Fixing Things Up

I Reset the Script of a Dead Albatross

Written 7 January, 2018

When you own property in Second Life, things-- usually little ones, fortunately, go spontaneously amiss-- although see my post here about when BIG things go wrong. Things happen for a variety of reasons-- you, or someone with permission to modify your objects, accidentally lassos and drags one or more objects, little script errors accumulate, eventually crashing an object or walking it a couple of meters from where it should be. These things happen on a day-to-day basis, so imagine what might happen over a period of three years (that's how long I was away).

Actually, very little went wrong on Whimsy.

I've snooped all over Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom and found a dozen or more small problems and only one major one. "I think the duck near my house is upside down," said Sere Timeless when I asked her if she had noted any problems.

It was actually on its side. Sweetie had already noticed and set it upright. I may need to move that swan; it's in a little cove near the sim edge and doesn't have quite enough room to wander, and it occasionally whacks into the land and makes a bump noise and goes all weird.

I found three dead scripted fish, all by the same creator. Rather than teach them their routes all over again, I just zapped them. There are plenty of fish that can make it three years without running down.

I also found a dead albatross. That particular albatross dies on a regular basis. The other albatrosses (what is the plural for albatross?) were all placed  years ago from the same copyable bird in my inventory, and they circle high over Kaboom and keep on ticking.

The Abrupt End of the Tracks Results in a Spectacular Train Crash, Every Time

The carriages to Kitto Flora's little train disappeared some months ago; I knew that, but didn't log on to replace  them because of my slow laptop. I found them in my inventory, so I didn't have to search the land for them. The train is fine now Well, not fine. It still crashes, as planned, at the end of every route.

I got an error message from a prim that gives avatars free parachutes. I had dropped an owner-only script in the box when I made it ten years ago, so it didn't break over time, it was broken from the get-go and I just realized it. I also removed a copy of Bits 'N' Bob's great Devotion pose, as it was returning script errors. Other copies don't. Sometimes Second Life is inconsistent. It's due to either magic or science, I'm unsure which.

The big problem-- which wasn't all THAT big, was at the Robot Sanatorium-- the conveyor belt had somehow been rotated and was sticking out of the side of giant Rosie the Robot's plastic head. I must have lassoed it somehow, and moved it. It was easy enough to put it back in place.

I found a couple of wall prims that were a little short of reaching the ceiling and stretched them. I don't think they were that way before.

The doors of the HAL 9000 Memorial Secure Facility for the Robotically Criminally Insane had strayed a meter or so from their proper locations-- which could be a problem, as HAL is incarcerated there and his homicidal inclinations are well known. If you've never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, he's sort of the Hannibal Lecter of robots. If you've not seen Silence of the Lambs, just watch the evil pretender to the Presidency of the United States and you'll know what I mean. So anyway, HAL was still in lockup, so the virtual world is safe for now.

An old ca 2005 plant I have here and there around Whimsy was looking fuzzy to me. I rebaked it and it was still fuzzy. When Sweetie and our friend Cillian Dyrssen looked on I asked them to tell me if it was rezzing properly for them. They said it wasn't, so I suspected its texture had become corrupted on the Linden servers-- but when I went back a couple of hours later to remove them, they looked just fine, so so much for that theory.

So anyway, Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom are in good shape after three years unattended. All my scripts have functioned reliably, which makes me happy, as when I was learning to script I was sure  the scripts I created would go wonky because I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. Looks like I am a better scripted than I gave myself credit for.

Note: Good form, Chey, ending your post with a preposition!

Whimsy is Still.. Whimsy

I Find This View Stunning. This Photo Was Taken From the Airship,
Looking Down at the Huge Asteroid in Orbit Above Whimsy

Written 7 January, 2018

It had been a long time since I had really seen Whimsy. My logins over the past three years have been sporadic, to respond to a request, send a message to someone, or fix something that had been reported broken. Doing the latter was usually not possible because I was unable to came or move about, so I was in world for only a few minutes at a time.

When I logged on with my new laptop, of course the first thing I wanted to do was look at our sims Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom. I did.

And they are lovely as ever. Photos follow.

Whimsy, As Seen From Whimsy Kaboom

Kaboom, as Seen from Whimsy

Lava Flow on the Side of the Volcano Pele, Whimsy

Twin Gorts Maintain Security Over the Intan Singles and Couples Dance Ball Rezzers

Gardens at Whimsy. That's Bob the Giant Paleolithic Granite Drinking Bird at Upper Left

Earth View From Orbit, Whimsy Kaboom. I Made Everything in This Photo.

Color-Changing Chameleons, Whimsy Gardens

Giant Art Deco Avatar Transformation Machine, Whimsy Kaboom Robot Sanitorium

Lava Pool at the Volcano Pele, Whimsy

Overhead View of Main Floor, Robot Sanatorium, Whimsy Kaboom

Inside the Hollow Core of the Volcano Pele, Whimsy. I Love This View!

Whimsy Red Train. All Aboard!

Sea Cliffs at Whinsy

It's Been a Long Damned Time! (A Bit of An Explanation For Our Absence)

Our House in the Jersey Highlands

Written January 5, 2018

Sweetie and I have been away from Second Life for a long time.

Three years ago this month I sold my little lake cottage in Metropolitan Atlanta and moved to the highlands of New Jersey to be with my Second Life love. I left home On January 21st with the top down on my Miata, wearing sandals, and arrived the next day in the frozen north with the top up and wearing closed-toed shoes and my heaviest coat. We moved into the house we were finally able eto afford and were married in April.

Ours is a 1940 vacation cabin on a lake that had been expanded several times over the years.

It's a fairly large house now, with a full basement, three bedrooms, two baths, a mud room, a living room with a massive fireplace and vaulted ceiling, and a huge kitchen and dining area;

To get the house to our liking, we had to make some modifications. First was moving the washer and dryer upstairs from the basement to the kitchen.

It is of course inconvenient to have to run up and down stairs every time you want to load or unload clothes, but our stairs were a real problem. First, they were more ladder than stairs, and rickety to boot. I mean, just look at them!

Original Basement Stairs-- More Like a Ladder

Our first project was replacing the shaky ladder stairs. We were able to lessen the pitch and it's easy to negotiate them.

New Stairs-- Sturdy, and Better Angle...

... But Not Wide Enough For a Laundry Basket

They are, however, still narrow. They're framed by huge logs from 1940, and there's no easy way to widen them. We couldn't imagine going up and down those stairs with a laundry basket!

It was some months before a new washer and dryer were install and functioning and we were ready to move on to the next project-- a dishwasher. It took forever to find a new carpenter (the one who built the stairs kept promising to come but never did).

Meanwhile, we were out of Second Life. I had my Sony VAIO laptop, but while it chewed Second Life up when I bought it new in 2009, by 2015 had grown slow and did not give me a workable Second Life experience. Xubi's MacBook had aged out. We had no SL-capable laptops, we were busy with the house, and one thing led to another and we played hooky from Second Life for nearly three years!

It all hinged upon the second floor. Our house has one upstairs room  at 17' x 24' and a second at 14' x 17'. The 14' x 17' is to be my office. But there's a hitch.

Huge 17' x 24' Upstairs Room. Notice Subfloor

The Smaller 14' x 17' Upstairs Room. Again, Notice Subfloor.
This Will Eventually Be My Office

You see, the previous owners never laid down flooring. I think they meant to, but just didn't get around to it.

There's subflooring up there, of course, in fact, two subfloors, we discovered, but no actual floor. We had to make decisions about money, and the washer and dryer and dishwasher took precedence. So to date, no floors upstairs, and for several years my powerful desktop computer sat unused in boxes scattered here and there in the big empty rooms.

Despite our absence, neither of us could bear to see our sims go away, and so we paid tier every month. We were anxious to get back to them, but without means.

For my birthday my honey gave me a pretty good Lenovo laptop that works well in SL if I don't turn on shadows, and Sweetie, after long proscrastination, bought a kickass Alienware that lets her run with graphic sliders all maxed-- and so here we are! I've been so stoked I even managed to find an exact match for the antique mission style library table the movers smashed to kindling and round up most of the parts for my i7 desktop and assemble it in the middle of the large room upstairs. We're saving our pennies so we can get the floor in upstairs.

My Desktop, Stated and Ready to Go On My Library Table
I'm Still Looking for the Speakers and Second Monitor

I can't speak for how often Sweetie will be in world,  but I will be regularly-- and I will be blogging.

I have missed this blog.

RL Thoughts Intrude: My To-Do List

Whimsy's sun can be brutal. Until I can get to the CVS for virtual sunscreen I'm wearing long sleeves. Photo by Sweetie.

OMG! I can't remember the last time I changed the oil in the engine of the little train that runs around Whimsy. Or lubricated the wheels.

Need to buy some sunscreen to protect me from Whimsy's fierce UV rays.

Can't remember if my property liability insurance payment is overdue. Whimsy has a lot of visitors and I wouldn't want to be sued if one of them fell into Pele's caldera or was eaten by the piranha.

Out of toothpaste and deodorant. Reminder: stock up.

Wash your dirty clothes, Cheyenne!

Can't remember the day of the week for garbage collection day.

Take my flying car to shop for tune-up.

Schedule annual check-up with AGP (avatar general physician).

Search the grid for a CVS pharmacy.

Buy stamps.

Get registered to vote for next Second Life CEO.

Shine all my shoes.

There. That should just about do it.

Whimsy's Sim Neighbors Going Away, Probably

The Forsaken Sim, ca early 2007. My property is at bottom left; you can see the house Sweetie built for me and the volcano Pele. Leaf's property is at lower right. Her formal estate soon gave way to tropical silliness; I'm afraid Sweetie and I were baaaad influences. Dodgeguy Woodward lived at upper left. He was another great neighbor.

Back in 2006, when I bought my first parcel in Second Life, my sim neighbor was Leaf Shermer. Over a period of several years of drama and turmoil from an assortment of neighbors in Dreamland, I bought a sim-- and so did Leaf. Once again, she was just to our south. Her sim was named Eccentricity.

Our initial thought-- both of us-- was to have but a single sim each, but ill timing of our purchases soon left us each with a second sim, a new type of sim, a homestead. That happened because not a week after we bought our regions the Lindens dropped the setup price from $1500 USD to $1000. By way of compensation they gave us each a homestead with three months free tier. That's how we got Whimsy Kaboom. and how Leaf got her homestead Whimcentricity.

For most of the past five years we've had a block of six sims, three owned by me and three owned by Leaf. Leaf was kind enough to share Whimcentricity with us and rented the homestead Whimsical Mischief from me; in addition she owned a second homestead, Idiosyncracy.

We had great times and a zillion visitors to our asian- and island-themed sims-- but then Leaf, for personal reasons, became unable to log into Second Life.

She kept her regions up for two years, bless her heart, but I suspect she had made a decision to pull the plug. Having three regions is expensive and when you can't enjoy them...

Leaf's regions are offline and I expect they will soon be gone forever. She might still decide to keep them going, but I doubt she will. I certainly wouldn't. From now on it seems there will be just two sims in our little block-- Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom.

Leaf was a great person and is a great neighbor. We had a lot of fun times with her and we miss her terribly. I hope at some future time she will be able to come back into the world. When she does there will certainly be space and prims for her on Whimsy.

Leaf, we love you!

Another Second Life Partnership Leads to First Life Marriage

On Thursday, April 23, the humans behind the avatars Cheyenne Palisades and (the ever elusive) Sweetie tied the knot in Rockland County, New York. That's me on the right.

My sister and Sweetie's parents were in attendance and served as witnesses.

I'm now catching up, writing about what's been going on with us and why we've not been in world much.


Note:

In more than 2000 posts on this blog I have been extraordinarily careful with Sweetie's real life name and even her avatar's name (although anyone can find out the latter just by looking at my avie's profile). I am breaking with tradition just this once to let people know Second Life can be transformative of our first lives.

Harsh Weather

Shopping Cart Traffic Jam at Home Depot

So, what transpired during my period of absence from this blog? Lots, cumulating with my marriage.
Days after I arrived in New Jersey, winter set in in earnest. The jet stream veered to the south and the resulting front dumped a foot-and-a-half of snow on us. Temperatures plummeted and stayed below freezing for some six weeks. Occasionally it would venture above freezing in the middle of the day, but there was little melt-off and it would snow every few days. Thankfully, though, after getting slammed that first time the heaviest snow would hit toward the north or south or west.

Snow staying on the ground was something out of my experience. In the warmer climes where I had always lived roads would be bad for only a day or two and the snow would be gone not long after that. Now there was perpetual snow.

It took hours to shovel ourselves out after each snow, even with the help of the electric snow blower we had just purchased. We spread salt liberally and even though we had salt delivered, we had to frequently venture to Home Depot for more.

A huge ice dam formed on the eaves near the front door. A ton or more of ice threatened to bring down the gutters and there was risk of the house flooding when it melted. I hadn't even known what an ice dam was!

Road crews did a great job of keeping our street passable, but shoveling snow and chipping ice was a daily chore. Our cars were repeatedly covered with ice, but thanks to a Christmas present from Sweetie's parents, our windshields were kept clear-- so long as we remembered to attach the plastic screen they had given us. We weren't lacking for food or warmth and were snowbound only infrequently and for short times, but everything was inconvenient. The mud room at the front of the house was a mess, fill with shovels, brooms, snow blower, salt, boots, wet mats, and broadcast spreader, and we were unable to dry it out. The layers cardboard we had put down on the walkways during the load-in was frozen to the concrete-- nor could we keep the stoop clear of ice. Stepping outside was a perpetual adventure.

It was a full six weeks before the weather began to improve, and only since the first of May has it begun to look like spring here.

Wall of Car Wash 

Bad Moving Experience

Moving these days is not a trivial undertaking. That's because the carload of belongings from college days has somehow multiplied into a load sized for a moving van. It no longer fits into even the largest U-Haul truck. If I moved via U-Haul, I discovered, I would have to drive north in a 26-foot truck, fly back to Atlanta, head north in a second truck, and fly back again to get my car. Not great.

Rather than a full service moving company I opted for You-Pack. I rented a 26-foot trailer, loaded it, and rented about a third of a second trailer for the remainder of my stuff. Professional drivers would take them north.

I hired loaders through U-Haul's Moving Help subsidiary. They did a great job on the many boxes I had packed, but turned into animals when it came to the furniture. They refused to disassemble my metal desk and waterbed pedestal (which has 12 drawers) and moved them still together, and worse, in their effort to show everything would fit on the first trailer, loaded it so full they were unable to put U-Pack's load-holding partition into place. I let that stand because the trailer was packed so tight I figured the load would ride just fine.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The second trailer, which was filled with boxes I had in storage, made the trip just fine. The first trailer, however, was a hot mess.

I'm not certain just what happened on the trip, but I can only assume the driver unhooked the trailer and rolled it down every hill between Georgia and New Jersey. The entire load was upside down. My antique tiger oak Stickley-style library table was smashed do kindling, my desk, which I had used since 1978, was twisted like a pretzel, and all my furniture had taken damage to the wood. The gas tank from my cute little 1971 Honda CL70, which had been pristine, wound up upside-down inside its box with the beautiful silver metallic paint ruined by gasoline. The entire load, and consequently our house, smelled of house for weeks until we had tracked down and removed the boxes that had absorbed the odor.

Before the Move

I had had to suck it up about the damage-- mainly because of the partition not being in place. Still, an ABF driver somewhere deserves and ass-kicking,and I hope he or she gets it. The driving had to be rough beyond imagining for so much havoc to have been wreaked.

The Honda's gas tank has been repainted and I'm due to pick it up. I found a library table exactly like mine on eBay at a great price and purchased it. I'll use it for a desk when we get my home office set up.

The house was a jumble of boxes and broken things which Sweetie and I have been slowly returning to order.

My Stuff Arrives

My household belongings arrived in the middle of the harsh weather-- after dark and in a trailer so tall it knocked down a neighbor's cable line and I got to meet the police. The trailer was forbidden to return and I had to rent a U-Haul truck and pay movers to transfer and then unload and carry in my stuff. Several hundred trips in and out on a slushy day made a mess of the floors. Fortunately, Sweetie had researched floor protection and we installed layers of 3M sheet plastic and stiff paper on the floor in the days before the move, so there was no damage to the house.

My belongings were another story.