Second Life Exploration

Upon entering the game after getting it downloaded I entered the starting tutorial area, and went through each step in getting used to controlling my avatar. After getting the hang of it I started messing around with its looks and dress. I found it funny that if i try wearing girls clothes it would change me into a girl. While doing this however i think i managed to bug out my avatar because for the rest of my exploration i was stuck in a floating seated position (not flying) like Xavier from X-men. So I went with it and put on a suit and made him kinda look baldish. Anyway after finishing the tutorial I moved on a teleported to the Steampunk Sim area. In this area i took a picture of the chess set below. When i took the Picture i was contacted by another avatar. They had noticed that I had taken the picture and we got to talking about the game. I asked and recorded the conversation. That conversation is below the chess set picture.

[11:44] Isolde Firecaster: hi, saw you taking a picture of the chess set, i have sculpties for it if you wnat to make one

[11:49] laggedout Aftermath: is this a real person

[11:50] laggedout Aftermath: i am so confused

[11:50] Isolde Firecaster: If I am a real person?

[11:51] Isolde Firecaster: ::giggles:: in pixels and textures, of course

[11:51] laggedout Aftermath: gotcha

[11:52] Isolde Firecaster: What are you confused about?

[11:52] laggedout Aftermath: just really new, supposed to be taking pictures for a class, liked the chess board

[11:53] Isolde Firecaster: oh okay... I saw your profile but just thought you were someone's alt. didn't really think you were new

[11:53] Isolde Firecaster: what is the class for? RL school?

[11:54] laggedout Aftermath: rl school yea, college CIS class

[11:54] Isolde Firecaster: nice!

[11:54] Isolde Firecaster: and your assigment is to take a picture of something in SL?

[11:55] laggedout Aftermath: yea and to just interact, get a feel for it then write a reflection paper

[11:55] Isolde Firecaster: is this from the TG?

[11:56] laggedout Aftermath: TG? dont knwo what that is

[11:56] Isolde Firecaster: BTW the chest set you can actually play as you would irl.

[11:56] Isolde Firecaster: teen grid

[11:56] laggedout Aftermath: o cool

[11:56] laggedout Aftermath: i dont know what the teen grid is

[11:56] Isolde Firecaster: the 17 and 16 year olds are joing us in the main grid by dec.

[11:57] Isolde Firecaster: not many people are happy about that

[11:57] laggedout Aftermath: i can see that

[11:57] laggedout Aftermath: but yea i am in my 20's so doubt i am in the teen grid

[11:57] Isolde Firecaster: lol you weren't

[11:57] Drag items from inventory here

[11:57] Isolde Firecaster: the teen grid was/is for minors and schools

[11:58] Isolde Firecaster: educational institutions and educated people

 [11:58] Isolde Firecaster: we aren't educated here lol

[11:58] Isolde Firecaster: jk

[11:58] laggedout Aftermath: lol

 [11:59] Isolde Firecaster: one of those chess sets, is a gorean set

 [12:01] Isolde Firecaster: but Caledon is a steampuk sim.... well WOC is a different experience

[12:01] Isolde Firecaster: but you got the same unstable people on both lol

[12:01] Isolde Firecaster: you should go to the burn 2 live sims.. they mirror teh real burn 2 irl this week... some good stuff there to take pictures of

 [12:02] laggedout Aftermath: o cool thx

[12:02] Isolde Firecaster: oh because below there is an info hub

[12:02] Isolde Firecaster: it should have landed you there

[12:02] laggedout Aftermath: that makes sense

[12:02] Isolde Firecaster: did you come from rez island?

[12:03] laggedout Aftermath: no idea

[12:03] Isolde Firecaster: is this teh first time you log on after making your account?

[12:03] laggedout Aftermath: yea

[12:03] Isolde Firecaster: it should have landed you on help island or one of the info hubs

[12:03] Isolde Firecaster: has tutorials and things

[12:03] laggedout Aftermath: yea that was it

[12:04] laggedout Aftermath: well i need to log off, but thanks so much for helpin me out and get my bearings

( I am laggedout Aftermath)

This Conversation lasted into the next place I went which was some sort of info hub. I tried talking to several people there but they weren't having it. Also it seemed like everyone somehow had music playing through their avatars. A couple times when i passed some people I could hear real conversations through some sort of vent. Here are some pictures that i took there.

Overall I found Second Life to be pretty interesting, but way to buggy and laggy for my taste. As an avid World of Warcraft player I wasn't new to interacting with random people online thing.

CIS3050 Assignment 2, Question 2

I have decided to do apply the Porter’s Value Chain Model to the company of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment’s competitive strategy is to use both primary and support activities in such a way to be and maintain being one of the best computer game manufactures in the market. Blizzard Entertainment’s biggest competitors are other game manufactures like Microsoft games.

Blizzard Entertainment’s business model is based around their main game, World of Warcraft, and there two other main games Diablo, and Starcraft. These three games pretty much dominant the genre’s that they fall into like Massively Multi-Player Online, Real Time Strategy, and Dungeon Crawlers.  

Blizzard entertainment uses all the primary activities quite well. One example would be with their marketing and sales. They market there video games everywhere they think potential players will see then like online on forums or banner ads, and TV commercials. These ads and word-of-mouth have pushed all three of their main games to be some of the biggest selling games of all time.

Blizzard Entertainment’s use of information systems also really is what main them the company they are today. Their use of IS gives then competitive advantage over their competitors.  One example would be the fact that there games aren’t just released on PC but also Mac. Almost no game makers put their games out for Mac. Another use of information systems is that their game World of Warcraft if installed on a computer that is connected to the internet, in which you can download the game from their website not just from DVD, the player can play their character from it.

Blizzard Entertainment. Web. 08 Sept. 2010. <http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/>.

"Blizzard Entertainment." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 09 Sept. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment>.

CIS3050 IT Assignment 1, Question 2

My Group decided to answer question number two. Looking through the job sites it was pretty hard to actually find any job postings that listed its salary or hourly wage. I did manage to find a couple though, but our main resource was the Computer World 2010 Salary Survey.  Looking through the different jobs and the average salaries we found that they are all quite reasonable and paid pretty well.

The salaries for most all the jobs in each category (accounting, marketing, human resources, etc.) seemed to be about the same. Of course some jobs did pay more or less, but different ones seemed to be looking for differing levels of experience.   And in all categories we were surprised to see almost all the jobs had to do with IT, especially in areas like Research Triangle Park.

After getting all the information together we mostly talked about IT careers in our different fields.  Personally I am a marketing major, the only one in my group, so I did most the research on my own.  And in marketing there were a ton of different jobs available particularly in IT. They all were fairly interesting, expect for the fact that most of them weren’t permanent positions. Other people in the group saw that as a bad thing, but personally I plan on working as a consultant so the lack of permanence is exacting what I am looking for. The pay for the marketing jobs was awesome in my opinion. Even starting pay for a little experience was wonderful and with experience only went up, furthermore in some cases way up. Doing this research made me realize how much of my future field involves IT and I can’t wait to graduate and get started.

CareerBuilder.com Jobs - The Largest Job Search, Employment & Careers Site. Web. 01 Sept. 2010. <http://www.careerbuilder.com/>.

"Salary Survey 2010 - Computerworld." Computerworld - IT News, Features, Blogs, Tech Reviews, Career Advice. Web. 01 Sept. 2010. <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174032/Salary_Survey_2010>.

First blog, hey everyone

First blog for cis3050