Finding gold

Today's gold newbie: Lethe Naumova

Witty, clever, delightfully acerbic. Good conversation and good company. She's a keeper. Trust me on that :)

Saving Daylight

Well, daylight saving is now on here, and off in the USA. That means I'm timeshifted two hours earlier with respect to SLT. That's going to make some meetings and whatnot harder to get to, but on the plus side, it means I got to attend a Show Tell (Primworx)!

I managed to get to a Show Tell event on my first or second day in SL, and haven't been able to make it to any since (too late or too early). Had a lot of fun. Caught up with a bunch of people that I've regrettably not had a chance to spend much time with recently.

The flavour of our current newbie intake remains...peculiar. There are some good ones still, but most of the rest remain pretty uncommunicative. Uncharacteristically so. I am perturbed by it, and some of the mentors have been likewise, as the newbies ignore all hails, refuse inventory offers and just shoulder on past mentors and welcomers. If it were only a few you might think it was just alts of oldbies, but there are dozens, literally hundreds of them.

Strange days indeed. The intake has slowed. We're at 74,787 at the moment, and 3700 inworld. A bit of a jump. I'm interested to see what changes the intake brings.

Ali, Shelaura, Topaz - thank you. Things were a bit nuts this-morning, but you all kept me smiling.

LightWave, SexyEyes - Wish I could have spent a bit of time chatting.

Another day, another thousand

And there's another thousand newbies.
Whew.
The last couple thousand have been quite a bit different from the usual intake. Most of them have neither spoken nor asked questions, even with a full crowd of mentors and helpers on hand. Perhaps they were listening to answers given to other people. Mostly they wandered in circles, stood in one place, and eventually wandered or logged off.

Of the few folks who are asking questions, fewer of those seem inclined to do more than ask a question or two, get their answers and move on.

The remaining few are gold. Talkative, inquisitive, and suchlike. Most already socialised in other online environments by some means. Looking forward to seeing more of those folks. I really hope the others do well and fit in though. I keep wondering if there's more we could be doing for them.

More!

Yow! Can hardly keep up. Have to run across town, but there are more newbies coming into SL than I've seen before. You might be talking to 3 or 4 at once, and there's ten wander past, confused or determined, or too shy to ask for help, or simply not wanting to be just another face in the crowd around a volunteer.

Overflow!

Went out to Waterhead. Discovered that we have a newbies popping out of the air just like houndeyes and headcrabs in Half-Life 1. Overflow? Maybe. Busy, busy. Just had 20 or 30 come through in a few minutes, though suddenly it's slowed right down.

Things that go bump

Looks like a lot of the lumps and bumps are getting sorted out. Nice to see the bumps being smoothed. Got some of my new tee-shirts into the system, and found a few designs that I did a couple weeks ago that I'd forgotten to upload. Whups! Time to play some catch-up.

Shout-out to Pym Sartre, for being my newbie of the day yesterday. Patient, friendly, cultured, urbane, civilized, well-spoken, and a pleasure to teach. Going to teach that boy to build, script, fly and crow!

And big hugs to Ginny Gremlin, mentoring like crazy. I always smile when I see her at work. It gives me hope.

Doug? Cruz? Where the heck have you been, boys? Tat's missing you!

Loving the new map. Prowled around it looking at odd bits of land, scrolling it around. Spotted something interesting on a little island, locked in the mainland. Some watermelony coloured prims, it looked like. Had to fly out there and seek the spoor of the wild Torley. No Torley to be found, these tumbled beams of pink and green were not hers!

Obviously the remnants of some lost island civilisation of watermelon worshippers. This must be all that remains of one of their holy places. Should have taken a snap. I've not yet developed proper touristy instincts.

Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair!

Teaching is learning. Learning is teaching. Remember that. Teaching orders knowledge in your head and gives you fresh insights into things you thought you already knew.

EDIT:

Barriers to Entry

Chatted with a melancholy friend today. She's offput by the established businesses. There doesn't seem to be a way to break in and become a big success. I think she's perhaps focusing a bit much on the big part.

I make enough from my tee-shirt sales that I cover my costs, pay for my account, and still have some to donate to Tashie's money-tree. And that's when I'm not giving away product to friends who think it's cool.

I can understand how she feels though. SL (like RL) is probably never going to be equitable or fair. Sometimes the undeserving seem to get the breaks. It happens.The right person in the right place at the right time. I felt a lot like she did when I started thinking about a business in my first few days. Every niche seemed to be full. I just did my thing anyway, and it worked out. Not at first, but after a little while.

There's always mobility, and those niches just aren't as full as they look. Some people switch business models, stop doing business and retire, or get tired. And there are always new folks coming in, so those niches keep widening. There's always opportunity for the persistent.

Fixes

Well, there appear to be several parts to the problem. One is on the
server side, and we've seen gridmonkeys scurrying around setting sims
to rights. The other is on the client side, and an update came out a
few hours ago. Looking forward to getting home and trying it out.

Spent my morning in the SL Education Senate meeting today. The sim
was one of the fixed ones, and it performed quite well. We got a bit of
territory covered, though without Squagmire's sterling leadership we
faltered a few times. Come back soon, Squaggy!

I see grey people. Everywhere!

Well, things could be better. Looks like there's a nasty cache-invalidation bug dealing with textures (and apparently also geometry). Things go into the cache and then they get removed. All in all pretty ugly. It's not something that appeared to happen on the preview grid.

Apparently LL are hammering on another update, which suggests they've either found the cause of the problem, or have figured out some sort of workaround.

Taught my rudiments-of-building class today. I do so love passing on the basics. Nothing will eliminate the need for persistence and practice, but the important thing is to have a foundation for it.

Not sure how the Osgeld's all-new NCI Show&Tell worked out. It's in the old time-slot, which means I generally have to be on the move to work right around the time it starts. Hope it went well. Osgeld seems to be a good egg.

Login-able

Looks like the maintenance is over. I suspect it was somewhat inconclusive as it's suggested that logins may still be slow. Nevertheless, I'm very much looking forward to getting back on the main grid when all my tasks and errands are done for the day. With luck, I'll have an hour or two before I have to hit the sack.

SL 1.7

Well, the 1.7 version of the SL client and grid appears to have gone in with relatively few glitches. LL report a gnome stuck in the gears, but fortunately there are people with mighty spanners.

Additionally, it looks like there were some extra issues with the login server, but those are apparently being worked on at the moment.

Mighty big hugs to the folks involved in such a major overhaul.