Bugged Again

Did I mention the fun I had with bugs yesterday? This hole in the sea was only the second of many. Triangles with variable geometry with one point always on my head plagued me, curtains of water shooting up from the sea along a plane parallel to me and measuring the width of the sim, and my neck stretching beyond all proportions were just the more amusing ones.

No, I didn't bother filing a bug report on the JIRA (Web). My experience is that others will do one or more of several things: (1) Close the report so they can file their own and claim to be first; (2) Close the report claiming a bogus and ineffectual solution that the nOOb filing the report should have seen; (3) Comment "Me, too!" loud and proud but without any documentation or details about their computer/software. I've seen these things happen to many reports, not just my own. I wonder who these critters that seem to live in the JIRA really are, but like those that haunt the Official Blog (Web) comments and the forums I doubt many spend much quality time in-world. Rather they make the Web attachments to the Grid their bailiwick. Would this be a Third Life?

I rebooted my computer and all was fine. The Activity Monitor on my iMac shows a steady and unrecoverable memory leak when the Second Life^® viewer runs. I've been rebooting twice a day, minimum, since the latest viewer was made available. I haven't had to do this sort of thing since I had a PC. And I had the same bugs. I wonder when the stripes will return.

PoP ~ No Longer Secret

You may have noticed that like many in Second Life^®, I sell things that I make. It's pretty modest because I'd rather create than sell. So for a couple years The Poultry Co. has marketed skins, furniture, landscaping items, and more. Partly out of boredom and partly out of a need to accumulate more wealth ... um ... earn a bit more money ... I've started re-branding as PoP, a department store. I'll be focusing more heavily on landscaping and clothes as well as offering a few more conventional goods. What I'm excited about is I'll be offering services, such as making custom teleporters and creating prize hunts.

Another reason for the changes I can thank my loving wife for: Angela has recently rented a sim for her business (Dream Images Skins and Shapes) and we'll be having a grand opening in about two weeks.

But I have a lot of my stuff in place now and I'm proud of the custom store that I built. So drop into Cote Azure (SLurl) soon and take a look. Not everything is in place, but enough for a 'soft opening' today. I'm pretty pleased with the landscaping I did. Angela supplied the textures and otherwise let me run wild. The infrastructure is also custom designed and built by me. Some of it may change by the grand opening, but not by much (I hope).


Look for expansion of the MicroSTUFF brand, too, my line of goods for tinies. These will also be available at Hug✩Mart(SLurl). And my line of Erotic Art will still be available in the Isle of Lesbos Mall (SLurl), probably under the old company name.

My Mix'n Match Post

After some unintentional delay, my post for the Mix'n Match is now up at Torley's own blog (Web).

Can SL and RL truly be seperate from each other?

Here is the Mix'n Match blog swap (Web) post from Stuart Warf of The Insane Life of Stuart Warf (Web).

When I was assigned this topic of "Can SL and RL be truly kept separate?" My instant reaction was to say that they can't be separate. In the current state of technology it is hard to keep something like SL and RL separate. But then it dawned on me that my situation isn't entirely the same as others in Second Life.

Now there are many reasons why somebody would want to keep their Second Life separate from their Real Life. A simple example of this could be that the person just wants their right to privacy. There are multiple reasons why an avatar would want privacy though. Someone could have a high profile job in some area and want Second Life as an escape without anyone finding out who they are. Some companies do have policies that require them to say who they work for in their contract which can cause all sorts of issues and see it fitting to just not mention who they are in order to maintain a simple life and escape.

In todays digital climate it's hard for someone to keep their real life identity a secret once they have revealed it, thanks to things like Google. So people who are aware of this decide to just keep their real life information separate from their virtual life.

Another way in which SL and RL can be separate is via roleplaying sims where you can act out a different life as a character and interact with a world. Examples of this could be the fantasy world of Avillion or the Star Wars world of Little Mos Eisley.

However there are many beinifits to not keeping SL and RL separate. Depending on what you do outside of the virtual world, you can be more open about who you are as a person in reality. A great example of where this typically happens in social networks like Facebook. Social networks like these can help you get to know your SL friends more and maybe even make new friends.

Other ways to interact with other avatars are microblogging websites such as Twitter and Plurk. Not only can these services give you another communication window into peoples lives.

When I look at who are probably the most open of avatars in Second Life I think these people are the podcasters, bloggers and active community members. Podcasters love to talk openly about things which says to me that they are also open in Real Life about their Second Lives.

Personally I think that SL and RL can be separate if you really try it but you limit yourself to what you can do in the virtual world. What I mean by being limited is that you miss out on a lot of the things you could enjoy in the world. If your trying to cut your real life off and be someone totally different in Second Life then ultimately it won't last forever. You can easily not tell people your in Second Life in real life but that can cause problems and that's why I figured that when I entered the world, I'd talk about it to friends and family.

Another thing that I've found while being in the virtual worlds is that aspects of it changed me in real life. I have become increasingly confident towards people (and I know that this has also happened to friends on mine in Second Life as well) and I truly believe that because of things like this that SL and RL cannot be separate.

How To: #73589 in a Series - Measuring

How do you find a building's footprint when the signs don't include that information? Measure it! This could be tricky in a No Build area so here is what I did:
I attached a 20x20x0.50 Megaprim to my stomach and walked inside the building. This was good enough but I could have added a grid texture to be fancy. Be careful doing this, though. Megaprims attached to avies can be considered griefing (Web; Web).

I rather liked this small castle from Lapin Feu Prefab Castles & Fish (SLurl). One of this company's gazebos is a centerpiece at my home. Texturing is awesome and there are some clever tricks in the builds.