BUILDER’S BREWERY MASS EJECTION
On October 19, 2011, there was a mass ejection of nearly all of our Builder’s Brewery members. We went from 16,800+ members (the largest building help group in SL) down to 400, in the blink of an eye. It was a horrible and tragic loss.
We Invite You to Rejoin

 

THE PERFECT STORM
We’re not exactly sure what caused it. It seemed to have started during Linden Lab’s critical server software upgrade that day, along with rolling restarts that came with no warning countdown even. There was tremendous issues across the grid, including inability to log in, no teleporting, groups and friends not loading, overwhelming lag even in an empty full sim (causing us to cancel at least two classes that day). Our two sims were greatly affected during this time, which apparently and sadly, may have caused our group bot to get stuck in constant eject mode.

via Builders Brewery Calendar (Education in Second Life).

I’ll log in and rejoin, so will Dhughan and Bug. So THAT’s why there weren’t any interesting class notices in my inbox. And I’ll probably have to start from scratch with the latest version of Blender, since some of the things I’d like to do involve making simple sculpted objects, although probably not involving using the new mesh technology.

The busy holiday season, and many RL commitments plus burnout, caused me to fall out of Second Life again. So did Dhughan and Miss Bugginia. But so glad I ran into Gloriana Maertens, a friend I knew from long, long before Second Life was more than a glowing particle in Philip Linden’s eye.

I participated in the STEAM 5 Hunt again (so did Dhughan) and never even made it through the first 1/3 of all the other merchants. WHAT? Yes, all three of us passed up on wonderful things, even Bug, who barely got started inworld before she lost focus. The sense of burnout was overpowering, and in the end I just didn’t feel I did my best, as I left too much until much too late, once again. But it’s a New Year, and I’m feeling optimistic about getting back inworld and doing things I enjoyed, like chatting, listening to music, and messing about with prims.

Meanwhile, there’ve been viewer changes, updates to building tools like Blender that I had never even mastered, and the thought of trying to create something original seemed too daunting, given the horrific disarray in my inventory (and Dhughan’s too).

Even having a week off before Christmas didn’t tempt me inworld; had too many RL things to get done. I did make sure that my Steelhead parcel rents were paid, although Dhughan owes his landlord an apology for letting his shop rental lapse in Steelhead Shanghai. I spoke to her on one of my rare visits inworld, so there’s no problem.

Last night, for the first night in forever, both Dhughan and I were logged in. Dhughan worked a bit on his parcel, which still contains trees, a building, and landscaping from the former owner. He finally has some ideas about what he wants to do there; some sort of old-fashioned hot spring spa. He cleared a few trees and messed around with elements of a new water feature, and thought he’d better take some classes in Blender again.

I logged in several hours later and dealt with some things I’d been avoiding; I filed a ticket on my scripted cat, who’d been deactivated and I struggled to update the HAIKUvend 1 prim vendor with new scripts.

The vendor creator chose to change the settings on how the script uses offsets to display a marketing image – either that, or assumes that everyone will just use a default template, which I kind of didn’t do.; I resorted to trial and error to fix it as the image I used had the wrong aspect ratio. For the next vendor I set up, I will use a standard 1024 size with each of 9 256×256 images set up with its own copy/mod/transfer info. No more layer files with all the c/m/t possible combinations!

Basically, if I’m going to make things to sell to people, anything that gets in the way of making a good quality, well textured, lag-minimizing product has got to get the heave-ho, and that vendor was one of them. To make the images work for this one vendor, I had to change the image aspect ratios in the script for each of the nine boxes (helpfully listed from 0 to 8, but I figured it out and worked from the center). The next one I or Dhughan sets up, we’ll just re-do the vendor image from scratch. What a pain.

The new version is now installed in my Steelhead shop; the update was needed because the old vendor kept breaking every time there was a (rare) sale. Dhughan has just realized that he has to update his vendor, too. Oh, bother.

In the meantime, I’ve actually cracked loose and bought the latest, dev version of Primstar-2 and downloaded and installed the latest version of Blender currently out, 2.6.1. Amazingly enough, after more than an hour of puzzling over some readme.txt files, I got them installed and working, though no guarantees on the dev version of Primstar. The package is discounted today and it was not much more than the previous version that only worked up to 2.49b. Blah blah blah! Well, at first I’ll just be making simple shapes, but hope to do better soon.

Sorry for the excessive detail – if I don’t note it here, and make notes in my journal, I’ll lose ground yet again.

One last note – I thought that I had screwed up my scripted cat, Dash – but KittyCats support comes through again, and he’s “back” and alive instead of disabled and dead… actually, it’s a backup copy from their database but who’s counting? I fussed around moving things and making sure the food is out. Dhughan is thinking of opening some kitten boxes or selling them as pets, we’ll see.

It’s winter in Steelhead St Helens… I wonder if I should bother finding snow textures for some of the trees I own? The Pacific Northwest usually doesn’t get much snow, but when they do, it’s pretty – and Mr Lunar used his magic weathermabob to make the snow stick on the ground.

Anyway, it’s good to be back. Now to get my skills sharpened up again (such as they are).