Your2ndPlace

European marketing chief Clare Linden goes all global on the official blog talking about how the Second Life love has been spread all around the world.

I note, with no surprise, that Clare ignores the globally understood concept of money in her blog. If Linden Lab really want to reach out to the worldwide community they'd do well to realise that a price increase at a time of global financial crisis is a price rise in any language.

Unfortunately due to the new nature of communication, there's no place to respond to Clare's blog post. They haven't even setup a forum post for people to ask Clare for a bear.

I like blogs like this because they are informative. I'd never heard of this sister cities project and now I can go and visit Dublin, San Diego, London, Krakow, Luxembourg! There are also other areas of interest such as the museum of robots. These are the sort of blogs that should be appearing on a regular basis.

I'm still not sure what they're playing at with the blog, Torley should be back on the front page of the blog too, not tucked away inside.

Another useful use of the blog would be to tell us that they've built a new road through a sim I have land in. I mean imagine my surprise when I went to visit a tenant to find a bloody great road through the middle of the sim. Admittedly it's a nice road, indeed it makes the sim look much nicer. { Read more }

Just a quick (and I mean quick) Happy New Year, and Joyful Seasons Greetings! Late, I know, my only excuse is work. I will be blogging a bit more....couldn't be less...this year.
I made a list of all the things that happened to me last year. On one side the good things, on the other side the bad things. There were many more GOOD things than bad in number. There were just more emotionally bad things (the loss of my mom) than good. So here is wishing all of you AND myself a very very GOOD new year.

Jez Bailey

A first person account of a happening within PlaneShift...

Leaving Hydlaa on the way to the Eagle Bronze Doors, I encountered a mass of people at the intersection of the paths leading to Hydlaa, the house of Levrus, and the Eagle Bronze Doors. A dwarf named Omeror held Xiosia's symbol, and all were intent upon his voice.

Xiosia has been busy of late, blessing seemingly random beggars. So out of curiosity, I watched. It was not long before I became a participant in the antics from there - first, Omeror called for the blood of Tefusangs. Later on the path toward the Eagle Bronze Doors, Omeror instructed us to slay Ulbernauts in the name of Xiosia. This followed with bathing in the lake near the Ulbernaut nest around the gold mine. The lake turned red.

Then other creatures were slain; the Marfusangs on the way to the Eagle Bronze doors had the good sense to simply not be there. Trepors were slain.

All in the name of Xiosia. { Read more }

Sometimes in life we find things amusing, when we probably shouldn't. Case in point being the angry reaction of the Italians to the openspace price hike on the forum... I think they're Italian anyway, that's the only language I can get sense out of via babelfish.

Anyway, near the bottom of page 2 of this thread, that until this point has been pretty much all Italian someone pipes up in English:

"well what can i say.....i agree with alll you guys !It's not fair what they are tryin to do !!!!!!!!"

That's it comrade, just feel free to join in. Then you get ominous post titles such as "E ora di dire BASTA**** linden" hey it sounds nasty.

Where have they been until now? These guys appear to have only just found out that prices are going up, how can this be?

Anyway enough of this, I've had a harrowing week and at times I've been delving into people's profiles. Well I often delve into people's profiles, I want to have an idea who is talking to me.

The thing is, I seem to be surrounded by deviants. I mean there I am having a perfectly innocent offline im conversation with someone when I login. I check their profile and find they're a roleplayer, fine, they have limits...hmm what kind of roleplay is this, the limits are no disembowelment or perma death......... WHAT KIND OF ROLEPLAY IS THIS!!!!!

No disembowelment???? Why would anybody need to point this out? What are people doing in my rental properties! I'm glad I don't go into these places very often. { Read more }

Last September, I bid farewell to Y2P as a contributor. Embedded in my farewell article was a silent vow that, should the WSE declare insolvency or otherwise withdraw as a virtual exchange, I would return to cover the event.

In his December 2008 address, Luke Connell announced that his exchange would be severing all ties to Second Life and Second Life-based companies. Though the announcement provoked some applause and cries of victory from the virtual exchange cognoscente, the majority dismissed the address with an indiscernible shrug – comfortably nestled in the latter camp was yours truly.

In the two month period between my announcement and Connell’s, RL had whisked me away. Until two weeks ago, most of my involvement had taken place via email. When the holiday break afforded me a bit of leisure time, I sat down to make good on my promise, but the words didn’t come. The distance had given me a new perspective. So I stepped back, caught up, and drew some disturbing conclusions.

Where the WSE is concerned, it’s gone from Second Life. Good riddance. The periods of unannounced halts, disinformation, fear mongering and revisionism -which I’ve flippantly dubbed “retConnelling”- are someone else’s problem.

But this by no means constitutes a victory. When I think of the “old investors” whose money has hitherto been made unavailable to them while “new investors” deposited and withdrew at will, I can only conclude that the sole winner here is Connell himself. But that was always the case. Besides, people like myself weren’t trying to beat Luke Connell at a game he dominated. We were simply creating an archive. As VSTEX PR Director Samantha Goldflake likes to say, “The internet does not forget.” I concur. { Read more }

I'm quite impressed that the site went sick around the same time as me. However the site had a very professional doctor in the shape and form of Nobody Fugazi whereas I have some super painkiller pills from the parents. This is the one huge advantage of your parents getting older, they have a vast array of super mind blowing drugs (don't try this at home kids!).

So here I am with a combination of man-flu and a bad back, plus it's new year's eve and usually I'd be out on the lash. This will be the first new year's eve since about 1986 when I haven't been out on the lash, it's a weird feeling.

However back to Second Life and Monday's blog post from M. This is probably the best blog post yet from M, the sincerity angle I'm still not 100% getting, especially when he comments in the forum:

"There has been a lot of very good dialog between Zee, T, Jack Linden and the Resident community about the OpenSpace price adjustment. With that in mind, I feel I have a very good understanding of Residents' frustration. I -- we -- learned a lot from the experience."

I find it hard to take him seriously. This serious dialogue simply didn't happen, and when I see something like that I wonder what else he's glossing over. If there's one thing I want Linden Lab to do in 2009, it's to stop the spin. Spin really isn't helpful to those on the receiving end of decisions like the openspace price hike, it may have won a few friends who weren't openspace owners but believed the spin, but to those who were/are openspace owners, it just twists the knife deeper and there was no need whatsoever for it. { Read more }

Sorry about the site hiccough. I personally apologize. Here's the explanation, for those interested.

As Cocky Dagger indicated here, BlueHost.com has been iron-fisted lately with overuse of resources... something that probably seems familiar given Linden Lab's recent Open Space server issues within Second Life. Yesterday, I got an email (as described here) and responded to it immediately. But it was already too late to assure continuance of service.

After working my way through the anger phase, I looked through the logs and found that there had been 1 error a day for the last month as related to the database - and this had to do with aggregation from other sites. This, I have found, is problematic with Drupal when on shared hosting - so I needed the site re-enabled to disable the module. You can imagine how easy that was to explain. I can too. Because I don't think I actually did.

So - two tickets later into Customer Service, the site is now back up.

And yes, I am working toward this being avoided in the future. It may be time for a dedicated server.