The Ever Exciting Blog of Kelly Daly

I believe ...

I have now seen irrefutable proof that aliens do, indeed, exist

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAN!

what more is there to say?

OMG!!!

I spent a little time this evening reading through some reader comments to a story on anti-american sentiment. While I haven't yet read the actual story, this reader comment caught my attention:

Hey Jas of Sydney just what politically illiterate left wing cave did you crawl out of!!! In fact there were over four occasions where Clinton was advised that they had Osama Bin Laden in their sights but he refused his operatives to take any further action because of potential "collateral" damage. In one instance they knew the time Osama would be attending a mosque in Afghanistan but Clinton did not have the guts to take him out because of potential damage to the building. Just think had he had the resolve of Bush 3000 Americans would still be walking this Earth. But then you traiterous left wing filth would be screaming about Americas imperialist foreign policy and the great threat they pose to the rest of the world. Were it not for the United States and its incredible commitment to freedom and Democracy we ungrateful Australians would not have enjoyed over 60 years of peace and stability. Take America out of the picture and watch Japan and China rip each others throats out. In fact America is the only reason we have not had a major Nuclear conflagration in the past 60 Years. The vast majority of the Earths nations are a hairs breadth from social anarchy - visit any Asian nation apart from say Singapore and you will know what I mean. The greatest threat to this planet today is not Bush but the masses of illiterate Western liberalist lefty lowlifes - the Bush hating traitors and the Western press. Annihilate these trotskyists and you rid the world of the terrorist threat! And just remember my fine long haired inexperienced Uni student friend Clinton and his wife voted for the War in IRAQ. So stop listening to your degenerate socialist history professors and take a lttle wider view of the world. When you get a little more experience you will realise that the socialism has and never will work and that Bush is probably one of the best Presidents the US has had in the last 40 years. /p>

Posted by: Paul of Adelaide 2:21pm today

Comment 193 of 233

Ummmm....

OK - I particularly like the bit about "The greatest threat to this planet today is not Bush but the masses of illiterate Western liberalist lefty lowlifes - the Bush hating traitors and the Western press. Annihilate these trotskyists and you rid the world of the terrorist threat!"

For someone who seemed so upset about the killing of 3000-odd americans in 9/11, I wonder if he has any concept of the millions of people he has just "annihilated". Maybe he should kill all the children while he's at it, lest they grow up to be free-thinking lefty lowlifes... Who, really, is the terrorist? Should he be picked up for plotting/scheming/thinking against western culture as with all our funny-beard wearing friends?

Or maybe someone should just contact a proctologist in his area... I do believe that Paul of Adelaide may be requiring of some assistance in locating his head.

Hitched!

Well, we did it! We got hitched!

pics available here!

The bastards!!!!

I am running around like a headless chicken preparing for my trip to Sydney today... Getting all my gear organised. Boarding pass - check. Laptop - check. Notepad - check. Pen - check. Laptop charger - check. Ok - now I have to put it all somewhere...

Today is the first day i have needed to use my laptop backpack in the past couple of months. If Chris and I go into the office, we pack both laptops into his bag or something. This is the first time in a long while that I am going somewhere without him and therefore am wanting to use my backpack.

Seems it is one f those things that you don't miss until you need it - and now that I'm looking for it and KNOW where I left it, it is obvious that they bloody well stole it during the robbery.

D'OH!!!!!!!!!!!

The countdown has begun...

It is now officially under a month until Chris and I get hitched! Seems like not that long ago since this

So by this time in 3.5 weeks we'll be relaxing on a beautiful tropical island, signing documents for our intention to marry (needs three days notice!!), and generally freaking out that its a small island and there's not that many places to run!! Just kidding ;)

On to Linden. Our beautiful kitten is growing up fast - and she's a bit too smart!! Chris posted this blog entry about her antics. We are constantly surprised by the things she gets up to =) The other cats are constantly surprised by her sneaking up and jumping on them.

Will update the photo gallery with more Linden snaps soon =) And in a little over a month, wedding snaps!

We're expecting the arrival of a new baby...

Kitten.

Yes, today we paid our deposit on a tiny little bengal cub =) - now we just have to wait three weeks before we can pick her up!

Her name is Linden (sorry ePred - Chris couldn't help himself!!)

We have yet to find out the reaction from Gizzy and Pipe, but I'm sure they will be fine. Gizzy has always loved kittens in the past. Pipe gets a bit jealous though, so we'll see what he thinks.

So here's my baby!! =)

this is gonna be the longest three weeks. EVER.

Telemarketing has hit a new high!

Telemarketers are annoying... Getting cold calls during the evening in your own personal time is annoying... If I wanted to buy it, I would have come to find you. Fine, I understand that for these ppl it pays the bills, and they probably dont care much for it either... But that doesn't make it any less annoying

MORE annoying is when you answer the phone, and you get a few seconds of silence or hold music - you then have to wait patiently to have your evening interrupted by annoying people trying to sell you their wares and/or services.

Today they have hit entirely new heights!!

A few minutes ago the phone rings. Chris gets up from what he's doing, heads to the kitchen, picks up the phone... I'm watching this look of confusion on his face. Then he hangs up and bursts into fits of laughter.

"What was that?" I ask

"There are no representatives available to speak with you at this time"

w00t?!?!?

virtual insanity!

I have been SO bad with this blog lately - my excuse is my second life. In Secondlife =)

So... Last year a few of the fabulous guys from the UK built a replica inside SecondLife of a tennis court, scripted it to take a data feed and display ball placement, and fed it with data from the Winbledon Tennis Grand Slam. It allowed you to watch a game from inside of the secondlife virtual world environment. It turned out fabulous, and was well received by all.

This year, we expanded on that work a little to create the Australian Open =)

Chris and I got a temporary reassignment at work, sold our souls to the awesome Brad Kasell from the IBM Emerging Technology Group (the driving force behind this project), and worked with James (Maxx) Andersen (an outstanding graphic artist from IBM, USA) to build something really freakin' cool!! We have also had some wonderful help from ppl in making some of the funky bits and pieces you may see around the grounds - signs, statues, etc... Dino and Arabica - you guys rock!!

So how have we extended it, and what features have we added? Oh god - where do I start...

for starters, we have built the stadium. And a large section of the surrounding grounds. The build currently includes Rod Laver Arena, Margaret Court, Garden Square, Australian Open Shop and a fair amount of the landscaping and such around... We've gone into great detail to recreate things like stairs, chairs, water fountains, rubbish bins, signage etc as accurately as possible.

Smooth movement of ball by converting point data to position and velocity vectors and then utilising the Second Life physics engine.

Representation of players on the court with their position based on where we know they hit the ball from (unfortunately we don't track player position, just the ball).

Ability to place your avatar such that you move as if you are one of the players, and have the player's viewpoint during the game. You can literally be Roger Federer or any of your favourite tennis stars. Well - virtually ;)

Better control of data sources. You can choose between live data (current matches being played) and previously recorded game data.

The stadium roof opens on command (you "talk" to it in world - type to it =). And what command is better than "open sesame"? ;) It also closes on "close sesame". It's not quite realistic though - the real one takes about 20 minutes whereas our build takes about 20 seconds...

Stadium seating includes fold down seats (like the real arena) with alternating poses for avatars seated in them... We felt that most sit poses make avatars look so stiff, so we've included scripts that change your pose every few minutes - from edge of your seat excitement to laid back enjoyment. Every pose is selected randomly so that we dont have a stadium full of people looking exactly the same.

The scoreboards, serve speed boards, etc, all contain live data updated as it happens =)

The IBM Match Update Centre contains live data on game statistics for completed matches and currently playing matches, and schedule information for upcoming matches.

A heads up display allows people to view live game data from anywhere in Secondlife - you don't need to be at the stadium to see it =)

We have already seen a lot of interest from both inside and outside of IBM, including quite a lot of press interest. Press on this so far includes Sydney Morning Herald, The Avastar (Deeeep Witte - Secondlife journalist) and CNN (going to air on the 20th January, I believe), and many more to come in the following days. Also a lot of attention in blogs and such.

A cool blog entry by Andy Piper - including some funky pics =)

Chris has a blog entry here with some more funky pics

And my fave pic of the arena at night:

And the youtube vid with the correct spelling of my name ;)

This has been an interesting few weeks =)

And thanks to everyone who has helped along the way - what an awesome ride! =)

My Other Life

So it's been a while between serious posts (ones that aren't road raging!) - so here we go!

So probably of most importance to my way of life, I sold my beautiful car. My lovely little 2002 Mazda Mx5 has relocated to Sydney, and we've parted ways... It was definitely not through lack of love, more fear of not loving her enough... She had a lovely layer of dust when I took her in for a pre-sale wash! So mixed feelings (but the right decision) - I'm gonna miss my beautiful little beast!

This leads to much more reliance on the ol' push bike - which can only mean good things! So between riding into work and occassinally leaving my bike there to catch a lift home so as to have an excuse to walk to work the next day, i should be improving the amount of exercise i'm getting... Having said that, I've been riding in several days a week for the past couple of months anyways...

So other than that, I've been spending all of my spare time in my other life (SecondLife). It is a virtual world where you can basically live nefariously through your avatar (seeing as I don't have any children to be able to do this with - apart from the cats). So my name is Gizzy Electricteeth (don't ask me why - they give you a selection of available surnames and that was the coolest available at the time). My avatar looks somewhat like I did - say - 5 or 6 years ago.

One of the cool things in SecondLife is that you can "buy land" and build houses, shops, whatever you choose... So I've built a house the closely resembles a plan that I've been working on for some months. Based on our sets of wants and must haves, I think I've come up with something relatively cool. So having built it in SecondLife, we get to road test the design... We've worked out that the shower works betteragainst this wall instead of that, this door should open this way because it gets in the way if you open it the other way, etc etc etc... So by the time we're ready to build it, it should be perfectly livable with no "damn, I wish I'd done things differently!". If anybody has a secondlife account and would like a walk through, please email me and we'll organise a time to eet up online OR i can just tell you where to go (as in where the house is, nothing impolite!).

On the home front, I've finished building the deck, it looks unreal... So we bought a cantilevered umbrella to put over the deck to provide shade in the hot summer. Chris (the big meanie) said that when I finish installing the umbrella (which involved much concreting and star pickets and shtuff) he would buy me a deck chair for my birthday. So I got my birthday pressie this weekend just gone (2 weeks AFTER my birthday)! I think it highly unfair - I never make him work for his pressies!

Pipe hasn't been swimming again, but he has been birdy chasing... He's not very good at it (thankfully). Since adding a bird feeder to our back yard we have crimson rosellas visiting every afternoon - would be devastated if he actually managed to get one. Fortunately he's way obvious when he starts his run, so they have heaps of notice of incoming cats.

Chris got a new Nokia E70, and has been playing with it almost constantly since it arrived (yesterday) and now has it working with our asterisk (voip) setup at home. So when he's home all his calls are made through voip (free or cheap), and when he's away it defaults to the mobile network. Way cool! He pretty clever (even if he is mean).

My cousin's wife is pregnant (YAY!!! Go Matt and Relle!!), and one of my best mates (Stevo!!) is getting himself hitched in about 4 weeks... Oh - and Anton is getting a motorbike! Am way jealous, and trying to convince him he needs one in Canberra as well as Austin for when he's local - we have heaps of room in the garage now! AND I have a new laptop! It's an IBM thinkpad Z61p - and it is way sexy (gorgeous widescreen) =) That's about it in catching up on the news!

now... back to my second life ;)