NORAD FOLLOWS SANTA

For boys and girls of all ages - the Santa Tracker.

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.html

THE REBEL JESUS

By Debbie Bulloch

Tomorrow is Christmas Day.

For many, Christmas is a time for joyous family gatherings, meeting up with old friends and watching little children laugh as they eagerly anticipate receiving gifts from Santa Claus. For many others, however, Christmas has a more ominous meaning: for the sick, for the homeless, for the poor, for those without family or friends and for the children for whom Santa Claus is just an image on a store window, Christmas can be a lonely time.

If you are celebrating this Christmas with dear friends and family members, hug each and every one of them and tell them how much you love them and how much you treasure their presence in your life. Friendship is a special gift for which we ought to be thankful. Especially in these troubled and uncertain times, friends and family are worth more than all the gold, myrrh and frankincense in the world.

If you are not celebrating Christmas with friends and family, please do not despair. No person is ever completely alone. Look around and soon you will realize that even in the loneliest of times there is a presence there, right next to you. As humans, we all belong to a higher spirituality that links each and every human to all the other humans who now walk, or have ever walked or will ever walk, upon the planet. Whether we live in a fancy castle, or sleep on the sidewalks of a crowded city, we are all children of the Universe; no less than the trees and the stars. We all have have a right to be here, that is part of our humanity. No one can take our humanity away from us - it is our birthright.

Regardless of your situation, be at peace with God, however you conceive Her to be. Whatever your labors and aspirations are in the noisy confusion of the Holiday Season, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world. Please be cheerful - and alway strive to be happy.

Jackson Browne, one of my favorite singers, wrote a song titled The Rebel Jesus. This time of the year Browne’s lyrics have special meaning. Please allow me share those words with you:

THE REBEL JESUS

All the streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants' windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
They'll be gathering around the hearths and tales
Giving thanks for all god's graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus

Well they call him by the prince of peace
And they call him by the savior
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
As they fill his churches with their pride and gold
And their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worshipped in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus

We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why they are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

But please forgive me if I seem
To take the tone of judgment
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus.


A Merry California Christmas to one and all!

THE DAY AFTER THE STORM

By Debbie Bulloch


This past Sunday night, and into Monday, we had one of those rare Southern California occurrences - a winter storm!

But almost as soon as the storm rolled it, it was gone. Before leaving, however, the storm left us with a good soaking and some nice iamges.











Heavily overcast skies were a reminder of the storm briefly lived fury.



If you look closely at the horizon, you will see one of the five islands that, collectively, make up the Channel Islands. Right off the coast of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the Channel Islands National Park encompasses five remarkable islands (Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara) and their ocean environment.

The Chumash Indians, who once populated the area, believed that the first people were created from the seeds planted on Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) by Hutash, the Earth Goddess. Hutash was married to the Sky Snake (The Milky Way), who made lightning with his tongue and gave the people their first fire. The people kept the fire burning to stay warm and cook their food. Since the people were getting more comfortable, their population grew until the Island became too crowded.

The people made so much noise that Hutash could not get any sleep, so she decided it was time to allow some of the people to cross over to the mainland. Hutash made Wishtoyo, a Rainbow Bridge which extended from the tallest peak of the Island to the tallest inland mountain near Carpinteria (between present day Ventura and Santa Barbara counties). Hutash told the people to cross carefully, and to never look down, but some did, and fell off the Rainbow Bridge and into the ocean, where they were turned into dolphins by Hutash to prevent them from drowning. This is why the Chumash Indians consider the dolphins to be their brothers.

After the storm the waves were flat, but that did not keep these two surfers away from the (very cold) waters.


And, of course, every storm brings its own rainbow.


Enjoy!

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

By Debbie Bulloch


Today I went on my usual Sunday bike ride. Whenever possible I try to ride by the beach, on a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) where the road hugs the shoreline. There is something about the awesome power of the pounding surf that stirs and renews my soul. Add to it the feel of the warm sunshine on my skin and the cry of the seagulls as they circle above and I feel closer to the Creator than in any church or cathedral.

This morning, as I headed towards PCH for my ritual rendezvouz with the California surf, I searched my iPod's playlist for the Mamas & Papas. First song on the playlist is "California Dreaming."

All the leaves are brown
and the sky is grey
I've been for a walk
on a winter's day

I'd be safe and warm
if I was in L.A
California Dreamin'
on such a winter's day

Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I got down on my knees
and I pretend to pray

You know the preacher likes the cold
he knows I'm gonna stay
California Dreamin'
on such a winter's day

All the leaves are brown
and the sky is grey
I've been for a walk
on a winter's day

If I didn't tell her
I could leave today
California Dreamin'
on such a winter's day

Although the National Weather Service had predicted (and is still predicting) a big storm for Southern California, the sun shone bright and warm as I headed towards the beach. Only the strong surf hinted at the storm that may still come later on the day. For the time being though, Mama Cass singing about California Dreaming on this glorious winter's day was all I needed to ward off against any bad weather.

Here are some pictures from today's ride. Enjoy!

The sun's rays shone brightly as they reflected upon the tip of the waves.



Same view, but in black and white. What do you think?



This seagull decided to play it safe by sitting on top of the sea wall.



His (or her) friends, however, were enjoying a dip in the water!



The surf, stirred up by the upcoming storm, pounds a sea wall. (I got sprayed a few times - I love the salt water).



Surfers love this weather. Life in Southern California means year-round surfing, even on New Year's Day.



The train passes right by the beach affording riders a wonderful ocean view.



The cry of seagulls provides a nice musical backdrop.



Finally, my "cranks." They help power my coastal adventures.




I hope that this bit of California Dreaming has brought a little sunshine to those of you living in colder climates.

BUILT MERCEDES TOUGH

By Debbie Bulloch



My father taught me many things: to appreciate classical music, to enjoy fine art, to fight my own battles, to fix a bike's flat tire and to change the oil in a car. He also taught me how to appreciate the value of fine engineering. For my Dad, his beloved Mercedes cars were the epitome of the best that German engineering could offer.

This is for you Dad. (I know you would probably disapprove of what was done to that poor wagon, but it was all done for a good cause: to prove how tough your Benzes are!)

And now, for something entirely different, take a look at the video clip below. (It is part one of a series produced by the British TV show Fifth Gear. You can go directly to YouTube to see all five parts).

Enjoy!

FALLEN HEROES

By Debbie Bulloch



The word HERO evokes images of great bravery and untold sacrifices. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines a hero as “a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life." The term hero is also often overused to the point of rendering it nearly meaningless.

The stories below, from our neighbors, brothers and sister to the North, do justice to the term hero. Please read on. Thank you.




DADDY IS FINALLY HOME

(Story by Bruce Ward, The Ottowa Citizen)

With her teddy bear clutched in one hand and a long-stemmed red rose in the other, four-year-old Rowan Shipway watched intently as a flag-draped coffin was carried from the CF Airbus to the shiny hearse.

Her daddy was finally home.

Sgt. Scott Shipway, the 97th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan, was honoured here Wednesday in a moving repatriation ceremony held on a sunny afternoon. By now, Canadians are becoming numbingly familiar with the TV pictures from these ceremonies -- the solemn honour guard, the impassive dignitaries, the piper's lament.

Civilians and emergency crews on a Brighton-area overpass pay tribute to Sgt. Scott Shipway yesterday as a hearse carries the body of the fallen Canadian soldier along the Highway of Heroes, a stretch of the 401 that runs from CFB Trenton to Toronto.
Jean Levac, The Ottawa Citizen

But nothing prepares an onlooker for the heartbroken wails of a little girl with buttery hair who has lost her father. As Rowan clung to her mother, Diana Kaczmar, her sobs carried across the tarmac.



Her six-year-old brother, Hayden, who wore a baseball cap, stood silently by his grandfather.

Sgt. Shipway, an infantryman with the Second Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, based in Shilo, Man., was killed Sept. 7 when his armoured vehicle struck an improvised explosive device during a security patrol in Panjwaii District. Seven other soldiers were injured in the explosion.

For more about Rowan follow the link below:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=23dbbe7e-789f-46d2-ba26-03ad7ab0a191

More about heroes...

Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke once remarked: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

The three good men below did their duty, and made the ultimate sacrifice, in order to keep us all safe from the forces of evil that seek nothing better than to destroy all that is good and dear to our society.

FALLEN SOLDIERS TO TRAVEL HIGHWAY OF HEROES

When the bodies of three more Canadian soldiers are brought home from Afghanistan on Monday, mourners will gather along the sides of the Highway of Heroes to remember the men whose deaths pushed Canada's troop casualties to 100 in the war-torn country.

The fallen soldiers are Cpl. Mark Robert McLaren, Warrant Officer Robert John Wilson and Pte. Demetrios Diplaros, all members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment based out of Petawawa, Ont.



They were killed Friday morning after the armoured vehicle they were travelling in was struck by an improvised explosive device (IED).

Their remains are due to arrive at Ontario's CFB Trenton at 2 p.m. ET on Monday afternoon.

Their surviving families will take part in a repatriation ceremony at the base, and then ride in a motorcade along the Highway of Heroes to Toronto.

It's a scene that has been repeated many times since the start of the Afghanistan mission, which generally brings hundreds of Canadians to the sides of the 172-kilometre stretch of Highway 401, holding flags, watching and saluting the motorcade as it passes by.

Historian Jack Granatstein has said the outpouring of emotion Canadians have shown for their fallen war heroes in recent years is "quite extraordinary."

"I have never seen anything in my life like the crowds that line Highway 401," he told The Canadian Press recently.

"Extraordinary displays of public sentiment in all kinds of weather, ranging from heat to cold to rain. The same crowds are out there all the time."

For more about Canada's soldiers and the Highway of Heroes, please follow the link below.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081207/highway_heroes_081207/20081207?hub=Canada

Note: One of our own members will be present at the Higway to pay a final tribute to his comrades.

DJ, we will be there with you, in spirit if not in body, holding your hand as your brothers ride by for one last time.

ALL YOU WANTED TO KNOW (ALMOST) ABOUT PRIMITIVES (PRIMS)

By Debbie Bulloch


What are Prims

Primitives or prims are Second Life’s (SL) building blocks. A prim is a single part object. Multi-part objects will have multiple prim parts. Think of a prim as a cell in an organism. Organisms can range from single-cell to multi-cells. Similarly, objects in SL may range from one-prim to multi-prims. You may also think of a prim as a kind of LEGO building block.

In SL, virtual physical objects such as cars, houses, jewelry, and even less obvious things like hair are made out of one or more prims. Objects made from prims are usually created in-world using SL’s built in object editing tool. This tool is used for all sorts of 3D modeling in SL, playing the same role as 3D Max, Maya, or Blender, but customized for the Second Life way of doing things.

Prims can be modified in various ways, such as size, twists, shearing, and cutting. Also, images (textures) such as photographs can be applied to each surface of a prim to change its appearance. Perfect examples of this are the beautiful rugs sold by many SL vendors. Take a prim, flatten it out into the shape of a rug, apply a texture (for example, a photograph of a rug design) already in your computer and voila you have just made a rug.

Types of prims

There are eight different types of prims:

1. box: all kinds of rectangular shapes;
2. cylinder: round tables, floors, long pipes;
3. prism: a box with one very small face;
4. sphere: can be used for ellipsoids of all shapes;
5. torus: most complex, can be modified in many exotic ways;
6. tube: another form of hollow cylinder;
7. ring: another variant of tours; and
8. sculpted: new as of 2007, used for highly variable organic shapes.

Prims are important to builders because builders must learn to link, or arrange, prims to create various objects. Again, think of prims as LEGO blocks. Anyone who has watched a child play with LEGO blocks to build objects, knows that different size and shape LEGO blocks must be linked together in order to create an object. The more skilled the child is in arranging LEGO blocks together, the more complex her creations will be. The same is true for SL builders; the more skilled and experienced builders can create amazingly fantastic objects using the very same prims that are available to everyone in SL.



Why should non-builders care about prims?

Understanding prims, and how they work, is also important to non-builders and here is why. SL is a graphic, virtual world that runs on computer power. It takes a lot of processing power to make SL run as well as it does. (I know that some of you like to complain about how laggy SL can be at times, or how it often crashes for no apparent reason, but talk to the people who left text-only chat to join SL and they will tell you how vastly superior SL is to anything else out there, so stop the bellyaching already!). So Linden Labs have limited the amount of prims that can be rezzed (or put) in-world.

Each parcel of land can only support a finite number of prims. Houses, furniture, landscaping, boats, vehicles, animals, toys, etc., EVERYTHING that you rezz or put in a parcel of land adds up towards the parcel’s prim limit. There is a formula to determine how many prims a particular parcel of land can support. The formula goes like this:

(Square meters/65536) X 15000 = Prim limit

So if you own a parcel of land that is 512 sq. meters (the basic SL parcel), your parcel would support the following number of prims:

(512/65536) X 15000 = Prim limit
0.0078125 X 15000 = 117.1875 (or 117) prims

There are some parcels that can support extra (bonus) prims beyond the 117 prims per 512 sq. meters standard. Similarly, there are other parcels where the number of prims allowed is less than the standard 117 prims per 512 sq. meters count (Open Space is an example).

Figuring out how many prims a parcel supports

To see how many prims a parcel actually supports open the About Land dialog box. You can open the About Land dialog box by right-clicking on the ground of the land that you want to check.

This is what the About Land dialog window looks like:



When the About Land dialog box opens, click on the Objects tab. You will then see the Objects window. The Objects window looks like this:



In the example above you will see the following information regarding primitives:

Primitives parcel supports: 2702
Primitives on parcel: 796

In this particular example, the parcel can support a total of 2702 prims with 796 prims being curently used. This means that the parcel may support an additional 1906prims. But if the parcel owner tries to rezz objects that add to more than 1906 prims, SL will not allow him to rezz the objects and he will get an error message stating that he is “over prims.”

Figuring out how many prims are in an object

You can always see how many prims are in any object. This is true even if you do not own the object or do not have rights to the object. Right-click on the object, when the object's pie dialog appears, click on Edit.

This is what the pie dialog looks like:



You will then see the Edit dialog box. (If you get the abbreviated Edit dialog box, click on More and you will get the full Edit dialog box.) On the General tab area look down, about halfway down the dialog box, and you will see how many prims are in the object you are looking at.

The illustration below shows that there is one object, and the object uses only one prim.



A quick word about freebies and prims

There many generous individuals in SL. They freely give away their creations so they may be shared with anyone. Some freebies, however, come with a prim penalty. It is not that freebies are bad; it is just that many times freebies, especially freebie furniture, are the result of a builder’s first creations, when she was still new to building.

The more advance builders are particularly skillful at creating wonderful object using the least amount of prims. It takes a truly talented individual to be able to create very intricate objects using very few prims. In fact, there are builders who take pride in being to build the most beautiful houses using the least amount of prims; for them it becomes a sort of a friendly competition to see how much they can build with the fewest number of prims.

Do a search in SL using the term “low prims” and you will find a large number of shops that specialize in selling low-prim objects. Some of these objects are amazingly deatailed even though they use very few prims. Check them out!

Finally – Why are prims important at Between Homes?

Between Homes was created, and continues to exists, through the generosity of its supporters. Three current members have bought (and continue to buy) land to donate to BH. (You can see who these individuals are by looking up the group’s information dialog box). Other members have made donations of tiers that then allow BH to buy more land. Finally, there are other members who have donated their building and other skills to make BH what it is – a friendly place for homeless avis to visit and stay a while.

All of this, of course, comes with a price tag. Land is expensive and monthly tiers can add up after a while. Building supplies and scripts can also cost money. In order to be able to provide a nice environment to as many avis as possible we need to limit the number of prims that are used by each resident. The main grounds at BH, as well as all the “annexes,” are very nicely decorated and beautifully landscaped. In addition to the apartments, BH has a dance floor, a pond with fishes and diving board (frozen for the winter and ready for ice skating), a park, a chapel and various other areas. All of the above requires the use of lots and lots of prims.

Help us help you - keep your prim usage to 60 or less. And if you hear from me, from Yucca or from any of the BH officers that you are over prims we are not being mean, we just want everyone to have a great time.

For additional information on prims, land and other fun stuff, please watch this short SL video tutorial.

A Light Look At Drivers

By Debbie Bulloch



And now for something light and fun.

I was born and raised in La La Land, better known by the rest of the world as Los Angeles, California. For better or for worse, L.A. has the reputation of being the car capital of the world. (Of course, my dear friend Yucca Gemini would quickly point out that this is a rather dubious distinction and not one to be proud of - but I digress).

Anyhow, while cruising YouTube I came across this animated Disney short. After viewing it, I think that the message in this little film is as revelant today as it was back in 1950, when it was filmed.

Take a look at it (it is only about 7 minutes long) and tell me what you think. Are you an "evil" driver?

Have fun. (As an added bonus, if you watch through the end of the Disney clip, you will then have a chance to watch various bike related vidoe clips.)