her immediately and didn't tell her why. Why? Because of the outrageousness of her behavior.

Iffy Weather on Kaboom

It was a nice day on Kaboom-- until the clouds began rolling in.

Happy Belated New Year!

Here's an image I meant to post on New Year's day. I took the picture the night before, on Caledon.

If you're in the eastern part of the United States, I hope you and your water pipes survive the cold, cold weather. If you're there, or if you're anywhere else in this world, or orbiting it, I wish you a happy new year.

Have Space Suits, Will Travel