Personal

A new pest is forming up in Second Life: newbies going around with banner ads (and similar objects), getting paid for it the usual rates (2-4 L$ / 10 minutes). The benefit for them? Well, they can move in contrary to camping chairs or dancing pods, so I expect to see a drastical increase in such kind of advertisement.

The benefit for the people “employing” them? Very cheap advertisements running around nearly everywhere.

The drawbacks? Well, for me:

• Bad karma and bad image. I would never do business with such a store/shop/company who litters the landscape of SL with such kind of garbage.
• It ruins many places, because the banners are something that catches your eye.
• The people doing it do this normally without asking, just come in with it and walk around, so they are in many places in for an ejection or ban. Go figure.

And here is a nice screenshot of such a guy dancing around in the garden of Intimate Moment’s with such a banner ad:

I finally took the time to let take new pictures from me for my profile by a photographer. Without further adago here they are:

I’ve placed the colored picture in my profile. Those nice pictures were made at the Serenite Gardens, a very nice setting there. The photographer was Melodious Source, I can recommend her without doubt. A great artist and wonderful personna!

After not posting entries for some days, I’ve got to dequeue my queued posts now. So, with no further delay here they are:

• SL had terrible problems yesterday. They bunch varied from not being able to login to problems with teleporting up to problems with the assets. So it was unsafe to use the inventory at all. This reminds us: when you really want to do business in SL, the platform tends to be fairly unstable. Count that always in. The whole drama lasted over 10 hours. Hopefully it is over now.

• Zee Linden posted an Excel spreadsheet about the key measures of SL. Very interesting read, you should give it a read. There are some big differences from SL’s statistics to other games, and it shows. For example:

  • The time of hours spent online per month seems to grow exponential at the moment.

    [Mehr]

Today there was a group notice for all members of Sinner’s paradise. It was closed at 09:00 am SLT by the owner, Hunter Tempura. She said, she thought about it over one month, but she came to the decision.

The reasons? You could only speculate about them. Perhaps too much griefers attacking the sim again and again and/or the much too large entrance area. Well, it’s sad, that the sim is not available anymore, since it stood out in terms of landscaping and quality!

Arg! Newbies are coming around in masses again at all places recently. I’ve got no problem with this. But some of them are just getting too much annoying!

I’ve noticed quite a change in the last few weeks about the newbies behaviour; some of them are still good mannered, though they are the minority, it seems. Others are just thinking “money makes the world go round” and looking for the perfect job, though they are still newbies and inexperienced.

And guess what? They are bothering many people on many places with questions like “Where can I get a good job?”, “Are here jobs available?” and so on… d’oh!

Get a life! You don’t need a job at all in SL. You can play for months, still have some money and have much fun without having any job at all! And if, I repeat, if, you are really in need of money - first learn to calculate!

Well, it is an update - again. The downtime got - again - extended from 5 to 8 hours. If you rely on doing business in SL, those times are always not for you.

But this could be hopefully one of the last updates they have to take the whole grid offline while doing it. The changes the programmers from LL are implementing are allowing better ways to update in the future.

Hopefully we’ll see them soon!

Yesterday I visited the new home of my dear friend Lu Stapleton. It’s a very nice and modern house somewhere on the mainland, which is definitely a good fit. She was quite impressed by the work of the builder and for sure is going to recommend him to others.

While I was there, some classic music played on the parcel. She told me that she bought SLTunes, a nice interface for iTunes to set the media URL on the parcel based on the radio station list in iTunes. It was a cheap buy, doesn’t get in the way and gets its job done. A well thought out piece of software, just like all software should be. A tool that doesn’t get in your way!

Well, I was curious, so I used Google to find some information about this tool and stumpled upon the website of the maker, Darius Lehane, named “Darius Lehane’s Second Life.” Doh!

Well, today was smooth and without any trouble. All was quiet in the garden, danced with several nice ladies and I found some stuff to read and to do.

Well, here’s my roundup:

• An article named “What do Paris Hilton and Second Life have in common?” from the CEO of Iron Realms, a company doing business in and with MUDs, from 10/20/06. Well, Matt Mihaly takes a very negative stance against SL. No great news there, because they are competitors. The quote “SL is famous for being famous” sums his opinion up very well! He has some points there, but the reason for a company going into SL is always first - cheap publicity. If you join there, then you’re hip, you get big press for nothing at all and the project costs are just a very minor part in your budget. That’s the way it works!
• A piece named “Relay for Life and Exploits” from Hiro Pendragron from 06/20/06. Quote: “Linden Lab loves to play this game called “Let’s release a patch befor a major release!””. About the problems of the patch schedules and that he is the opinion that the Lindens should be allowed to play actually in the world while at work to get a grip of it. Point taken there, but not all Lindens are technicians like he writes.
• The article of the day: “Politiker in “Second Life”: Der US-Kongress wird virtuell.” This was today at the frontpage of the website of the German magazine “Der Spiegel”. It’s about a new sim, in which the US congress was put into. Well, actually good PR for LL at no cost at all, since this is a biggie.

I wish you a Happy New Year and that your wishes for 2007 do come true!

Personally, my own start in 2007 was very sad. A very good friend and neighbor of mine, 86 years old, died at 0:30 am in hospital today. He was there for a little bit more than one week, he went into hospital before christmas and the last time I saw him was at Thursday. He was sleeping and not well, so I just took a look into his room and went away quietly.

He would have had his 60th marriage anniversary in about one more month. If you take a look at this, most emotions and stuff in SL seem so hollow compared to that.