Strange’s Second Life Blog

While, this time, I’m not “vowing” to leave Second Life, my time working with SL Reports has come to an end. I really enjoyed my time with them, and I’m sure I’ll continue to read the site, post comments, and (of course) take care of any server-side things that need to be done. I know that Xavier has been interviewing different people for the CEO position, and the person chosen will most likely take care of all the duties of both positions.

With this behind me, I’m likely to spend even less time in-world than I have been (which wasn’t much, anyway).

One of the reasons that I needed to lessen my workload was the work that I’m doing on a new web site. I had a major breakthrough, a couple days ago. After a couple weeks of worrying and 5 hours of “trying” to make something work, I made it work “exactly” how I had it planned. I’ve got plenty of experience in PHP, but editing MySQL databases has never been a strong point. To get this working feels great!

I sent out a final notice to the SL Reports Journalists group, letting them know that payments for articles would be suspended for the month of December, or until the transition is made to the new staff.

Posts on this site might be few and far between, for a while, given my current situation. If anything really interesting catches my eye, though, I’ll be sure to write about it. Recently, I’ve been hearing whispers of Luke at WSE de-listing companies and locking accounts again, for no reason at all. Not really surprising, but there’s not many details right now, either.

Until next time…

A lot of times, I get Google Alerts for things that I never really asked for. One of my “keyphrases” that I have it find for me is “second life”. You can probably imagine that I get some off-topic articles like “Man Gets Second Life Sentence” or “Woman Gets Second Life After Transplant”. Maybe you get some of these, too.

One of them that came in, just a little bit ago really just made me wonder.

“Second Life For Condoms In China” - No shit!! First, the condoms are used, then they’re “recycled” and made into hair bands. The kind of hair bands that women will put between their teeth while pulling their hair back into a pony tail.

Not only is China selling some pretty bad crap to companies throughout the rest of the world… they are also selling used rubbers to their own people. Rubbers that are used to protect against sexually transmitted diseases and could still contain bacteria and viruses despite being recycled.

You can get a bag of 10 of these hair bands for about three cents USD… that’s less than L$9!! While selling recycled condoms is illegal in the country, the Chinese industry is flooded with several harmful goods manufactured for domestic or foreign markets.

Here’s what really makes me wonder. I know that in the US, we recycle aluminum, glass, newspaper, and other items. We take the time to separate the items from the “regular” trash and often times have different containers to put the different items into, to be picked up.

How do people go about recycling condoms? Is there a special receptacle that people throw these into? Are used condoms such a problem to the environment that recycling them is better for Mother Nature? Who actually came up with this idea, in the first place and thought it was a good idea?

I know that this post had absolutely nothing to do with Second Life, but just think… with all of the apparent “flying penises” in Second Life, it’s a wonder that the Lifestyle or Trojan companies haven’t set up shop in-world. They could start offering “protection from griefers”, or something.

In an attempt to explain and justify a few things, I figured I would explain, here. Sadly, I realize that the readership of this blog is not as high as some places that I could get this information to more of the people who need to know. There has been some talk and there have been some accusations since I decided to leave SL Reports, and I just wanted to try and clear things up, a bit.

Most of the talk has been in the SLCapEx forums, in this, this, and this thread. Most of the contention has come from one person, although others have also made it clear that they feel like what I did was wrong.

First, I will say that I know that what I’ve done might not have been completely right and there was probably better ways that I could have done it. I’m not trying to “clear my name” or anything… just simply explain. Some may still think that what I did was wrong.

Over the past few months, there were various times that I had talked with Xavier and he brought up his intention of leaving SL Reports. For various reasons, each time, he decided to stay. On the morning of November 21st, he brought it up, again. During our conversation, I brought up that I had been thinking about leaving, as well. I asked him about the 400,000 locked SLR shares that I had, and what would be done with those, if I decided to leave SLR. He said that they would be unlocked and I would be free to do with them what I wanted.

About an hour later, that morning, we talked again. At that time, for reasons that I totally understood at the time, he had decided to stay, again. After our conversation, I went to bed (since I work nights in RL). When I woke up, I was still thinking that I needed to leave, so I decided to write the previous post on this blog. I posted it at 8:30pm SLT on the night of November 21st. I sent an IM to Xavier, making him aware of the post, which he received.

After arriving at work, Xavier and I talked for a while via IM. He seemed to understand my decision. At about 2:00 SLT, he asked if I would proof-read something, which he sent to my email address. I was actually surprised by what I read, considering the reason he decided to stay, just 18 hours earlier. The overall text and tone of what he wrote sounded good to me.

Then, he “pressed the button” to post it to the SLCapEx web site… about 6 hours after my announcement.

Six hours after that, after getting home from work, I decided that I would sell enough shares to reduce my holdings below 5%, getting my name off of the public stock ownership page. As I was doing that, I noticed that there were some pretty large buy orders being placed at amounts that would be high enough for me to consider selling at. Knowing that the news of Xavier leaving SLR had been posted for the past six hours, I knew that people had seen it, and that I didn’t have any type of unfair advantage that would be considered “insider trading”.

As long as buy orders were being placed, I continued to sell. SLR opened at .45 that day and closed at .47. Selling that many shares to a person that was willing to buy them, essentially had no effect on the overall share price. In the back of my mind, I did think that since I only “announced” that I would be leaving and hadn’t actually “left”, that selling them at that time might have been wrong. My departure is inevitable, though, so it was either 6 or a half-a-dozen, in my mind.

That’s really all of the explaining that I wanted to do. I know it’s nothing that’s overly important, since it’s said and done, now, and the current price is up at .53. The people that ended up buying shares from me got a great deal as well, since they are all worth more, right now.

Anybody who really knows me knows that I’m a really honest person. Though I may kid around at times and be sarcastic at other times, I don’t lie about things that I’m thinking. I’ll give honest opinions if I’m asked. I’ll keep things private if I’m asked to, as well.

This post is really about the work that I’ve done at SL Reports and a decision I’ve made. This is the first announcement, and the link to this will be given directly to those who need to know. I’m announcing it publicly so that everybody knows, though.

In early June of this year, I was hired to do a web site redesign for them. It was not a super difficult site to redesign, but moving the site from one platform to another was the hardest thing about it. Even with that, some of the archives were not transferred to the new platform. Since SL Reports is a “news” site, the more current articles were more important than the archives. New content was added quickly and the past articles became less and less of a priority.

It’s been about five months since I did the redesign of the site. Since then, I’ve become more and more involved in working on it by adding features, tweaking templates, deleting spam comments, adding a mobile version, and a couple months ago, I was hired as the General Manager. Since taking over the GM position, I changed a lot of the way the contact information was delivered for the site, so that the CEO (Xavier Mohr) saw less of it. Essentially, that’s what I was hired for… to take some of the workload off of him. Rather than everybody contacting him, they would “have to go through me, first”.

I also ran a highly responsive campaign to get more writers, covering a variety of different topics, for the site. Within the four day campaign, 23 interested writers responded. Only a handful of them have actually written anything, but what they have written has been some pretty good stuff. An in-world group for SL Reports Writers was created and all of the people that responded during the campaign were added to the group. The group is used to send notices of events and other things that need to be covered, in-world.

While I don’t write much content on SL Reports, myself, I do spend quite a bit of time on the site, behind the scenes. Recently, Xavier has begun posting more and more financial articles, as well. He’s much more connected to the “financial world” than I will ever be, so I am thankful that he’s as active as he is.

Getting to the point of this post (believe it or not, this is going somewhere), I just want to say that while SL Reports has been a huge part of my Second Life for the past six months, I think the time has come for me to say goodbye.

Though I have half-kiddingly mentioned this intention to Xavier Mohr, the fact is, I was only “half” kidding. Xavier has been a great person to work with and has become a great friend, something that I hope will not change after my departure.

The one thing that set this decision of mine in motion was a post by Xavier on November 17th at SLCapEx, though. I realize that SL Reports is owned by Arbitrage Wise and that any decisions about major changes would have to go through him, before being implemented. Part of the November 17th post said:

“Arb and I discussed last week hiring a contractor to do a web template redesign or seeking a “prefab” upscale web template to purchase, so I would like to see if we really are going to go through with this or hold off… and how much, if anything, said projects will cost us… before issuing further dividends. I am assuming this would be a big expense if contracted out, but nothing is final right now. I am still looking into some existing more economical template options as well.”

This was the first time that I had heard about another template redesign being discussed. Xavier and I discussed this a few days after the notice was posted, and I was shown a couple templates that were being considered. They were very impressive templates, by the way. Since I was not contacted before this notice was posted, I felt as though I was not being considered for the job of redesigning the template. Maybe those feelings were wrong, but if this was discussed, I would think that it would have been brought up to me, beforehand.

Like I said, that post just set the wheels in motion for this decision. It is not the entire reason for the decision. There are other RL reasons that have also brought me to this decision. One of them is that I need to focus more time and attention to another web site that has very big potential for income.

Even though I am stepping away from SL Reports, I will continue to host the site for the same monthly fee, if desired, for as long as it is needed. I will continue with my current position until December 1, 2007 (again, if desired), and will help with anything I can to insure a smooth transition, during that time.

I just finished reading the latest post by Nobody Fugazi at your2ndplace.com. While I agree with just about everything he says, I’m simply afraid that the constant echos from people that are upset about the current state of SL will continue to go unheard by the ones who really need to listen. I’m afraid that no matter how loud we yell or how many of us do the yelling, they’ll continue down the path that they’ve been on for so long.

As with “any” business, you have to change… not just simply be open to change or listen to people talk about change, but actually go through with the changes. If you don’t adapt to what your customers expect and if you don’t give your customers what they want, they simply leave. They’ll find someplace else to go. Many are already doing that, but Linden Lab doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

Simply adding features like better search and more realistic skies do nothing to solve the problems that current residents have been complaining about. Take a look at the latest “Windlight Update” and following comments to see what I mean. In fact, it allows current residents to see the problem much more clearly. How many residents were “yelling” about search or the way the sky looked? How many residents are “yelling” about the ongoing landbot, griefing, and other problems? The answer to those questions reveals just how much Linden Lab listens to the residents.

I love analogies, so I can’t help but compare this to a baby that’s screaming and crying because it wants it’s diaper changed, but all you do is keep feeding it and feeding it. Pretty soon, there’ll be so much shit that the diaper won’t hold any more. After a while, the baby gets so used to sitting in a crappy diaper that it quits complaining. Maybe Linden Lab will notice, once it gets all over them.

I’ve been running a classified for a few days, trying to hire some more writers and freelancers for SL Reports. I’ve had a really good response, so far. More than 20 people in the past 48 hours have been interested in writing. Many of them seem to “really” want to write, because it’s “what they do”. I can’t wait to see some of the things that start rolling in, now.

Tonight, I received a message from a resident, however, that I couldn’t help but be simply amazed by… and I’ll also add that I was very amused. The resident will remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. Keep in mind, while reading this, that this is a classified ad titled “Writers needed”.

She said, “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”.

That was enough to make me shake my head and think to myself “No friggin’ way! This has got to be a joke.” I might not be the best writer (I know I’m not, but leaving the option open… lol). I use way too many commas, most of the time, and when I try to type fast, things don’t always get spelled the way they should. This sentence broke just about all the rules, though.

Because of the first impression that I had, I figured that there was probably no way in Hell that this person would ever write for SL Reports. I sent her back the following message:

“Reply from email: First, I’d like you to correct the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in the following sentence, before we even think about talking about what else you would need to know, to write for SL Reports: “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”

I knew that this was actually a relatively rude comment and suggestion, but considering that the job is a “writing” job, I think that the people writing should actually know how (or at least come close).

A few minutes later, I was actually amazed that she corrected the errors (or tried, at least) and sent it back to me. Things have been capitalized and some commas were added, but words that were spelled right in the first one were now wrong. I had to laugh when I saw the question mark at the end, though:

“Hi, I seen your employement ad in the Classified. I wanted to know what I need to know, to be able to write for the SL Reports.?”

Being an EOE (is there a such thing in SL?), I logged in and sent her a couple notecards with information about the positions that we’re filling. You never know, but with my first impression, I have a pretty good idea.

UPDATE: Two weeks later, and I still haven’t heard back from her. 

Just a short post to express my frustration with the 25 group limit in Second Life. With the influx of residents in 2007, it would really make sense to allow users to belong to more than 25 groups. I would think that 50 would be plenty, for a while. I’ve had to leave groups, in the past, that I would really still like to be a member of, but had to drop to make room for “more important” ones.

I haven’t looked… maybe this has been proposed in JIRA (I’ve never used JIRA, myself). If it has, and you know about it, please let me know what’s been talked about, or if it’s even been talked about, at all. UPDATE: I just found out about Jira MISC-208. Go vote!

I know that this is something that is pretty widespread, as far as people that I know that have their 25 groups full, and have no room to join any others. If there’s that many people that I know, personally, in my small circle of friends, I’m sure that there’s a huge percent of overall users who have the same problem.