If you're having problems with our system, check it's our fault before complaining

From the official Second Life Blog:

"We’ve received a recent rise in reports of inventory loss, including inventory resulting back to default, including your avatar. We’re actively investigating this and having already helped a number of Residents, we’re continuing to work on individual cases.

In order to help you better, as with bugs and issues in general, it’s important that if you think you’re affected, that you rule out other causes first."

The entry then goes on to blame everything else, such as if you're using a wi-fi connection or if you might have given items to someone else by mistake.

To me, the entire tone of the posting is disrespectful. The point of it seems to be an attempt to blame ANY other cause than the system. It's even technically misleading, since although wi-fi "hotspots" can indeed cause high packet loss if there's 100 users all sitting in a massive lounge (at an airport for example) surfing wirelessly at the same time, but a home user with two or three PCs linked to their wireless router is not ever going to experience the same degree of packet loss unless they have faulty equipment. I've got Sympatico High Speed Unplugged, what could be termed the ultimate in wifi (the modem doesn't even plug into a phone line) and yet I can still play SL without any issues. Also, many people who play SL play other online games as well, and if they had an important issue such as high packet loss, the other games would be unplayable. In all the cases I've heard of, or spoken to people about, this hasn't been the case.

Inventory loss means the item has gone. If you give it to someone else, you receive notification "Unfortunate Victim has accepted your inventory offer." If you get it returned, you receive a notification "Your item 'Linden Prayer T-Shirt' has been returned to your lost and found folder from plot testbed due to auto return rules" - people complain of inventory loss when they log on, open their inventory and half of it is missing.

In an attempt to aid Linden Labs in their diagnosing, here would be my checklist:

Have you just logged on? If you've just logged on, and half of your inventory isn't appearing, then you may have inventory loss. If you get it during a session keep an eye out for server messages in your chat log. A server message such as "Can't find " may indicate it's the by now infamous asset server that's creaking under the pressure yet again.

Have you cleared your cache? This is actually not a bad idea, since SL doesn't seem to know some of the time what to do with its cache, and in any case it crashes so often it frequently doesn't clean up what it was doing in a previous session, and this can lead to problems.

Is there an obvious message in your chat log to explain your loss? Such as the ones I've detailed above. Yes, it is also possible to drop entire folders into objects, but it's uncommon since a lot of inventory loss doesn't occur at home, and involves packaged items rather than folders. I would also say here that to drop ONE folder into an item by mistake is unusual. To drop SEVERAL folders into items is so unusual as to be not worth considering. People complain of inventory loss when they have no idea what happened to folders, they don't generally complain of it when they were using that folder a moment ago.

In your inventory's 'Recent Items' tab, do the items appear there? This means you were using them, and can clear up if you've dropped them into items. If it doesn't appear here, you haven't been using these items recently.

As for "search the knowledge base" - well, that's a laughable attempt to sidestep responsibility. If someone's got a problem and they HAVE caused it themselves and not realised it... trust me, they are NOT going to know enough about the situation to be able to find answers in the knowledge base, and those that know how the system works will already know whether or not the knowledge base can help.

I've often wondered why, if items are "ours", they're all kept serverside. If we've created an item surely the details of that item should be stored locally, on our own system, and uploaded to Linden Labs only as required? Looking at my inventory I've already got over 3000 items; people whose accounts are older may have tens of thousands of items. Is it not putting LL's asset server under too much pressure to have to store ALL of these serverside? Especially if a lot of them are attachments. Why must these things all be serverside, and prone to vanishing if a server hiccups?

Linden Labs, surely it should signify a problem if SUDDENLY there's been a rise in inventory loss complaints. Yes, there'll always be a level of complaints, from people who haven't actually lost anything... but if for several days you have 100 complaints and the next day you have 1000, then there's obviously something gone wrong or those 900 other people would be complaining on the other days too. It would be helpful - and respectful - if you made sure your own house was in order before trying to blame everyone and everything else!

Reflections on the time I've spent in SL

Once upon a time, there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours,
Think of all the great things we would do


When I first came to SL I was gobsmacked. The system held so much promise, made boundaries so much smaller. It wasn't long before I found Support for Healing, and not long after that I founded Listening Ear, for helping those who felt uncomfortable talking in a group environment. This was my home away from home, and when I lost people RL I could come here, where there was no death, and still be helpful.

There was even a darker side to SL, where I could indulge my fantasies, in the hope I might find respite from numerous ghosts that had haunted me over the years...

Then, the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If, by chance, I'd see you in the tavern,
We'd smile at one another and we'd say


Time passed. Rules changed. Arguments broke out about paid accounts vs free accounts. I moved countries, and somewhere along the way my first ever account was deleted, my land in Disl recycled, my possessions deleted. When I came back to SL after settling in another country, Support for Healing was a ghost island, regular meetings cancelled, hosts drawn from helping to dealing with RL matters. A very few people I managed to re-establish contact with. A few names I still try to look up every so often. I exchanged many a happy word with one person in particular, but I have no idea if she comes on any more... I've never actually seen her online, and now the system has changed so that you can't see the online/offline state of someone unless they allow it - which I still think is a deliberate cop-out to stop Lindens being IMd when they take no notice of the help request channel...

Just tonight, I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass, I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me?


When I first came to SL I was an escort for a while, to make enough Linden Dollars to survive. During my prowling today I was asked for sex in the usual pidgeon english that is a dead giveaway the person I'm talking to either doesn't speak good english, or is well under the age the mature grid requires, or both. With things like first land disposed of, and RL politics in the form of various countries politicians invading SL to canvass for any votes they could get... I just felt the loneliness very strongly. I looked at the glass of the monitor, and I did indeed see a strange reflection of myself, and wonder - IS this really me, is this what I've become, and all I can ever be?

Through the door, there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same


I watch the happenings these days at places like CaRP and Support for Healing from the sidelines. I see familiar faces, hear people occasionally greet me... all the dreams are gone now, gone to dust, as time passes and Second Life gets more restrictive, more unstable and more filled with people who just want to fulfill sexual fantasies with this unmoderated medium...

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days

Very little holds me to SL now... the few people I mention in my web profile, the occasional genuine cry for help that I can in some small way help... but very little else. Some days I just long to fade.

One day, I shall fade from SL. I will close my account, and click the magic button in control panel that officially kills me from the system. Few will notice, few will care.

It's just another lost dream, after all.

Stay safe.

(lyrics: Mary Hopkins - Those were the days, my friend)

Upstream Girl

Plenty has been said, and plenty continues to be said, about the upcoming voice feature to Second Life. Now that the beta has gone live, there's a lot of comments about it on the blog, but I shall not be using it for a wholly different reason than any of the ones given there.

When I was with Telewest in the UK I got a speed of 3Mb/512k and the latter is the important number - it's the upstream value, the amount of data per second that your computer can send back to your ISP.

When I first came to Canada, that changed to 5Mb/384k which was faster at receiving but slower at sending. This was still okay for what I wanted; SL worked fine, and so did WoW.

Now I've moved ISPs again to Sympatico, and quite frankly they're not very good, but at the present time they're all I can get onto. Their speed is 3Mb/256k which again is fine for receiving, but now on the threshold for transmitting. World of Warcraft now has severe latency problems, and Second Life - without voice - is also somewhat laggy. Add the strain of having to deal with voice streams coming in and going out, and the whole thing will collapse into lag hell. I already can't use Skype or Ventrillo with either Second Life or World of Warcraft without getting such severe breaking that people can't understand what I'm saying.

I reserve judgement on whether it's a good or a bad idea to add voice to Second Life. I do agree that many "girls" out there will end up being proved to be men, and I do think a lot of escorts may lose their jobs when the clientèle discover they've actually been engaging in gay cybersex. But all this doesn't matter to me... Second Life is, after all, a game, and if guys want to play girls, or girls want to play guys, that's fine with me. But those who are on slow upstreams like I currently am won't have a choice about voice, because they simply won't have the bandwidth for the extra functions. Perhaps Linden Labs' time would be better spent fixing bugs and improving compression (and particularly trying to do something about packet loss, which is one of Second Life's particular bugbears) than introducing new slowdowns to the grid.

I called you... but you weren't there...

I've had some pretty appalling waits for customer service departments in the past, but Linden Labs - you just outdid them all:

My Skype log for today, at the time of writing, has 6 entries for the Linden Labs number. The first four I tried to get through to the general enquiries department. I was told "The average wait today is five to six minutes." After 14 minutes on hold EACH time I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."

I decided to put my priority up, by instead selecting billing services (indicating that I was a paying customer) - Strangely enough, the average wait time there was "five to six minutes", although the music on hold was better and interspersed with "Thank you for holding, your call is important to us, we'll be with you shortly." messages.

20 minutes later, with still no answer, the system transferred me back to the queue for the general enquiries (with it's absolutely AWFUL music - if you can call it that - on hold, interspersed with random Linden wisdom all about how to spend money and view forums and stuff like that.) As if a 20 minute wait on hold wasn't bad enough, it then left me on hold a further 14 minutes for the general department - and then, guess what?

I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."

So let me see, that's ONE AND A HALF HOURS waiting on hold and still I never got to speak to anyone. Remember, this is also at a toll free number, so once the call was answered, Linden Labs were being billed (thank goodness) for each minute I was on hold. If I'd had to pay for the one and a half hours on hold as well, I'd NOT have been a happy customer. How much, I wonder, did my unanswered calls cost Linden Labs, and how many other people cost them that much, given that I obviously didn't speak to anyone because the lines were to busy?

While I appreciate that some technical support lines might feel a bit like the three dead trolls in a baggie internet helpdesk sketch there can be no excuse for making paying customers wait 90 minutes on hold and STILL not have anyone answer the phone.

Come on, Linden Labs, lets have some service around here!

The worth of a Wildcat

I just got sold for a week at CaRP for L$300.

Good to know I'm worth SOMETHING...

Might take my mind of the mistake I made earlier today, wiping out an entire 115Gb partition on one of my hard drives...

Politics leaks from first life to SL

In my capacity as staff writer for the Metaverse Messenger I was asked to look at the new campaign headquarters in SL of American Presidential hopeful John Edwards.

I have to say, having visited his site, I do think that the most important thing from my perspective - that of continuing healthcare.

Regular readers of this blog will know about how I work in healthcare and how important it is to me. To find Bush proposing not only to send more troops to Iraq but to reduce the healthcare budget does not make sense to me.

In his song "Nineteen" Paul hardcastle wrote:

According to a Veteran's Administration study
Half of the Vietnam combat veterans suffered from what Psychiatrists call
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder
Many vets complain of alienation, rage, or guilt
Some succumb to suicidal thoughts
Eight to Ten years after coming home almost eight-hundred-thousand men are
still fighting the Vietnam War

Iraq is going to be no different. Returning soldiers from Iraq, whether returning whole or crippled in the combat, are going to need domestic healthcare. To cut back on it and instead use the money to send even more people into a situation where they will need it is insane.

So, I'm going to be following Senator Edwards' campaign in SL with great interest.

Illness

I've had appendicitis which has caused me to be away from SL for a while, but don't despair, I shall be back soon, and I'm still managing to send in the backlog of M2 articles I have.