With a Q

Well, I finally graduated from my Masters program in Education, via CTER at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Forever an Illini now! I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t make it into Illinois for my real-life graduation, but I decided to get dressed up anyway in OpenSim to celebrate.

Make sure to check out my final project, the Fashion History Holodeck!

So now what? Not sure yet. I plan to relax, carry on what I learned at school and apply it in my 9-5 job, I really want to get OpenSim up and running there so I can really have some fun with it. But for now I want to spend time enjoying myself: maybe pick up the guitar again, learn ukelele, migrate this blog over to Wordpress, and take care of everything I have been neglecting for the last two years, i.e. go to the gym more.

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New class, last one then it’s a full fledged Masters. It took two years, I remember blogging from airports, doing homework in movie theaters, mobility isn’t necessarily a great thing all the time.

My latest class has me in OpenSim a lot. It is a great opportunity to use this software since it is essentially a private, open source VLE. It looks and behaves mostly like Second Life since it uses the same viewer application. But there’s lots of land to play in. One of our assignments was to create a movie in a virtual environment we’ve covered in class, and I decided to make a presentation showing the capabilities of the software. So here it is, after the break.

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I have been playing with a new tool to create interactive fiction games. I was a big D&D fan, and played the Zork games and even the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide Infocom game. This was about 25 years ago when my parents had to wrench me off the computer to keep me away from those dark rooms with lanterns and rusty birdcages in the corner. I have fond memories of those days (I was 10 or so-ish) but more visual media has pulled me into the career I have now.

That is, until my grad school program pulled me back. There is this really great tool out there called Inform that lets you generate interactive fiction games such as the ones I described above, all without too much drama coding it. The code is very legible, no crazy variables or other things to worry to create a simple game. Read on for a sample, and my first game!

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for Don: 1951-2008

2008 has probably been one of the toughest years in recent memory, personally and for the rest of the world at the same time. Lots of changes this year: new president, crappy economy, unexpected job changes for my wife. Everything got crazier this year, like life got turned up to 11…

Diana and I lost a good friend of ours over the summer. I haven’t been able to really process it yet. Don was a great friend and a great guy who had so much strength…. This is a picture of the bench behind Jan and Don’s old home in Kagel Canyon after the big fire in November. Jan came back into town and we checked out the property together. The fire raged all over the place, cooking their back yard, all except for the bench at which he had spent a lot of time looking out over the canyon. I logged some bench time with him there too. That’s it I guess…if I can grasp any metaphor to attempt to encompass everything that has happened recently, I guess it would be this one. I just would like to sit at that bench again someday.

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Image by laffy4k (Flickr) under CC license

I wasn’t originally going to post this, but after reading Rita’s blog entry about her experience in our student-led conversations tonight I had to chime in. Rita commented:

“I truly feel that I interact with my classmates and instructors more often and on a more complex level than I ever have in a face to face environment. I think that our conversations are more carefully planned and thought provoking than face to face conversations. Take a moment to think about all of the times that you have left a conversation and thought “oh I should have said this” or “I wish I would have worded this more clearly, I should have said…”. In an online environment, you have time to construct those complex thoughts and you can always, easily, go back and review the conversations and revisit the conversation, and add to it.”

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