Thank you Linden Lab

After a whole day work, you come at home, a bit tired, preparing your meal...thinking of what might come this evening.
Oh, why not log in a little bit earlier on Second Life? That might be a good idea, nothing on the television, so what would be better than to have a nice chat with friends on the grid?
But, what is supposed to be prime time in Europe, is not in the US, so what happens...indeed failure by trying to log in. We try again...and again...and again, but despite all the efforts, we are not able to go in.
Immediately I went to the Linden blog, to see what is happening, and yes, there was a notice. Now I am relaxed...Linden will fix it in no time....
" [11:30a.m. PDT]
We are currently investigating an issue where people are unable to log in.

The Ops Team has been notified and is currently investigating the problem."

But what is no time in Linden language? I need to find a new Linden dictionary and see what they mean by saying " is currently investigating" Does that mean they are fixing the problem, or does that mean they will only investigate the problem?

Ok, after approximate 45 minutes they fixed the problem, we are all save on the grid now, thank you Linden for having us. Even if it is only for a couple of hours.;))

Halloween Linden Lab joke

"Second Life will be unavailable for approximately 5 hours on Wednesday, October 31st. We will be adding additional hardware to our asset storage system to keep up with growth. No software upgrades are planned, no new viewers will be required after the downtime."
This was the text that we could read on the official blog some days ago. As many of us were asking themselves, what about Halloween? Did Linden Lab forgot this major annual event. Or was it a joke from Linden lab towards all residents? Normally it was not a problem for all the parties, but what if those 5 hours would become 6, or even 7 hours?
Finally, after tons of reactions , another prove was established that the Linden's are listening, and they apologized for not having thought about this before they scheduled the closing down of the grid.

"The planned service outage has been canceled. More time is needed to prepare the updates, and it may prove to be possible to do so without downtime for all of Second Life.And yes… the angry mob surrounding the castle with torches and pitchforks made its voice heard! I admit to being totally oblivious by scheduling an outage on the date of one of our favorite annual celebrations. Mea culpa! The shambling horror will slip back into the shadows… for now…"
This is the updated text on the official blog.
Thanks Joshua!

VAT in Second Life, is America next?

Reading this article on Second Life Insider, I could not help myself, to post it on this blog.
There has been a lot of posts about the VAT for Europeans. Yet, it calmed down a bit, but now there is a rumour that the Americans will have to pay taxes as well. Or at least, they are wondering.
There is a person in world, Tax Anderton, who is part of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. He's available to residents who want to ask questions about taxes related to their in-world businesses.
Is that the person who would know?
According to the reporter it is all inevitable. So, at least they are expecting it. That is more than we, Europeans, could say, we were not warned.;))
But I refuse to make jokes about it. I think it is up to Linden lab to spread the news, and I am sure they will, after their experiences with the VAT in Europe.

Linden Lab admits

"Linden Lab has made more mistakes about Second Life than anyone else ever has.

That shouldn't be a startling admission: When you are the one developing a product or service, you have more opportunities to make both right and wrong decisions about what you’re making. This is probably true about any complex product offering - the maker makes more mistakes than anyone else because no one else has so many chances to screw things up! What’s different about Linden Lab is that this place is more transparent about its operations than any other private company." This is from the official blog....

It is the first time that I see Linden Lab admits of making mistakes, and realizing that the residents of the grid, are indeed a great help for them, to improve Second Life. In other words, they need us, we need them!!

But to be honest, how did they work in the past? Very poor, we must say. Everyone will agree that communication is a main problem at Linden Lab. Obvious they want to do something about that, and that is good news.

But if they are saying "...that this place is more transparent about its operations...", than I have to say, it is good when you are planning this, but do not tell us that it was like that in the past, as I think that we should have known a long time ago what Linden Lab's plans were with the VAT, the gambling issue.....where we all have blogged about many times, but had the feeling they were not listening at all.

Let us keep an open and positive mind, and see what such a message can lead to.

As usual you will read the pro's and contra's, but, do we like Second Life or not? When the answer is positive, I think we should appreciate all the efforts Linden lab is planning to make, and has made. As, if it wasn't for them, I would have never known my new friends in SL. I hope they are realizing that with this message, they are saying, that they are learning from the past and will inform us in time what is going to happen in the future (when does Windlight come back?;)))

Over the edge

I have a strong feeling and thought that I have to quit Second Life.
Yesterday evening was supposed to be another fun moment on the grid, but it turned out in a world of doubt and uncertainty, not to mention anger.
The irony is that I wrote about it in my previous post, that my main goal are friends. Well, I found out that SL is even worse as RL.
I don't need it here. Getting accused by so called friends, while there is no reason too, just because this" friend" has a quarrel with another friend. Pffft, I think they should ban "childplay";), let's grow up people. What do they seek in here? Why accusing people of something, they even don't know anything about? I will save you the details.;)
And at the end of the evening, I got the message that another friend is in risk of being accused by the Lindens of something that has never occurred.
What is the meaning of all this? I am getting really angry, by reading all this stuff.
I don't need that in Second Life, that is over the edge.

PS. I am not leaving right now, I still love the things I do in SL....but......without this.

Oops, Linden Labs did it again!

What was supposed to be a nice evening among friends, became again a struggle for staying on the grid, pffft.
After I was logged in, and was having a chat with some of my friends, we received a message that our sim was closing down within 5 minutes.
With the experience we had, nothing to fear, just go to another sim, and everything should be solved. Nothing was less true.
After a couple of minutes, the message of 3 minutes left, showed up. We were joking, and saying who is staying here the longest….?
But I did not wait till the last minute, I was playing save, and tp’d myself to my home. I had still the message on my screen of the last 3 minutes, that I deleted, and what did I see underneath that? Another message saying we still had 30 seconds to leave the sim. Haha, not with me, I thought, I was safely back at my place.
But what happened…….exactly, we were thrown off of Second Life. Apparently Linden labs were having a master clean up, with all sims at the same time.

Reading in the meanwhile on the official blog: “The rolling restart is a little more aggressively scheduled this time than in times past. Logins for some residents may be slow until the restarts are finished. Also, the nifty trick of wave-jumping the restarts by TP’ing to the Northwest is unfortunately no longer supported - the restart order is no longer dependent upon map location. In exchange for this inconvenience, the restart should be finished much sooner.”

This was of course the best timing to do that, for the Europeans, at approximate 22.00 hrs.. Probably, Second life is meant to be amusing only for Americans. No taxes, no problems with rolling restart, as it happens in the middle of the day, when everybody is at work..;))

After this inconvenience, I was trying to log in again, but you can guess what happened. Exactly, …..nothing. I rebooted my whole system, and tried again. Sometimes the screen was hanging, without doing anything, another time I got the message that the servers were not available, or not connectable.

It took me almost half an hour to get back on the grid, but by then, my evening was almost finished. Perhaps I was better stayed in my seat before the television, and fall a sleep in the middle of a movie ;))