Time to start blogging again!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged externally, although I have been blogging fairly regularly on the internal blogging system at IBM. I ran a skillshare last week for my colleagues in user technologies on blogging, and I seem to have inspired at least some of them to actually start blogging, both internally and externally. I should really follow my own advice then, and try to blog regularly externally too. It’s been a busy several months and I’ll use that as my excuse as to why I haven’t blogged for a while. I’ve decided to have two external blogs. This one for technology/IBM type blogging, and a different for personal stuff. I don’t think blogging about personal stuff here seems quite right, so I’ve set up one using my other screen name: Fluffy dragon.

On that note, you can keep a track of day to day stuff, both personal and technology using my id on twitter.

Lego Star Wars II

I have to confess to being a bit of a lego fan, and I have had the opportunity to play a bit of the new Star Wars lego game on the playstation 2 over the Christmas holiday.

This is the second installment of the game, and is based on the original star wars trilogy. As described on the official site, its a very tongue-in-cheek take on the original films. There are two modes of play – story and freeplay. In story mode you select a movie to play levels from and work you way through the different sections of the film. Each level starts with ‘lego-ized’ animated sections of the movie with some comic additions\alterations. You then get to run around as an appropriate lego star wars character fighting storm troopers, building items and picking up bricks, mini-kits and ‘coins’. These collectable items can be used to develop your ‘true jedi’ score and to exchange for hidden characters, tips and quite possibly other things I haven’t seen yet. There are also puzzle types of activities where you have to work out what to do next to overcome a certain obstacle or move on to the next section. You can ride in different vehicles – from what i’ve seen so far – including snow-speeder, at-at and even bantha! The AI of the other characters wandering around the landscape with you also seems pretty good. The freeplay mode you can select the characters that you want to play, and skip between them. This mode allows you to go back to played levels and pick up objects, and access special areas using new characters that you pick up or buy.

The graphics and gameplay are excellent. This is a two player game as well if you want, just pick up the second controller and two can play in either mode. I’ve only seen a bit of this game but I think it would keep kids of all ages busy and challenged for quite a while!

In the first few minutes of the game you can be running round as Princess Leia and slapping storm troopers – what more can I say? Definitely recommended for the gloomy winter evenings – must get myself a copy!

Time to fire up the blog again

Well for various reasons I’ve neglected to blog in the outside world, so here I am back again with a new year resolution to blog about stuff. Many of my colleagues have excellent blogs, so I’m hoping to follow in their footsteps! I’ve got plans to learn some new technologies in 2007 – I’ve decided to finally take the plunge and get my head around Javascript so that I can have a go with Ajax – I think this should be fairly familiar territory as Actionscript is based on Javascript. I’m also planning to do some more 3D graphics this year – as I’ve been a bit out of practice – but I think that it will come in handy for building in secondlife and possibly for my dissertation. On the subject of the dissertation, I’ll also be starting this in January and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into my project – more on that later…

Starting Secondlife…

OK. I’ve heard raving about this secondlife thing – I’ve even been advised to get involved by my mentor (who’s a master inventor don’t you know…)! So I had a go this evening. After the initial introduction and warm up I think I spent an hour just trying to figure out how on earth you found anywhere ‘friendly’ to go!? I’ve quit with the impression that you really need a buddy online at the same time to help you get started.

Initial impressions were pretty good – nice landscape (watch it eat that bandwidth though – yikes!), friendly newbies like me making themselves pretty, learning how to fly. Nice. Then onto Help island – well that was a bit of a let down really. OK, a place to learn a little – but I didn’t see any sign of the mentors that were supposed to be around – and the tutorial on objects was truly terrible! I understand the concept of prims (i think) – but then I play with 3d studio max from time to time – and the information given was hopelessly unhelpful. Ho hum – whats wrong with following the model used in stuff like Zelda and resident evil? Give me instructions I can go back and re-read – or give me an interactive tutorial. Anyway gripe over.

So having learnt a bit more about how the world works – and finally figured out how to take the skirt off after putting trousers on – I thought I was ready for the big wide world… Well apparently not.

I go to the teleport and expect to be taken to some kind of nice – next step place – and maybe thats what i got – but what it appeared to be was a rather dodgy location – with only a few (very odd) people. I look out of the window – and what do I see ’sextopia’ – oh great. I’ve come to learn something and do something techie and the secondlife world is full of the same saddos as the real world.

OK, so I gotta get out of this spot and find a nice friendly one with a different perspective on life. I look at the world map and can’t help notice that everywhere I point my mouse at has (mature) after it. So how do I find somewhere safe to go to – I know there are people I know out here somewhere – so how do I find them? I can’t find the places I know exist ( i guess if they are private then they can’t be searched for) but then not all the places that were public seemed to be found either. I’m not sure of the search scope on the map – I did find Dragon Moon – but then at Dragon Moon the world map seemed to be limited to that specific place. Any-hooo Dragon Moon seemed to be hosting a U2 concert – pretty cool – I thought maybe I’ll go back and see that later but as it happens I found out after I came offline that it was earlier in the day – it’d be mean to mock the poor lonely fools sat there waiting for it to start…

I’ll struggled again with the search and the help to work out how to find someone or how to join a group… nothing at all – yeah you can see the groups and the people in them – but that’s actually no help at all. So I gave up and decided to try and find someone to give me a helping hand.

Welcome to Portus Ardaoni Blog!

Hello, welcome to my wordpress blog!