So my brother and his wife and little Ben are in town visiting. It's been a ton of fun having them here, especially watching Ben be a little dude and do stuff. He's really great.

When I talked to Dave and asked if there were things he wanted to do while he was here, he said that he wanted to golf at Torrey Pines. So me, Iwan, and Dave are going to head down there at the crack of snot and see if we can get out for a round.

The prices for a round at Torrey Pines are different for city residents, county residents, and everyone else. For the South course, the prices are $40, $85, and $115, respectively, and the North is a little less.

Now, some time ago, I got a resident card, probably using an old drivers license with my parents address on it. That card expired about three years ago. Given that card, I wondered if I could renew it, in spite of the fact that I have no proof of residence there anymore. As I walked up to the course, I concocted all sorts of stories in my head... I used to live there, but went away to graduate school and then moved back, but don't have my address changed or any mail there yet. Or that I've lived there the whole time, but still haven't updated my drivers license address. Or, or, or...

As I got to the front of the line at the starters office, I decided to just try telling the flat out truth.

"I'd like to renew my resident card, please."

The guy barely looked up. "Ok, that will be $12, please."

Done and done. Sweet. I guess honesty really is the best policy.

Real money!

I met with my Second Life business partner last night, and gave him the "Diamond in the Rough" casino game. He was pleased with my work, and gave me L$4000 as promised, as well as a second game to code. The game is called "Dice War". The player and dealer each roll a die, winner takes all, and dealer wins on ties. When he showed me the game, it had two big floating dice on it. I thought it would be neat if the dice actually spun around and showed the right numbers.

It turned out to be easier than I anticipated. There are built-in functions to rotate child objects. There is built-in object-to-object communication, so when I touch the main object, it sends messages to the dice saying "start spinning", and when the dice are done, they send messages back saying "Ok, done!". Then the game pays out if the player beat the dealer. (Technically, the parent object tells the each die "start spinning, and end up on THIS specific number").

So I got it all working last night, and tested it out. It rules. Here's a lil demo movie: http://www.westcoastdefenders.com/dice.wmv

My boy is going to pay me L$6000 for it. I don't really know what his plans are, but he says that he has more games in mind. I think he's planning on reselling the games to casino owners (as opposed to running them himself), which is fine with me. You need a lot of bank to back some casino games, and I'm not sure I'm into it.

The next game he wants me to code will be called "Mirror Image", where the player rolls two dice, and gets paid 5x if he rolls doubles. Should take literally about 3 minutes to code, given the code that I just wrote. He's out of town for the weekend, he said, so we'll talk more about it next week.

On the Second Life website, they have the LindeX, which is a currency exchange center. You can offer to buy and sell Linden Dollars and US Dollars. You post if you want to buy or sell, how much you want to buy or sell, and the exchange rate you want to use. You can use whatever exchange rate you want, but orders are all filled against each other, so if you put in something wacky, you need to find an equally wacky order on the other side to fill it.

I put up $2000 Lindens at the average exchange rate of the last 24 hours (278). After a few minutes, I got email saying my order was filled. After a small (3% I think) exchange fee, I netted $6.95! So now, on the site, I have a Linden balance of about $2100, and a USD balance of $6.95. I can withdraw USD to PayPal (and therefore, directly into my bank account) for a $1 fee, but I'm not going to do that quite yet. It should be noted that I can also put money from my bank account INTO my USD balance, and then from there buy Linden Dollars, but that ain't going to happen. I'm EXTREMELY committed to investing $0 into this little project. I may spend money to buy or rent land, but it will all be from profits, not from my bank account. Just in case you were worried.

But I'm fired up! I've had a ton of fun doing this in-game programming, and I'm going to be sitting on $10,000 Lindens and the promise of more work to come! And I'm convinced that that work actually can directly turn into real US Dollars. Not much, I guess, compared to my day job, but I'm accustomed to having to pay for entertainment, not having entertainment pay ME.

My universe is upside down, and I'm loving it.

On the Second Life forums, I answered someone's want-ad asking for someone to script a card-game casino machine. The game was really simple (pay 10, pick a card, and if it's the Ace of Diamonds, win 500). I started working on the script last night, and expect to finish it tonight. The scripting language has the concept of a list, so I made a list of 52 integers (0-51). I made a function to determine what integer is what card. There is even a "randomizeList" function, so there's my shuffle routine. Tested it all out and it all worked as I expected.

He asked how much I'd charge. I had absolutely no idea what the going rate was, so I kind of deferred. Newbie free accounts start with L$250 (about 90 cents). I currently have L$165 or so. He offered me L$4000! At the going rate of about L$275 = $1USD, that's about 14 dollars! That's real money!

And, he said he had more work after that.

Short term, it would be great to get paid. Long term, it would be awesome to either get a cut of the profits, as well as have him recommend me on the forums as a trustworthy, quality scripter.

Crazy. I'll believe it when I see a check.

Get ready to have your mind blown.

This weekend, I signed up for a free Second Life account. I'll call Second Life an online "game", but it's really more of a big virtual world. So, you control a person in the game, and wander around a virtual landscape.



In the game, every player has access to tools which allow them to create clothes and modify body shape, as well as build new objects. With clothing, you can always say "I want a new shirt", and with a click, you have a new shirt in your inventory. You can then choose from a library of styles and colors and textures, and rename it from "New Shirt" to "My Blue Denim Long Sleeved Shirt" and keep it forever and ever. What's crazy is that you can do the same thing for body shapes. You can create a new pair of eyes, say, and give them a color and shape, and when you drag them on your guy in the game, voila, he has new eyes.

If you make a folder filled with clothes and body shapes, and drag that whole folder to your guy, then all the changes in that folder get applied to your body. So, you can go from being a tall, strapping man to a short, miniskirt'd raver chick in a second. For those of us used to static game environments, it's really a trip that your representation is so dynamic.

All players can also build arbitrary objects in the game. You can say "I want a cube right there", and with a few clicks of the mouse, you can create a cube. Or a sphere, torus, or a dozen other primative shapes. The basic primatives can then be manipulated (moved, stretched, skewed, etc), and you can attatch many primitives (aka "prims") together to create complex objects. Prims can be colored and textured (you can upload your own textures). Most of the content you find in the word has been created by users is this fashion, and as a result, the quality is highly variable.

As a programmer, the coolest thing is there is a scripting language where you can write code that attaches to your objects and controls them. For example, I made a "firework" object by creating a cylinder, a cone for the nose, and some tail-fins. I then wrote code so that when you touched the object, it flew up into the air and exploded. Pretty neat.

Now, there is the concept of money and land ownership in the game. With a free account, you are not able to own land, and you start of with only a small amount of in-game money. However, if you sign up for a premium account with a small monthly payment (on par with other online games), you are given a small plot of land and some more in-game money.

Land ownership is important, as the people who own land can control everything that happens on it. For example, if I create something on someone else's land, it's because they've allowed me to by setting their land options to allow building. And if I create something and leave it on someone else's land, most likely it will get cleaned up and returned to my inventory automatically after some amount of time has passed.

With money in the game, you get the concept of creating items and selling them. You can even buy land and charge rent for users to put stuff up. The sum of those concepts is that people have bought land, created big shopping-mall like areas (with little kiosks and stalls for selling items), and then rented out those areas. For a small amount of rent, people can sell their goods, and the sum of that rent should cover the cost of the land ownership for the landlord.

Now get ready to have your mind be blown.

The currency in the game is called Linden Dollars, or L$. (Linden Labs is the creator of the game). Through the Second Life website, you can exchange L$ for real US Dollars. There is a variable exchange rate for doing this (it's currently around L$ 280 for $1 USD.

I can get on this game, create virtual objects out of nothingness, sell it to people for virtual money, and then exchange that money for real US money. Or buy land that doesn't exist, rent it out, and make money off it. In fact, some people have done this so successfully, they have quit their day jobs to run their full time business in Second Life.

Let that sink in for a second.

I fooled around in the game all weekend, and have been having a blast. As I said, I created my firework object. Someone gave me a "vending machine" type object. I put my fireworks in the vending machine, and found a place that allowed me to set up said vendor for free (or cheap). I also created a mini "desktop" firework thing, that is a decorative item that would launch fireworks up about 3 feet and explode them in a radius of about 1 foot, meant to sit on someone's desk and look cool. My fireworks sell for L$2 each (what, less than a penny?), and I put up the generator for L$150. I logged off the first night, and by the middle of the day the next day, I'd sold L$68 worth of fireworks! It was really neat.

On the website's forums, they have "help wanted" ads, and there are a couple leads on people who are good at creating objects, but aren't programmers. There is the potential for doing fun game programming and getting paid for it as well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to quit my day job quite yet, but I'd enjoy creating and scripting game objects for free, if I can try to sell the objects or the skill, why not?

Crazy.

So here at work, we have an intranet with important documents, department stuff, etc. And to ease in searching for things, we have a Google-powered search engine. I've discovered a few things. First, the search engine will show documents that are in folders that are restricted. However, it also caches the documents, or provides a "text only" link for things like Excel documents which is accessible to anyone in the company. I haven't found any juicy stuff, but the possibility is there, I suppose.

The second thing is that an ex-employee happened to save a bunch of email onto a network drive, and it's not been shared via the Googlebox. Most of it are joke forwards and so forth, but quite a bit of it is relationship stuff with co-workers. When the guy left, the joke was that he left because he'd dated all the women here and needed to move on, and after perusing the extent of his communications with female co-workers, I can see where the joke came from. Good stuff. I'm really glad that I don't have access to other people's email, 'cause I'm pretty sure that I would never get any more work done... I'd just read other people's gossip.

A lesson for all of us: Assume that all your corporate email is being read. It might not be, but it certainly could be. I'm not just saying that. Believe it.

In other news, I got my mail-in rebate check from a hard drive I bought six-to-eight hundred weeks ago. $30! Woot. Add that to the recent annual incentive bonus, and I think we'll scrape by for another year.

Not too much other news to report. Diana is still workin' hard. We took advantage of a recent low-tide and went tide-pooling down in La Jolla a week ago. It could have been awesome, but I didn't really see much of interest, unfortunately. We're in deep discussion about sabbatical plans, and I think we're pretty close to pulling the trigger on a Tahiti trip. My current thoughts are three vacations -- Sweden/Vienna, Tahiti, and Montana. I won't get this kind of opportunity very often, so might as well do it right! Should be a fun summer!

I watched the Superbowl over at Eron's house, on his glorious 62" hi-def plasma TV. Good stuff. I was thinking of dropping him as a friend, but I think I'll let him stick around for a bit longer. At least until I get tired of Guitar Hero (which will probably be never).

Dr. Dave and wife and child show up in a couple weeks. He's already hit me and Iwan up for some golf plans at TP, and I'm generally looking forward to having them around. Ben will a lot bigger and smarter since I saw him last! Should be a good time.

That's all. Smell ya later.