My Friend Kal

Written 11 December, 2006

My friend Kal

My dear friend Kal was one of the first people I met in Second Life. We were total newbies together. The first picture is one of my earliest snapshots, taken before either of us got our look together.

Before long we were hanging out at the trivia lounge in Wingo.

Kal doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s worth the listening.

On Halloween eve, he and I were at Wingo in costumes. I was a Playboy bunny, and he was Superman. Stop me if I’ve told this story before.

A naked woman appeared in the lounge, right in front of God and everyone.

There was 20 seconds of stunned silence.

Then Kal, bless him, said in Chat, “I didn’t know this costume came with x-ray vision.”

So yeah, he’s worth listening to.

Kal is a big fan of Superman, and of the Beatles. He lives in Texas, and has brothers who play guitar. He plays too.

Kal’s a fan of live music in SL, as am I. He cleaned up at a Bill and Pam Havercamp concert when he knew the answers to all of the Beatles-related trivia questions. A day later, he presented me with a beautiful Marshal amp he had won. He knew I wanted to perform, and reasoned, correctly, that I would need an amplifier

He stunned me shortly after that when he gave me a single red rose.

What a sweetheart Kal is!

Kal is renting a skybox, which comes with a ridiculously low prim allowance. He’s allowed only 30. I visited and we talked about what he could fit into his space and how to budget his prims. I mean, SL is a world where a single easy chair can have 45 prims!

I found a four-prim couch in my inventory and gave him a copy, and on the spot made a one-prim table for him. Then we went together to Parrot Island, a great place which has low-prim, $L1 lighting. A few days later, I teleported him to a mall where I had gone to buy an anti-grief device and found instead a four-prim bed with twelve sets of sheets and twelve wood textures, and a built-in sleep pose, and for less than $200. We each bought one.

Kal is a great friend. He’s a very nice man, and a handsome one.

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Photo 1: New citizen Kal and new citizen Chey dancing.

Photo 2: Kal and Chey in Pele. Chey, remember to turn your bling off before taking snapshots!

A New PC

Written 22 December, 2006

A New PC

I loved my alien PC—it was, after all, in its own Frankensteinian way, my own creation. I had been my own Igor, shuttling back and forth between home and Fry’s, buying case, mother board, Athlon chip, RAM, floppy drive (yes, I know they’re antiquated, but I hate being without one), hard drives, cables, and glow-in-the-dark accessories. It had performed like a champ for nearly two years, until that unfortunate NVidia accident.

It could be fixed. “We can rebuild you.” Like Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man (seems a cheap fix these days, doesn’t it, six million dollars?), it could rise, phoenix-like, from its ashes, but Second Life awaited.

Rationalizing I needed a backup PC, I drove to Frys and bought a Sony VAIO dual-core system. No flashy case, no lights, one GB of RAM (it's now at two gigs, as I bought and successfully installed another gig stick), and 128 mg of on-board RAM (now disabled because I stuck in a PCI Express video card). Way more computer than the alien box.

When BellSouth reps came by my house a week ago Friday, I switched—after 15 years—Internet Service Providers, and doubled my DSL speed. And so I was back on SL.

And just in time, too, as my new property was beginning to require all of my attention.

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Photo: These are the aliens who sold me faster DSL.

I Blow Up the Alien Computer

Written 21 December, 2006

PC Problems

V. I Blow up the Alien Computer

Destroying my operating system was a direct result of my involvement with Second Life. Before SL, I had no desire or need to update my video drivers.

Now, with all of my utilities, programs, and games installed, and with only one daunting task remaining—organizing the Start menu so it would made sense.

(Mini-Rant Warning)

What is it with Windows? It wants to be a multi-user platform, but there’s only one of me!

I’m not sure if I’m the Administrator, All Users, or Cheyenne Palisades. Do you think I need to talk to a guy in India about that?

Some of my start menu items wind up under All Users, the rest under Cheyenne. I am forced to open two windows so I can cut and paste (or drag and drop) shortcuts into categories that make sense (for me, utilities, games, multimedia, internet, and applications).

By now my PC is running like sludge. That’s because every darn program I’ve installed has its hooks into Windows and is opening a little spot in memory for just in case- just in case I use that program. Time to clean them out.

Grrr.

(Min-Rant Off)

Now, finally, after more than a week, my PC is running properly. I have a fast Athlon processor, ample hard drive space, a fast internet connection, and a 256 MB AGP video card. It’s time to kick some SL ass. But just a sec—shouldn’t I have more than 1 gig of RAM?

And so I take myself to Fry’s (my 15-year-old Izuzu pickup pretty much drives itself there on autopilot by now) and buy a stick of Kinsgton RAM.

It costs a hundred bucks for 1 GB. I wince and pay it, and remember with no fondness the black day when I paid more than five hundred dollars for 8 MEGAbytes of RAM.

When I get home I turn off the PC, ground myself with a wrist strap, and stick in the stick of DDR. It’s difficult to see what I’m doing because there’s little light, and hard to make my way to the slot because of the IDE cables (which are round and glow in the dark; it is, after all, an alien computer). I push in the module and hear it click into place. And I withdraw my hand and turn on the power.

There is just the smallest, just the tiniest puff of smoke.

Little smoke, big trouble.

I have fried not only the stick of RAM I just bought, but the RAM that was in my computer as well. And who knows, maybe my mother board as well!

Oh, dear.

Said Alien PC is now sitting on the kitchen table…

See part VI.

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Photo 1: RAM getting zapped

Photo 2: Zapped chip

Software Hell

Written 21 December, 2006

PC Problems

IV. Software Hell

When Windows is finally installed and Bill Gates is satisfied that you have a legitimate copy, and after it has endlessly installed service packs and bug fixes from the Microsoft website, and after you have set and reset a hundred or so switches the fun really begins.

You must install an endless number of programs.

There’s anti-virus, anti-spam, and firewall software. I use Norton, and it likes to install, reboot, update, reboot, and update again. By the time all that happens, Ingrid Bergman will be leaving Casablanca and Bogie will be telling Claude Rains they’re going to have a beautiful friendship (and you just know they will).

Might as well install Ad-Aware and SpyBot to kill those annoying data-collection programs. And of course they need updating. And what’s this? Microsoft now has a spy killer of its own and it wants to update its definitions as well. Why not.

Should take a minute to flash the e-prom. Done. Set a restore point. Done. Make a copy of the Windows registry. Done.

Then there’s the software for your ISP. And Opera, which is a way better browser than Explorer. And Mosiac. And Netscape. Browsers all, and they all must be tweaked.

And the first website you visit asks you to install Java, or Flash, and, of course, you do.

Want to read that Word document? Install MS Office and talk to Bill Gates for validation.

Watch a video? You’ll need Quicktime. Fortunately, that comes with iTunes, which you will need to download so you won’t have to use the Microsoft program Windows Mediocre Player.

Want to zip a File? WinZip. Make a PDF? Adobe Acrobat. Get satellite images of your house? GoogleEarth. Play cards? Pretty Good Solitaire.

You’ll need to get your home network running again. That’s always fun.

And then there are all those programs you use regularly. Now where was it that you stuck all those CD ROMs so they would be close at hand?

Oh, and printer drivers. And you might as well update the video driver while you’re at it.

Wait a minute! Isn’t this where I came in?

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Photo: Updated computer

New XP Install

Written 20 December, 2006

P.C. Problems

III: New XP Install

I hate it that it takes 45 minutes to install Windows.

Oh, if that was all there was to it!

XP installs with every fail-safe, thumb-fingered, hand-holding switch set to dumbass mode. It takes forever to hunt down and kill the switches necessary to make Windows drive a little less like a VW and a little more like a Porsche and install my favorite photo as desktop wallpaper.

And of course, the stupid switches—especially the firewall settings—tend to reset themselves back to dumbass mode.

Oh, and before that—you must validate Windows. It wants to do so over the Internet, but of course the Internet is not yet available. That means you have to talk to someone in Seattle-- or, more likely, India.

Bill Gates, what were you thinking?

First thing, I installed the NVidia mother board software. Then the software for the video card. Then I made a connection and got online. First place I went? Second Life, of course. I had been jonesing.

As soon as I did, Windows began to download updates and insist that I allow it to restart.

And XP wouldn’t take a simple no for an answer. It told me unless I slapped it in the face, it would restart without permission. When I would tell it not to restart, it would go off and sulk for about five minutes and then come back and go through the same tired routine.

And of course, the default was to restart, and not NOT to restart. Bill Gates, WTF were you thinking!? That I wouldn’t mind if I was typing along and XP fell out from under me?

Chey to Seattle: Don’t make me come up there and straighten you out!

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Photo: Microsoft XP toggle switch

Oh, So _That's_ the Problem!

Written 20 December, 2006

P.C. Problems

II. Oh, So That’s the Problem!

How was I to know?

How was I to know the mother board support for my computer was by NVidia? How was I to know the NVidia file I uninstalled wasn’t the video driver at all, but the very software that made my PC function?

And how was I to know Bill Gates was about to make things worse?

I mean come on, I have to blame someone, right? Who better?

Although I have to say, it was a Microsoft engineer—and come to think of it, he was in India—who helped me identify the problem. He told me I had a hardware problem. My LAN port was out of commission. Sure enough, when I checked the back of the computer, there was no light on at the house of LAN. That’s when I realized what I had done.

Before that, though, and even before I talked to a single guy from India, I had backup.

I had imaged my boot drive to not one, but two other hard drives, using the manufacture-supported software that came with them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when neither would boot.

Back in the days of DOS, I would have simply typed something like xcopy c:\*.* g:\ /s /x, with x being whatever tag causes the system to be transferred. Now here I am, having trusted the software provided by Western Digital and Maxtor to image my drive, and the imaged drives have no system software!

Grrr. I hate when that happens.

As much as I rag on Bill Gates and Microsoft, I have to say that before November, I had never paid for a single Microsoft Operating System.

Well, I suppose I did indirectly, for my VIC-20 and Commodore 64 had MS BASIC built in, and every version of Windows from 3.1 to XP was bundled with computers I had purchased, but I didn’t have a Win XP installation disk.

On second thought, I did! I had the copy that had come with my laptop.

So I pulled it out and reinstalled Windows and it had a little problem and trashed the first drive.

Before it was over, both spare drives were trashed. And the original boot drive. Data were okay, though; they live in a separate hard drive.

And so I took myself to Office Depot (Fry’s being too long a drive for mere software) and bought Windows XP.

Then I did a new installation of Windows on a drive I had wiped clean.

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Photo: Flick your VIC

I Talk to Guys Named Tom and Bob

Written 19 December, 2006

PC Problems

I. I talk to Guys Named Tom and Bob

No, not political correctness problems. Geekical problems.

I really liked my glow-in-the-dark Athlon 64 system. It looked as if it had been crafted from alien technology—and maybe it had been. Could it be a coincidence that the first solid-state electronics appeared only a few years after the Roswell saucer crash? Think about it: before 1952, cathode ray tubes. After 1952, integrated circuits. And Diet cola.

I broke up with the Athlon system because of Second Life. It and I are not seeing one another these days.

It started when I sent a message to Live Help about my shoe base. I’m always losing it, which causes my feet to get swallowed by my CFM pumps. It makes me look like a little girl clumping around in her mommy’s shoes.

So some Linden or another at Live Help suggested updating my video driver might help with the missing shoe problem.

As if, I thought to myself, but I decided to try it. Anything to enhance the SL experience.

The instructions for the new driver said I had to uninstall the old driver first. So, to Add/Remove programs, and there it is, NVidia. Kill it.

I installed the new driver and rebooted.

Black screen.

I was able to get video back by hitting the F8 key while booting and choosing “Last Known Good Configuration.” That let me start Windows normally. I restored the system to an earlier date. Problem fixed, right?

No.

I could not get online. Not no how, not no ways.

I can’t begin to tell you how frustrated this made me. I was in the first blush of a love affair with Second Life, and I couldn’t bear being offline.

I was tempted to rush right out to Fry’s and buy another PC—it would be merely a backup system, I told myself—but I managed to resist.

I spent the next couple of days talking to a variety of guys from India. Curiously enough, they were all named Bob and Tom and Michael. Sure they were. Earthlink told them those were their names.

Bob and Tom and Michael didn’t seem to know much about computers, but they knew a lot about the scripts from which they were reading, and a lot about sexism.

“Hi, Tom. I can’t get online. I’ve already reset my modem. I unplugged it and let it set all night. What next?”

“I want you to be unplugging the power cord from the back of your modem, sir.”

Everybody is sir to these guys from India, where women walk behind the men and, when the men die, cheerfully climb onto the funeral pyre to be immolated. Suttee, they call it. Suttee on this!

“It’s ma’am. I told you, I reset the modem already.”

“Sir, I want you to be waiting twenty seconds before plugging it back in.”

“Again, it’s ma’am. Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

“Thank you sir. Twenty seconds has passed and the modem is now reset. You can be plugging the cord into the back of the modem at any time.”

“Ma’am.”

“Do you see the Start button at the bottom left corner of your screen, sir?”

“Ma’am. For the fourth time. If there’s a fifth time there’s going to be trouble. I already have a command window open.”

“Please be clicking Start. Do you see where it says Run? Sir.”

“I am not a goddamned sir. I’m a goddamned ma’am. You want me on that funeral pyre, don’t you, you third world bastard! The command window is goddamn open! And I know your name is not goddamned Bob.”

“My name is goddamned Tom, ma’am.”

“That’s better. The command window is open.”

“Please to be typing in CMD, sir.”


"Supervisor."

“Sir?”

“Supervisor. NOW! NOW! NOW!”

And what does the supervisor say when he comes online?

“My name is Greg, Inshallah. May I to be helping you, sir?”

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Photo 1 : Chey after talking to a lot of guys from India

Photo 2: A guy from India

My Top Ten Second Life Annoyances

Written 18 December, 2006

My Top 10 Second Life Annoyances

Not that anyone asked, but here they are.

10. Rolling Blackouts

That irritating pop-up message means the sim you’re visiting is going to reboot in five—no, make that four—minutes. If you don’t GTF out of Dodge before the deadline, you’ll be knocked into the first world.

What? Thirty seconds before reboot and you’re still here? You need to get the f

Just like that, you’re sitting in front of your monitor in that world to which you don’t want to go because the garbage is beginning to smell and you need to take it out.

This annoyance works, er, annoyingly with the next, which is:

9. Can’t Teleport

That rolling blackout is coming in 90—no, the new message says 45—seconds, and you can’t seem to beam your way out of the sim. In desperation, you click on the first Landmark you come across and the teleport fai

Darn it! You really are going to have to take out that garbage.

Also, you gotta hate it when your friends are having a party and you get trapped by that island-to-island teleport thing and by the time you get there most of the guests have left and the beer and hors d’ouvres are all gone.

8. Screen Cluttered With Too Many Menus

Nuff said about that.

Guess I need to buy a second monitor and drag all the menus over to it so I can have a clear field of vision.

7. Griefers

Very annoying people. At least they can’t annoy me on my own land. Or not for long, anyway.

I can knock them a couple of sims over with the RPG Patrice gave me. It won’t work, she told me, if Push is restricted. That’s why I didn’t blow that guy into kingdom come last week; I had Pele set to No Push.

I know shooting is bad karma and can get you in trouble with the Lindens—but since SL is a right-to-carry world, maybe I could plead self defense. I can see myself in SL night court now:

LITAGATOONEY RACECOURSE: Your honor, my client pleads the fifth!

JUDGE LETITIA LINDEN: Attorney Racecourse, it looks like your client is drinking the fifth. And—OMG—is that an RPG she’s pulling out of her inventory?

6. Random Crashes

You’re flying alone, or in an intimate moment with your inamorata, and zap! You’re looking at the big blue XP screen (or a much less unpleasant Mac or Linux screen.)

Do you want to send an error report? No, no, no. You had that option turned off! Why the hell is it on now, just because there was a software upgrade when you logged on this afternoon? If it’s an upgrade and bug fix, why is local water still disappearing? And where have the Client and Network menus gone? Why didn’t you write down the keyboard shortcut that gets them back?

And you’ll never know why you were dumped.

5. Typing in the Wrong Instant Message Box

There you are, talking privately with a friend, dishing everybody at the dance, making crude remarks about their physical features and outfits, and you realize that for the past five minutes you’ve not been typing into your girlfriend’s box, but the box of that furniture maker you’ve been trying to sweet talk into repairing the out-of-synch doors of your shower. Hope she has a sense of humor!

Oopsie!

It’s easy to make such a mistake when you have four or five IM boxes open at the same time, but sometimes I find myself accidentally switching between Chat and Instant Message when only one IM box is open.

MSMUSICLOVR DUKE: “Whatever is she prattling on about? She’s asking someone to fix the doors of her shower, but there’s no one talking with her. Do you think she’s switched out of IM again?”

FUNGRRL BROADWAY: “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

On a serious note, I once found myself in IM with both parties in a disintegrating relationship at the same time.

It would have been a disaster if I had switched boxes, so I made sure it didn’t happen. How? By closing the IM boxes after every message and reply. Disaster averted.

4. Missing Inventory Items

I’ve learned the hard way not to returns items on my property via the About Land menu. Most of the items on the land were sent directly to the Twilight Zone and are floating about there still.

The first time I lost only a few items—a marble platform I had made and the bench, particle torches, flower arrangement, and beach towel I had placed on it. And oh, yes, my neato Rocket 88 hovercraft (think of Luke Skywalker’s ride on Tatooine in the first Star Wars movie—which, by the way is Episode IV). It was just—gone.

I don’t know if the hovercraft got zapped in the first Great Return or if it otherwise disappeared. Maybe it was hot-wired and stolen by a ring of hovercraft thieves. All I know is I was desolate over its loss. Its creator was kind enough to send me a replacement when I told him I had mislaid it.

The objects from the second Great Return, including two hungry sharks and a floppy octopus, are still out there somewhere.

SL just send back to me, one month after their disappearance, the objects that were on my land in the first great return. Now I’m obliged to contact the creators who were kind enough to give me copies when I went crying to them about my missing inventory.

No hovercraft, so I must have left it at a parking meter somewhere.

3. Lost Prims

You’re moving an easy chair around the room, sliding it along X and Y coordinates to get it just where you want it, or lowering it to the floor when your finger comes off the mouse button at just the wrong moment, and it’s—gone.

No, it hasn’t been destroyed. It’s somewhere, just not where you thought you left it.

If your objects wind up on someone else’s property, they’ll know it when they look at Objects in their About Land menu, at which time they’ll probably return it—or it will be automatically returned, if that’s the way the land is set. If it’s your own property, though, your lost objects may stay around for months or years, floating high in the sky and increasing the parcel’s prim count, until you or one of your friends stumbles across them.

I find a lot of lost material as I fly about. Usually, I IM the owner and give them the coordinates so they can come get it.

It’s my own objects, and on my own land that is the real problem. It’s impossible to tell how many of the 750 or so primitives I’m using are the ones I know are there and how many have been driven deep under the ground or zoomed high into space.

I know I’ve had to rez some objects several times. Does that mean there are a couple of 40-prim Shower Ensembles or Houses of 1000 Pleasures lying about somewhere, adding a hundred or so primitives to my count? Perhaps. There’s just no way to know.

2. Slow Frame-Per-Second Rates

When frame rate gets too slow, an avatar’s movements become jerky, and it becomes difficult to walk or fly without crashing into objects or people. I find anything less that five FPS problematic.

Slow frame rates are a big problem at gatherings with more than a dozen or so people. At concerts, I usually find a space and stand or else click on the dance ball and let Cheyenne do her thing.

In low-traffic areas, I get about 15 fps, which makes for smooth movement—but when I call up the Statistics menu, I see the frame rate counter goes up to 45 fps or so. I can get a higher rate than that if I move the video sliders all the way down into Pong territory, but I like to see the detail. Makes me wish I had one of those superduper six hundred dollar video cards.

Well, for a brief moment, I DID have one of those superduper cards (more on it later), but I took it back to Fry’s with the box unopened.

Anyway, you gotta hate it when the frame rate slows and you begin to lurch around like a drunken sailor.

Not that I have anything against drunken sailors.

1. Connection Problems.

My number one problem with Second Life really has nothing to do with Second Life. It has to do with not being able to get to Second Life.

I can’t log on at work because the on-board video isn’t powerful enough (well, and also because our IT people put the a in anal)—but it’s when I can’t log on at home that I get really nuts.

Hello, Bell South! DSL is down! Get someone out here NOW to fix it! Oh, sorry. Just noticed that the modem was unplugged. Never mind.

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Photo 1: This railing has been floating up here at 400 meters since early November. If I hadn’t smacked into it when flying, I might never have found it.

It's a Trick

No, I'm not walking on walls like Spider-Man. It's an illusion.

I'm standing on a 10x10 prim onto which I textured a photo of the Skybar.

I just named it. Until today it was My Skybox. Now it's the much more presumptuous-sounding Skybar.

The Skybar has only 19 prims and costs less than 200L. It's hanging over Pele at 450 meters.

I'll be using it for soirees-- receptions and concerts, so I'll soon be adding a dance floor, lights, and a mirror ball. It will have a black grand piano.

The bar here was not inexpensive and it's prim-hoggy, but not much of my stuff is, so I was able to get away with it.

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Photo 1: Optical Illusion

Photo 2: The Bar at the Skybar

Photo 3: The Skybar, Outside

Photo 4: The Skybar, Inside