Hello everybody, this is Dedric Mauriac.

So today let’s talk about things that are happening. One of the things I would create was an RSS feed icon, or more like a general generic feed icon that you see in most of the Firefox browsers when you see that a feed is available. So it’s like an orange square with a white dot and two curves. And what I did was I made a whole stage where the white dot is where someone can speak to an audience. The first inner curve would be areas where people can stand or sit down and listen to me speak or anybody else who’s speaking. And then the outer curve I made into a kind of like a walled area, but with doors through each place. I guess you’ll have to see it to understand, or you could look at my blog for pictures or it’s over on SL pics and SL buzz and blog head. So you can get all those places and find it. But the cool thing about it is I made it large enough so it has a topographical view and shows up on the world map for the Sim of Higgins. So that was kind of cool.

It has double use, it’s both a stage and an icon on the world map. Next on my list here is $1,000. That’s right, not Linden and dollars. I have made over $1,000 US dollars in Second Life in the past year. Actually it’s been building up since September when I started building up pretty heavy at the end of September. Now it’s the beginning of February. So October, November, December, January.

So four and a half months for $1,000. Now if it’s seeing sales are starting to really pick up a lot lately too. I don’t know if it’s because there’s so many people coming in world or if more people are hearing about me. Or if it’s due to all this advertising that I’ve been trying to push out. You may have noticed I’ve had ads in the Amistar. There’s a few podcasts that have been mentioning my name here and there. And my wife is actually saying she’s starting to see a lot of my products around Second Life. So that was pretty interesting that other people recognize some of the stuff I’m making. And I’ve actually been getting people coming to me who said that they’ve looked at the creator of some products in Second Life and found it was me and came to my store through my profile.

So that’s pretty exciting. I haven’t sold my Linden yet. Right now I’m saving them up in Ginkgo Financial. And what that is is like a savings account that accrues interest each day. I’m almost getting about a dollar’s worth of Linden’s each night when the interest is applied. It just dropped down to .9%. Because it was at .9 or .09% right now. I don’t know.

Either way, I would have been making a dollar a night, but they changed it. Let me see if I can find that real quick. Ginkgo. So it’s Ginkgo Financial. .com. It doesn’t cost anything to join. Actually, I think I joined when they were offering $100 for any new person that signed up. And I was like, hey, $100.

I signed up with Drew with $100 right away. But then I came back and tried them out. And I started accruing money in there. Then I took them all out in a ball of land over the summer.

So I was practically starting from zero again. Let’s see. They are now offering .09%. It was .1%. So in about, I guess, four years now you can double your money. If you want to wait that long. Actually, it’s less than that because it’s interesting.

It’s applied every day. So I don’t have the brain power right now to figure out how long it will take to double your money. Okay, so what’s next? Oh, I am saving up for an island anyway. Eventually, I’ll have enough for the island, but I still won’t have enough for tier to support the island.

So I don’t want to have to pay any cash at all. It would be nice if it supported itself. So next thing I have is the hiding. In second life, it’s pretty much impossible to give yourself a transparent skin.

Why? Because for some reason the skin, not the skin, but the object, or if your avatar had alpha skin all over it, it would still show up as a normal skin tone color. Because there’s something solid underneath that just will not let you see through an avatar. The only way you can get around this is to use a special texture. And everybody has this texture in their client, but it’s not really accessible. But someone found out all the texture keys that are built into the client. And people have figured out how to muck around with this specific texture so that you can hide any object that appears behind this texture.

It’s weird how it works. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a glitch or if it’s meant to be this way, but not the whole texture does it. Well, it’s a texture that fades from a solid white to a transparent color. But the more transparent it gets, the more it hides anything behind it. And so if I make a cube that is part of this transparent texture and I stand behind the cube, I will not be able to see my avatar. However, this is the part that I don’t like.

It’s the gotcha. If you’re wearing attachments such as hair or a watch or jewelry or shoes or skirt now, those will be seen. So what you’ve got is it looks like an invisible person walking around with all these attachments on. So if you’re trying to hide yourself and walk around, the best thing to do is take off all attachments except for this one. If there’s a prim that you would wear. Now mind you, the normal alpha texture that people used to make things transparent, that’s not going to hide you. This is a special texture. And the only way you can get it is to actually apply a key for the GUID or asset UUID is what it’s called. I’ll try and see if I can put that in the notes.

It’s a really long string of hexadecimal characters. Anyway, the thing that I did with this was I built a little house or igloo I should say. I was demonstrating to someone else that if you put objects inside of this little igloo area, that nobody can see the objects either. Now, I just said that you can see objects that the avatar is wearing, right? It’s only certain objects. So if your object has a little bit of transparency applied or it has a texture with alpha, then you will see those prims. But if those prims don’t have that applied, then you won’t see those prims. It’s like either or.

And I think you can even muck with the texture a bit more so that how it’s applied so that it will hide the transparent but not the solid or it will hide the solid but not the transparent. It’s like either or kind of special settings to play back and forth there. And it got me thinking that there is this book series I love listening to on audiobooks. I don’t know if any of you have heard of it before, but it’s called Discworld.

It’s just amazing. It’s a British author, Terry Pratchett, and he’s got so many of these things. I think there’s about 30 books right now and still going.

There were a few computer games made of it and even a PlayStation game for the PS1 that was made for it, which I’ve got somewhere around the house. But, you know, it’s hard to explain because there’s so many different things to explain. Let’s just say, I think one of the things they say is there’s a place on the edge of reality that is so close to everything that’s possible that those things leak in in anything that’s possible in Discworld.

Let’s start with the first book. We’ve got a gentleman who walks around and behind him is luggage with lots and lots of little feet. And the luggage is a very loyal being. It has a life of its own and anything can be put in the luggage. And, you know, there’s tons of gold in there. One person opened it up and the luggage ate him. And the next person who looks in just sees a bunch of clothes. So it’s got some very magical properties.

Let’s see. The world is actually a disc on top of four elephants on top of the great Artuin, which is a turtle that floats through space. And I think actually the turtle is female.

Oh, yeah, and she has babies later on. So that’s kind of cool. But there’s just so much of this Discworld that I want to. There’s so much creativity there.

I keep getting ideas for second life. And what is this invisible prim idea? Since you can put these invisible prims together and such. I was thinking I could make like what is called the Unseen University, which is a whole wizarding school that apparently nobody is supposed to be able to see, but they do see it.

But I don’t know. But anyway, with this idea, you could actually build a castle of some kind and have steps and everything inside. You can then hide everything from outside people so that they can’t see all this stuff.

And only you who you’re inside, you’ll be able to see these things. So it’s just a little idea. I was passing around my head seeing if I should go ahead and do it or not. What’s next? Alright, I said I was going to talk about this in the last show and I probably should because I kind of left you guys lingering there. I don’t know if you were…

I’m also listening to this anyway. Anyway, McDonald’s Gadget Trade Show. There is a trade show coming up on this Thursday over in Samoa. And I guess it’s like the Girl Scout cookies, Samoa.

S-A-M-O-A. Anyway, there are these spots, 10 by 10 spots, and you can be there for up to three days. It starts on… Oh, it starts on Friday on the 9th. It goes to the 11th.

Thursday is the day that I have to set up shop for everybody to see my stuff. So I got a little confused there. So anybody who wants to get in on there should hop on over to Samoa. I have a landmark set up at my shop. It’s just a sign that says McDonald’s Gadget Trade Show. If you click it, you’ll get a note card with the landmark in there to where it’s at and more information of who to talk to.

But spots are like 500 lendons for three days. I got in early 360 for… What’s next? What’s next? Alright, let’s talk about Avastar. Avastar gave me, well one of the guys in Avastar gave me some things that he would like to do. He’s looking into branding things for the Avastar. And I was showing him around to other places where people brand things. And he asked me to start out with a hat, a pair of earrings, and some shades.

So that sounds simple enough. I quote him a pretty low praise for each one. And I probably went a very low, I don’t know. I should probably ask for advertising or something, or a higher price at least. But you win some, you lose some.

We’ll see what he thinks. Anyway, for the earrings, I don’t know if I talked about this or not, but for the earrings I made, I went over to their island and I got some pictures from inside of one of their dome offices. And I took maybe like over 200 pictures from every angle that I could when I was standing in the middle. And I was able to merge all those pictures together into one panoramic view and paste it on the inside of a sphere, a hollowed out sphere. Then I went ahead and went back to the Avastar and I got a snapshot of the floor plan straight down. And I went back to my earrings and I made a hemisphere because you have the floor on the bottom where you stand on. And I pasted the floor, I put the floor plan on the flat part of the hemisphere. And I made the rest of the hemisphere just a gray reflective surface.

And then I went ahead and I made a texture that looked like sort of what they had, but it has triangle bars like a hexagon or let’s just say you have hexagons of triangles all over the thing. And so these little earrings look like miniature versions of their office. And the guy was pretty amazed at the detail that I got in on these tiny earrings.

So I was pretty happy that he liked them. He had some requests. I’m finding that working with clients now who are asking for things. My past clients were really previous customers who wanted something modified on their items that they purchased from me. Now I’m starting to dig around into the other side where the clients request the item originally from scratch.

So they’re starting to get a little more detailed in their feature request of what exactly they want. Because at first they don’t know what they want or they have a general idea. But then as you start to build things, they generally get more ideas of exactly what they want. And they tend to want to steer you in other directions than your mindset is already focused on. And this happens in a real world too. It’s not just Second Life.

It’s just everywhere really. It’s just that it caught me off guard with some of the things. At first it was simple things like just changing the color for the spheres or the globes. I originally had it blue because their own offices had this blue color to the windows. But they prefer red and white for their colors. So I had to make it red and then he wanted a little darker red and I made it darker. So if you ever look into doing things for clients, just be aware that these kind of things are going to happen.

It’s not just a straight shot and you’re done. So the next thing is I made a paper hat. Now he just asked for a hat.

He didn’t ask for any kind of hat. So me being the very creative gadget kind of person, because those earrings were really a technical gadget kind of thing. There was a lot of technology behind getting everything put together. So I went ahead to the next thing, the hat, and made something very technologically achieving. Which was I made a magazine paper which looked just like their first issue front page and put one of the pages on the back too. And then I automated it so that when the owner of the object clicks on the paper, it folds up into a paper hat one step at a time.

And then they can go ahead and wear the hat and walk around, whatever. So, did the client like it? Uh, yeah. But you know what? The client didn’t think that they could sell it.

Now, let’s, I’m not going to talk about that, but the thing is I jumped a little too far there. And I didn’t, I probably should have talked with the client more about exactly what kind of hat they wanted, or maybe I shouldn’t have went off the deep end and scripted so much work into it. I should have just made a regular hat. So what did I do?

I said, okay, that’s great. Just do me a favor and do like a Google search or something and find the kind of hat that you’re looking for. Because you know, the main thing behind the paper hat was because I was thinking newspapers. The Adamistar is a newspaper and what better than newspaper hat? But anyway, so he found the hat and he, uh, he sent it to me and I told him, okay, that’s great.

I’ll take a look at it when I get home because I get emails and for all my instant messages when I’m off line. I came home, saw the journal idea. Well, anyway, I was able to make a helmet, a bicycle helmet that was similar in the shape in what he was proposing. And it seems that he liked it. It was actually pretty low print too. And again, the customer came back and wanted some modifications. The main thing was the color again, the color red. I use the regular red on my color picker. So it’s like the highest, the most red that you can get. So I guess in the future, I’m not going to use, I guess you could almost say these are the primary colors.

No, you can’t. Well, red is a primary color, but not the default colors. I’m going to stay away from these default colors.

You know, 100% saturation is not good. I toned down the saturation, the brightness a bit and I kept with the same hue. But I also went ahead and I threw on a gradient texture on the bottom of the helmet so that it started to get a little bit more darker. As it went to the bottom of the helmet or it’s darker.

No, got a little bit lighter. I’m sorry. And I set that back to him.

So hopefully he likes that. And what was the next thing? The next thing was the glasses. I just finished up the glasses not too long ago today.

And the glasses are okay, but you know what? I probably went too far again. You know, this is a script there and me. I’m trying to be creative. But I guess I got to learn to hold back. I can’t be doing it for my own wins in entertainment. I was pretty much doing this for him. So I should not be doing things for me when it’s a product for him. But I don’t know. We’ll see what he says.

But I don’t know. I made some white rim glasses with the Avestar logo reflecting on the shades part of it. So that’s pretty cool.

But the feature I threw in there was when you click on the glasses and you are the owner. You get a list of names of people who are close to you within 10 meters. And if you click on one of the names, well, we’ll ask you who do you want to use X-ray vision on?

And when you click on one of the names, you see a skeleton appear over top of the avatar whose name do you click. So this again is that, remember the hiding things with your prims deal that I was talking about? Well, this is where it came back. So I was having a little bit extra fun with this. So the idea is you can advertise that the X-ray vision glasses lets you see through people’s clothes.

Little on clothes, but you can see through their skin as well. And I don’t know. One of my neighbors got a kick out of that when I showed it to her. But I guess she, I’m just thinking this person is not going to like it when they see it. They’re just going to ask me to remove it. I just know it. But the skeleton is wearing boxers that say the avatar, their logo all over the boxers. So I don’t know.

I really, really, really don’t know. But I’ll probably just package it up without their logo and sell it separate on SL exchange or something. It make a great good gift. So, I don’t know. Well, what is this?

This is episode number three. How do I do? I think the sounds are much better on this computer. I had this microphone attached to my old computer using same software and everything, but I don’t know where the beeps, not the beeps, but the garbled sound was coming from. I thought it was my microphone perhaps. Maybe it got a little too moist. But it was still doing the same thing today.

And when I just changed computers, the voice, the audio was just fine. So I don’t understand what’s going on here. So I’m sorry about that, guys.

We should be getting together more nicely now. Can you hear me? Am I coming through clear? I think I am.

Alright, well, this has been a great episode talking to you. And I am Dejik Moriak. My website would be DejikMoriak.wordpress .com. That’s my blog. And then I have a podcast, which I assume you already know this. You’re listening to me right now, right? So, yeah, this is a podcast.

And my podcast would be bluehair.potcho .com. Alright. And I don’t know if I have anything else to say. Alright. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one quick note. The traveling avatar is quick and dirty tips for a better second life.

You guys need to check this out. It was flying really low under the radar with Second Life Podcasts. And I’m not sure how I found this guy.

But I think it’s on QTNOW.com. So check them out. The guy is pretty cool and he’s just starting out too.

He’s got one more podcast than I do on his shows. So, I’m catching up. Yeah. Alright, this is Dejik Moriak signing out. Ciao.