Getting back in the swing of things.

As Kit Meredith says on her blog, it's hard to get back in the swing of things. There's never enough time to do what I want in SL and do other things in RL. I've also been trying to figure out a way to streamline photo stuff. On the new laptop SL pics are 11MB, which are teh devil if I want to send a bunch to anyone. Either I can compress them and lose quality or send em as is. Though one good thing is the new lappie must have the gods own integrated graphics. When I can go to a charity fashion show, have everything rez and take 600MB of pics, and only have SL crash after turning up the graphics after at least 6 hours of SL, that's something.

I swear, I should just set up a cron job to auto convert and scale pics I put in a specific directory.

Oh yeah I also have another new toy, that I've been wanting for over a year, a mighty Playstation 3. I needed one in addition to wanting one because Midgar (my Playstation 2 with Linux installed) was having hard drive issues. I knew it was going to fail soon, and it did. fscking superblock errors, it refuses to boot at all now, and I never did get all my files off of it. I installed Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3 late night the evening I got it. It runs soooo much better than on the PS2, the GIMP is actually speedy, though it's an older version than what I had on the PS2.

I've also discovered that the laptop's LCD screen is crap compared to the cheapo Wal-Mart LCD TV I have the PS3 hooked up to. It's contrast and color is not so good and it's even lower resolution. The TV is 1440x900 and the lappie is 1280x800. I'm using 1280x768 under Linux because going higher res causes the TV to try to scale things funny, the PS3's graphics chip is funny about output resolutions too, it only uses specific ones, so I can't force it to go 1440x900.

I've been playing Oblivion on the PS3 too, been collecting pretty dresses for my character, a female Imperial with reddish hair. :-) Oblivion's character graphics are "uncanny valley weird", even more so than SL. In some ways I think the game would have been better had the avatars been more "SL" in appearance, less realistic. They eyes on Oblivion characters are spooky.

I've been a member of Sony's Gamer Advisory Panel for over 5 years, so I'm hoping I'll get an invite to the "Home" beta. "Home" is sony's SL style virtual environment, that looks suspiciously a LOT like SL. I really want to compare the two. I'm also hoping they allow for user content so Elika can make hair and Roslin and CJ can make makeup for Home. Because I don't want to wander around Home without my ETD Hair in Mahogany or Fleur skin.