Key issues

My keyboard worries continue apace... really, I need at the very least to send this laptop in for a service.  Unfortunately, I also need to use it on pretty much a daily basis; you can see where there is a conflict of needs, there....

This makes stuff like scripting so frustrating as to be darn near impossible... which means Tali, bless her, is currently doing all the work on the rebuilding of Caledon's ferries.  And she - and I - have been running into some issues with the (relatively) new keyframed movement system.

Basically, this is a setup where you can feed an object a list of positions and rotations and times - all the details for a key frame, in fact - and SL will move it smoothly from one specified frame to the next, without all the faffing around you would normally have had to do with setting position and rotation (for non-physical objects) or applying impulses (for physical objects).  It is neat, it is easy to script, and it gives a surprisingly smooth ride.  When it works.

Tali is running into an intermittent but persistent bug where the first frame in a sequence gets ignored, which, naturally, throws all the rest out of whack.  Meanwhile, I have found that region restarts are extremely bad news for anything that's executing a keyframed movement sequence when the restart happens.  I have four "gravity lifts" running on keyframed loops up and down sections of my tower, and not only do they all freeze in place when the restart hits, they all behave in different ways once it's finished and I try to reset them.  It's as if the sim is trying, in some rather patchy way, to preserve state in the keyframed sequence over the reset... and sometimes this takes precedence over any attempts I make to restore the things by hand!  One of the lifts, in particular, simply won't respond to manual script resets, or even a complete recompile - I have to delete it and rez a fresh one from my inventory after each sim restart.

It's a nuisance, as we were kind of hoping to use the keyframed movement stuff on the new ferry system! - It really is good, when it works.  And Tali's implementation of the Catmull-Rom algorithm to generate intermediate waypoints makes for a very smooth ride indeed.  Now, all we need to do is get the damn bugs out, somehow!

An intimate dysfunction

I complained a while back about my wonky keyboard - specifically, the sticking G key (took me twelve tries to get that!), though there is other stuff wrong besides.  It is still a problem, even after attacking the laptop with a variety of cleaning methods.  And it is having a terrible, and somewhat unexpected, effect...

It is putting a real crimp in my sex life.

Now, this is still Not That Sort Of Blog, so don't expect me to go into explicit details here, but.... SL sex, basically, is cybering with better graphics, and though the graphics can (and do) add to the experience....

:: muses over looking into her lover's silver-gilt eyes, the sight of our bodies entwined together ... ::

... where was I?  Oh, yes.  The graphics enhance the experience, but the experience is still all about communication - effective communication - building up an emotional rapport between the participants, and enabling that to develop to its, ahh, natural conclusion.  And that rapport is just not going to happen unless the communication is articulate, and unimpeded. (A note to any "gentlemen" thinking of approaching ladies with the by now traditional "hi ur hawt want 2 do it?": this is more or less equivalent to tattooing a notice on your forehead saying "I am rubbish in bed".  Unless you have the verbal skills and dexterity to build the mood, it just isn't going to happen.*)

So, yes.  Unimpeded communication is key.  And, it transpires, having bits of one's utterances mysteriously transposed, and having to pause every few seconds to think of a synonym that doesn't have a G in it... is a real mood killer.

I will persevere, of course, because my partner also has needs, and I want to meet them... I want to meet them very much, in fact!  But, there is no point denying it, I am finding this an oddly frustrating situation.

There is a joke in here, somewhere, about being unable to find the G-spot, but I am far too mature to make it.

*Worth noting, of course, that there are ladies, too, with a similar... directness of approach.  And my criticism applies equally to them!

rrr, I ot a nain problem...

The "G" key on my keyboard keeps sticking, or at least refusing to respond.  This is kind of a problem if you are called something like "Glorf", or if you spend a lot of time using present participles, or have other reasons for wanting to use the letter G.  (Which you do kind of have to, sometimes.  After all, we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet to start with, and some of them don't pull their weight.)

I foresee keyboard-cleaning time in the near future.