Children in SL

Honestly, I think most so-called drama in Second Life^® is brought on by children who have snuck into the adults-only side of the service. Not just children in the chronological sense, but also children in the I-behave-like-I'm-4-years-old sense.

Here is the scenario: Some 100 meters from where I was standing, minding my own business, a resident was being a nuisance and was ejected from the region. Said individual then began to harass the ejector and thus was banned. So here is where I come in ...

Out of the blue, I received an IM asking why this other person was banned (don't ask how I knew, but I was aware that the IMer was an alt of the offender), making me wonder why they contacted me. I was not wearing my security group tag, though if someone was really diligent they might have found out that I have the Security Chief title despite someone else really having that job. So, maybe it was a fair cop (pun intended) to contact me.

Mind you, at this point I knew of the incident peripherally at best, but despite that, the offender's alt began to harass me because I would not clear the ban. They did not ask to discuss the issue or to plead their side. And they were in contact with my boss, the real head of security with much the same conversation going on at the same time. From what I found out later, the initial ejection and ban were valid based on the region's rules, but the resident's subsequent actions would have earned a ban anyway and eventually earned official Abuse Reports from several individuals.

What kind of abuse? Apparently the resident makes vendor systems (though thier profiles were very vague as to which ones so I can't imagine they have much business) and promised to program into all the vendor server software the avatar keys of all the region's staffers so that no in-world vendor would sell things to them nor would the vendors work on any region owned or operated by the owner of the region from which the offender was ejected. They also made vague threats about some sort of action on XStreet, but I guess all the contempt was lost in the rabid froth so I didn't understand most of it. Lastly, the resident threatened another region with similar actions, not aware that I have never even visited that region. ::shock:: Could this person be banned there, too?!?

Do you see the childishness? I mean, aside from trying to hurt people not involved in the situation, such as other staffers not even present and the merchants who would lose business from the loss of sales. A more mature person would probably have thought through their actions and realize that their vendor clients will be contact them about why transactions are failing.

More Mistakes

Not my mistake this time, though. The build was great (well, others said so) and, aside from some pose scripts, all was set with full perms to turn over to the project manager. I grabbed a copy and it showed in my inventory as No Copy. Fine. I fixed it with Properties and handed it over. It was No Mod on the whole build when she rezzed it. Mind you, the pose scripts were the same ones as in another part of the build that, after some work, turned out well.

However, even after removing all the poses, making sure all the textures and each prim had full perms, problems persisted. So I started from scratch, even changing the design of certain elements in case I somehow offended the Game Gods. The new bit is sitting in place ready to go. Now I wait.

Choices, Tweaks, and Mistakes

One of my most recent projects is 99.999% ready to box up and deliver. All I need is an independent eye to look at things because each time I've declared it "done" I've found something that didn't quite work. For example, the area greeter was originally set to recommend that visitors set the "day" to Midnight (the bottom inset pictured at left) for best viewing. Then I tried it. Not good.

So I destroyed the delivery box, changed the recommendation to Sunrise (top inset), reboxed it, and found that I didn't change everything as I should have. Twice. So I sent a message to the project manager "can you take a look" and left the build in place. Then I saw everything looks better during Sunset (middle inset) from another angle.

Everything looks okay when the environment is adjusted to Midday, maybe marginally better than Midnight, but at this point maybe I'm being too picky. I could save two scripts and five prims by ditching the recommendations all together, but then I'd find something else to tweak.

Take my planet ... please!

Déjà Vu in SL

While dancing with my wife last night I kept seeing our movements momentarily freeze and even "rewind" a few seconds then proceed again, much like a bad sim crossing when your avie keeps moving for a while then "jumps back," but more briefly in these incidences. It reminded me of the déjà vu graphics glitch scene in the movie The Matrix (Web).

[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]
Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
(Web)

Big Text

As I'm tracking the imminent release of the new iMacs (Web; like I can afford one!) I'm lovin' the Full Page Zoom feature of Safari 4 βeta (Web). Like many my eyesight is not quite what it could be so being able to make Web pages bigger is a big plus (pun intended). Now if I can only find a way to make one click of the big A permanent ...