UGHHHHH!!!!

Team projects are bad enough. A team project over the internet is even worse. All the emailing of documents and trying to keep up with the most recent revision....Are you confused yet? I sure am. Added to the stress of the project were Thanksgiving visitors who stayed all weekend. I was glad to have the visitors however. It was my little sister Carla and her daughter, (my niece) Kassidee, who I don't get to spend nearly enough time with. I think my sister wanted to come to our house this year for Thanksgiving because it was the first major holiday since she lost her husband in July and she just didn't want to be at home with all the memories of past Thanksgivings so close at hand. It was a somber holiday for all of us with James missing from the table. My niece, who is only seven, seems to be dealing with the loss extremely well. Kids are so resilient it is just amazing. She has her moments when she talks about him and says "Daddy used to do...." this or that. She was her Daddy's girl. Pretty much inseparable. We all miss you James...

Cousin Morgan to the rescue!

Group project = Group Misery? Not Necessarily...

As we begin our group projects this week, I was filled with a bit of dread. Group projects remind me of a three ring circus, all kinds of different things going on in all different directions, and sometimes not in a good way. Luckily my group mates are organized and dedicated. We all seem to mesh and work well together. We all have different strengths and weaknesses so that makes for a nice well rounded team. I actually look forward to helping them pull this whole thing together. 

On another note, tomorrow I will be traveling to Asheville for a North Carolina Division of Veterans Affairs conference. This will be the first conference I have attended and I am really looking forward to it. I really do love my job as a County Veteran Service Officer and I hope to come back with some valuable information for my toolbox. 

I saw this picture on the label of a bottle of wine last weekend. 

I have to admit that I thought it looked like the bear was throwing up at first. 

He had too much wine perhaps..... 

Have a great week everyone!

 

Building in Second Life

I really like to build stuff in real life, so building stuff in Second Life is pretty cool. It is fun to play around with the shapes and textures, but not as satisfying as creating something real that I can touch. This week we were asked to create three original objects and find three objects to decorate our space in Second Life. I was a bit stumped about what to build at first, so I looked through my inventory to get a few ideas. I seemed to have a collection of hats in my inventory so I decided to build a hat rack. It is a pretty basic structure, but it took me awhile to get the parts of it all lined up just right and to link them all together so they could be moved as one unit.

After I got it built to where I could live with it I took the hats from my inventory out and placed them on the rack to display. One of the three required items was complete. After that I started playing with different shapes and trying to grow a tree, but since I don't own the land I couldn't grow a tree the old fashioned way so decided to build a tree. Since it is nearing the holidays (and because I couldn't figure out how to build any other shape of tree) I built a Christmas tree. I didn't decorate it yet however. Maybe my roomies will give me a hand with that. 

I then constructed some decorative candles that really glow to give the room a nice homey atmosphere. 

Have a great week everyone.

  

Touring NIU in SL

This past week a friend and I took a self guided tour of the Second Life campus of Northern Illinois University. The campus was a nice looking place but seemed very small compared to the campus of East Carolina University, which made me wonder if other universities use or still use Second Life as an educational platform in the way ECU does. It turned out that many of the classrooms were located in the sky and so that is why the campus appeared to be small. The campus was mostly deserted except for one person playing in the sand box with a car that they rezzed in. My friend and I also took the opportunity to do some building while we were there. I had gotten a free beach house in a box at the Freebie Galaxy and had wanted to try it out and see what it looked like. It was HUGE! I had to delete it peice by peice before I left the campus. Kind of a neat experience regardless.

Using Second Life....

This past week I had better luck with Second Life than I had the previous week. My sound is working pretty consistently now. I really have no idea what the actual problem was with my sound. I looked at message boards and it seems that I was not alone. Others were looking for the answer to the same problem. I believe that in my case it was some conflict with my machine and the older version of Second Life. I feel this to be the case because as soon as I downloaded the update it worked correctly. I was NOT logged in in basic mode as was suggested by many of the folks trying to help me. Nor was my sound muted or the volume turned down. I have had enough experience with the program to know how to check such issues and the problem seemed to randomly occur. I would log in and the sound would be fine and then after less than 2 or 3 minutes it would just suddenly stop on its own. Anyway the new version seems to be working great. I hope it will continue to do so for the remainder of our class.

Blog Avatar: Laura Macatak

 

Hi, its me again....

As for my avatar, this lady doesn't so much represent me as it is a representation of how I wish I looked these days. We do have similarities however. We are both blonde and have blue eyes. Well that's where the similarities pretty much end I guess. In an imaginary world why not make yourself into the person you wish you were and not the flawed person you actually are? Oh yeah, because it is lying. There is that. I prefer to think of it as embellishment......

Welcoming Flat Stanley

This weekend was another beautiful fall weekend and I got to visit a few places that I hadn't been in awhile. Kassidee, my seven year old niece, sent a surprise to me in the mail.....Flat Stanley! Some of you may remember the children's story of Flat Stanley. Her class is doing the project that goes along with the story by sending a cutout paper doll named Flat Stanley to someone in another state so they can "show him around." My job was to  take Stanley to some local attractions and take pictures of him doing what the locals do. Since we live here at the Marine bases, Camp Lejeune and New River Air Station, Stanley joined the Marine Corps while he was here.

After a hard day on base Staff Sergeant Stanley headed out to Topsail Beach for a little R and R. His "friends" buried him in the sand so he wouldn't blow away. 

That was all of Stanley's adventures this weekend, but next weekend who knows where he will go. I hope m niece and her class enjoy the pictures. 

Have a great week everyone!