Hello everyone, this is Blue Hair Episode Number One from Dedric Mauriac in Second Life. So today I’m going to start kicking off this podcast because today was the first day of podcast and I figured what better day than to start off than the day that podcasters start teaching each other about how they do things and what they do. Alright, so the first thing on my agenda is the pet dog that I purchased in this past week who I named Odin. What I had done was I had found out about this dog from a friend of mine and she had told me about the creator who had had his own kennel shop, the creator who was Enrico Genasi. So I went over to this kennel club called the Virtual Kennel Club in Caledon.

If anybody hasn’t been there before, Caledon is a 1800 Periods Victorian style sim where everybody dresses up in period clothing and has the houses and such. At the time I think it was roughly five dogs who all came to me, sniffed around, barked and just were happy and wagging their tails and enjoying my company. The whole concept of the Virtual Kennel Club is not a common place where you have a lot of vendors set up all over the walls. This is actually a place set up to look like an actual dog park with a kennel in the back. So the dogs get to play around and there’s even some things set up around for them to do their tricks on.

Like they can walk through a tube, go over ramp, walk around, some poles and hop over some obstacles. The dogs respond to just about every one of your commands but if there aren’t any commands that they don’t understand you can teach them. When I purchased my dog one of the first things I taught him to do was to dance. So I had him turning left and right while he was in the big position. I then was able to have him call this dance trick many times over and some of the people that I was around liked the dance so much that I taught them how to do it. So since my dog’s name is Odin, I would type Odin, learn, dance, beg, turn south or turn S in this case, turn E, turn S, turn E, sit.

So once I did all that the dog would stand up in the beg position and then turn left and right twice and then he would sit. So the dogs themselves, I could not figure out how to purchase the dogs at first until I read the signs around in the dog park, was just said to go ahead and pay the dogs themselves. And they range, I think it was in the $2,000 range, $2,000 lindens.

Some were different prices at cheaper prices or more expensive prices. And then once you take them home, they’ll start learning commands on their own and build sort of an artificial intelligence. It could train the dog whether you like what they do or you don’t like what they do when visitors come up and they do things.

So you can encourage good behavior by saying, as in my dog’s name, Odin good or Odin bad if it’s doing some bad things. Next on my agenda here is the Particle Lab class. I sponsor a class with Dr. Fran who does clothing and to build a dress and another class to build magical holiday staffs. And I’ve been paying her once a week to do more classes.

I do two classes a week and at the beginning of each class she tells everybody please visit these fine sponsors of the class for providing the materials and time or the funding for the class and such. So anyhow, someone came after one of her classes, it was interested in my Particle Lab and they later went on to purchase the lab. However, the lab did not come with an instruction manual.

I mainly built this Particle Lab to be more of a visual indicator of how things work so I didn’t actually put in any instruction manual. So later on she sent me a message asking me if I could go over all the controls with her and by the way would I mind if I brought if she brought a friend with her. So I said sure she could come along and bring her friend and we must have spent about two hours just going over every single control and the things to watch out for recommendations, what Second Life is not capable of doing with its particles engine, settings that you may want to do set up for your client with working with particles and just a whole bunch of different things. The log from this conversation was so long but it was enough information to make a manual out of and I started separating each section of it into different parts and dressing up the text file that I saved it to so that only her conversation would be there.

The problem is it’s just so long and tedious. However, my friend Dr. Fran offered some help or a barter if you will in that she was really good with doing copy editing and in return I could make some scripts for her to make a pet. So I said sure I could do that if you could do that for me. So I’ll be working on some scripts for her to use.

I don’t know if she’s going to just use it to sell her own pets or future classes that are upcoming so we’ll see how that goes. The next thing on my agenda is the chatbot name social. This guy was actually a I saw him in SLpix.com which is a website of just everybody sends their pictures to this email address pics at SLpix.com and within a few minutes your pictures or your snapshots that you sent out to that address will show up on this website. The snapshot that I saw in particular sent me over to a place where there was a chatbot in his name. What was his name?

Next generation you can talk to him. Social auto poyesis. So what is social? Social is a chatbot as I think I just mentioned but what he is is an avatar running through the lib second life client which is a library of methods that are available to programmers to connect to second life. This is separate from the second life open source code.

It was a project started way back in the day before this happened. So a programmer took the lib second life code to be able to connect to second life with a program that he created himself using this library and then he was able to listen to people and process responses based on what someone said compared to something called an AIML file. AIML files stand for artificial intelligence markup language. This file is a special file that has patterns that match up against what people say and then if a match is found then it has a few given responses that you can respond with to make it to simulate an actual conversation. It goes much deeper than that but that’s the basics of how these AIML files work. When we have a conversation with social at first he seems to have a pretty reasonable conversation and things start to make sense and the conversation actually goes on because he’s able to stay on topic with a few of how AIML works.

The problem though is after a while he starts saying something way crazier that just doesn’t make sense or he’ll have common knowledge or he’ll seem to lack common knowledge like he’ll ask where you live and you say San Francisco and he’ll ask well where is that and it’s like California just about everybody knows that because it’s such a popular city but there’s even more details besides that scenario that you can actually trick the robot and if you can trick a chatbot then it would fail something called the Turing test and the Turing test is what professionals use to test if a chatbot can simulate a human conversation and trick other humans. The cool thing about that is Hamlet All from New World Notes had actually picked up on my story and sat down for a conversation himself. And then he went farther and took a video of the whole conversation and posted on YouTube, which was pretty amazing. Actually, that’s where I got the San Francisco reference was, is because that was part of the conversation that he had with social.

So on to the next thing. Dr. Freyhan took me over to Paris and she has a shop over there right now and I think it’s Paris 1900 is the actual surname. And I purchased a giant Saint Martin’s clock from her. It looked like a nice antique clock, but she starts showing me around one of the places she showed me was a giant elephant, which you could walk up to on a scaffolding on the side and walk inside. It was actually a nice little opium den that you could sit down in and chat with your friends and just hang out. One of the interesting things I saw was a skull with a candle on top, you know, the classic wizard’s candle skull.

And I went ahead and it just start jogging some memories about one of the first things I did in Second Life with one of my friends. And that was that we had a collaborative effort to build a skull together. We would build our own prims together and make a giant skull. Problem was it didn’t really look too much like a skull. I mean, it did, but it was just so prim heavy and so complex. And it still just wasn’t too much like a skull. I don’t know if it looked more like a monkey or what. But anyway, it turns out that this skull looked pretty cool.

And I don’t know. A lot of people have a knack for making some things and some things I just don’t have that knack. So sometimes I’ll just drool over what people are capable of doing in Second Life. And other things that are just so simple. It’s like I can just snap my fingers and it’s done. And I guess it’s like that for quite a few people on the other side of the things that I don’t know how to do, they can do it in just a snap of the fingers and other things. It just takes, you know, complex logic. Well, one of the other things I did while I was in Paris was I got to use my multi-gaggit tool and I was able to set it up so that everybody around me who was speaking French, it would translate into English for me.

And everything I typed, it would translate into French. If you have a multi-gaggit or if you don’t, you can go to Second Life, SL Exchange, or just search for it in Second Life. But if you have a multi-gaggit, this command is found under the Fish command. So you would type slash fish for forgetting quite a few commands that you can actually execute with this thing. What I did to speak in English but have it translate into French was I said slash fish en underscore fr space zero. And what that does is it says anything that I say on channel zero, which is the default channel or the public channel, then it’s going to translate what I say into French. And then it’ll make green text appear as if it says, Dejric Maria colon and then some French text for me. And then if I want to listen to everybody who is speaking French and understand them in English, I type slash fish fr underscore en space.

And then the word default. And then that sets everybody coming to me so that I can understand what they’re saying. So I had quite a good time just talking to quite a few people, which, you know, without this gadget, I would have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s very hard to put some of the things together because it doesn’t translate everything or or somewhere.

It’s just come across a little bit garbage like, but, you know, it gets some use to and you can still have a conversation with someone. So what’s next? The last thing on the list is Podcamp, which actually inspired the idea for this show. And Podcamp is where in real life, Podcamp lets people get together in an informal environment and talk about different things about podcasting. It’s almost like a conference, like the portable media expo, but it’s just not so hyped up and everything. Over in Second Life, tonight was just a meet and greet where everybody was supposed to dress as their favorite podcaster, excluding themselves.

Well, I didn’t do that part, but I did. I was able to meet and greet a lot of people. And a lot of people I already know in Second Life because I tend to hang around with a lot of podcasters at different areas, specifically the Diva from the broadcast. There is Corey Acula and Madison Cornet from the Bucket podcast.

There is Yxes Dellacroy and Banana Stein from the Goddess of Banana show. There is Stuart Worf. I believe he has a podcast.

And, oh man, I think Rich DeSoto just started one up with, I don’t know everybody’s name, but I think it’s called DeTickles. Then there was another podcast. What was it?

Let’s get naughty. That’s the podcast, but I don’t talk to that guy too much, but he’s still pretty cool. But all these people are still podcasters that just hang around in all the places that I hang around at.

So I think I need to get out a little bit more. So anyway, tomorrow, which is Saturday, and the next day after, there are quite a few scheduled events that people can attend to. It’s not just for podcasters, but also for people who listen to podcasts. So one of the events was something like How to Be Good to Listeners and Encourage Your Podcast Hosts or something like that. And another one was about, what was it, like the Ten Commandments of Podcasting, of what they are I do not know.

Another was about how to prevent podfading, which I guess is you just lose a lot of listeners or something. I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow what exactly that is if I have time to show up. And there was one on a lot of technical details with compressors and thresholds or something. I don’t know. Tonight, I did find out a lot of information or quite a few useful tips because a few of us were actually in the Skype conference while we were at the meet and greet. So we got to exchange tips.

One of the things I had problems with in the past was getting my audio condenser microphone to not pick up on so much noise in the room. And one of the persons I think his name was Crabb Fantastic. Is his name in Second Life? I’m not sure. But yes, that was it. OK, so his idea was to just put a blanket over me and the microphone into his podcast.

And he’s like, as long as you’re not doing a video podcast, who cares? Nobody can see it and it should work some wonders. And I’m not too sure, but I may just try it out one of these days. I still have to hook everything back up. One of the problems is that my compressor starts causing a lot of problems with it. It doesn’t want to let anything through at all or or everything gets through. And I don’t know.

We’ll have to see. So this is the that that’s all the topics I have for tonight on this podcast, which I named Blue Hair. Thank you, Diva, for for that suggestion. I originally made this podcast with no idea what to do with like an hours worth of 20 topics about or 15 or 20 topics.

So I think this one is much shorter and more interesting topics than all of them. And Blue Hair is pretty much the name of this podcast because in Second Life, I have blue hair. I always have blue hair. Well, sometimes I change colors, but I primarily have blue hair. I usually change it back.

And all right. So do you like the podcasts? You can subscribe to it over at BlueHair.podcast .com. You can send me an email through dedrick.muriak at gmail.com or you can. Send me a Skype if you want to Skype me over at dedrick.muriak. All right. Thank you for listening and please send in your feedback or any comments. Ciao.