Here’s a picture I took for a contest a while back…. Now that Summer is nearing, this might help to warm things up and it will make Supernovas happy….

-Veyron

I took Vint down to Phreeq Malt Shoppe in the Ride Sim the other day. I was going to do some rah rah for OMG Magazine, for who I model for from time to time. I am Miss April in the 2007 Fantasy Garage Calendar, and you can find a picture of me in the current issue of OMG with Mistina Vavoom on the cover. It is fun to model now and then and I like to work with Korbin.

Anyway…. I dragged Vint (she really struggled) down to the Malt Shoppe to see the car show contest and take some pictures of her own. The show was fun, and Vint had a good time taking pictures of me and someone else I posed with, Vincent. Who I think she expressed some interesting adjectives about, but I let her speak for herself.

Korbin has some of the pictures he took up on his OMG blog and I suspect Vint is hard at work slaving away to do her usual magic in Photoshop.

Vint has taken some really excellent shots of me before for a contest - I was made up to be a vampire of sorts. I think she got some pretty good shots, so I’m anxious to see the final versions.

-Veyron

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Linden Labs needs to fix the serious problems with Second Life if things are going to continue. The last post about Koz loosing his inventory is just one of many symptoms of what is going wrong. Rather than adding goofy things like voice, wouldn’t you like to actually be able to use a vehicle? Not worry about your inventory? Have more people in a Sim? Stop doing the lag dance?

I could go on and on… but here’s an open letter Cristiano Midnight of SLUniverse is putting together to Linden Labs to get Second Life fixed. If you care about the world we play in, please sign it. We can get Linden Labs to pay attention.

-Veyron

Koz Farina of BlogHUD has lost all of his inventory. I blogged about it before, and now it’s hit someone again. I wonder how many other people this is hitting we are not hearing about.

UPDATE: It looks like Koz got his inventory back. Yeah!

Thank God. Linen Labs is going to fix the so annoying “X has left the session” messages in groups, very soon now. On a positive note, I have noticed that teleports seem more relibable since the upgrade. Anyone else have the same experience with teleports?

-Veyron

As anticipated, the old Second Life rating system is now gone from the latest client. This new client and server upgrade has a number of new “features” we all really love, but rather than start ranting about that, I’ve been looking into a replacement for the rating system. I decided to give TrustNet a try. Its cost is low, I like how the logic of it works and it has what I would consider to be a useful HUD. You can get the HUD in world in the Sprawler Sim. The cost is free. It appears to be subscription based, but it’s not very clear on that upfront. It looks to be L$50 a month, with is pretty cheap.

TrustNet has a web site for your account to manage your ratings and you can rate other skills than just behavior of an avatar, such as building, appearance, scripting, buying and selling.

They are also promising a security orb that uses the TrustNet data. This might be very useful. I use a Home Security Orb by Psyke’s Defense Systems, which I have found to be very useful, but this may be more useful, as it could be self-maintaining in the list of people who get access. It appears to have most of the features of Psyke’s Security Orb.

Maybe it might be a good idea to get together in world and start to build up a trust net?

-Veyron.

There is no shortage of fashion blogs and fashion magazines, but I have yet to see a Home and Garden type of magazine for Second Life until now. Prim Perfect is a new Second Life magazine, with a blog that aims to home and garden market in Second Life. This should be a welcome addition. They are having a launch party May 1st on Venice Island.

I wish them luck.

In my last blog posting, I talked about the Google Operating System. You can also expand on this and create an entire operating system for your Avatar, to better separate your lives from each other. It might also help in keeping your Avatar’s existence private. An interesting tool is the Free Portable Privacy Machine. It is a Linux virtual machine that will run under Windows or Linux using QEMU, potentially off of a USB memory stick.

From within the virtual machine you can run Firefox and get access at all of your Avatar’s life within the Google world. The only down side is the version of Firefox they have installed, version 1.5, is getting old. I’m not sure if it can be upgraded to the 2.0 version easily or not. In any case it should still do the job.

-Veyron

Okay, who has had enough of IM’s about this? No one say another word in a group again until this is fixed.

Kill me now.

-Veyron

Well, looks like I won’t be served any drinks with this I.D. card, but it is pretty amusing. Much like taking your avatar to work, this might be fun. Then again, it might be a bit incriminating….

-Veyron

Since is seems now that everyone is going Neko these days. Even the boys are going this new fashionable route. I don’t want to be left behind the fashion curve….

Now I haven’t added guns yet, or a uniform, but here’s a shot of my new Neko with some weaponry. This outfit is from Artemis Fate, who is one of Second Life’s original Neko girls and you can find her in OMG Magazine as well. She sells some pretty interesting clothing as KO Industries. You can find KO in the Gibson sim. I’d give you a SLURL to it, but you’ll have more find exploring Gibson looking for it….

Another shot of me thinking of my new Neko appearance….

And finally me laying around Svarga admiring the scenery.

-Veyron

UPDATE: As a minor experiment, I put these pictures up on Google Picassa, so you can view them in higher resolution. The album is here.

Well, this is fun. I love doing the cha-cha lag dance. This new release is an equal opportunity lagger. Ever sim I’ve been in has had the worse lag I’ve seen since last year. Linden is working on it, obviously, but wow. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s having a bad day today. Sorry to hear about your hard drive Vint. I know how painful it can be to loose data.

-Veyron

p.s. Vint, try this web site for backing up data….

Last week an active member of the Second Life libsecondlife software library, Jesse Higginbotham, who’s avatar was Jesse Malthus died in an automobile accident. It is always tragic to see someone that young die. It brought up another interesting and often disturbing thought, what happens when the person behind the avatar suddenly dies or is disabled, and no one in real life knows about there Second Life? I am sure it has already happened, given the size of the population in Second Life.

I suppose the avatar just does not sign on ever again. Sort of vanish without a trace. A rather tragic way to go actually, since know one would know why they are gone. Some close friends in Second Life would never have a wake or a get together to pay tribute.

Even more disturbing, what would a family member think or do if they logged in with the decedent’s account? What might they find they might not want to find?

Interestingly, I have seen a service to address this sort of problem on the Web, MyLastEmail.com. Maybe Second Life needs something similar, but what would it really say or do? Even more troublesome, people disappear from Second Life for other reasons.

-Veyron