Waiting

Well, apparently while I was running errands and melting in the Summer heat, the last of the month's bandwidth allotment dribbled away, leaving me nothing for the day. Just waiting for the New Year so that I can get some bandwidth to log in with.

Kind of messes up the evening. I was looking forward to spending New Year's Eve with my friends on SL - I had made no other plans.

Having some local machine problems too. My local fileserver appears to have failed in the heat. Looking forward to cooler weather.

I've either an hour to wait, or two. Depending on whether the ISP's accounting server is running on daylight-saving time or not. If it is, I have an hour. If not, two.

It is not my intent to neglect you, my dears.

The only limit is your ...ISP

Turns out my ISP's bandwidth usage stats are...about a day wrong. I'm virtually out of bandwidth until January 1 (about 12.5 hours away - Since I am a day ahead of most of you, New Year is at 5am 31 December SLT for me).

I thought everything was going to work out fine, however the ISP apparently doesn't figure the last 24 hours into the statistics quite right, so when you look at the numbers it appears you are going to make it....and you aren't.

I've got enough for very light web-browsing and email, and IM/email, and maybe a couple of hours in-world this-evening.

I'll probably hop in for five minutes, send some rapid IMs, and bail out again. There are some people I want to leave messages for. After all, if someone doesn't send me an offline IM, I can't answer them back.

For those of you who think get a better ISP well..this is the best deal in town, folks. Most countries don't have 'unlimited' bandwidth deals. Some have things that are called that, but turn out to be very limited indeed. It's alright. It just takes a little management, and I think you'll all agree it's been a big month for me in SL :)

Since December 1, I've spent about 420 hours on Help Island. I've lost track of the number of newbies I've spoken to (hundreds), made some good friends, and felt good about myself and what I was doing - even during the few times when it wasn't much fun.

Looking forward to January.

Shriners

So, I take a break from Help Island to go help one of my kids on the mainland with a build problem. One thing leads to another - you know how it is; everyone suddenly has a small query or something to show, and that's fine. I love to help, and love to see how all my kids are getting on, if only I can find the time - and I'm gone for maybe 90 minutes.

What do I find when I come back? Shrines. To me. All over. Here are a few.



Add that to the sudden rash of gifts and thankyou notes in the wake of my building class the next day...well.

Now, I've got some mixed feelings about all of this. In context it's not really creepy or anything. Because there are so many people involved. And it's flattering, certainly. And makes me flush red to my roots.

I'm hardly certain whether I should just accept the Cult of Tateru, or ruthlessly suppress it as a waste of limited newbie funds. They're spending money on these texture uploads (in a couple cases, a lot), and that makes me feel a little awkward. Guilty.

Fifty-Two Pickup

Whew. Help Island has been mega-busy. 12 hours today in my first session, and 52 orientations. That's enough for a deck of cards, sans jokers.

(The jokers were there, but I don't count them: The fellow who wouldn't answer but walked up to me later and did some body-builder gestures at me, then wandered off and logged out; Mister no-pants - No, you do not make me hot, sirrah; That crowd)

There were a few jumps out to the main grid, in response to newbies urgently flashing the Tat-Signal, on top of all of this.

The best ones are the ones who spend at least a day on the island. They socialise better, they are more confident, and they learn faster and run into fewer problems on the grid.


Some of them come out looking like experienced oldbies. They get some initial orientation, they hang around with the volunteers, they practice, they listen, they chat, and some of them help out and teach, passing on what they know.

We're getting a heck of a lot of Christmas traffic. Not sure why, but Help Island's been darn busy, particularly today. Thankyou Zero Linden, and Patsy Linden for coming out and mucking in when our volunteer resources were spread thin. Katiahnya, SuezanneC, Brian Engel, Ginny Gremlin, Blueman, Toy; Thanks for just plain being there. Everyone else who popped in and out to help, bless you. We needed it.

Soon as I get this food down, it's back in again for the next shift.

Mentor Jam

It's so much fun introducing people to new ideas. SL is a new idea for most people that is in itself full of new ideas. Like a tantalising mysterious box, full of wonders.


We had something of a mentor jam this evening, a few newbies a few mentors, some good conversation and comfortable surroundings, questions and answers and trying things out. We all learned things, and that's the best result of all. You can teach without learning, but .. well, try not to do that :) Learning is so much more satisfying.

Those newbies? They'll be back. For sure.

Preconceptions

Resident intake continues apace. It's actually quite busy on that front at the moment, though it's lumpy. It'll be dead for a while, then you get swamped with half a dozen at once.

We've got quite a mix of people coming through, but most of them have one thing in common. Very few of them read or heard anything about SL recently. These are folks - like me - who have been aware of SL for some time, and finally found some reason or time to give it a go.

These folks form an interesting crowd, since they've already formed an opinion of SL, by not actually ever seeing it. They are already possessed of fairly strong, if not well-formed opinions at the outset. Some are positive opinions, but most of them aren't a good reflection of what SL is. Whatever the heck SL actually is.

In some cases, it's great watching their faces light up and realising how much cooler SL is than they thought. Others though look around, and whatever it is they see confirm whatever opinion they already had, and they're gone after a short time.

What is to be done? I'm not sure how we can catch the latter group. Would they be happy if we did find a way? Or not?

100K

The 100,000th resident passed through about 36 hours ago. We've had 1400 more since then. It's busy. There are new folks all over, and volunteers all over.

Less fortunately, we had a sim restart on Help Island without notice. Even a fifteen-seconds-advance-notice popup would have done the trick. Instead we all get kicked out. Didn't see any of the newbies again after that. Would have been awkward to explain.

Making progress

Well, we're making progress. More volunteers are actually coming out to the island. People are making an effort to call for replacements when they leave.

Some folks just don't mind leaving the island unattended, even though there is never any shortage of volunteers willing to attend, regardless of how busy or quiet the island might be. You don't need to put in a lot of time. Five hours or five minutes. Just make sure you call for a replacement to mind the island if you're the last one out.

Some of the volunteers complain whenever they hear the island mentioned, grumbling that they refuse to attend unless they are paid to attend, and harshly criticising the rest of us for turning up. *sigh* Not the point, folks. Yes, you should not volunteer if you don't want to volunteer, but don't just sit there and insult the rest of us because we choose to spend some time there. Our presence there is not a calculated insult.

Some of the volunteers just don't know anything about HI. They don't attend the meetings (often timezone issues), don't read the forums (who can blame them, really?), and don't really know where it is or what it's all about.

If we can just get a little closer to 24x7 coverage of the Island, then I'd be okay to call it a success. Right now, though, it depends on a small, core group of volunteers to keep it ticking over. Thankfully, as I suggested, that small group is starting to expand.

Once it does, perhaps I can squeeze a little more time out on the grid. Starting to feel a little out-of-touch with current events.

Redevelopment

Well, Help Island is being rebuilt. Quite a lot of work has been done, and on the whole it's quite pleasant. Today I took a quick flight around it and found all but one newbie paired off with a volunteer. Quite the pleasant change from the long hours I've spent alone with the newbies there. Not that other volunteers didn't show up. But it was sporadic and quite a few volunteers were prone to leaving the island unattended.

Looking forward to seeing how the in-world greeter-selection system will change the whole volunteer dynamic. Certainly I expect it to make better use of volunteer resources.

Help Island - Sunk

Right now a fair chunk of Help Island is underwater. Apparently some direct height-map loading went awry, submerging the land-bridges to the Orientation Islands and the sandbox, tutorial and telehub areas.

Right before the weekend, of course.

Did some emergency repaving to give us all something to stand on, rebuild the bridges, and so forth.


Since then, someone's rebuilt the landbridge to Orientation Island 10, but I'm not sure who, or why the rest wasn't done.

Redecoration

Well, originally I'd hoped to build a road from the Help Island sandbox out to Orientation Island 11. Newbies were faced with a barren expanse of terrain and it wasn't easy or obvious where to go, especially since all the interesting stuff was up in the far corner next to Orientation Island 10.

Well, things got a little out of hand. You know how that happens. Road, park, plaza, fountains, statuary, seats and benches, lamps, flowers, hedges. Plus side: It's more interesting now. Newbies are spending a bit more time looking around, more folks are going to see Wilder's house now, I think. I think the whole atmosphere has improved.

I'm not sure what Jeska will think, though. It's her land that I've been cluttering up.

If you show me yours

Last week I lined up Yumi Murakami to run an off-hours Newbie Show and Tell at the NCI, to cover for those folks who couldn't make it to Osgeld's timeslot. Of course there will always be some folks who can't make either timeslot, but I'm glad I picked Yumi.

She handled the whole event with enthusiasm and aplomb. The whole thing went off like a charm, especially for her first time hosting it. We had some great entries, and Yumi handled it all very well! Great job, Yumi! Looking forward to the next one already!