PostHeaderIcon Your are a NERD, not a Geek.

futtbugglyI like Amanda murphy, [sic] who is a "journalist" that can't even capitalize her (his?) own last name in her (his?) byline.

I like her because she pulls no punches. Tells it like it is. Doesn't go with 'political correctness' bullshit, unless it's when she (he?) is likely salivating over the Messiah Barak Obama. I don't know about this last part, actually. It's just that she (he?) shows all the classic signs of a typical tree-hugging, cool-aid drinker. You know the type: "kumbaya around the world because peace is the answer, unless you disagree, then I'll punch your face in and burn down your house."

What I don't like about Amanda murphy [sic] is that she (he?) throws bullshit inflammatory titles around at an entire class of people simply because of their interests. Can you say "holocaust?" No, I am not comparing her (him?) to anything the Nazi buffoon idiots ever did. But it's the same intellectually delusional idea, isn't it?

I mean - 'besides your hair color, skin color, religious belief, political belied, sexual orientation, age and all the rest, I'm going to now lump-in your proclivity toward certain things that entertain you that I know absolutely nothing about, so I will diss on it because I'm really the one missing-out on it and no, I'm not really jealous inside, nanner-nanner, boo-hoo-hoo.'

So, she (he?) writes on what appears to be the subject of, and what appears to be an objective comparison of "World of Warcraft" (WoW) to "Second Life" (SL) online virtual worlds, which has been utterly and literally beaten to death over the last six years - she (he?) must be in the middle of a writer's-block brain-fart and can't think of anything more interesting to write about. Let me guess... you, Amanda murphy [sic], started your whole online experience as one of those amateur dip-shits who thought America Online was the shizzel in the day, right? Probably still do.

The Infant FingerWell, according to her (him?), you who use WoW or SL are a nerd of the worst, highest order. Your life is worthless. And you should likely be dumped into a hole in the ground and buried alive so it will be a good riddance for society at large.

Well, that's me paraphrasing. Here's a sample of her (his?) bullshit diatribe:
Dip-shit Amanda murphy [sic] says: "The first game we will look at is Second Life … Oops, I just called it a game. That's your first mistake, call this a game, and you will be virtually beaten by SL fanatics who will explain to you that Second Life is a whole other life. A … second life, if you will. It's basically a huge world that is created, maintained and policed by other nerds like you. They spend eight hours making a virtual guitar, three hours searching for one outfit and 15 hours trying to get the hell off of the newbie orientation tutorial island. Get this; they have their own fake currency, kind of like Canada, only it's worth more in real life. They're called Linden dollars, and a bunch of them are equal to one real American dollar, which means you can buy Linden dollars with real money to buy fake crap in the world. Confused? Tell me about it. People can collect Linden dollars in Second Life and trade them in for cold, hard, American cash. There are no goals, no score and no winning; in essence it's Pee Wee hockey only for nerds. You can buy houses, own land, and make your avatar just as hot as you would want to look in real life, but don't."

Dip-shit pinhead. And yes, that is exactly how all that was formatted - one big, long paragraph with no breaks for ease of readability.

Don't get me wrong here, I am laughing so hard I'm in serious pain. It's funny that this so-called writer actually even knows what she's (he's?) talking about to begin with, funny that she (he?) actually thinks more than a few 'regular' readers of her articles — other than cool-aid drinkers of like-mind — actually exist, hilarious how she (he?) is an embarrassment to the very masthead (Brock Press) under which she writes.

Talk about delegitimizing an entire publication! Wowzers.

Anyway, the difference between Amanda murphy [sic] and I is this: while she (he?) insults millions of a particular class of people based solely on their interests (of which she (he?) knows absolutely nothing of,) I insult specific people for factual instances of pure bullshit.

Amanda murphy [sic]: you are a dip-shit pinhead and I thusly hereby chastise you for being such to no end in sight. Crawl back into the cesspool hole you climbed out of and do the Brock Press a favor and allow them to work for the next several years saving face, after losing it by letting you out of your cage into the unsuspecting public at large.

And as I have stated in my opening, I do like her. Yes, I do even like pinheads sometimes. I just don't like the part of them that make them pinheads.

via Brock Press

PostHeaderIcon Murphy is Alive and Well in His Second Life

Facelight-8Prad, Prad, Prad.

You have to know we love you for your amazing lists. Not because they are so funny on the face of each line item. But because in an attempt at satire, you capture truth which is satire of satire and that's there the funny of the most high resides.

Thank you again for helping us all to laugh at ourselves, no matter how painful the truth really is.
Metaversally Speaking: "5. If at first you don’t succeed, blame lag.

6. To err is human. To blame Linden Lab for your errors is not only human, it’s freakin’ natural.

7. The assets server will lose objects in your inventory in direct proportion to its value.

8. If you think nothing can go wrong, you’re a noob.

9. He who laughs last, probably didn’t realise he just got logged out of SL."

For those of you who don't regularly follow Metaversally Speak, Prad Prathivi is a very good blogger (far better than I am, that's for certain,) and usually has a good article up everyday that is well written and often thought-provoking. And, as you see, a very good sense of humor, too.

via Metaversally Speaking

PostHeaderIcon Second Life Plumbing Clogged

Despondent.jpgI started yesterday's post about the grid maintenance and XStreet SL integration with this:

I usually try to login for an hour at about 4:30 two or three times a week. You know, to clear-out any notices and especially the Instant Message cache, which caps far sooner than it ever used to.


It got me thinking again about something I've been wanting to rant about for some time: IM cap ceilings. Just last week a customer had an issue with a product she bought from me. I responded and wondered why she never bounced the communication back so I could help her.

Then she drops a notecard on my profile - with no IM are anything to explain it. It's frustrating, but I accepted it, had to do the 'properties' research to discover who this person even is (note to all you idiots who drop notecards to people requesting a response and don't put your full name inside the notecard: just go away and die please.)

So then eventually a friend of hers catches me while I am online - at first explaining how frustrated this person was that I am so unresponsive. As it turns out, all three of us had an amicable ending with a solution to the problem and they were most happy with me.

It turns out she was a rather new account and wasn't familiar with IM cap ceilings or the IM to email feature - which Linden Lab should turn on by default for all new accounts, if it were up to me.

In the old days, IMs would cap after about 30 sends or so (presses of the 'enter' key when someone types and sends the typed text.) Possibly much more. One reason I ask people to please, Please PLEASE type out your whole message before pressing the enter key for the first time!

However, just luke the convenience and fast food restaurants have been shrinking their portions in fear of raising their prices (anyone ever remember how large a Big Mac really was?) - Linden Lab either consciously or have it rigged to automatically lower that cap ceiling based on resource usage.

I'n not complaining or whining. It's just the nature of the beast: population is outpacing recourse expansion. So the caps on these things are lowered to maintain stability as the use of those resources increase almost exponentially.

The problem is how the caps seem 'universal'. Perhaps it always was this way since my first days in the Summer of 2006, but it's definitely noticeable now: Once my IM's are capped, so is everything else...

And once I come in-world, I see the notices, IM tabs and anything else that occurred while I was offline - up to a point. And that point is considerably sooner, shorter, smaller — however you want to phrase it — than it ever has been before. Any additional notices don't appear and additional IMs don't even show a tab in your communication window.

Once that magic, significantly lowered threshold is reached:
Group notices don't ever show themselves. Group notices aren't so bad, because they remain in group cache for 15-days (and even that was recently dropped from 30-days.) If you know there was a notice sent, you can go into the group information window and reread them.

Notecards and objects dropped onto profile never display the blue menu notice you would normally get, if they were dropped to you after the cap ceiling has been met. Fortunately the notecards almost always still will be in your inventory waiting quietly for you. You just never know it. Which is why your notecards folder gets so poluted so quickly.

An odd thing is objects... it seems to me that objects will act like notecards: sit in inventory without the blue menu notice - waiting for you.

Ummm. No.

Not for me, anyway. They just poof into the Linden void. Seriously. Which is why I insist that if you are going to drop anything to me via my profile, always, always also IM me.

And then people wonder why I am so 'unresponsive' to their inquiries and other communication. Um, hello? Turn your IM-to-email feature on.

Even after the IM cap ceiling is met, all IMs and notices still come through email. This is why I require all who drop anything to me to also IM me - to tell me what it is they are dropping to me. Or I will likely never see it. besides, if it didn't come through ( 9 of 10 times for me) - I'll need to ask you to give it to me again.

Oh! And this is one of the reason I absolutely hate those damned group notices with a cryptic title that only say "read the attachment". Damned you who send those to hell!

At least have the goddammed curtesy to put a freakin' summary in the notice message. Please!

Now if only everyone else would do the same, because if I reply in IM, and your IMs are capped - the only way you will know I even tried will be through email.

I thought the IM-to-email feature is turned-on by default for all new accounts. The problem is that people are signing-up with throw-away email accounts that they rarely check, if ever, like Hotmail or Yahoo mail.

Oh, well.

So how much frustration have you endured over the lower-than-ever IM cap ceiling?

PostHeaderIcon Happy Valentines to My X! I hate you.

HousewifePlumbingI usually try to login for an hour at about 4:30 two or three times a week. You know, to clear-out any notices and especially the Instant Message cache, which caps far sooner than it ever used to.

However, when I made my attempt, I received the old familiar message: "Logins are disabled now..." and I popped over to the Grid Status page to take a peek. I knew there was maintenance scheduled, but it wasn't supposed to start until 5 a.m. and I don't recall they were planning to disable logins.

Sure enough, it was bumped-up an hour and the logins were disabled. So I tended to other real life tasks.

However, something jumped out at me (reversed to display timeline oldest to newest, top-down - emphasis is mine):
[Started] Planned Database Maintenance: Feb 12, 2009: "[UPDATE 9 Feb 08 09 4:50 pm Pacific]
The scope and schedule for this downtime has changed."

[BUMP 11 February 08 09 2:20 Pacific]  Just a reminder that this is still planned for tomorrow (Thursday) morning.  We’ll keep you posted with any unexpected developments or changes to the scheduling or scope.

[12 February 09 04:06 am PST] The scheduled maintenance is under way.

[04:15 am PST] The xStreet marketplace will also be disabled for the duration of this maintenance.

[05:15AM Pacific] Scheduled maintenance is going as planned.

I found this unusual.

SL Exchange; now known as XStreet SL is designed to automatically ping the grid and know when the asset servers are wonky or otherwise offline. This is to prevent people from losing money through purchases that are reported as delivered, but aren't.

So why would Linden Lab feel the need to mention this in their Grid Status updates?

I suspect it's because they are making the first code changes to begin the actual integration of XStreet SL into the Grid directly. It only makes sense. After all, on the Second Life Resident Home Page, there is the big, over-bright, ugly Valentines advertisement urging everyone who sees it to buy something foo-foo for your digital pixel-lover...through XStreet SL.

Practically impossible unless both of you have XStreet SL accounts and you have enough Linden buckaroos (L$) in that XStreet SL account - which is a separate bank.

So, I suspect a large part of this "scheduled maintenance" has a lot to do with the beginning stages of integration of XStreet SL agent UUID database with the main grid, just in-time for Valentine's day.

What will really screw-up people is when, not if, they link your in-world L$ balance with that of your XStreet SL account directly, which may actually be part of this 'maintenance', too by the way. I appreciate that it's a separate bank account right now. It's far too easy to buy things on impulse through that online shop and at OnRez.com. So when my XStreet SL L$ balance gets close to L$0 - I don't sweat it because my in-world balance will be what it was when I last made a purchase in-world. it's easy to set a "hard budget" there.

However, when the day comes that my XStreet SL balance shows L$5 is all that is left in my account and I pop in-world and it says the same thing because it is live-linked the same way the LindeX is, it will be a rather unnerving thing for a month or so. And I can see a lot more scrutiny in my purchasing decisions.

So, with Shop.Onrez.com dying on Monday, leaving only XStreet SL available and this 'scheduled maintenance' that happens to include XStreet SL being 'affected', I would venture to do the math and actually dare to presume that 2+2 will equal 4 this time around.

And the maintenance must have gone smoother than they anticipated. Off the cuff, I decided to try logging in just before I leave for real life work, at 5:30 a.m. I went right in without delay.

...of course, there is talk about (and Linden Lab already has shown and proven the ability exists) allowing premium memberships to be allowed to login while keeping basic accounts out in what we affectionately call "login-throttling".

But that's a post for another time.
via Second Life Grid Status

PostHeaderIcon Windows 2000: Rest in Peace.

SunsetA few months ago, Linden Lab notified all mac users that support for the 'Panther" edition of OS X would be discontinued. There were a few outcries, but nothing really major. I suspect it's because users of Apple's hardware do try hard to keep their stuff up to snuff with the latest and genuinely greatest. When they rolled out the new viewer that didn't support OS X Panther, I don't think anyone even noticed.

A couple months ago, Linden Lab made the official announcement that they will stop active support for Windows 2000. There was a more of an outcry than with the OS X announcement, but again not enough to make any waves as far as Linden lab is concerned.

Windows 2000 is long in the tooth and was geared mored for corporate use rather than consumer use:
Win2k Support Cancellation: "We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.

What does it mean to ‘stop support’? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on Win2k.

What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Windows 2000, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time."

What I'm waiting for will be the inevitable announcement that Linden Lab will no longer actively support Windows XP.

This announcement is a very long way off because of the flop that Windows Vista turned out to be, the majority of people on Windows XP are refraining from upgrading and those on Vista (for example pre-installed on a new machine) are rolling back to XP if they are able to.

Meaning of VistaThis means Windows XP is deeply entrenched in the computer-using universe. However, there will be a day when hardware manufacturers will stop developing drivers for that graphic card or sound board or network adapter chip set.

Of course, being a Windows (XP!) and Macintosh user, I don't have many worries. There's no doubt I'll always be up to date on my Apple hardware and OS because it always is really worth the money I pay for it. The 'Windows box" is another story. Return on investment only happens when I allow it to be used until it's no longer usable.

The problem I have is that my Macintosh is such a pleasure to use in ALL things computing, that my actual productivity work is done on them. Microsoft windows (in my home, anyway) is completely useless except for Flight Simulator and Second Life.

And the day I decide to run Second Life on my Mac (which actually gives better performance and exponentially better graphics, even though my Windows Velocity machine is actually marketed as a "kick-ass gamer's system".)

I know I will dump my Microsoft Windows machine eventually, and just as unceremoniously as Linden lab drops support for Windows 2000.

Then I'll finally be 100% Microsoft-free.
Then and only then will I finally feel free.

via Second Life Grid Status

PostHeaderIcon Only Anywhere Besides the United States

Yumminess  >:)Go, go Canada!

I've always loved those television shows that highlight advertising on an international scale. It seems the United States is so prudish it's actually boring.

It's especially true with regard to media. For example a "shock-jock" like Howard Stern is only a "shock-jock" in the united states. In the rest of the world he's more likely a lot closer to status quo.

Not necessarily as the 'norm', but rather in terms of what might be commonly allowed.

As is typical, Second Life sensationalism just will not die. The BBC ran an interesting documentary about two different real life couples and their Second Life relationships. it was a good, well-balanced documentary that equally highlighted the good along with the bad.

So now along comes a documentary out of OH CANADA!

But this one focuses on old news.
Cheating Second Life Husband: The Movie: "The Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary on cheating spouses in Second Life has aired, featuring a look at the women in the life of Dutch, the Second Life cheating husband we've come to love."

Though it's typical trash. I do appreciate the liberal restraint (read: lack-of) they have with regard to such imagery and language on their public airways.

Well, next to Second Life of course. Where else can people run around in their sexiest, most provocative skimpiest lingerie leaving nothing to the imagination regarding titillating body parts on a shopping hunt in public?

via Kitaku