Second Life History

Here's some Second Life history for you ... The first Lucky Chair!

• Chair Design by Funaria Moose, created on January 4, 2006.
• Converted to a Lucky Chair by Shep Corvin on January 5, 2006 (modified until Jan 29).
• Sixteen prims and one script (a Lucky Tribe game script was added later).

See it for yourself in the LapGirl store in Broadwater (Adult; SLurl). You can buy a modern Lucky Chair and other familiar merchandising products at the Lucky Designs store (SLurl). You can try all the products and maybe win some cute little prizes. If you see Shep at either location be sure to thank him for starting an important and pervasive part of Second Life culture.

Back for Display Names!

I've been able to spend more time in Second Life again, though if I have 30 minutes to spare with nothing to do I'll probably head to Lego Universe (Web). But I'm back just in time for Display Names (Web). So far I rather like it and have actually found several long time supporters of the Viewer Formerly Known As Emerald using it. I'm simply Uccie in my tag, but if you check the right boxes in Preferences, my tag will also uccello.poultry and my active group tag (off by default). My alt is one of the many Spartacus-taggers in-world (see pic). Of course, Profiles always show the name.name User Name, the moniker under which someone created their account.

Have you spotted folks with the last name Resident yet since the change? I've seen a few. Lots of Noobies have been coming to Lesbos lately. According to Tateru Nino on her blog (Web), new registrants are automatically assigned that last name. No more scrolling through lists or hitting refresh again and again until you see a last name you like. On a similar note, if you see avies named something like 39873 Guest, then you've found someone trying the Web portal Beta (Web). I gave it a whirl today and it worked very well. I'll have to try it on my iPad soon.

With Display Names, though, I learned that if you set a name and don't like it you are not stuck with it for two weeks, as the various Second Life official Web sites indicate, but if you hit the Reset button on the name change pop-up your User Name is restored as the name everyone sees right away.

Addendum: I've seen some prize givers of late that use initials of last names as well as first names (the latter style invented by Shep Korvin of Lucky Designs). I wonder how the standard last name change is going affect those. Or how names will now appear on Contest Boards at events. I might have to make an alt to find out.

My New Job with the Tribe

Shep Korvin, inventor of the Lucky Chair and head of the Lucky Tribe, paid me a very high compliment when he asked me to contribute to his Lucky Tribe blog (Web). Primarily I'll write about the great prizes that Tribe members can earn when and I'll be giving out "Kudos Points" for the first people to read these entries. Learn more about the Tribe in-world with this SLurl.

Insurance and Folder Perms and Backups

Recent events and a discussion of the SL asset permission system on Tatero Nino's blog Dwell On It (Web) has got me thinking once again (earlier post) that some sort of insurance system should be developed to protect against inventory loss. The event: A club I was building disappeared from my inventory. The in-world copy was deleted to conserve prims and now only one link set remains, some carefully adjusted curtains. Maybe the cause was some form of stupidity on my part. Some recent health issues have left me not entirely "here," so to speak. But if the cause was similar to my previous losses then I'll be well and truly upset.

At one time I owned nearly every dragon pet made by Winx Whiplash, beautiful L$400 creatures that captured my heart the first time I saw them. The collection took nearly two years to build and it disappeared over night. Along with an expensive and now unobtainable riding unicorn and dozens upon dozens of other critters, avatars, and other objects from a variety of folders. My Wryms dragons were copyable and I had the backups. Same with some other objects, but the dragons were gone. All the standard recovery methods failed and I was without my pets or the funds to replace them.

If this had been Real Life some homeowner's insurance would have covered the property loss and I'd have the cash to rebuild the herd. Sure, I'd have to prove the loss and there would be paperwork, but eventually my losses would be made whole. Why can't there be insurance inSL?

For one, it would require the cooperation of The Lab, and their acquisition of XStreet leads me to believe they'd rather have us spend money to replace assets than to use resources to recover or replace them. Actually, the arrangement could be a boon if there was a way to verify that an asset was no longer in the databases (think UUID) then a requested replacement could be sent via Xstreet in a manner much like the Midnight Mania prize redelivery system developed by Shep Korvin.

Secondly, planning for schemers and hackers would mean considerable investment in a secure system. I don't believe The Lab would be willing to work with someone to do this even if a turn-key solution was provided. Again, it would not be to the benefit of The Lab if they are not convinced it is a serious issue. And would you want to admit that your servers lose inventory?

Maybe The Lab could be convinced to let users set permissions on our folders and assets. The folders for Objects or Scripts, for example, can't be deleted. I would love to have the ability to set "can't delete" on folders I've created or even on individual items in a folder. It wouldn't be fool proof (there are too many talented fools) and it wouldn't prevent on-server losses, but it's an idea.

Or maybe The Lab could implement backups. Everything that I have with full C/M/T permissions is eventually copied to an Alt I created for storage. Same for things that I can transfer and but seldom use. This has helped on a few occasions, but won't solve the problem with losing No Trans assets. Here is a chance for The Lab to make some more money: Backups for Premium accounts. Just a thought. I have two premium accounts and my brother has a third. That is $216USD per year they get from our household. Some value-added consideration would be nice.