Robby Wins

I went into the Beta Grid to test the C:SI swords with the new Havoc engine. The following error appears when slashing: "Unable to create requested object - Parse failure." This happened with my Musashi Black Rose and Ashes Cursed Spirit, and Kasumi said it happened with her Archanox sword. However, the Wave Katana didn't produce this error (hence this post's title). Regardless of the error, all the swords could damage another avatar, however only the Wave could do damage to the practice dummy I have, which uses collision detection. Kicks did damage and produced no error messages with all the swords, but they didn't push the opponent. We were in a sim with llPushObject restricted, though.

Jumps are different. You can't move around as much while you're in the air. The effect this has on dueling is that when you jump slash, there is no way to avoid landing right behind your opponent (if they don't move) instead of far away from them like people often do.

For all the swords, the avatar didn't move during a special. They still did damage if someone was nearby, and Kasumi actually managed to hurt herself with one.

There was one bug we found that was hard to reproduce. After dueling, both of us were sunken into the ground. We fixed it by teleporting each other. During the next fight, I sunk so far into the ground that I got stuck in my falling animation and couldn't move. I tried to reproduce this by running around, jumping, and doing sword actions while out of mouselook, but it wasn't happening.

Google's Virtual World

It looks like Google may be launching their own virtual world by the end of this year. It will probably use the data from Google Earth, i.e. be a virtual replica of the real world. It will be interesting to see what Google does with it. Since it doesn't look like there will sword fighting any time soon, I probably won't abandon Second Life, but knowing Google they probably have some pretty cool stuff planned. At the same time, it appears that Linden Labs is working on opening up Second Life as much as possible:

"We imagine a future where Second Life is able grow beyond the borders of Linden Lab. We see regions running on open source, alternative simulators. We see web services that allow people to build mash-ups of Second Life and the Web. We see organizations being able to integrate their members and their members’ avatars. This is the vision of future Second Life Grid that we want to develop."

So it's possible we will see a future where the best parts of Google's new virtual world are integrated into Second Life.

Google is also going to announce on November 5 a new API that will be similar to Facebook's application API. Basically, web developers will be able to leverage social aspects of Google's tools such as Orkut and Google Talk on their own webpages. This is pretty huge, as it has the implication of turning the entire internet into a social network if the API is used extensively. The Google Talk API, for example, could be used to easily create an area in a webpage where everyone currently looking at that page could chat with each other. Imagine if this new social internet was completely accessible from and integrated into Google's virtual world. I think the next 5 years should be pretty interesting.

p.s.: Didn't Google try to buy Linden Labs earlier this year?

Jokes

I found a list of computer science jokes. I was a bit disturbed by the guy pointing at me and laughing.

Quality Metrics

Linden Labs now has a page showing Service Quality metrics. Right now, it just shows a bar graph of planned and unplanned interruptions since March. The trend doesn't look good. Hopefully the fact that they have made this information publicly available indicates that they hope and expect to improve it.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

I've never been very good at pirate talk. Let me give it a try.

"I can burn you a copy of Spiderman 3 if you want."

p.s.: I realize the bold I added in my last post isn't very visible. I added underlining to make it stand out more. If you missed it, my final comment may not have made much sense.

ToS Problem Resolved

Ok, I got my alt working again by going to live chat support a third time. I spoke with "Patrick" again, but this time convinced him to actually fix my account. I got this amusing email when they fixed both of my accounts. I emphasized my favorite phrase in bold.

Dear Colin Kiernan,

Greetings from Second Life. Occasionally, Linden Lab needs to determine the cause of bugs, simulator slowdowns, and various other occurrences that you may have experienced while in Second Life.

While fixing a bug, we were able to trace it to something that your avatar may have been doing, or something they may have seen. For this reason, we have disabled your ability to log in to Second Life while we examine your logs and try to determine the cause.

Your account will be returned shortly (usually within a 1/2 hour), and no changes will be made to your character or account other than those required to resolve the problem.

Your account will be restored as soon as we resolve the specific issue, and we will notify you via email when that happens. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact us if you have further questions.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab

"Sir, we have tracked the problem with your account to last Friday, when your avatar witnessed a double homocide involving a pregnant woman and a kitten. It was extremely traumatic."

Comments from the Official Linden Blog

Sometimes I wonder what percentage of Linden Lab's employees take anti-depressants.

"…we value free expression, bla bla bla"

"How about the account history page NOT updating for hours…a problem that exists since last thursday?

Good morning Linden…hope you guys/gals had a good rest - at least your sleep seems to be very sound !"

"It’s posts like these that make me laugh quietly to myself."

"WOW…… right now i can’t remember any of the bugs i was working around all the time that HASN’T been fixed!!! GREAT WORK!!!"

"You know this may be alittle OFF TOPIC - but you keep on with this new CRAP! I WANT YOU TO FIX THE SOFTWARE FIRST ! I have crashed 24 times today - get that LL 24 friggin times. This time EVERY NIGHT (LISTEN NOW) EVERY NIGHT I start jerking and jagging and stuttering and slobbering all over myself. I push 8md bandwidth !!! HEAR THAT LL ???? It’s not on MY SIDE> I am damn tired of it. You charge me $9.95 every friggin month “ON TIME” cause that’s the only software you HAVE that WORKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am sick and tired of friggin posting here cause you never fix crap - you never answer OR resolve “BUG REPORTS” you do nothing but introduce new crap that screws things up more. You are loosing premium members and “gaining” newbies that don’t pay crap!!! I am sick and tired of you not addressing the issues brought up in the blog replies. You whistle and bell us and give us a story. LL you have some SERIOUS ISSUES to address. Some of which are SECURITY ISSUES>which I have told you about the bugs in your software and you ignore. You take our money - on time. When your “cracked” software allows avatars to poof objects and manipulate other avatars and access my funds - you have a serious problem -YET YOU PAY NO ATTENTION TO IT OR ANSWER MY REPORTS!!!! That’s “good” business! You pay absolutly no attention to “bug” or “abuse” reports except send me an email. I can use your online support fine “that works” half the time to waste 70 minutes to get no where and cut off. Your relationship with PayPal - well let’s just say PayPAl don’t like you. Straight up!!! Everytime I do PayPal I call to call you - on MY DIME to set it straight - let me hear you explain that LL. It does get straight but it costs me another 5 bucks long distance to do that. How many lindens it that LL? You can remove this post if you don’t like the truth."

"/me laughs at yet another half-done pseudo-effort of problem solving."

These are all from the past few weeks or so. Some of the best ones were from the Wednesday maintenance posts back when they shut down the grid every two weeks. I might go back and look through those if I find myself with nothing better to do.

Can LL change anything without a bug?

LL made a change to the Terms of Service today. The nature of the change isn't the topic here, although it appears to be beneficial. The problem is I now can't log in to SL as I have to agree to the new ToS, but the dialog is stuck on "loading..." and won't let me choose to agree. I have tried restarting the client. Grr...

Update: I went to the support page on the website and connected to live chat. "Jake" asked what my problem was, I told him, he said "I will fix this" and then a few minutes later "fixed". I successfully logged in (I didn't see the ToS box). So...I avoided agreeing to the new ToS...?

Update 2: I am having the same problem with my alt (who I haven't introduced yet, that post is coming), but since my alt doesn't have a premium account, I can't use live chat. I went back to my normal account and back into live chat, telling them I was having the problem with an alt. This time "Patrick" said they knew about that problem and were working on it. I asked if there was a work-around, and he said they were asking people to just wait a few minutes until it loads. I think I have been waiting close to 10 minutes now. Where is "Jake"!?

Tagging Inventory Items in SL

My inventory in SL is a nightmare, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has trouble keeping it organized. I just sumbitted a feature request to Jira to add tagging support to objects, as seen in Gmail and many other services.

I think a very useful feature that seems easy to implement is to allow tagging of inventory items. By tagging, I mean assigning one or more keywords to objects. This can be seen in many of Google's services such as Gmail. This feature would make it much easier for a resident to find items in his/her inventory, which can be rather difficult for residents with large inventories.

Currently, a resident must either spend a lot of time organizing everything into folders so they can easily find what they or looking for. Otherwise, they need to remember the name of the object they want, which is sometimes hard.

Assigned tags would be transferred along with items, so that people wouldn't have to tag each new item they got, which isn't any better than having to move it into the proper folder. Ideally, the tags would be pre-assigned by the creators and previous owners. This would make it much easier to find specific items. For example, I might have a shirt with "mens", "goth", "shirt", "short-sleeved", "black". If I felt like wearing a goth outfit, I could just look at all the items in my inventory with the "goth" tag. Maybe I want to show off my new tattoo, then I can search for the "short-sleeved" tag. There could also be tags that SL maintains, such as "added to inventory in the last 30 days" or "rezzed/attached/worn in the past 7 days", etc.

If you think this is a good idea, go and vote for it and then spread the word!

Wha?

It occurred to me how strange certain computer geek terms must sound to outsiders.

"Gooey" programming?
You mounted a hard drive?
You used "eunuchs" for your project!?

I'm sure I'll think of a lot more.

Google Sets

There is an experimental Google project called Google Sets that is fun to play with. You give it a few words or phrases, and then it comes up with a list of related items. For example, if I give it "red", "green" and "blue", it generates a long list of colors (and "unleashed07", for some reason). As the list goes down, the terms seem to be less and less related. I can see a way this might be useful. Let's say you don't like iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player. Type those into Google Sets, and it will give you a ton of other music playing programs, such as my favorite, Amarok (only for Linux...until Amarok 2 comes out). I was also able to stump it. I gave it "Oda", "Takeda", and "Shimazu", which are three clans from Sengoku era Japan. I expected other clans such as Mori, Uesugi, Hojo or Imagawa, but instead I got nothing.

Comparing Second Life on Windows and Linux

Here's something I found interesting. I logged into Second Life a couple times when I was still running Ubuntu, and I noticed something about my framerate. (Unfortunately, Blogspot appears to convert any image uploaded to a jpeg, which makes it hard to see the individual red dots in the screenshots.)


You can't see the dots very well, but there are two distinct columns on either side. On my old computer, I used SL in both Windows XP and Ubuntu, but I never saw this. My framerate is oscillating between about 35 and 42 fps, forming those two columns. Usually the distribution is more chaotic. It might have something to do with the dual-core CPU, or could just be that I'm running it on a much newer Ubuntu installation without a lot of other software installed. I thought maybe it had something to do with the window manager, so I ran SL without a window manager to see what it would look like.

Now we see a much more steady framerate. It also looks like this if I switch to fullscreen mode, but am still running a window manager (GNOME).

Now that I'm running Windows, I decided to do the same experiment. There's no point in comparing the actual framerates, as I wasn't always in the same place when I took these screenshots (but I did make sure I wasn't looking at any avatars or anything that was moving and might cause fluctuation).

In windowed mode, there's is a lot of fluctuation, and it tends to be all over the place. What's shown here is perhaps a little more extreme than the norm.

Fullscreen is better, showing slightly less fluctuation than Linux in windowed mode.

On a side note, I have probably used SL about equal amounts in both Ubuntu and Windows XP, so I'm going to write a short comparison for anyone who's interested. For me, it always feels smoother in Ubuntu, although when I actually look at the framerate there doesn't seem to be any significant difference. The Linux viewer also seems more stable. A downside to Ubuntu is that there is no support for video playback in the Linux viewer (which is why it is still tagged as 'alpha'), but I don't need that very often. One thing that always annoyed me in Ubuntu was the sound. I won't go into the technical details, but there are two options. If I just run SL normally, the sound is delayed about 1 second from when I should hear it. This is kind of annoying, and might actually hurt my dueling ability since a lot of my reaction is based on sound. If I edit the script that runs SL by commenting out a certain line, the sound delay is fixed, but there is a side effect that SL doesn't allow anything else to play a sound. There are times when someone will post a youtube link or something like that, and I can't watch it without logging out. It also makes it so I can't listen to music while I'm using SL, which is something I do a lot.

Chat with Dell Tech Support

Here are parts of my conversation with Dell tech support. I saved the chat log, but that turned out to be unnecessary as they emailed it to me a few minutes later.

09/07/2007 06:33:15PM	Session Started with Agent (Harshavardhan_77570)
09/07/2007 06:33:27PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Thank you for contacting Dell XPS Premium Support. My name is Harshavardhan and my rep ID number is 0177570. How may I assist you today?"
09/07/2007 06:34:08PM	Colin Kern: "I have just installed Windows XP on my XPS 410, but ethernet and sound doesn't work."
09/07/2007 06:34:22PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "I will assist you with the issue."
09/07/2007 06:34:40PM	Colin Kern: "Thank you."
09/07/2007 06:36:29PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "When was the first time you had this problem ?"

Notice it was a about 2 minutes of silence after I stated my problem before he asked that question. Also notice I have already answered it in my initial statement.

09/07/2007 06:37:37PM	Colin Kern: "I bought the computer from Dell with Ubuntu Linux installed, and everything worked fine then. But I have just installed Windows XP, and the sound and ethernet don't work."
09/07/2007 06:39:02PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Have you made any software or hardware changes?"

Umm....I'd say I made the biggest possible software change? Also, notice the almost 2 minute delay again.

09/07/2007 06:40:35PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Have you tried any steps from your end to resolve the issue?"
09/07/2007 06:41:53PM	Colin Kern: "I looked in the device manager to try to diagnose the devices, and they did not appear in the list, so I believe the problem is that I don't have the drivers."
09/07/2007 06:42:15PM	Colin Kern: "I looked at Dell's support website, but was confused as to which drivers I need to download."

I like that I was asked what I had already tried, instead of the normal tech support experience where they take you painfully through everything you've already tried in mind-numbing step-by-step instructions.

09/07/2007 06:43:13PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "All right."
09/07/2007 06:43:34PM	Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "Can I take the control of your system to check with the issue?"

Now, if you read my previous post, you know that I put a wireless card in the computer. But he didn't know this, so I don't know how he was expecting to be able to connect to my computer. I had already told him one of my problems was with ethernet device. Luckily, I did have the wireless card. The Dell software to do this failed the first time, but it worked on a second attempt. After connecting, there was a delay of a few minutes, followed by him opening Device Manager, then another long delay. A total of 12 minutes after he connected to my computer:

09/07/2007 07:13:59PM

Agent (Harshavardhan_77570): "You need to install the drivers on the computer."

I waited for more, since I had stated above that I was pretty sure this was the problem but that I didn't know which ones to download. I finally asked where to get them and he said he'd give them to me; then navigated to the driver download page and began downloading. It was going to take 40 minutes, so I told him I had a slow connection and that if he just gave me the URLs to the drivers, I could download them and install them on my own. He gave them to me, and even asked me if I wanted him to call me the next day to see if it worked. I told him I'd just contact tech support if it didn't. I guess this was a pretty good tech support experience, compared to others I've had. From beginning to end it was 1 hour and 15 minutes, but during a lot of that I was waiting for a response, and could watch TV.

Finally!

Ok, here's how I finally got Windows on my computer.

In Ubuntu, I was able to apply the SP2 update to the files I had copied from the CD using Wine. The problem was with burning it back onto another CD. I extracted the Windows boot image, but it wasn't in a normal format, and as much as I searched on the internet, I couldn't find a Linux tool that could do it. I burned a few duds that contained the data but weren't bootable. The next thing to try was running trial versions of Nero or Roxio with Wine. Neither would run with Wine, so it was finally time to install Windows XP on my laptop. I got back to the point I was at before, and then got the trial version of Roxio. But guess what? The trial version doesn't allow the option I needed. I tried Nero and found out the same thing. So it was back to the drawing board. I finally discovered a program called nLite, which does everything for you. I downloaded it and had my slipstreamed CD within fifteen minutes.

So I went to install Windows with my new CD...and I still got the blue screen of death. The error was different, though. I wrote down the important information (some hex numbers) and then started searching around on the internet. I finally found out what the problem is on the Dell support website. My motherboard settings were set to "RAID on", and I needed to switch it to "RAID autodetect/ATA". When I went to change it in my motherboard, I noticed it said that switching could decrease performance, even if I only had one disk (if you don't know, RAID is a method of using multiple disks to either increase performance or backup data). It's interesting that they had this option set for Linux, but it doesn't work with Windows. I wonder if I should try to get a RAID driver and switch back to it. Anyway, once I had changed the setting, I was able to install Windows without a problem. Unfortunately, not everything worked when I booted it up.

The first thing I noticed was that I had no network devices. I noticed later that I also had no sound. The problem was obviously with drivers, but upon getting to Dell's driver download page I couldn't figure out which I needed to get out of the about a hundred that were listed. They were categorized, but there were still something like 5 for networking and 8 for audio. At this point, I was using my laptop to look for the drivers with the intention to transfer them with a USB flash drive. I decided it would be easier if I took my wireless card out of my old computer and put it in this one. I did that and then started running Windows Update. There was an updated driver for my wireless card that I selected to have downloaded, but when got to installing it, there was a flash of BSOD and my computer restarted. Windows booted up, BSOD after a few seconds, computer restarts, repeat. I got into safe mode and uninstalled the wireless card. Rebooted and still had the problem. I tried rolling back the driver, but it said it didn't have any previous versions stored. Instead of spending who knows how long figuring out how to fix this, I just reinstalled Windows. After this, I was very frustrated and just wanted to get things working. I went to Dell's support website and was able to chat online with a technician who eventually gave me the drivers I needed. Look forward to another post containing this chat session. So after getting the drivers, everything works, and I am being careful to not let Windows download that updated driver. I had a similar problem with my old computer, where it always wanted to download an updated driver for my sound chip, but it would always just break sound and I'd have to roll back.

So hopefully this will be the last of these types of posts for a while, as I can now enjoy a working computer. On another note, I have 2 other posts I want to do, and I'm thinking of a 3rd. I'll try to space them out, maybe save some for tomorrow. But expect more posts in the near future.

The Void

Here I am in the void after sitting on something. I'm sure this has happened to everybody before. This time was strange, though, because I seem to have taken someone else's attachments with me. You can see my Wave on my back...so what's that other sword I'm sitting on? and that necklace thing? I've never seen that before in my life. That green/red glow (mostly red in this shot) is the multitool that most people have. It does that when it gets rezzed and not attached for some reason. All my attachments seem fine, so I can only assume that belongs to someone else as well. When I returned from the void, I looked around for these accessories but didn't see anyone wearing them. Very odd.

Freezing & Crashing

There was an article today in the Second Life Herald that had an interesting graph of some data from the recent key metrics release. It showed that about 24% of sessions are ended "abnormally". I'm not sure exactly what this includes...obviously crashes or freezes. I find this number surprisingly high, as I would estimate 5% of my sessions, at most, end in freezes or crashes. Since my internet problems have started, however, I'm sure I've been contributing to this number from all the times my connection has gone out on me while I was logged in. This makes me wonder how many of these abnormally ended sessions are actually not the fault of Second Life, but something on the user's end.

How often do you freeze or crash? Are there other ways your sessions ends "abnormally"?

p.s.: I am writing this from my new computer which is now running Windows XP. I was finally successful in getting it installed, and I may write about it. Right now, though, it's something I just want to forget.

The Fate of Second Life

Will Second Life still be here next year? In five years? To answer this question, let's first take a look at Linden Labs financial situation.

It's important to realize that revenue is not profit. Many people see that Second Life is generating millions of dollars a month, and then don't understand why LL doesn't upgrade their network infrastructure and servers to be able to support the growing population. The fact is that LL doesn't have millions of dollars to spend, because the cost of maintaining the grid at its current state is extremely high. An article published in the Second Life Herald this summer looked at the sources of income for LL and their costs, and found two important facts. First, that while LL is making a profit, it is a very small one; and second, that about 1/3 of their revenue comes from selling servers (private islands), and this doesn't include the monthly fees of those private islands, but just the setup fees. This means that unless LL significantly changes either their sources of revenue or their costs, Second Life is only profitable as long as it continues to grow at its current rate. This is basically what caused the dot-com bubble and burst. Internet companies assumed that the growth of the internet seen in the mid-late '90s would continue at that rate indefinitely. There are only so many people in the world, so obviously the growth is going to have to slow down at some point. For the dot-com companies, this happened around 2000. When will it happen for Second Life?

It was around the time I started SL that so many companies began experimenting with marketing in Second Life. If Second Life became an effective marketing tool, LL might be able to get support from companies to boost their profits. LL announced in their blog today the launch of a website focused on assisting companies and other organizations in creating a presence in Second Life. However, I began to see articles popping up a few weeks ago (I get email from Google whenever news stories with the term "Second Life" appear) reporting that many companies are now abandoning their Second Life projects. I think at this point it's too early to tell if and how companies will use Second Life.

There is an article I read earlier this summer I found intersting. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find it again. The author speculated that LL might not care about Second Life continuing for years to come. Why? He saw the trend of LL releasing new features one after the other while the quality of the grid degraded, and recognized a strategy that has been used by companies before. The idea is basically that a company spends all their money creating features (which they patent) and don't care about the actual product failing. Other companies will create their own versions of the product, and now the original company will be able to collect royalties on their patents. So in the case of Second Life, it might fail but if anyone else creates a virtual world with, for example, integrated voice chat, LL will collect royalties. The caveat to this theory is that LL doesn't appear to be patenting like crazy. I personally don't think this is what's going on, but you never know.

From what I've seen, it doesn't look good for Linden Labs, but I don't think this means the end of Second Life. Even if Linden Labs loses all its money, declares bankruptcy, and the grid is shut down, there is still the open source viewer and OpenSim. People will start creating their own grids using OpenSim. It's even likely that the employees of Linden Labs would start contributing to the open source projects (I can only assume they are as obsessed with playing SL as all the normal residents are). But these new grids won't all be linked together in a monolithic "main grid" like the current SL. Instead, there will be numerous grids for different purposes: A C:SI grid, a Gorean grid, an underwater basket weaving grid, etc. I think this is a good thing. Smaller grids are cheaper and easier to maintain. Also, because both the client and server are open source, each grid can have specialized viewers and server code for whatever service they are providing. In fact, I think that once the OpenSim project becomes more mature, what I've just described will happen regardless of whether the main grid goes down or not. I think that people will want to specialize the software to fit their needs, as has happened with almost every open source project out there.

But it's expensive to buy server machines and rent enough bandwidth to maintain your own grid. It seems like these new grids would have to charge lots of money to stay running. If you look at Second Life now, though, there are tons of private sims that people have provided free of charge, and those sims are pretty expensive.

Still there are some other problems that will have to be addressed. For example, what happens to our accounts? Will we have separate accounts for each grid we want to log on to? Perhaps someone will maintain an account server that the grids can talk to, so that we can maintain one account across all the grids. What will happen with money? Will we revert back to a pure barter system (I'll give you this exploding egg for that dancing cow)?

Regardless of these problems, I think the future of Second Life is bright, even if LL goes out of business.

Monkey Wrench

I went to the "Technology Solutions Center" on campus to buy Windows XP today (see my previous post), but it turns out I have to order on their website and wait for shipping; they don't keep it in stock. Being impatient, I started looking for alternative methods of getting an install CD of Windows XP with SP2 (other than pirating it). I came across this, which I am going to try. Basically, it involves copying the contents of the install CD into a folder, downloading the SP2 update and applying it to the folder, then burning a new CD. First, I am going to try doing it on my new computer in Ubuntu, using Wine and other tools. I would love to be able to say I took an old Windows XP CD and created a (legal?) up-to-date CD using Linux. If I fail (which is likely), the backup plan is to use my laptop and create the CD in Windows. That will be more annoying because I use Ubuntu on my laptop and so I will have to backup files, install Windows, create the CD, then reinstall Ubuntu, i.e., to get Windows on my desktop, which has Ubuntu, I have to install Windows on my laptop, which I want Ubuntu on, so that I can install Windows on my desktop, and then install Ubuntu back on my laptop.

Worse than Dial-up?

It's story time again. This one is about the horrible internet connection I've been living with all summer.

For the past year, we had Verizon DSL, which was fine, although rather slow (downloads were about 90 KB/s on average). The problems started towards the beginning of the summer during a lightning storm. I was at my computer, on SL, and there was a popping noise accompied by my computer restarting. I don't remember there being a lightning strike or anything at that moment, but my only guess is that it was a power surge. When my computer finished booting (thank god it booted, the popping noise was not unlike that of a capacitor taking on too much charge), I noticed the internet was not working. I went down to the basement and saw that all the lights were off on the DSL modem, except for the power light which was flashing, and all the router's lights were off. I unplugged them and plugged them back in, tried other outlets around the house, still the same thing. I called Verizon, they sent a new modem, and I bought a new router.

With the new equipment, we could get back online, but the internet was unreliable. We kept losing our connection (dsl light on the modem would flash green, which means it isn't getting a signal from the ISP). It would come on and off, sometimes just for a few minutes, other times for hours at a time. Also, when it was on it was about half the speed as it used to be. I made multiple frustrating calls to Verizon tech support. Finally I convinced one of them that the problem couldn't be fixed by trivial methods such as turning off the modem and turning it back on, but that there was actually a more serious problem. They put in an order for a technician to come out and find the problem.

The technician came out and said that the line going out of our house needed replacing. You'd think he would then go ahead and replace it, but that would be wrong. Instead, he set up another date for someone to come out and fix it. Are these people really so specialized that one person is trained to diagnose a problem, but then someone else needs to actually fix it? So the line was replaced, and I hoped everything would finally work. Wrong again. The speed seems better, although still fluctuated, and the internet still goes on and off (notice I'm switched to present tense, as this is still the current situation). I didn't bother calling Verizon again, as it's like pulling teeth to get them to do anything other than the basic troubleshooting steps they always go through. Also, I'm now fairly sure the problem is with the internal wiring in the house. Fixing that is something Verizon probably wouldn't cover.

Obviously, this makes SL rather painful to play, which is why I haven't been around as much this summer. Let's take a look.



Now, it's not always like this, just when it's downloading something. So it's like this for maybe 5 - 10 minutes (remember, slow connection) after I teleport somewhere or log in, and maybe 30 seconds whenever a new person arrives. If you're not sure what a ping time of 6476 msec means, it means that if I push a command like 'w' to walk forward, I won't actually move forward until ~6.5 seconds later. The high packet loss rate ensures that a lot of my key presses never even make it to the server...but of course I don't know that until 6.5 seconds later. Add to this the sporadic total loss of internet connectivity, and you have a pretty hostile environment.

Things will finally be fixed when we switch to Comcast cable internet. They are scheduled to install it on September 13th.

How I found C:SI

In response to Robby's post, I'm going to tell the story of how I found C:SI, which is actually linked to how I found Second Life, even though I was on SL for a month before coming to C:SI.

The person who showed me SL was my (at the time) girlfriend. I had read a book called Snow Crash, which is a sci-fi book from the early '90s that describes the future of the internet as basically Second Life with virtual reality (in the book it's called the Metaverse, which happens to be the name of a newspaper distributed in SL). Anyway, I had lent it to my girlfriend who liked it a lot, and her Dad had mentioned SL to her (he doesn't play it, but he had read articles about it). She logged in to try it out, told me about it, and then the next day, January 25, 2007, I got my account. She logged in with me and we spent about an hour wandering around as newbies. After that, she never logged in again. She was disappointed that it wasn't exactly like the Metaverse from Snow Crash, and that she couldn't be exactly like the main character, who is the self-proclaimed greatest sword fighter in the world. Also, she recognized it was something she could get obsessed with to the point that it would consume her life. Unlike me and everyone else I know in SL, for which it HAS consumed their lives, she was able to get out while she still could.

I kept coming back, though. Until C:SI a month later, I spent all my time at a place called the Shelter, which is a dance club for newbies. I think what interested me about SL was the social aspect of it. I started graduate school a year ago in a place I had never lived before. All my friends from high school and college were hours away, so I didn't have any friends close by. SL was a place where I could make friends, which is hard when you aren't living in a dorm anymore and just going to campus for classes. One day at the Shelter, a girl showed up with a katana on her back. "Maybe this is more like Snow Crash than I thought," I thought. I asked her where she got it and she gave me a landmark to Samurai Island. I went there, was confused (I don't think I'd bought anything before in SL), and left.

I went back to the Shelter for a while, but I kept thinking I wanted to try the sword fighting. I don't remember exactly what prompted me to actually go out and try again, I think I was just bored one day. I ended up at Bare Rose (I don't remember how, maybe I searched for "katana"?), and asked one of the people working there where to buy a sword. She showed me where they sell them, and I ended up buying a Cursed Spirit. She also gave me a landmark to Shrouded.

I unpacked the sword, read the instructions, and tried swinging it around for a while. Then I went to Shrouded and watched some people fighting. I later realized one of them was Shidji (you can't forget a scary robotic death woman), but I don't remember who the others were. It didn't take long to realize there were clans, and that one should join a clan. I came back the next day and asked someone about joining a clan. That person happened to be Xiang Hifeng (or Kasumi as she is more recently known) who had just started Oda. I joined Oda and the rest, if you'll pardon the cliche, is history.

Fighting against a Naginata

I'm going to expand on my comment here about the naginata in C:SI.

First, I'll just post the comment here:

Things have changed with the naginata since I started C:SI back in February. It used to be generally believed that someone with a sword fighting someone with a nagi would usually win, unless the person with the nagi was much more experienced. Now, though, people seem to think that the nagi is stronger in general. I’m not sure why this is. It could be that people such as Mayan and Jane actually advanced the art of the naginata, so people are better with it now. But it could also be that people just aren’t taught how to fight against it. It’s been awhile since I’ve fought a nagi, so I can’t say which I think is true, but I used to be able to fight pretty well against nagis. You definitely can’t win if you do the exact same thing you’d do against a katana, but if you adapt I don’t remember there being any advantage to having a nagi.

The two main strengths of the naginata are range and power. Its weakness is speed. A basic idea that can be applied to any fight is that you want to try to take advantage of weaknesses while trying to eliminate strengths. There really isn't a way to take away the power advantage of the naginata, but you can take away the range advantage easily. As long as you stay within katana range of your opponent, then it doesn't matter that they have a longer range. Once you are in range, you can easily use your speed to get in strikes whenever they lower their guard. Unfortunately, most people won't tank against a katana if they are using a naginata. Still, you can catch people off guard by trying to stay close. I think they expect the opponent to try to stay away from them, but doing that would allow the range advantage to come into play.

I think I'll stop here and try to fight against some nagis when I can get back on SL, then post a follow up here of what I learn. Most of my experience fighting naginatas was a while ago, when it was more a sort of novelty. I don't think at that time anyone used it as their main weapon or considered it their specialty. It was more that people were just trying it out for fun because it was different.

The Circle of Life

I broke my computer last week. I was moving my memory into another slot to see if it would stop making the annoying noise it has been making, but something went wrong. I built this computer myself, meaning that the inside is a massive jungle of IDE and power cables, mostly centered over my memory slots. As a result, I couldn't see the slot very well and was doing most of the work my feel, which turned out to be a bad idea. I thought the memory was in all the way, but it wasn't. This resulted in smoke when I turned the computer on and a few of the metal connectors on the RAM had burned. I'm pretty sure putting any other RAM in that slot afterwards would have had bad results. I could have bought some new memory and maybe a new motherboard, but I just decided it was time for a new computer. After this experience, however, I didn't feel like building one.

I came up with a plan that would allow me to get a better computer than I had before for relatively cheap. First of all, I bought a new LCD monitor last spring, so I didn't need to get a monitor. That's about $250 off the price tag. The second part of the plan was to buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu Linux. Linux is a free operating system, which means another few hundred dollars off the price of the computer because I don't have to buy a Windows license. This is my gaming machine, though, and so I actually want Windows on it. I have my old Windows XP CD that I can use to install Windows once I get the computer.

I got the computer yesterday, and discovered there was a flaw in the plan. I boot up the computer with the XP disc and after it loads the necessary drivers it attempts to boot into a minimal Windows XP to do the installation, but crashes with a blue screen of death. After trying some things and searching around on the internet, I finally figure out what the problem is. My Windows XP CD has the original release on it, without SP1 or SP2. It wasn't until SP2 that XP supported PCI-E based graphics cards (all new computers now use PCI-E instead of AGP). So now the plan is to buy a new Windows CD. My plan still saved me money, though, because I can get it pretty cheap through the University. I just wish it wasn't Labor Day weekend.