Written 9 August, 2007
Oh, Sweetie!
How endearing you are!
How funny you are!
How sexy you are!
How beautiful you are!
How talented you are!
How clever you are!
How irreverent you are!
How conscious of aesthetics you are!
How creative you are!
How ambitious you are!
How extroverted you are!
How introverted you are!
How paradoxical you are!
How cute you are!
How wonderful you are!
Friday, August 10, 2007
How Very, Very Strange!
Written 10 August, 2007
How Very, Very Strange!
I turned in early last night (for me), perhaps 1 pm.
I woke at 2:00 feeling as if I had slept all night, and for some reason, even though the house had become warm since I had the air conditioner off (We are in a 100 degree F. plus streak of weather. 100 degrees is an absolute rarity in Atlanta, surprise, surprise! It rarely breaks 95, although it can be almight muggy! Atrlanta's weather is more civilized than that of places like Washington, D.C., which is far [although IMO not far enough] north of here.)
Anyway, I woke at two, after only an hour or so of sleep, and managed to sleep another hour and forty-five minutes. Then I was awake and of course I logged onto Second Life.
I mean, who wouldn't?
Strangeness of strangeness, Forsaken was running perfectly. The time dilation was consistently .98 (had been running .83 or so), and frames per second and physics FPS were both consistently around 44.5. Scripts were running at 17k.
So, although nothing happened on the land from the time I went to bed and the time I awoke, Forsaken, which had been sick, was running just fine.
Of course, both Dreamland and Linden Lab will blame the poor sim performance on me and the other residents-- but clearly, there's something going on at the Linden Lab level.
Don't you think?
Don't you?
How Very, Very Strange!
I turned in early last night (for me), perhaps 1 pm.
I woke at 2:00 feeling as if I had slept all night, and for some reason, even though the house had become warm since I had the air conditioner off (We are in a 100 degree F. plus streak of weather. 100 degrees is an absolute rarity in Atlanta, surprise, surprise! It rarely breaks 95, although it can be almight muggy! Atrlanta's weather is more civilized than that of places like Washington, D.C., which is far [although IMO not far enough] north of here.)
Anyway, I woke at two, after only an hour or so of sleep, and managed to sleep another hour and forty-five minutes. Then I was awake and of course I logged onto Second Life.
I mean, who wouldn't?
Strangeness of strangeness, Forsaken was running perfectly. The time dilation was consistently .98 (had been running .83 or so), and frames per second and physics FPS were both consistently around 44.5. Scripts were running at 17k.
So, although nothing happened on the land from the time I went to bed and the time I awoke, Forsaken, which had been sick, was running just fine.
Of course, both Dreamland and Linden Lab will blame the poor sim performance on me and the other residents-- but clearly, there's something going on at the Linden Lab level.
Don't you think?
Don't you?
Consolidating Pele
Written 9 August, 2007
Consolidating Pele
I’ve suspected for some time that Anche Chung has from time to time quietly and without fanfare revised the covenant for the Forsaken sim.
I mean, I KNOW this was once a pirate area. And yet now it’s not. And after all that money I spent on Jolly Rogers and eyepatches, too!
Anche is putting into place a new payment system which, among other things, will take a 16 square meter bite out of every parcel in Dreamland.
Ouch!
That’s bad— land owners will lose part of their property and the prims that go with them.
Not a well-conceived plan, IMO.
In my case, I would have lost nine 16-meter swatches of land, because I had nine parcels on the Forsaken sim, ranging in size from 2048 to 5120 square meters.
Well, eight, because early on I joined Pele’s 4096 to the 2048 parcel I bought from the Mother Ship Guy. So I stood to lose 96 square meters of land.
Rez a cube prim and stretch it 10 meters along both the X and Y axes. That’s how much land I stood to lose—and 24 prims.
What was infinitely worse, however, was the fact that in the changeover the land will be reclaimed and sold back to the owner for zero lindens—and that during this change, prim-sharing between parcels will be wrecked.
Meaning that those who have more prims on a parcel than that parcel supports will lose them.
Which is most of us, I think.
Winding up with 2/3 of Pele in my Lost and Found folder was not an option; I would have left the prims there and immediately put my land up for sale—so I asked Carcinia Polano, the Dreamland Angel with whom I have done business—if I could join my parcels.
Carcinia, who is indeed an angel, said yes.
And so I did.
Now there’s just one parcel, so Pele should be safe during the soon-to-come changeover.
Or we can hope.
One benefit of the consolidation is that now all of Pele shares the same audio and video stream, meaning that radio stations will be constant as one crosses the land.
I was able to take up seven Wurlitzer jukeboxes. The remaining two are placed so one is always within shouting distance.
It would sure be nice, though, to be able to split parcels at will.
If I had that ability, I could, for instance, make the audio stream for the inside of the Dragon, with its hot dance floor, lights, and mist, a rave station, and the outside, with its marble floors and carpet, a jazz stream.
And if I had a store—which I can’t, since my portion of Dreamland is residential—I would keep build turned off except in the dressing rooms, giving avatars a place to open the boxes that contain their purchases.
You know, I’m just going to have to figure out how I can afford a sim of my own.
Or, I should say, a sim of OUR own, for it will be Sweetie’s as much as mine.
What Sim Owners Are Paying For
Written 9 August, 2007
What Sim Owners Are Paying For
The Linden (I won’t mention the name, but you can see it if you follow the thread on the forums) who responded to Wayfinder Wishbringer’s post about poor sim performance missed, in my opinion, the point—which is this:
Sim owners have a reasonable expectation of acceptable levels of performance from their simulators.
Grid problems, perhaps, can be overlooked—but sim owners are paying for virtual space on Linden’s servers, and they are entitled to machines that operate as they are supposed to.
The Lindens get a lot of grief they don’t deserve, but I think in this case they’re deserving of Wayfinder’s ire. There is clearly a problem with performance on his simulator, and the Lindens need to look into it. How unfortunate that the Linden who responded to Wayfinder’s post didn’t acknowledge Linden Lab’s responsibility in this matter.
What Sim Owners Are Paying For
The Linden (I won’t mention the name, but you can see it if you follow the thread on the forums) who responded to Wayfinder Wishbringer’s post about poor sim performance missed, in my opinion, the point—which is this:
Sim owners have a reasonable expectation of acceptable levels of performance from their simulators.
Grid problems, perhaps, can be overlooked—but sim owners are paying for virtual space on Linden’s servers, and they are entitled to machines that operate as they are supposed to.
The Lindens get a lot of grief they don’t deserve, but I think in this case they’re deserving of Wayfinder’s ire. There is clearly a problem with performance on his simulator, and the Lindens need to look into it. How unfortunate that the Linden who responded to Wayfinder’s post didn’t acknowledge Linden Lab’s responsibility in this matter.
So, What IS Lagging the Forsaken Sim?
Written 8 August, 2007
So, What IS Lagging the Forsaken Sim?
So, what IS lagging the Forsaken sim?
The short answer is, I don’t know.
The long answer is also “I don’t know”—but it is, I think, a reasonably informed I don’t know.
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Theory 1: Too many scripts on the sim
When Second Life was launched, the Lindens expected that at best only a few hundred scripts would ever be run on a simulator.
That was never the case. Most sims, unless they are bare ground, have _thousands_ of running scripts.
Forsaken has more than 3000 scripts—more than it should have, I’m sure—and probably Pele has more than its share of those—but it’s not an unusual number. The sims adjacent have as many or more running scripts, and I suspect most sims do too (and yet their simulators are running at 44-45 frames per second with time dilation close to 1.0 and Forsaken is running at 37 with a time dilation of .83). My best guess is that Forsaken is pretty typical in its number of running scripts.
Forsaken is lagging badly, and I’ve been on sims with far more scripts, yet no appreciable lag.
And taking on or turning off scripts doesn’t seem to make a differences.
So while it’s possible Forsaken’s scripts are lagging the sim, and while that number of scripts would doubtless lag any sim to some degree, I don’t think the theory can account for the terrible lag.
------
Theory 2: A small number of scripts are consuming an inordinate amount of processor resources.
I could substantiate or disprove this hypothesis by switching off the top offending scripts or by toggling all scripts off and on from the World > Region menu and nothing the effect, if any, on sim performance—but I’m not allowed this information and so far I’ve not been able to get either Dreamland or Linden Lab to give it to me or do the test themselves. I have no idea which scripts are the worst offenders and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to identity them.
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Theory 3: Some one else’s objects and scripts are lagging the land.
There are only two other land holders on Forsaken. One, wanting to redo her property, recently took every single one of her objects into inventory. There was no noticeable difference in sim performance—and she had a LOT of objects on her 16k plot.
The other property owner went through a brief period of rezzer craziness, but he got over that. On his 19k of rental properties (most of which seem to be vacant) he has simple builds with few apparent scripts.
And then there’s our resident artist. He makes heavy use of particles and moving textures in his objects. And yet he has switched them off and nothing has changed.
I’m glad it wasn’t his scripts, because Sweetie and I love having a resident artist at Pele.
------
Theory 4: Griefers have placed non-detectible objects on my land which are designed to lag the sim.
I read recently in the _AvaStar_ that it’s possible to put objects onto a sim that don’t show up in About Land > Objects. So maybe someone is goofing us.
The adjoining sims seem to be sharing Forsaken’s slow performance, so that might be the case.
Returning all objects might work, but I can’t do that, since Sweetie and my renters have objects on the land. Until yesterday—I’ll explain why soon—I could have turned auto-return on for the “back forty,” the 5k parcel that abuts the sim The Cauldron, but now instead of eight or nine parcels I have one and can’t do auto return without wrecking others' work. Tonight I’ll fly up to 750 meters, where such prims are usually placed, and use my Ptools gadget to see if I can locate any prims.
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Theory 5: Sick Server
It’s entirely possible there’s a mechanical problem with the server on which Forsaken lives and that my objects and scripts, and the scripts and objects of others, have little or nothing to do with Forsaken’s abysmal performance of late. It’s a bad box.
I’m sure Linden Lab has the ability to run diagnostic tests on their servers, and I’m sure they do from time to time. Maybe, when the support portal opens, I’ll talk to Howard from Idaho and promise to unplugging my modem if he will arrange to have diagnostics run on Forsaken.
The server might also be sick because of software issues. Perhaps there’s bad code that slows things up. Again, diagnostics should help.
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Theory 6: Server load from other sims
Linden Lab’s original servers held one sim each.
Newer generation servers hold two sims, or even four.
And so far as I’ve been able to determine, the software doesn’t share processor and memory resources or hard drive access equally, but allots resources according to the demand of the individual sims. In other words, there’s a communal pool of memory, processor time, and hard drive space and access time, so a crowded or busy sim can lag another.
Which means if your sim is sharing mechanical space in the San Francisco or Texas server lot with the GetDown&Dirty Casino, Camping Paradise, and Whorehouse, you’re just shit out of luck. The 45 avs that are camping there around the clock will grind your sim to a standstill.
And Linden Lab won’t reveal the sim(s) which share your server. (although it’s apparently possible to determine this on one’s own).
So maybe Forsaken’s problems have little to do with Forsaken and everything to do with some (as yet, but I’m on it!) unnamed sim.
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Theory 7: Grid Problems
It would seem Forsaken isn’t the only region with performance problems.
The adjacent sims seem to be lagging about as badly.
True, there are usually about 15 French Vampires on The Cauldron, and 15 gay sex frolickers on the sim past that, but those sims apparently lag even when mostly vacant.
While researching Forsaken’s performance problem on the Second Life forums, I came across a lengthy post by Wayfinder Wishbringer entitled “Sim Owners Take Note—Your Sims are Sharing Servers.
It seems Wayfinder’s sims are lagging, and he presented credible evidence that, despite having been told it was the sim’s scripts that were lagging it, the scripts had nothing to do with the lag. I mean, he switched off all the scripts from the World > Region menu, and nothing changed.
Wayfinder was too much, I think, on about the placement of sims on the same servers, but his problem is real enough, and it’s almost certainly not a problem of his own making.
I would reproduce the thread here, but I’m not sure about the proprieties of that, so here are some excerpts from Way’s post:
For MONTHS we have been trying to track down causes of "lag", and found no perceivable cause on our sim. We often described the matter to LL as "someone flipping a switch"... causing our sim to lag excessively. We were told by LL over and over that the problem was NOT server side, that it was our content, our textures, our scripting... although none of these things had changed. We cut content, cut scripting, and the problems still remained. Constant data readings we took correlated NO content/client side cause with lag incidents. Every claim LL made was unsupported by data; in fact all of our data conflicted LL claims…
When we searched through the data, we discovered that our sim, ElvenGlen, was sharing a server with EATON. Those who are acquainted with Eaton know that it has been the #1 traffic sim on SL almost since its inception. 24/7 tringo games, massive shopping malls, casinos, nightclubs. We are good friends with the owners of Eaton. Wayfinder designed their kickboxing arena and the game itself. So we know Eaton. It lags like a fiend. And THAT is the sim ElvenGlen had been sharing servers with! As the owner of Eaton humorously said when this information was presented to him: "I wouldn't want to share a server with me…"
Further, we made some additional tests. We discovered (from what we can discern) that the RUN TIME ms reading that appears in the statistics box, is apparently not a rating of individual sim content as we had been told by LL... but is instead a rating of total server activity. This went a long way toward explaining why it is that this figure would jump from low to high for no explainable reason. This was most upsetting, because we had been lead to believe (directly told, actually) by LL that Run Tasks ms was the most accurate reading of our specific sim performance. Yet now, we discover that our sim was obviously being directly influenced by the other sim(s) sharing our server-- and that, despite claims to the contrary, what happens on one of those sims can and does directly affect other sims on the same server…
To prove our point, we reduced active scripts on ElvenGlen from 750 down to about 480. Result: there was NO PERCEIVABLE DIFFERENCE IN SIM SPEED as a result. So we intentionally increased our active scripts by 180... and SIM SPEED ACTUALLY INCREASED over the span of a few days. Conclusion: the scripts on our sim had no discernable effect on overall sim performance. These findings have been verified by other sim owners who have run their own tests and come to similar conclusions…
At one time, a Linden recommended that we try shutting off script operation on the sim. So we did. The results: sim performance did not significantly change…
-----
My best guess about all this is that something significant is wrong with the grid. Whatever it is is lagging sims, including Forsaken, horribly.
Clearly, Linden Lab needs to understand the seriousness of this problem.
And I have something to say to the Lindens, and in particular to the Linden who responded to Way, and who seems to have missed the real point of all this. I’ll do it a couple of posts from now.
So, What IS Lagging the Forsaken Sim?
So, what IS lagging the Forsaken sim?
The short answer is, I don’t know.
The long answer is also “I don’t know”—but it is, I think, a reasonably informed I don’t know.
-----
Theory 1: Too many scripts on the sim
When Second Life was launched, the Lindens expected that at best only a few hundred scripts would ever be run on a simulator.
That was never the case. Most sims, unless they are bare ground, have _thousands_ of running scripts.
Forsaken has more than 3000 scripts—more than it should have, I’m sure—and probably Pele has more than its share of those—but it’s not an unusual number. The sims adjacent have as many or more running scripts, and I suspect most sims do too (and yet their simulators are running at 44-45 frames per second with time dilation close to 1.0 and Forsaken is running at 37 with a time dilation of .83). My best guess is that Forsaken is pretty typical in its number of running scripts.
Forsaken is lagging badly, and I’ve been on sims with far more scripts, yet no appreciable lag.
And taking on or turning off scripts doesn’t seem to make a differences.
So while it’s possible Forsaken’s scripts are lagging the sim, and while that number of scripts would doubtless lag any sim to some degree, I don’t think the theory can account for the terrible lag.
------
Theory 2: A small number of scripts are consuming an inordinate amount of processor resources.
I could substantiate or disprove this hypothesis by switching off the top offending scripts or by toggling all scripts off and on from the World > Region menu and nothing the effect, if any, on sim performance—but I’m not allowed this information and so far I’ve not been able to get either Dreamland or Linden Lab to give it to me or do the test themselves. I have no idea which scripts are the worst offenders and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to identity them.
-----
Theory 3: Some one else’s objects and scripts are lagging the land.
There are only two other land holders on Forsaken. One, wanting to redo her property, recently took every single one of her objects into inventory. There was no noticeable difference in sim performance—and she had a LOT of objects on her 16k plot.
The other property owner went through a brief period of rezzer craziness, but he got over that. On his 19k of rental properties (most of which seem to be vacant) he has simple builds with few apparent scripts.
And then there’s our resident artist. He makes heavy use of particles and moving textures in his objects. And yet he has switched them off and nothing has changed.
I’m glad it wasn’t his scripts, because Sweetie and I love having a resident artist at Pele.
------
Theory 4: Griefers have placed non-detectible objects on my land which are designed to lag the sim.
I read recently in the _AvaStar_ that it’s possible to put objects onto a sim that don’t show up in About Land > Objects. So maybe someone is goofing us.
The adjoining sims seem to be sharing Forsaken’s slow performance, so that might be the case.
Returning all objects might work, but I can’t do that, since Sweetie and my renters have objects on the land. Until yesterday—I’ll explain why soon—I could have turned auto-return on for the “back forty,” the 5k parcel that abuts the sim The Cauldron, but now instead of eight or nine parcels I have one and can’t do auto return without wrecking others' work. Tonight I’ll fly up to 750 meters, where such prims are usually placed, and use my Ptools gadget to see if I can locate any prims.
-----
Theory 5: Sick Server
It’s entirely possible there’s a mechanical problem with the server on which Forsaken lives and that my objects and scripts, and the scripts and objects of others, have little or nothing to do with Forsaken’s abysmal performance of late. It’s a bad box.
I’m sure Linden Lab has the ability to run diagnostic tests on their servers, and I’m sure they do from time to time. Maybe, when the support portal opens, I’ll talk to Howard from Idaho and promise to unplugging my modem if he will arrange to have diagnostics run on Forsaken.
The server might also be sick because of software issues. Perhaps there’s bad code that slows things up. Again, diagnostics should help.
-----
Theory 6: Server load from other sims
Linden Lab’s original servers held one sim each.
Newer generation servers hold two sims, or even four.
And so far as I’ve been able to determine, the software doesn’t share processor and memory resources or hard drive access equally, but allots resources according to the demand of the individual sims. In other words, there’s a communal pool of memory, processor time, and hard drive space and access time, so a crowded or busy sim can lag another.
Which means if your sim is sharing mechanical space in the San Francisco or Texas server lot with the GetDown&Dirty Casino, Camping Paradise, and Whorehouse, you’re just shit out of luck. The 45 avs that are camping there around the clock will grind your sim to a standstill.
And Linden Lab won’t reveal the sim(s) which share your server. (although it’s apparently possible to determine this on one’s own).
So maybe Forsaken’s problems have little to do with Forsaken and everything to do with some (as yet, but I’m on it!) unnamed sim.
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Theory 7: Grid Problems
It would seem Forsaken isn’t the only region with performance problems.
The adjacent sims seem to be lagging about as badly.
True, there are usually about 15 French Vampires on The Cauldron, and 15 gay sex frolickers on the sim past that, but those sims apparently lag even when mostly vacant.
While researching Forsaken’s performance problem on the Second Life forums, I came across a lengthy post by Wayfinder Wishbringer entitled “Sim Owners Take Note—Your Sims are Sharing Servers.
It seems Wayfinder’s sims are lagging, and he presented credible evidence that, despite having been told it was the sim’s scripts that were lagging it, the scripts had nothing to do with the lag. I mean, he switched off all the scripts from the World > Region menu, and nothing changed.
Wayfinder was too much, I think, on about the placement of sims on the same servers, but his problem is real enough, and it’s almost certainly not a problem of his own making.
I would reproduce the thread here, but I’m not sure about the proprieties of that, so here are some excerpts from Way’s post:
For MONTHS we have been trying to track down causes of "lag", and found no perceivable cause on our sim. We often described the matter to LL as "someone flipping a switch"... causing our sim to lag excessively. We were told by LL over and over that the problem was NOT server side, that it was our content, our textures, our scripting... although none of these things had changed. We cut content, cut scripting, and the problems still remained. Constant data readings we took correlated NO content/client side cause with lag incidents. Every claim LL made was unsupported by data; in fact all of our data conflicted LL claims…
When we searched through the data, we discovered that our sim, ElvenGlen, was sharing a server with EATON. Those who are acquainted with Eaton know that it has been the #1 traffic sim on SL almost since its inception. 24/7 tringo games, massive shopping malls, casinos, nightclubs. We are good friends with the owners of Eaton. Wayfinder designed their kickboxing arena and the game itself. So we know Eaton. It lags like a fiend. And THAT is the sim ElvenGlen had been sharing servers with! As the owner of Eaton humorously said when this information was presented to him: "I wouldn't want to share a server with me…"
Further, we made some additional tests. We discovered (from what we can discern) that the RUN TIME ms reading that appears in the statistics box, is apparently not a rating of individual sim content as we had been told by LL... but is instead a rating of total server activity. This went a long way toward explaining why it is that this figure would jump from low to high for no explainable reason. This was most upsetting, because we had been lead to believe (directly told, actually) by LL that Run Tasks ms was the most accurate reading of our specific sim performance. Yet now, we discover that our sim was obviously being directly influenced by the other sim(s) sharing our server-- and that, despite claims to the contrary, what happens on one of those sims can and does directly affect other sims on the same server…
To prove our point, we reduced active scripts on ElvenGlen from 750 down to about 480. Result: there was NO PERCEIVABLE DIFFERENCE IN SIM SPEED as a result. So we intentionally increased our active scripts by 180... and SIM SPEED ACTUALLY INCREASED over the span of a few days. Conclusion: the scripts on our sim had no discernable effect on overall sim performance. These findings have been verified by other sim owners who have run their own tests and come to similar conclusions…
At one time, a Linden recommended that we try shutting off script operation on the sim. So we did. The results: sim performance did not significantly change…
-----
My best guess about all this is that something significant is wrong with the grid. Whatever it is is lagging sims, including Forsaken, horribly.
Clearly, Linden Lab needs to understand the seriousness of this problem.
And I have something to say to the Lindens, and in particular to the Linden who responded to Way, and who seems to have missed the real point of all this. I’ll do it a couple of posts from now.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Simulator Lag
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| Those Darn Campers |
Simulator Lag
For the past several months, the Forsaken sim has been sick.
I suspected it when Kitto Flora’s little steam train started performing erratically.
And I confirmed it when I started figuring out what some of the sim stats meant (hit CTRL-SHIFT-1 to see toggle them on and off).
I bought a couple of sim stat testers (the more fancy is made by Mystical Cookie, who makes the wonderful Mystitool) and they agreed with me. Forsaken was performing poorly.
Before the slowdown, the sim was percolating nicely—and most of the prims and scripts now on the land were already in place.
I tested the sim repeatedly over a two-week period, with distressing results. Mystical Cookie’s sim tester, which ran a full test in less than four minutes on a clean-running sim (I actually ran the machine on two other sims) took more than 90 minutes and generated multiple low performance warnings on Forsaken.
I looked around my property to see what might be causing the lag.
I had about five rezzers making 20-prim plants. I turned them off.
No change.
I removed about 100 miscellaneous scripts.
No change.
I removed all of the giant prims on the land (about a half dozen) save one, which is set as nonphysical and hence is not likely to cause lag.
No change.
I asked my Dreamland representative for help. She restarted the sim.
Things got worse.
The Region tools, which are available only to sim owners, reveal the scripts that consume the most processor resources and generate the most particles (for a long time, I’ve suspected that one or more particle scripts on Pele are producing almost as many particles as can be viewed).
I asked my Dreamland representative to give me the names of the worst offending prims (all scripts and particles are prim-based). She refused.
She just told me it was Pele that is producing all the lag on Forsaken.
Today I looked for the Support Portal and didn’t find it. I suspect it’s because it does not yet (and may never) exist.
So no help from Linden Lab, and only a little from Dreamland.
Yesterday I posted in the Forums, and got some helpful replies. One avatar (I’m offline as I write this and so can’t list his name, but I did thank him in the forums and via IM) actually went to Pele. He said, on the basis of his use of beacons, that the problem has to do not with scripts, but with the physical objects on the land. He cited several possible offenders, including my balance, which I will turn non-physical as soon as I get home tonight, and a couple of sculpted prim fish which cycle sculptie textures. They will go into the cooking pot.
Yum! Sculpted fish for dinner!
I can’t think of anything in particular which I or Sweetie have placed on the land which might lag the sim so badly.
And it’s possible that the cumulative effect of the scripts on the land are lagging the sim—although that is, I think, despite what the Dreamland rep told me, not the most likely problem.
I have some theories about what is lagging the sim. I’ll talk about them in my next post.
Second Life Support Portal
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| Second Life Support Portal Headquarters in "Des Moines" |
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| Applicants Line Up in Idaho for Support Portal Jobs |
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| Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale |
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| The Geek Squad |
Written 8 August, 2007Second Life Support Portal
Awhile back, Linden Lab announced a live support portal for premium account holders. For a reason I’ll soon blog about, I went looking for it. Didn’t find it.
Maybe I’m missing it, but I expect it is, like WindLight, a delayed feature of Second Life. But I—and Sweetie, who brainstormed this post with me—can imagine what it will be like.
Maybe it would work something like this:
“You have reached the Second Life Live Support Portal. Our office hours are Monday through Saturday from 9 am – 6 pm, Pacific Daylight Time. Thank you for calling, and please call again.”
“But it’s 10:30 in San Francisco! Hello? Hello!" Click.
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Or, more likely:
“All support portal personnel are currently speaking with highly incensed customers. Your wait time is approximately NINETY-TWO MINUTES.
“You are now number 40,951 in the queue.
“We will now play an endless Muzaked loop of 80s metal sensation Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady.’
“You are now number 40,950 in the queue.
“We will now play an endless Muzaked loop of Marilyn Manson’s ‘Mutilation is the Sincere Form of Flattery.’
“You are number 40,948 in the queue.
Second Life Live Support Portal says, “Congratulations! You have just earned $2L for camping on this phone line for one hour.”
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Even worse, maybe you’ll even eventually reach someone live:
“Namaste, and thank you for calling Second Life Support Portal. My name, despite my accent, is not Rajah, no, no no. My name is Howard. Please to be calling me Howard. May I please to be helping you, sir?”
“Ma’am.”
“Yes, sir. You will please to be telling me your problem?”
“My sim is lagging.”
“One second, please, sir.” (Pages rustle)
“That’s Ma’am.”
“Okay, I am returned. Will you please unplugging your modem for twenty seconds, sir?”
“I am not a sir! I am a Ma’am. And the problem is most definitely not with my connection!”
“Yes, sir. May I ask you if are to be already unplugging your modem?”
“Ma’am! What time is it in Delhi?”
“Oh, it’s eight in the—Oh, no, no, no, sir, I am not being in Delhi, no no no no no. I am one hundred percent American in Des Moines, Idaho. I am living here since I was a gudda. Des Moines. I know no one named Rajah, no no no. God bless America! Go Cornhuskers!”
“Aren’t the Cornhuskers in Nebraska?”
"Oh, yes, yes, to be sure, but I am so excited by all things American! I am loving to be fed on the American corn! Please to be forgetting this Delhi nonsense, sir. You are perhaps misled by my Midwestern accent. Or perhaps my many American references are confusing you.
“Please to be excusing me while I go to eat my wholesome American cheese food in a can.”
“You mean Cheese Whiz?”
“Yes, the whiz of the cheese, thank you so much.”
“Can you help me with my sim lag problem or not? And it is by damn Ma’am! If you call me sir one more time there will be hell to pay. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir, I am most sincerely understanding. Now will you please to be unplugging your modem for twenty seconds? How can I be helping you if you will not unplugging your modem for twenty seconds?”
------
Or maybe it’ll go like this:
“Linden Lab. Philip Rosedale speaking. How can I help you? Sim lag? How unfortunate! Of course we’ll help you.
"Helen, book me a teleport to the Forsaken sim. And make sure I’m on my private Punky Nerd intrasim teleporter. I don’t want to have to deal with those TSA bastards at the telehub.”
Yeah. Right.
------
Maybe I’ll just call the newly formed Geek Squad at their new simulator.
“Sorry, the Geek Squad is temporarily out of service due to severe simulator lag. We are talking to Linden support portal staffer Howard from Idaho, who, we are sure, will be helping us with our problem. Please excuse us while we unplug our modem."
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Big Builds
Written 4 August, 2007
Big Builds
Lot of things in Second LIfe are built on a scale larger than life-- but some entire locations are scaled for Stumbo the Giant.
Kirra Ball, who Sweetie and I met at the very interesting Sploland sim, took us to one such build. It was really huge.
Big doors, big furniture, big kitchen appliances, big toilet seat.
The first thing I said when I saw the house and judged how small I was in relation to everything was, "Kirra, please tell me there's not a cat."
"There's not a cat," she promised.
Of course, there was a cat!
But we were safe up on the lighting fixture.
The high point had nothing to do with the scale of the build, however.
Sweetie found a regular-sized desk in a cupboard and sat at it. When I flew up she said, "Please come in, Ms. Palisades. I need to talk to you about your job performance."
"I'm still not going to sleep with you," I said.
“Didn’t I give you a stapler?” she retorted. “And the sharpest pencils? Your own code to the photocopier? And you no longer have to clean the bathrooms.”
“You can’t ask this of me!” I said plaintively.
“A megalomaniacal CEO like me has… needs,” she leered, and came around the desk after me.
“Eeek!” I squeaked, and tried to put a chair between us.
I can’t quite remember the rest of the conversation/sexual assault, but I assure you, Sweetie was every bit as much “on” as she was in the recent “Torrent of Consciousness” blog.
From now on I’m going to capture Sweetie’s maunderings.
And my feeble responses.
-----
(Sure wish I'd made a notecard about that big build!)
Cocoloco Boat Ride
Written 4 August, 2007
Cocoloco Boat Ride
Not long ago, while out grid-hopping, I found the sims of Cocoloco [W. Cocoloco Island (59, 183, 22)].
I had a good time skydiving and looking at the beautiful crystal wedding fountain, but I had the most fun on the boat ride, which sound through jungle and then took to the air-- so much fun, in fact, that I talked Sweetie into coming to the island and taking a ride.
The boat was absolutely beautiful.
I most liked the rope bridge that spanned the peaks (shown). Sure wish there was another mountain on my sim of Forsaken to hook one on to. (The other end would stretch to Pele, of course!)
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