General News

#SL Scheduled Maintenance May 8, 9, 10

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Taken from the Second Life Grid Status page.

[Posted 9:45am PDT, 8 May 2012] We [Linden Lab] will be performing scheduled maintenance [on the Second Life system] today, Wednesday and Thursday of this week (May 8, May 9, May 10), beginning at 6:00pm PDT each day. Each maintenance is scheduled to last around 8 hours. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects, as some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time. Please follow this blog [Grid Status blog] for any updated information.

See the coming SL News post for some speculation and ideas to what is going on.

Also…

Spikes, Slow Restarts For Some Regions Overnight

[Posted 9:25 pm PDT, 07 May 2012]

Some regions are taking longer than normal to work their way through restarts this evening. In addition, they’re reporting higher-than-normal spikes in performance and viewer instability.

Our engineers have done the preliminary work tracing the problem and will be forming a team early tomorrow to fully diagnose and correct it.

Tonight, please file a “region offline” service request as needed for any region which remains inaccessible to you for longer than 15 minutes or so, and we’ll work with our network engineers to assist the restarts as needed.

Second Life 9th Birthday – Perception

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Linden Lab® has announced Second Life’s coming ninth birthday in June. It is a small announcement, 158 words. See: Help Us Celebrate Second Life’s 9th Birthday! If one had no history with Second Life® the announcement would just be an announcement, neither good nor bad. But, those having history with Second Life are having various reactions to the announcement based on their history, expectations, and perceptions of Second Life and Linden Lab.

Tateru in an article on Dwell On It, Anniversary time. Everything new is old again, recalls what, to her, is probably the best SL Birthday in all time: SL3B. Tateru see this announcement as possibly opening the best opportunity for a great celebration in years. She goes on to speculate on why the Lindens are proceeding this way, but that is speculation.

D'ni Refugees at Second Life 5th Birthday

Innara Pey at Living in a Modem World sees it as a shame. For her the collection of regions devoted to the celebration and the large number of builds for the Second Life 8th Birthday (SL8B) made for a great party.

I was somewhat disappointed with SL8B. I like to see great builds. I like to see creative ideas well expressed. I love things like Kerryth’s lacy, fairy like buildings. I like the interactive art. I like finding a bunch of friends parting and having fun. There were 3 or 4 builds in all the dozens that fascinated me. I want to be endlessly fascinated. But, such builds take a huge amount of effort. Building just for a few days and then seeing the build disappear has to take its toll.

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Second Life Interesting

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Strawberry Singh with her fun nature does a fashion blog and a hilarious Plurk line (example she Plurked about: Brown Vag) I check both each day. She finds awesome skins and lingerie. Great photography. But today she surprised me and posted about doing a promotional piece for Linden Lab. See the image. I think it is one of the best promotional pieces for Second Life that I’ve seen.

Strawberry's Blog and Art

To see it on the Second Life site, you need to log out of the SL web sites. Then visit SecondLife.com. You may not see it as the first image. However there is a pager button in the images so you can look through the images. I have all the ones that came up for me, 5, after the fold.

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Second Life News Week 13

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This is general news from different sources. Some interesting stuff.

Sever Updates

Tuesday the simulators were restarted for the main grid. The Lindens usually only do this when they need to update the software running on the sims. But, again not this week.

The release channels got a different roll out than I anticipated and the Lindens had suggested. Magnum is running the multi-threaded region crossing code. This is the package with the Phase I infrastructure upgrade that has been cycling in and out of the release channels for a few weeks. As Oskar Linden says, they are letting it “soak” awhile longer.

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#SL Fun Things

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Coming from Myst Online MadPea has always fascinated me. If you don’t know who MadPea is, you are missing out on once of Second Life’s creative groups. While skimming through my reader I saw Honour’s quick review of MadPea’s Show and Tell. They do a show and tell thing on Sunday’s at 2 PM SLT. It was just 2 PM so I popped over. It’s in-world at the MadPea Base.

MadPea Show & Tell

I got there and had to change viewers. Sculpties or Mesh was going nuts and filling my screen. A quick change of viewer and all was working as expected.

Show and Tell

This show and tell thing is about people showing things they have built, as Honour describes it, their inventions.

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Direct Delivery Launches

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The Lindens have enabled Direct Delivery on the main grid today. There is also a nice new shiny blog post creatively titled: Direct Delivery Launches Today.

The post has links to Wiki pages with more information and a Torley Linden video, Yay! Torley! Titled: Direct Delivery Essentials.

[youtube cgRtCAMyWDI]

I am one that believes in avoiding the rush and never being first… even if there is a virgin involved. First is dangerous and full of surprises.

UPDATE: Getting your Merchant’s Outbox working is trick. To get the Received Items folder visit the Market Place and get the Direct Delivery Bear. The Received Items folder will appear when it arrives. Actually buying anything that is Direct Delivery ready will cause your Received Items folder to appear.

Getting the opposite side of the coin working is more complex. Some are saying log in and out of SL and it will start working. (Me->Merchant Outbox…) But, that has not worked for many of us. The in-world commerce group is flooded with people asking, ‘WTF?’

Some are recommending logging out of and into the Market Place then logging out of and into of Second Life. A number of people are saying it works for them. I tried it and it worked for me. \o/

UPDATE: For those moving things to the new DD Market Place… when you make a folder to place an existing product into DD, the name must match the product name exactly to auto-associate. Otherwise, you must manually associate the new DD item with the existing Magic Box item.