Early attempts...

Some know I am happily working my way thru many tutorials for the various elements of CS5.  One thing I know for sure is I've always been a better cookbook user than creative chef.  Yet it is my goal to move from being able to follow directions in a tutorial to a more genuinely creative process.  A few weeks ago when staying at the coast for a few days with family I had the opportunity to take a ton of photos.  Now that I've had a little time to go thru them I've put together these two triptychs, the first of Newport Harbor and the other of our beautiful rocky North West coast line.  I thought perhaps you would enjoy seeing them and more to my point they were fodder for exploring and pushing myself just a tad beyond cook booking something beautiful.  While I certainly have a lot more to learn, see what you think…

Fishing Fleet

Northwest Surf

HELLO WORLD!

OpenSim on a USB stick...
Many may have seen the post below yesterday (or the one from Tateru Nino)

John "Pathfinder" Lester Runs OpenSim, Transfers Objects From a USB Key & Explains Why It Matters To Educators

Here's an amazing innovation explained by metaverse consultant John Lester, once known as Pathfinder Linden during his days as education evangelist with Linden Lab. Using the Second Life compatible Imprudence viewer, which can easily log into numerous OpenSim worlds and save back-ups of objects you create within them, John was able to make an object in one grid and then move it to another OpenSim grid. Which is very cool, but that's not even the best part. This is: He did it with a USB memory key, even putting his own OpenSim grid on it, and explains how he did so here.

Quoted from http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/10/opensim-on-a-usb.html:

It really worked. Today i was able to get an OpenSim up and running from my USB drive on my laptop. See pictures below. Some have asked why? Free full sim (full prim) developement sandbox is one thing. Anything created there could be uploaded to SL (of course at a cost of $10L per assest, but no more paying for trial assests).
I will be interested to explore this further. Is it possible to have friends access your usbSim remotely? Possibly not. But there is much more to learn about this. Folks have had clients (viewers) on usb sticks for long time, but this is the server side as well. It sets you up with MySQL and Apache server... I then loaded Imprudence onto the stick... and both ran flawlessly (well... after some tweaking) on the 6 yr old laptop running with Vista. 
 

Hello World

Truly Ruthed!...

I probably didn't need to black those out... I freely admit my ignorance there... but all you need to know to set it up, can be found by following the links from New World Notes and Dwell On It listed above. 

And for more info (certainly over my head at this point) try this link you can also read from Pathfinder himself at
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks.
If nothing else... I learned a lot and look forward to exploring the potential of my Sim on a Stick