A few of my favorite things...

What I'm Thankful For:

My friends and designers in IDG. I won't put out their names because I don't want to embaress them, but they know who they are.

My family.

You, my loyal readers and customers.


I hope Thanksgiving finds you with more blessings then not and that the bright side blinds you.

Where I've Been....

Well, my streak has been broken, I was posting every day but Saturday for quite awhile, but I've tripped and fallen. This is due to lack of creativity and a ton of stuff hitting all at once. Yes I'm ok, and everyone at IDG is still ok. But I haven't been posting.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to go do family time for Thanksgiving and I won't be back until Monday with very limited internet so I won't be posting then either. Because it's Thanksgiving there will be no Live Music event on Sunday. Thank you all for your support and everything else. Hope you have a great Thanksgiving.

Live Music Sundays ~ Damian Carbenell

My apologies to Stella and everyone for last Sunday, rl interfered.... but...this Sunday!

Damian Carbenell is now playing a one hour set every other week for us and it's this Sunday at 5pm! Please come hear this talented singer songwriter and support his continued success.

Guitarist/vocalist Damian Carbenell picked up the guitar at age ten and added the keyboards soon after. He began to write his own music at age 15 and now has an extensive collection of originals and cover songs under his belt. A typical Damian performance might include the Eagles, Green Day, Jack Johnson , Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Rob Thomas, or even Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. His wide variety in music style is sure to please everyone. His MySpace page is here.

Second Inventory

So with the whole OpenSpaces aka Void Sim debacle I started looking at options, one of the open sim places I looked at was fairly good but I'll talk about that another time and it's still not ready for primetime. But in the course of looking for alternative building areas I came across the question we all have... how do I move items back and forth? The only real solution I found was Second Inventory. It has it's quirks but it does work. For a legitimate use of moving your own creations to other worlds this is a legitimate tool, though it takes a long time to work for each item. More info is available on their site but I managed to move a full copy of my house to my OpenSim sandbox and it looked just like it did in SL. Pretty neat, if you can put up with the headaches. It also has the side benefit of being able to perform batch uploads of textures, something I've been wanting in SL client for ages.

Waiting....and Link Love.

I am sitting at the airport waiting to pickup my boss to go to install servers for the clients after driving 4 hours, so that's why you didn't get a post earlier. Couple of articles I'm thinking about....

Wrong Answer, Mr M Linden by Gwen, one of the smartest commentators on SL ever.

The Light at the End of Tunnel… by Veyron.

Think about these and I'll comment later.

Live Music Today at 5pm ~Stella Silvansky

Okay...so Stella is a girl who has no problem being the center of attention. :)

Stella Silvansky is now playing a one hour set every other week for us and it's Today at 5pm! Please come hear this talented singer and support her continued success.

Stella Silvansky streams her sultry voice live from Western Maine to her adoring fans in SL. Singing everything from Jewel to Norah Jones, from Sheryl Crow to Indigo Girls, Stella thrives off making a true connection both to her songs and to her audience.

She's also been fortunate to sing original songs by other incredible SL artists like Raspbury Rearwin, and she really comes alive when she gets to sing live with Maximillion Kleene.

Stella loves suggestions from her fans, and it rocks her world when she can find a new and unusual approach to a song everyone knows.

You can check out her websites here, and here.

Endless Nights Closed

You have received a message from Second Life:
Your 9 objects have been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by XXX near parcel 'Endless Nights' at Endless Nights 147, 199 due to parcel owner return.

Unfortunately the build we did called Endless Nights is no longer. I may talk more about this tomorrow, but it was fun to build and I'm sorry to see it go. If you'd like to see anything we built there just send me an IM and I'll pull it out of inventory.

Live Music Sundays ~ Stella Silvansky

Okay...so Stella is a girl who has no problem being the center of attention. :)

Stella Silvansky is now playing a one hour set every other week for us and it's this Sunday at 5pm! Please come hear this talented singer and support her continued success.

Stella Silvansky streams her sultry voice live from Western Maine to her adoring fans in SL. Singing everything from Jewel to Norah Jones, from Sheryl Crow to Indigo Girls, Stella thrives off making a true connection both to her songs and to her audience.

She's also been fortunate to sing original songs by other incredible SL artists like Raspbury Rearwin, and she really comes alive when she gets to sing live with Maximillion Kleene.

Stella loves suggestions from her fans, and it rocks her world when she can find a new and unusual approach to a song everyone knows.

You can check out her websites here, and here.

SLBloggers Mix and Match - Joonie Jatho - 10 Things.

Today I'm participating in the SLBloggers Mix and Match, which means that I'm writing on a topic not of my choosing on a blog not of my choosing, in exchange Joonie is writing here on a topic not of her choosing. So enjoy our guest blogger who has some great advice and go check out her blog when done reading here, links to all the posts at the end.

/Noel off..

TOP TEN MOST IMPORTANT THINGS

 FOR A NEWBIE TO KNOW IN ORDER TO ENJOY SL

Wow…what a topic. This topic is always relevant and can have a jillion interpretations. So without further adieu, here’s my list.

1. Don’t base your opinion of Second Life on your first day inworld, or even your first week. Second Life is difficult to categorize even for those of us that have been there a while. Let your avatar roam around and experience what all this world has to offer before you decide if it is for you or not.

2. Learn the basics of how to maneuver, teleport, and search, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Most people will be more than willing to help you get started and give you the tips and clues you will need. Don’t be afraid. We were all newbies once.

3. Once you have the basics down, get thee to a nunnery…I mean, a haberdashery, as soon as possible. Nothing says newbie as loudly as Linden Lab issued skin, hair, and clothing.

4. I know it’s pretty and sparkly, but resist the urge to bling, if at all possible.

5. Get involved. Be friendly. Search groups and places of interest to you. A good place to start out is a Live Music venue. There is every genre of music you could ever hope to find in Second Life.

6. The Golden Rule definitely applies here. Remember, on the other side of your monitor is a real person. Same applies to everyone you meet in Second Life.

7. Yes, we are all human, but we are not always who or what we say we are. Be prepared to suspend your concepts of reality.

8. Two words: Time Management. They do not exist in Second Life. If you need to be somewhere by 8pm Real Life, begin saying goodbye to your Second Life friends around noon.

9. Do not burn bridges.

10. Second Life is what you make it. Be creative, or not. Be whatever you want. Take responsibility for your own Second Life. Most importantly, don’t take it too seriously. Real Life is more important.

Everyone’s experience in Second Life is different. Hopefully, these ten things will help get you started on a more enjoyable adventure!

Thanks, Torley, for the awesome topic. And thanks, also, to Noelyci, for letting me be a guest blogger. And last, but not least, to Vint and ArminasX for putting this concept together! It was a lot of fun and I found some great blogs to add to my reader. :)

Joonie Jatho

/Noel on.

Thanks to Joonie! You should definately take her advice and follow us around. For some ease of use, here's my personal tally...

Joonie was blogging here on Torley's Topic!

I'm blogging on Second Effects on Alphonus Peck's Topic!

Vint is blogging my Topic on HRH Princess Ivory's Blog!

Wow, that's exhausting.... enjoy, hope you find some interesting articles and see you all back here soon. The rest of the posts should be listed Here.

Broadcast change - SLBloggers Mix and Match

Tomorrow will be an interuption in your regularly scheduled broadcast of my thoughts...

Joonie will be blogging here on Torley's Topic!

I'm blogging on Second Effects on Alphonus Peck's Topic!

Vint is blogging my Topic on HRH Princess Ivory's Blog!

Wow. There are 56 of these things going on.... the instructions, delivered in secret and with much clandestine rigamerole (Yes it's a word.) came as followed, strangely written in purplish crayon on plywood prims....

Vint has written up the official instructions to follow from this point:

Write your blogpost.

Check on the .pdf which we emailed you what you'll be writing about and for whom. Write an well-researched, incredibly funny and kick-ass blogpost that exists of a maximum of 1000 and a minimum of 500 words. There should be at least one snapshot/illustration/graph/... to go with it. Make sure those are 'safe for work'! You will email both to your 'blog host', the person that will be publishing the article before Sunday November 9th 2008.

Publish the blogpost

All blogposts should be published on Wednesday November 12th*, the format for that:

• Introduction by 'blog host' (optional)
• Blogpost and pictures. Style at will.
• Author name (+ link to his/her blog)
• Person who suggested the subject (+ link to his/her blog)
• Link to the blog where your blogpost will appear (optional)
• Link to the person who will blog the subject you suggested (optional)

So, I figured I'd play along, enjoy tomorrow... it should be crazy and fun.

SLBloggers Mix and Match - Yes I'm participating

So Wednesdays I usually post about my upcoming singer but this week I'm taking part in the first ever SL Blogger's Mix and Match. The idea behind this was cooked up by two venerable SL bloggers, ArminasX Saiman and Vint Falken. Each person who signed up suggested a topic, and offered up their blog to be posted on by someone else. Well, it turns out that My topic is being blogged by Vint, and I'm posting on Arminas' blog! Talk about exposure. This should be fun. So on Wednesday you will get a post by Joonie Jatho here, and you'll have to go to secondeffects to see my thoughts on something I didn't come up with. To see someones thoughts on what I did come up with you'll have to go to Princess Ivory's blog. (Whew!)

Here's an easy to follow map for wednesday:

To read Joonie stay right here.
To read my thoughts on Digital Sucide, which isn't my topic, go to secondeffects.
To read Vint's thoughts on Consumer vs. Creator, which is my topic, go to HRH, Princess Ivory.

Spend Wednesday following the links around, you might have some fun, it's what I'm going to do.

Live Music Sundays ~ Damian Carbanell

Damian Carbenell is now playing a one hour set every other week for us and it's today at 5pm! Please come hear this talented singer songwriter and support his continued success.

Guitarist/vocalist Damian Carbenell picked up the guitar at age ten and added the keyboards soon after. He began to write his own music at age 15 and now has an extensive collection of originals and cover songs under his belt. A typical Damian performance might include the Eagles, Green Day, Jack Johnson , Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Rob Thomas, or even Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. His wide variety in music style is sure to please everyone. His MySpace page is here.

Homesteads...

You can read the new policy here.

This is what I suspected and several smarter people told me would happen. Linden Research has this irritating habit of saying something really bad, then doing something slightly better but still bad, then saying, "But we listened!" It's a distraction technique and either it's planned which is disturbing and frustrating or it's not which means they need to work on their communication skills a ton.

So, Natalis will survive one way or another, either as a Homestead sim, or if I can find partners and renters as a full sim with skyboxes. We'll still be around.

Happy Rez Day to Me, Happy Rez Day to Me....

I don't want a party, I wouldn't have even noticed if somebody didn't tell me, mostly because my rez day is inaccurate, I've been in SL longer, back when I became premium they glitched my rez date, so actually this is the anniversary of when I became a premium member, but it's a milestone anyway. So if you have wacky memories of time spent with me share it in the comments, just remember what your mom said.

"If you can't say anything nice..... publish it on the Net."

Live Music Sundays ~ Damian Carbanell

Damian Carbenell is now playing a one hour set every other week for us and it's this Sunday at 5pm! Please come hear this talented singer songwriter and support his continued success.

Guitarist/vocalist Damian Carbenell picked up the guitar at age ten and added the keyboards soon after. He began to write his own music at age 15 and now has an extensive collection of originals and cover songs under his belt. A typical Damian performance might include the Eagles, Green Day, Jack Johnson , Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Rob Thomas, or even Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. His wide variety in music style is sure to please everyone. His MySpace page is here.

The CEO responds - OpenSpace policy changes...

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has an interview with the CEO of Linden Labs, he says about the subject of the interview:

Mark Kingdon, new CEO of Linden Lab, in which we mostly spoke about the first grassroots uprising to test his leadership: the ongoing rebellion over the fate of Openspaces, which are currently set for a steep price increase in January. In the next few days, however, Kingdon says the company will post an update to this policy which will incorporate feedback from Openspace owners.

The interesting bits for me were the following questions and answers:

What percent of Openspace owners were abusing their land?


"In some cases they have beautiful builds so I'd hardly call that abusing the land... I don't have a percentage of that for you, but it was substantial enough that it led to us repricing the product."

Isn't "light use" a vague definition?


"I think we need to put more definition around it and be clearer about what we mean by it... I think we articulated what the intention was [when they were first put on sale]."


Didn't giving Openspace owners a several thousand prim allotment tacitly or even explicitly suggest they could build on them?


"That's a far lower prim count than our [standard] island product... some of the larger landholdings you see, the content is far more extensive than we expected."

So, it looks like they aren't going to actually ban people who overuse, just charge them. This is still not resolved and we will have to see if they handle this in a way that allows me and the people like me to survive. Either way they've done immense damage to the trust and goodwill they had built recently.

Give me a land... Wide Open..... pixels?

I know this post comes late, there's a good reason for that. I was so upset over the recent LL decisions regarding OpenSpace (aka Void) sims that I knew if I posted anything I would not make any sense. Plus, I wanted to see how the fallout came down from the people way more intelligent then I am.

Lillie Yifu originally posted about this issue or at least she's the first one I read about it from, (Helps to have a blog starting with a number Lillie!) and I immediately went to read the Official Second Life Blog. Then jumped in world to whine and complain to my fellow bloggers and friends. Here is selected from the original notification:

So Openspaces have been incredibly popular as a perk for estate owners, but sadly there is a twist. Unfortunately most of the Openspaces are being used for much more than light use. Based on analysis performed in August and September, Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use.

Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld.

Here's the issue for me and IDG, Natalis, our home and design center, runs on an OpenSpace sim. We are very careful with it, our script resources routinely take less the 1.2 seconds to compile, we limit the sim usage to 20 people unless we're hosting a concert, our texture cache is very low. Generally we try to be good stewards of what we have in Second Life and we realize that creating a good environment leads to a good reputation and the ability to create on a sim that has more resources better then if we hadn't. Really being forced to design well with a void sim has lead to excellent design on a 'full' sim.

Yes it's often frustrating that we are subject to four other void sims and what they choose to do and that it could impact our sims. I understand where LL is coming from when I see sim owners open clubs on void sims and load it down with scripts and textures. However, what I have an absolute problem with is that LL is using a blunt instrument to reverse direction rather then giving us hard limits and letting us choose to play in them or not. Maybe I'm overreacting, but how do you think they will police 'overuse' will it be an individual decision like so much of LL's policie's are or will we be able to correct things and continue to run our creative space? The paragraph that bothers me from their annoucement is not the price hike, though that's frustrating but this right here:

Lastly we will begin to proactively discuss overloaded Openspaces with their owners. This is important because as with abuse of region resources, a heavily overloaded Openspace can adversely affect other Openspaces sharing the same machine which is clearly unfair to residents who are using them responsibly. We have listened to your feedback on this, and agree that we need to make changes to better support our Openspace users by actively working to keep the performance levels as high as possible. We will also provide some detailed guidance about what ‘overuse’ looks like and how to prevent it.

Combined with the sentence above that said, "Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems." I saw the banning hammer coming down for Natalis and buy extension the way the IDG designers and I do business. In order to get the same 'spatial' relationship if they determine we are overusing, we'll be forced to upgrade to a full sim, at an additional cost to us of $175 a month. That's after the price hike, if you include the price hike it's actually $225 more a month. So.... let's split the difference and call it around $200. As I've stated before, IDG dosen't make RL money yet, I'm still thinking through how much of my personal finances I want to share, but there's no way I can justify an extra $200 a month for a hobby. Especially with the state of the economic times being as they are. This action is really going to hit the 'middle class' of Second Life hardest, the ones who don't own land won't care until their favorite designer disappears and the people who make a ton of money won't be happy but have enough to survive it. (Trust me, there are only a handful of those.) In fact, Lillie, has stated she's leaving SL and the 1000 sims she has that are rented to people are going poof. So one person's impact hits 1000 people. Can you imagine the domino affect this could have? This makes little sense as a business decision for LL, they will lose thousands of dollars.

As of today the issue is looking slightly better, Jack Linden put an update on the blog that in part says:

...I wanted to clarify one issue. As mentioned in the post, Openspaces were intended for space, empty areas of ocean or forest. Take a look at the Knowledgebase article description here. By that criteria, the large majority of Openspaces have more going on than was the original intent. We are not suggesting this is a bad thing, and of course we’re delighted that people have found them to be so useful. And we’re not saying that everyone is abusing resources. We are saying that the use has changed, and continues to do so as people find more creative ways to use them. So the revised pricing is about recognising that change of use and the additional costs and value associated with it.

Over the next few days we will be continuing to review the feedback and keep the dialogue flowing with as many of you as we can. If you have something to say, the forum is the best place to say it. It is clear that some Openspaces are being used as they were intended originally, so we recognise that there are different levels of usage that we need to account for.

So at least for now it seems that they are not going to 'enforce' the water or forest 'intent' of the void sims and I may be safe. Even if Natalis does get impacted as overuse I will figure something out, but you may not see many more products, from me or anyone if things go badly. And that... will impact Second Life in a very very large way.

If you wish to be constructive and share your thoughts with LL,

then please post in the Second Life forums here.

Live Music Sundays - Recorded Music Replacement - Alicia Chenaux DJ's!

The lovely and talanted Alicia Chenaux is filling in for Stella Silvansky this weekend and will be djing a 'at least' one hour set at the IDG beach at 5pm today! Come see and hear the fun. Unfortunately I'll be on a plane so I won't be able to host, but my thanks to Alicia for covering, next week Damian is back with his great vocals.