Books And Libraries

So my ususal Monday trick of listening to Digital Human on BBC Radio 4 for blog inspiration failed this week because they were talking about Cyborgs, transhumanism and whether we are all subsconsciously becoming Cyborgs and try as I did, I couldn’t find an angle to get to Second Life from that material, a jolly good listen however.

So I decided, after urgings, to investigate e-books. This was a tale of woe, first of all I tried to get an e-book from Waterstones. However to read e-books on the PC I needed to download Adobe Digital Editions, this was a breeze and now I was cooking on gas, all I needed to do was remember my Adobe password and I could install my soon to be purchased e-book on different mediums, if I didn’t register, I’d only be able to read it on my PC. At this point things went tits up, I couldn’t remember my password. Aha, there’s a password reset request and sure enough, I was informed an email was on its way. Several hours later and I’m still waiting.

So instead I went to Amazon, installed their Kindle for PC reader, realised I’d forgotten my Amazon password… oh heck but this time a password reset request actually worked. The only annoying thing left was having to pay VAT on my e-book, in the UK we don’t pay VAT on physical books but an e-book is considered an electronic service, not a book, even though it is a book, I’ll save that rant for another day, although Remember Remember, the fifth of November is an ideal day for a rant about The Government! The real moral of this story is to remember your passwords.

Then I read a little and decided to quickly take a look at the Second Life storytelling scene and popped to the Seanchai Library.

Seanchai1

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Oskar Confirms Departure Over At SLUniverse

Oskar (formerly Linden) has apparently commented on the SLUniverse thread regarding his departure. I have been toying whether or not to post this because I don’t want Oskar to get into trouble, but as SLUniverse is a public place, I’ve decided to link to it anyway. There’s also a picture of a man with a big beard who has a sign saying he’s the Oskar formerly known as Oskar Linden! He actually looks a lot like I imagined he would! I don’t think this is a hoax.

Oskar doesn’t go into specifics about his departure, as he’s not allowed to by the terms of his separation agreement, but does talk of his shock at the infamous Skype call that led to his departure.

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Private Estate Losses Slow To Lowest Decrease Since June

Tyche Shepherd’s weekly report of the size of the grid has revealed this week that we lost just ten private regions this week. One Linden region was added, making a net loss of just nine regions, the smallest fall in regions since the week ending June 24th, which was actually the last time we had growth in the number of regions on a weekly basis.

Now considering that this is a much smaller loss than recently, it could very well be an outlier, rather than an indication of a change in trend. Time will tell. The same can be said of the net loss of over one hundred regions reported on October 21st, that was much higher than usual trends and thankfully looks like an outlier, that was linked in with the Royal Properties estate going belly up.

Tyche has also reported the results of her October 2012 private estate survey, which is based on a random survey of 5,000 private regions to determine the results.

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Failed!

 

An Image Should Be Here

So there appear to have been some technical issues overnight, which are continuing, unscheduled inventory maintenance has been followed by unscheduled login maintenance. When I try to login to the main Second Life website I get the message above, a plain white screen with the word Failed, at the top left. This is actually a rather user friendly message that tells me all I need to know, basically, something is borked. However it’s not as much fun as the old gorillas with hammers image that used to appear, it’s still a to the point message.

However a point worth noting is that outages of this length and bumpiness are infrequent these days, their service has improved a lot, but sometimes things still go tits up. Older residents have more experinece of problems, I arrived in 2007, when once a week there would be scheduled downtime and then lots of people trying to login at the same time when the grid was supposed to be backup, followed by a flood of forum posts complaining it still wasn’t back, in between posts along the lines of “I’m back in! neener neener! At times that could get quite funny. However as I said, things have improved over the years.

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Oskar Appears To Have Left The Building

Prokofy Neva broke a story on November 3rd that Oskar Linden had been fired. SLUniverse had a thread regarding rumours that Oskar had been fired. NowLinden’s don’t comment on departures, ever. I’ve been to office hours before where people ask a Linden whether someone has been fired, and they never tell you!

Now, I don’t know if Oskar has been fired, but a couple of things here, love him or loathe him, Prok generally doesn’t post malicious rumours. I can’t see Prok making a post like that without having investigated the issue and spoken to sources.

In the SLUniverse thread, Jessica Lyon of Phoenix viewer development fame pretty much confirms that Oskar is no longer working for Linden Lab and that Oskar was surprised to have lost his job.

I’m always disappointed when we lose a Linden, I can’t recall a single Linden whom I’ve been happy to see go, and that includes Daniel, whom got a bad press over putting his name to an infamous blog post in the past. I mean I’m not saying I think they were all the bees knees, but they play their part and do their best and even when I’m critical of them, I respect them. The thing is, I admired Oskar.

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