I finished reading Eudeamon yesterday… It was a great read. It was really quite enjoyable. It reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode (or was it Outer Limits) where a person was condemned to be invisible for a year as punishment. It only involved putting a raised symbol on his forehead. From that point on all of society ignored him. Eudeamon has more of a techno-sci-fi piece to it that that episode which was much more cruel actually. Anyhow if you get some time, give the story a try – you’ll probably liked it.

To go hand and hand with the Eudeamon story, I also watched Secretary. It is quite good and it involves BSDM, but not really any sex (okay there’s a few very brief scenes). Instead of trying to be cured of her submissiveness and his dominance, they embrace it and in the end it makes them both happy.

What I found really amusing was the times the Secretary intentionally tries to get “punished”. Gee, it was deja vu all over again….

-Veyron

Okay, we Second Lifer’s do some weird things, but this has to take the cake….

New Haven, Conn. — April 17, 2008

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art.  Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.  She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.  The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Well, she got the attention she was looking for, obviously.

-Veyron

So I was able to upgrade site here with the latest and greatest Wordpress, 2.5. I was able to do it pretty painlessly with the Instant Upgrade plugin. Except for the first time it did not seem to work, and I had to restore some of the files from backup.

Anyhow, contact me if something looks broken….

On another matter, I’m pondering what to do with my hosting provider. I’m not terribly ecstatic with their uptime or speed. I’ve looked at colocating a server, changing providers to someone like Dreamhost, and even running a virtual machine with Amazon EC2 service. None of which I’m happy with. I moved off blogger to get more control, so I think Wordpress.com is out.

Anyone have any thoughts?

-Veyron

If you’ve lost any inventory (checking now) here’s a tip I got today from The Brood….

If your account is enabled for using the Beta Grid (learn more here), then if you realize that you have missing inventory, you can try this tip. Follow the steps below as soon as possible:

1. If you do not yet have it installed, install the latest Beta Client.

2. Login to the Beta Grid and find a quiet place where no one will annoy you while you are trying to solve a problem.

DO NOT REZ ANYTHING WHILE ON THE BETA GRID. GO INTO BUSY MODE IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT ACCEPT ITEMS, DO NOT DELETE ITEMS, DO NOT PASS OR RENAME ITEMS.

3. Open your inventory, type in a search term and allow your inventory to populate.

4. Got your goods back? Awesome! Quit the Beta client, login to the Main Grid and do the same thing. Once you have retrieved your items on the Main Grid and your inventory has fully populated, logout and cache that stuff.

5. Log back into the Main Grid, recheck inventory, smile a lot, raise Hell as usual.

This technique has been proven to work more than half the time so it may save your hide. Please bear in mind that you should only expect positive results if you attempt this workaround as soon as possible upon discovery of your missing items. I am not guaranteeing that you will be able to recover your items but having at least a chance at doing so is much better than no chance at all. I hope this helps some of the residents that fall victim to this issue.

Read more about inventory loss issues on the Wiki. 

-Veyron
   

Tags: bugs, inventory

I have signups for Ping.fm. It allows you to update a lot of services like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce at one time. It is in beta right now. If you want one, contact me to get one.

-Veyron

I’m beginning to see a pattern here….

1. Today:  Various Issues
2. April 1:   Various Inworld Issues
3. March 31:  Second Life In-World Service Issues
4. March 30:  In World Services Down/Website and Support
5. March 30:  Transactions Timing Out
6. March 29:  Inworld Money Transactions Problematic at the Moment
7. March 28:  Asset Server Issues
8. March 27:  Inworld Issue Affecting Transactions
9. March 26:  Obviously took the day off….
10. March 25:  In World Service Disruptions Under Investigation
11. March 24:  Disruption in inworld services

I’d keep going, but I was getting tired of cutting and pasting – there seemed to be an endless supply of entries like these.  Oh, what we really need now to help Linden Labs out is a trouble blog entry generator.  It might save them a lot of time in creating the blog entry about the problem.  It could slap some random words together for the title, like “Transactions Inworld Timing Out Affecting Servers”.  Then they could use the tech support excuse generator to follow up with it.

Maybe we need to turn this into a game.  Sort of a meta-game.  This doesn’t quite work as a drinking game, as they manage to spread out the disasters by at least a day.  At most you’d get a headache, and we already have that.  I know!  We could do something like SLBrokenDownInTheGrid Bingo.  (Now does that meet new trademark policy?)  You get a bingo card and every time they have an outage, you get the first letters of all capitalized words they use in the title.  What would make a good prize?  Hmmm…  I need to think about that.  I do have this stockade I could put the winner in.

Obviously, any members of Linden Labs’ couldn’t play because they could fix the game.  Like they COULD STOP THE GRID FROM CRATERING EVERY FRIGGIN DAY!

I’m sure they’re getting right on with solving these problems as soon as they pick the next letters to use….

-Veyron

Supposedly, I see that it is possible with a bug exploit to make a giant avatar…. Veyron really want’s to know how to do it. If it’s a big secret email me how it’s done. I promise to reward to the informer….

-Veyron

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: bug, avatar

I’ll admit it, for grins and giggles, several times I’ve camped out.  Why?  I’m not sure, perhaps the thought of getting something for nothing.  Which really is not true since I am sure I consumed more in electricity than I gained in Linden dollars.  A few times it was almost a social event.  Sitting in a silly chair with some other strangers making odd conversation.

One thing that does annoy me is the whine from various n00bs and even some veteran Second Lifer’s that they have no money to buy Linden dollars to get things.  Somehow this stretches the believable.  The fact you could get online with a computer makes me think you’re exaggerating.

You know and I know that a few dollars in Second Life, if spent wisely, will go a long long way.  The price of a Starbuck’s latte and scone will do you well.  I think these cheapies probably fall into a few groups:

1. The underaged.  Sneaking into the main grid.  They don’t have PayPal or a Credit Card.
2. The lazy.  This goes without explanation – because that would take a lot of work to explain.
3. The sneakers.  Afraid of producing a money trail to their Second Life account.  Get over it, we know where you live, it’s just we don’t really care about your little life (although it makes you feel better that we might)….
4. The true idiots.  See the Second Life Fashion Police for the evidence file on this one. 

But I do offer a small solution for the rest of you lindenless who don’t fall into the above, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  You can be paid slightly more than camping for using the grey matter between your ears that computers don’t have.  As part of this, you can play around with a new service called TagCow.  For a bit less than a penny you can tag a picture with who and what it is.  Arrington thinks that you could make a $1.20 US an hour at this….  Which is around L$350 – better than camping – except you’ll have to work at it.

Moo!

-Veyron