Protein Motif

Protein Motif
Originally uploaded by pdecell

My first Second Life video. Enjoy and either comment here or on Flickr. The animation is a complex sculpture of 3 sculpted prims free to rotate independently and intersect each other leading to complex patterns. My avatar (Simone) is sitting on the sculpture as in a dream.

The video was produced using Camtasia Studio, as a windows media file, and uploaded to Flickr. Flickr can only make 90 second videos and apparently takes the format you upload and processes it into an Adobe Flash file. What is frustrating aside from the 90 second limit is that Flickr won't accept Flash files!

The sound track is a translation of a protein called Gamma Crystallin, courtesy of Max Chatnoir of Genome Island.

If you have Second Life installed:

Visit Simone and her sculpture at:
slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/167/208/155

and visit Max at Genome Island at:
slurl.com/secondlife/Genome/128/128/0


As a tip, use the highest quality settings you can use to produce your video before uploading to Flickr. I could not get mov files to work but Windows media files worked fine. Flickr does have a video upload limit of 150MB.

Now You See It...

On Wednesday I giving my Second Life office a make over to make it more comfortable looking when I suddenly could not take stuff from my inventory folders into my land. So I got on SL's help chat and Rika, the tech I got at SL patiently had me try various things. None of them worked. So she had to reboot my entire region.

I went across the way to the next region to watch what happens when a region is taken off line. My office is the low build with the green roof. Not very imaginative I know:

Now you see it:




Now you don't:



While I was waiting for my region to be restored I found this wonderful build nearby-



slurl.com/secondlife/Cisseps/45/213/212

where I could relax a bit:



The reboot worked and I could could return to my Second Life office:




Having access to online help is one advantage of a premium account and Rika was great. She probably spent 20 minutes working with me to figure out what the problem was. Second Life has been experiencing inventory problems this week and it may be that my problem was connected to that.

If you have the Second Life client on your machine you can visit my office/laboratory at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/176/217/137

After the Storm

Last night we had more violent weather in Kansas featuring everything from tornadoes to escaped elephants. To quote from the Lawrence Journal World:

"The elephants, part of a traveling circus in WaKeeney, were apparently frightened by the storm and wandered through the town after breaking loose, said Trego County Sheriff Richard Schneider.

One elephant wandered into a resident’s backyard less than a mile from the Trego County Fairgrounds and was blocked off by fire trucks until its trainers could coax it onto a truck, Schneider said.

“I guess it got tired of walking around,” he said.

The second elephant was tranquilized in another resident’s backyard, coaxed into a truck and taken back to the circus, which was already packing up to head to the next town, Schneider said.

There were no reports of damage from the elephants..."

This morning, no elephants but a snail tasting the calm:

At work in Second Life

OK..maybe a little bit of playing. I've gotten back to working with sculpted prims and just for the heck of it and to challenge my limited skills but together a flower out of sculpted prim parts.

Here I am hard at work in my laboratory putting the insides of the flower together:



The final result:



And Simone sitting on a petal. She's not a very good pixie.



If you have SL installed the flower is at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/121/195/137

Listening

Listening
Originally uploaded by pdecell

I climb up the scale and listen to your melody
As it casts itself out. A path for me.

A postcard from Second Life.

Alone
Originally uploaded by pdecell

I am alone on an alien beach.
Only your music sustains me today.

Hungry Baby

This newly hatched mantid was one of many on my Viburnum yesterday.

Beauty in Second Life...

My last major post discussed evolution and beauty. By the way that post was also sent to my science blog where it generated a lot of discussion so check it out at:

http://www2.ljworld.com/weblogs/dangerous-ideas/2008/may/30/evolution-and-beauty/

Today I was down loading the new edition of Sculptie paint. This is a software tool for making irregular shaped objects called "sculpted prims"in Second Life. The creator is Cel Edman (at least that is his avatar's name) and today I briefly chatted with him and visited two of his second life sites. First his store where he sells prepackaged sculpties for those who need certain types of irregular shapes. For instance-building stairs the old way in second life eats up a lot of prims, but Cell has a stair tool which allows you to create single prim stairs. Remember in Second Life you are limited in the number of prims based on how much land you own...so every prim counts!

Outside his store is a wonderful set of sculpted forms:



Cel also tells me that he has never really had time to build in SL and he has recently bought land in a public area and has begun to build some really exciting things. For instance, check out this wonderful sculpted prim tree and how in interacts with the light and fog in the sim.



Oops a storm is moving in and my battery back up has just kicked on.