Friday, June 26, 2015

About Zephyr Fox

Back in 1995, in my Mountian View, Ca home I watched an episode of the then popular tech series "Cnet Central", where they had an episode about virtual reality, which introduced me to this online VR world called "Alpha World".  I remember that I was hooked as soon as I was in world and building. But, back then the building was limited and painful (no ctrl function for quick land claim as today).  At that time, I was working as Network Specialist and Systems Administrator at the WSJ plant in Palo Alto, Ca that once existed up on Page Mill Rd. near the Stanford Campus.

I tried a few times to do ambitious builds only to find my stuff had been deleted when I returned.  When the cost of having citizenship was raised to $60 in 2002, and the memory of being deleted a couple of times still stinging, I could no longer imagine that it was worth any sort of build effort.  This was actually about the same time that I was laid off from Sun Microsystem, which eventually forced my move to Las Vegas, NV.  So, I actually went Rip Van Winkle on it, putting it out of my mind as my personal real world issues were becoming less ignorable.  I spent 20 years in Silicon Valley, and I had a good life.  But things are very different for me today.

So just recently, I decided come back to see what had become of AlphaWorld.  I fully expected to see that they were defunct, but a few years back I do recall discuss VR chat rooms with someone and found that they were still around.  I was so discouraged about the bad experience that I had with AW in the past that I was actually taking up Second Life more as it was a more popular environment for chatting in VR.  However, I still enjoyed AW for the simple build interface, and this is what I like the most.  To build something that was visually appealing in only a short period of time, and had the possibility to do more.

So recently when pressures of my personal life had become too great, I decide to find an outlet to relieve the hypertension which I was developing from the stress by reentering AW.  I started to build on June 14 with a project called ZeFoxVille.  This blog was created shortly after to journal my activities there.  Find more information about ZeFoxVille at the city planning page: https://sites.google.com/site/zefoxville/ 

I have always used zephyfox and I did find that I was in a file maintained on Muaz's AW web site: zephyrfox #357588  To me the previous builds are history and can be deleted, if I knew where the builds were and could do so, but I do hope that the current build will not become history and vaper as technology goes.

I'm currently welcoming trusted helpers for the Zefoxville project.  I would prefer a telegram, but you can also contact me at mark89121@yahoo.com

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