The Tale of Ruth

I was having too much fun to remember to take a picture - so I stole this one from Crap off of Flickr. Ruth took over the Paisley Beebe Show and if you watch tonight's episode you'll see five of us working as the backup singers. This was four of us in rehearsal. :)

Crap did a good job!

Went to the SL Bloggers' Party ... Crap Mariner hosted and did a great job. Met lots of bloggers and had a good time. I didn't take a zillion pics this time - but this one gives you a flavour of the event.

Congratulations Crap!

BRB

Have to take a short trip for business. Means I won't have access to a computer for a few days (gack!). See you when I get back. :)

PS - my cats turned 15 today. So Happy Birthday Jordie and Mulligan!

Way too much time on my hands.

Yes I should be working on textures - and I am making some progress. But I continue to be fascinated by the Dragonball arena near us. From observation alone I can tell you that they love colour.

This guy, however, must be lost. He took a wrong turn from the 'hood.

Don't think they're gardening!

This is not what I expected my ex-garden to be used for! Sorry neighbours!!!!

Did you ever

Just feel stupid? Kept meaning to put together a dance for myself and now that I have all this time on my hands I finally went to work on it.

First I went out and found way too many dances. Then I tried to stitch them together. Good grief!

Gestures would work if the dances were modifiable - which they're not. Perfectly understandable.

So you have to get the right chimera or hud. Tried a few before I got one that actually does what I need it to do.

Then I have to play choreographer - which I'm not.

Well I got one done. Now I just have to put all the salsa's together in another one. :)

I'd better get back to gardening soon - all I seem to be doing is spending money.

New Look

I had to change my blog template because everytime I tried to add something new on the side - the column was too narrow.

And if you want to get your own Personal DNA Map go take the test. :)

Lost & Found

I was just checking my land the other day and found the scene above. And no, it's not some weird artist channeling VanGogh - it's stray material from the Dragon Ball arena nearby.

This - for those of you like me who are not into gun play - is a close up of a stray bullet. I'm surprised that bullets can a) travel onto other parcels and b) don't have a dissolve mechanism of some sort if they do. I couldn't return them because they were actually on Wrath's property.



This morning I noticed he has a couple of new trees, two meditation pillows and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels - all donated by some happy person travelling by. !?!

Then I went to check out the land I have for sale. I discovered that the Easter Bunny became a resident yesterday and left me dozens of easter eggs.



A lot of them must be floating in the air - because they're not readily apparent. Sigh, guess I know what I'm doing today.

I love this place! v 3.0

183 prims of pure delight. This guy stands over the DragonBall arena near us.

Dublin - I had promised myself .....

When I first started to go to the Blarney Stone, I promised myself I would spend at least part of St Patrick's Day in Dublin. I made it just as the special day started in their time zone and caught the last of the set by Keltish (fun). When I took the next shot there were 83 of us there. :) Ham does throw a good party!

Limbo

Told Wrath this morning that I feel a bit like a spectator in SL these days. I mean I'm used to having all this work to do on the garden etc.

I'm taking a lot of pictures in rl - spring flowers, shrubs etc. My dog is getting tired of walking. :)

So at least I'm working on textures and will have some new products when I get the island and manage to get set up on it.

I'm sure I'll look back on this period of relative inactivity with fondness at some point.

I've even been desperate enough to go shopping!

Mmmmm Concierge Service

I only just realized that I qualify for Concierge Service. Not entirely sure what that means but I thought I would try it.

I've been trying to figure out what happens to your mainland tier fee if you go over a full sim in land holdings. If you go to the Land Pricing and Use Fees page on the web site you get this information:

Additional Land (over 512 sq meters)	(In square meters)	Monthly land use fee*
1/128 Region	512 m2	US$5
1/64 Region	1,024 m2	US$8
1/32 Region	2,048 m2	US$15
1/16 Region	4,096 m2	US$25
1/8 Region	8,192 m2	US$40
1/4 Region	16,384 m2	US$75
1/2 Region	32,768 m2	US$125
Entire Region	65,536 m2	US$195

But I want to know what happens if you go over the 65,536 m2.

I've been to the support portal and searched on various arrangements of the words tier fees, sim, region, ownership, land etc. etc. etc. I can't find anything more than you get from the above table.

I've tried google searches to find the information and still get the same as you see in the above table.

I know something must happen - even if the tier fee is frozen at the full sim level, that's something. I know people own more than one sim - so what..... do they start the count at zero for the second sim and add the incremental fees to 1 full sim for the first?

So I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out Concierge Service. So I did a ticket asking "what happens to the mainland tier fees if you own more than 65,536 m2 of land?

Got my response today: From your account page the menu to the left says "Land pricing and usage fees" and a helpful link to the following information:

Additional Land (over 512 sq meters)	(In square meters)	Monthly land use fee*
1/128 Region	512 m2	US$5
1/64 Region	1,024 m2	US$8
1/32 Region	2,048 m2	US$15
1/16 Region	4,096 m2	US$25
1/8 Region	8,192 m2	US$40
1/4 Region	16,384 m2	US$75
1/2 Region	32,768 m2	US$125
Entire Region	65,536 m2	US$195

No comment.

Wading In

I've avoided the whole theft issue til now - partly because I think there's a lot of hypocrisy inherent in the debate. And I think most of the debate about theft is played out about small things at a shrill level and ignores the real issues. This is an example of the type of thing I think the discussion should center on. I have this product and admire its creator - I found this copied on Ordinal Malaprop's Blog :


Sculptypaint has now been discontinued by its author, with the following explanation:

I decided to take down Sculptypaint site for the next few days.
Why?
Well there are a number of reasons. I love to create, and write creation tools, that I offer free to download as well. Love the positive response of the majority of people, but the same time.
- People threatning me in real life, that I filed a DMCA complain against.
- I got serious hate mail, about my software thats free to download for everyone.
- The way Linden act on DMCA and copyright infrigment.Like one person modified my artwork, removed my name and copyright, and have been selling my items for 6 months now.. Using an army of bots to get #1 in the search. I file a DMCA, wait 2 months, Linden removes the vendor boxes. And the next week the person is selling the same stuff again. I filed already 3 times in a row a DMCA takedown to this person, and still this person with ‘Payment info on file’ is running around in SL. Also selling other artist work.Another person has a huge record on selling stolen goods in sl, created by me and other artist. Selling stolen items for the last 12 months now, all the DMCA takedowns he received he calls just a joke. and continues this ‘bussiness’. The person got ‘payment info on file’ and his own sim.
- Yesterday I learned about the ‘mental mentors’ group in Second Life. This group is for mentors in Second Life, who’s goal is to help Newbie`s, educate teach, lead, guide and so on. Great..This group is rather big, about 800+ people/mentors.I found out several of my sculptpacks I sell are offered as freebee`s by the leader(s) of this group. For several months now.A ‘mentor starter pack’ is given out to all mentors, to help the helpless newbees in SL.I released my latest SFT-pack around 14 februari 2008. Only a few days later, this pack I created was repackaged, my copyright notices and TOS removed, (all the sculpties clearly state not for individual resell/repackage). The whole pack was distributed as a freebee pack too about 800+ mentors in SL, to use and to give away ‘to help the newbees’.If this group was called ‘robbers from SL’ I would not care a second, but from a mentor group.. Who`s goal to educate, teach, help and lead in SL?! unbelievable.
You must know, I only can continue developing Sculptypaint and other free creation tools by selling my work in SL.No income - no time - no coding - no tools - simple as that.I’m sick and tired about all this crap that sucks all the creative energy out of me, standing alone in the cold here for such a long time. So decided to put a statement here for the next few days. Hope you understand.
Have a nice day!
Elout de Kok - march 6, 2008SL: Cel Edman

We need to move away from picketing skin thieves (as obnoxious as they might be) and put our energy into developing a process which actually protects those creators like Elout/Cel from the assholes who exploit them and their talents.

Just saying.

Be Careful What You Wish For

I've been fussing for a while about the fact that if I added up all the land I own - it would be almost a full Region. But it's in pieces and spread across 5 regions.

So yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and put almost all of it up for sale. My thinking is I sell it and then buy an island - just think how much puttering I could do with an island!

Overnight I kept thinking that I would miss my neighbours. Where ever I buy land I seem to luck out with my neighbours. And I won't have any on an island.

Almost enough to make me think what I should do is sell part of my land and use the proceeds to buy up the rest of the sim where the garden is (the garden is now half a sim).

Too late. I accepted an offer on the garden. Boy it's tough. I have spent my entire SL life on that parcel - growing it, building on it, learning on it.


BEFORE

AFTER

Now if you'll excuse me, I have almost 6000 objects to sort out in my inventory. :(

Sigh ....

Some days it's just hard not to take it personally. I logged in this morning and did my usual tour 0f the various parcels I somehow acquired. At the end of my tour I crossed the road into the last parcel and got the message that it was damage enabled.



Huh? My land is not damage enabled. I started to go back and then realized it really was my parcel. But it was damage enabled. It was also streaming music I hadn't chosen (I like my bird song). It was also listed in Search - not my decision. It had a new name too and a new description.



The name and description weren't totally unfamiliar to me - they belong to a large parcel on a nearby sim - not adjacent to me mind you - but on the other side of two large parcels.



And of course to make it even better - that parcel has a ..... shall we say more risque business and clientele than my little garden. A major part of the name is "Passion".



Now it's really early in the morning but I do recognize that this is out of the ordinary and conclude that a formal bug report is probably warranted. That means JIRA. I do not like JIRA. A less intuitive tool would be very hard to find.



And speaking of finding - I rarely can. Find JIRA that is. I wind up going to support and then searching on the term JIRA and then using a link in one of the responses.



I finally find it and login - and then find the "new issue" button and then start filling it in. I really don't think that my video card is playing any role in this situation - or my RAM but I'm easy to get along with and I fill the darn thing in.



Then I figure I should test a few things so I leave the report in the middle and go back and test with different viewers and the same things happens. So I change the category of the report cause there's no point blaming the new viewer.



Then I take a screen shot - cause maybe they'll believe me if I do. Not that I think you can see anything.







So I've told them everything I can think of and I submit the bug report. Then I hope something happens. Well an hour later something does.

Turns out this has been happening to people for months and the lindens can't fix it cause they can't duplicate it.

So somebody takes my carefully crafted report and merges it with an old one so it's not there anymore - all my hard work, grumble. Then they ask me how it happened - well how the hell do I know. I wasn't there.

Then I try to come in and use the soapbox of my blog to vent and make myself feel better - and get an error screen cause google is taking a vacation.

Sigh....

Belated Blogger Party Pics

Thank you to Sofian for telling me how to solve my picture problem! I don't know that they're that great but I did want to record the part of the party I saw and thank GoSpeed Racer for the fabulous job she did hosting. I'm betting Crap is losing sleep at the thought of following her.

Anybody who thinks my garden looks like a landing strip - should not be allowed to fly planes. Now if they want me to sell it for them we could make a deal. :)

Thoughts on horseback ........

Went for a ride down the road today - it's been a long time since I've gone to check out the wider neighbourhood. Have to say things have improved over the past few months - fewer ad farms - very nice.

Couple of things occured to me:

• What the heck is Trilegy exactly?
• I understand that some people don't like to put a lot of info into their profiles - but the blank ones are annoying. Particularly if they've been here for a couple of years. I mean at least let me know if you have a sense of humour.
• On the other hand - the people that fill their profiles with instructions on how to behave to them - rules for dealing with them. They need to get a grip! I haven't seen one of them I wanted to get to know badly enough to try and write the entrance exam.
  

AV Rich!

I finally tried on the av's I bought - boy it's exhausting. They're beautiful but they have a lot of parts. Took me a long time to get my regular body back. Even better than the look though is the movement. Don't know when I'm going to wear them - but if I ever have a need... I now have an inventory. :)