Learning to Dance

Since I got the Animation Override, I was fascinated that it is possible to have own ways of moving. Not that I dared to create my own ways, no! But I wanted to collect animations, specially dances. I love dancing.
I found out that there are gestures that I can use. Some of the standard gestures are dances and they were assigned to function keys. So I spent my first times in clubs by pressing on of f9 to shift-f12 in the right sequence that would match the music. How creative I felt!
Than I had the idea to create my own gestures by combining existing animations with each other and sounds and assign them to commands.... when I was confronted with the first bug in SL... the gestures could be edited but not saved. After I worked for hours on them, I had to find out that everything was just for the waste basket. I sent a bug report and never got an answer.
However, still I was happy in my new life and practised to press the dance keys in-rhythm with the music. There I got the idea to open a dance school one day to teach all the other avatars how to press the keys at the right time. What a great business!

Later I found out that it was possible to program own animations. I downloaded a poser-demo and stared at it for a week or so. I never managed to see the little figure there, not to speak of programming a simple movement. I was depressed.
I searched for other programs and found the article in the knowledge base: the animations guide, where they also list a few free editors for animations. I stucked with QAvimator, not the ultimate tool, but easy to use.
I created my first animation, a pose, on 13th January 2007. It folds it's arms and stands on one foot only, looking a bit out of balance.
I wanted to try it in-world and found out that I need money to upload a file. My rule did not allow me to mix SL and RL and therefor I could not sipmly buy linden-$. I had to work... and what does a newbie for a living?

Camping! This was my first job. I hated it.