This is going to be a very long and meandering post, as I haven't blogged really in more than a year, so if you are just here to see what my take on the office hour is, skip to the bottom where it says HOW MANY USERS LOG IN WITH FIRESTORM?
Or you might like to TP in and see my art works called "The Linden Office Hour Triptych" which I think conveys the issues better in some ways, although you'll have to decipher some of the references. This one is called "Viewer Stability" and features Oz as Merlin standing before a painting of an idyllic glade from the Hudson School with a sack containing a little gift (click to get) called "Turtles All the Way Down". You know that one. The glass mushroom table has a mortar and pestle and a book of alchemy. He is wearing a robe of alchemy symbols and his inner garment is kind of the green of the SL hand. He is on an island surrounded by Victorian rose wallpaper with odd green-coloured water lapping on the shore. In attendance is a dragon (*waves to Whirly*) whose claw is holding a tattered post from Inara Pey of two years ago about last names, and a furry (a dog) with an ancient complaints tablet before him, and a superhero woman with a spear. Make of it what you will. I will do a post on the the others later.
But damn, doesn't that St. Nicholas look like Oz? This is a model from Bad Katz, and the egg is Katy Dirkle's. I certainly can't make stuff. I will post the rest of the credits later. One of the reasons I decided to have a scene where Oz as a Linden looms so much larger than the users, the furries and fantasy characters below, is that I couldn't get that model to shrink down further even using that special shrink script. This is a puzzle to me. I could have unlinked its parts and tried to get it to individually shrink and then put it together but I so suck at things like that, that I decided the message also has to be about "Big/Little".
It's probably been years since I've gone to a Linden meeting. I used to go to a fair number of them and publish the transcripts and write about them -- like this one in 2008, where Jack Linden, who used to be head of customers and left long ago, tried to stave off my angry questioning and quite frankly, the exasperated comments of most people regarding the insanity of rapacious ad-farms, and turned in this wonderful line, about how the Lindens' new homestead offerings or premium Linden Home improvements would be about enabling customers to "choose the level of unpredictability".
AD-FARM EXTORTIONISTS
The context there is important: it took four long years for Jack to put through a policy against ad-farming. This was a practice whereby unscrupulous land barons bought up parcels and split them into 16m chunks to be used for ads -- whether in the middle of prime waterfront or on a mountain -- and then charged extravagant amounts. That 2008 office hour has the extra bonus of being attended by Chrischun Fassbinder, AKA "Mr. Lee's Hong Kong" (gosh, where did he get that from) who used to put 32m parcels near my rentals, on the waterfront or in the middle of a sim as well as roadside, and set them to sale for $9,999. He pretended this was legitimate activity. I once met him in RL and asked him why the hell he went around extorting and ruining SL for other people. He is a highly-paid computer programmer in RL, he told me, and doesn't need the cash. And it's not even "for the LOLs". It's pushing the envelope to the breaking point to see what happens. The Lindens encouraged and indulged this destructive activity.
If I sound angry in that Office Hour, it's important to understand how I and others got to this point: because the original Lindens refused to enforce any rules for common living on the Mainland, and decided to solve the problems of humans living with each other by selling private islands and overselling homesteads (until they had to stop and throttle those sales by forcing you to own a private island before you could get one). They could have said that charging $9,999 was simply extortion intended to force people to "buy back the view" -- the location of them in the line of sight of private parcel owners and not the general public would tip you off to that. There was absolutely no rationale of "advertising" with these things. As one Linden acidly pointed out, it's not like you can sit and crochet on your 16m, there's not enough room for a rocking chair.
PREMIUMS NOT A PRIORITY
Just at that moment, the CEO of LL -- M Linden (Mark Kingdon) had declared that premiums were no longer a priority -- leaving all of us who had got multiple premiums (to solve the problem of officer recall and the need to hold land) and had invested a certain amount inMainland realizing we didn't matter. (Island ownership does not require premium accounts -- islands were not available at all in the early years of SL, then they slowly began to be added, and sales picked up briskly under M).
Why drop premium accounts? Back then, during the 2005-2006 glory years, they reached a peak of 100,000 and then began to plummet. For Lindens, they were too much work for too little revenue -- private islands were the main source of revenue. Obviously, collecting $295 in tier for islands, versus $9.99 a month for somebody with a 512 (those were the extremes then), it was a no-brainer. All this furious activity the Lindens do now with Bellissaria and the Moles and content and games is because they've changed their thinking on this -- more customers with smaller amounts to pay but with more dedication and more online hours and content purchases are a more solid base than island dealers who often disappear because they can't handle the tier burden, leaving their customers without their homes. I don't know how they evolved to this position, from the back-tracking and double-talking and hedging that you see Jack Linden doing in 2008, but they did. Jack actually did try to push for these reforms and did achieve them before he left. But he faced a range of indifference to ideological warfare from fellow techno-communist and techno-libertarian Lindens who though bourgeois suburbs and entrepreneurial malls and pioneer homesteading were all high- and middle-class activities that they should thwart in favor of adding more affordances for furries in sandboxes and griefers with machine guns. They provided better load tests, you see. This was not an experiment in international living; this was a hackathon.
WHAT IF YOU COULD BUY AN INCH OF A WEB SITE AND GRIEF AND EXTORT WITH IT?
I actually come up with a very interesting analogy in this office hour of 2008 -- 12 years ago! Imagine if you bought a domain name, built a web page, and someone was able to come and by a corner of that page from some unscrupulous domain seller who let micro-spaces go to sale as well as the whole domain. That is, not just an ad served from Google or somewhere which you yourself might sign up for, but someone invading that space and putting up ads that forced you to pay him to go away. That's what ad-farming in SL is like.
The Lindens devised a somewhat complicated policy (that has to do with the number of ads or the square meters) and also have steadily increased the number of meters required to put a parcel in search and make a classified out of it (I don't really see how this quells ad-farming because it's more legitimate businesses that want you to come to an actual store rather than obliterate the mainland view with billboards, as Kalyrra Estates did and still does, to force people off the Mainland into more expensive private islands. Ad farming was directly caused by their original policy of letting abandoned land fall into 16m chunks automatically to be "helpful" to people on that sim who wanted more prims but not a whole parcel. It's hard to imagine they countenance such idiocy but I starkly remember it -- they finally got rid of that insanity but that didn't stop greedy land barons from buying land people were ditching at fire-sale prices and then flipping it -- while keeping several micro-parcels to extort with.
I just saw this the other day at a parcel next to the awful GTFO gang that ruined the view in Tuliptree. I'm pretty sure this outfit was related. They put a "Roman port" and barge up, then suddenly flipped the back part of the lot and another avatar, likely related, put up several extortionist parcels. I immediately AR'd him, although that led nowhere, and also tried appealing to his decency, by buying his full parcel, which was low-cost and open for some grief-build by my rentals, and urging that he put the micros to a normal price. He did. Several other would-be extortion parcels were abandoned by another land baron who has abandoned even prime real estate so I don't know what goes on there. I doubt the AR had any effect; maybe it did. I doubt this avatar re-thought his extortionist bid on his own; I doubt my purchase of that lot helped him un-extort those parcels. But I just don't know.
MOUNTING ANNOYANCES
The reason I decided to go to Oz Linden's office hour is because a number of awful things had been mounting, and while normally I deal with this by filing tickets and writing a comment on the forums, when I saw a nice picture of a dock and the notice of Oz's meeting flit by amidst all the Tits & Ass on the events list, I thought, "I should go and hear what their latest thinking is." Office hours are not the place to get some one specific complaint fixed such as I have had -- with everything from the edit window always covering up objects to the beacon not disappearing to the stupid yellow line that intrudes showing the parcel boundary when you are in edit mode(NOT the same thing as the parcel lines showing when you CHOOSE to see "show parcel lines" -- DIFFERENT). Then to beat all, People Search ceased to work.
I wonder if that was tied to the forced log-in which happens when you use the search panels or when you click on an avatar's profile -- often these days it forces you to log-in through that window to the outworld secondlife.com -- and KEEP doing that even during one log-in session. MOST annoying. I go to search for my own parcels, which cost $30 a week each (I've now made much less of them), it gives me only the "G" parcels -- I have to re-check "M" and "A" although I already checked them in "Preferences". I sometimes turn off "A" because of the grisly offerings on the events list which usually include X-rated child avatars, although that is ostensibly against the TOS, posing as hentai, and other grotesqueries. But since my customers often put their profiles in "A," and I have at least one small community in "A," I can't afford to shut it off.
PEOPLE SEARCH DOWN
I decided to ask the Concierge about People Search, even though the forums drew the usual haughty "Not on My Machine" comments, or the explanation that it "didn't matter" because Firestorm, used by a majority of users, reverts to Legacy Search (which I and others liked better) so it's not noticeable when "modern" search with the Google appliance is "down".
The Conciergerie Linden on duty acknowledged that it was weird, and I sent her various screen shots of "WHOOPS" even looking for my own name, or my son's name, or my friend's name. I tried typing in "Linden," and what was weird there was I only got "Jagix Linden". Is he on his own server? Or maybe it was only showing "G" and he's the only Linden in "G"? It seemed appropriate that when People Search was broken, he was the ONLY Linden showing in search given that his job is community liaison from what I gather. He could be the last Linden standing to tell people that it was busted.
WHY YOU NEED TO SEARCH FOR PEOPLE
Anyway, I next tried to work around this hobble. Now, let me pause to explain why this is a nuisance that some don't appreciate. If you are one of those people who logs on and sits on one sim and talks only to your friends for whom you have friendship cards, you wouldn't notice. If you only go to those grotesqueries on the events list, you wouldn't either, as you just click on the avatar of interest.
But if you are a rentals agent, here's what happens. A person pays, then refunds a minute later. I find that usually happens when people don't understand that they have to join a group to set prims, and get angry or confused when their stuff returns on them even though they paid. Even though there are rental boxes with a hover text that says 'JOIN THE GROUP TO PREVENT PRIM RETURNS" and another prim that says "JOIN OUR GROUP IN THREE CLICKS" because people are so witless about group-joining via search, it's never enough.
People also don't read the info cards and get mad when they can't return other people's prims, such as those of a previous tenant whose rental box has expired, enabling someone else to rent it. (I don't know of a single rental system that enables you to return group-set prims or any prims not your own or the group where you have permissions, but this is the single biggest irritant people express. They believe that a payment event -- their own -- should trigger a return of all the prims on that parcel. There are rental boxes that remove prims if you are late, but I don't know of any that remove them after a payment. I don't think that's possible. And there are reasons why it shouldn't be, especially if you have a grace period, or if someone has contacted you saying they have difficulties buying Lindens in Europe. This is another chronic problem for countries that don't always have PayPal or credit cards that work with LL.
Or another situation: a person rents and happily joins the group, but then they log-off in exhaustion -- I find that a common pattern as well and sometimes ask people about it. Usually it's because they've been searching for a rental for hours, tired and cranky. When they find one, they pay and log off in relief to have dinner or go to sleep. Or yet another problem -- a person tries to pay an already paid box on behalf of another avatar (which won't work on my rental boxes and while you can get systems that take multiple payors, I don't want to deal with the hassles that can come with that, especially with ex-boyfriends trying to take over rentals for which a girlfriend in fact paid for months, etc.)
Manual, real-time peopled systems are just better than automatic systems in my view.
PATCHES OBLITERATE USER CONTENT
Or let's say a person sent you a query about a prospective rental, or a rental they just got, but before you could answer, a new patch came in. You log off and put in the patch, agreeing to let the patch wipe out your existing files because it's a chore to go copy or move them and put them someplace. It's rare that software reaches into your machine and wipes out your content -- but Second Life does that, at least now after asking you. If you are having game problems you want a clean install and you agree to all those wipe-outs and registry changes. But then...you have no chat history with individual avatars. You remember that some complicated name spelled with a frivolous font and lots of xxs and oos came in, but how to find it? They didn't join the group, so you can't see it there. They didn't lay down a prim yet, another way to pull up their name. You could go back to your chat notecards deep within those roaming files, but oops, they've all been wiped out as if they never exist. Do you see the problem?
I tried taking the unique avatar key that comes to the rental box from a payment and put that in a messaging script. But the only script I have says "Someone rang the bell in Ravenglass" and is bewildering to a customer who doesn't understand its history (I have that same thing on RacerX Gulwing's shack in Baileya and get rung all the time from it, maybe he wrote that script). Sure, you can substitute another text than that one, but when I try to do that it doesn't work. Too long? a quotation mark missing? I try another messaging thing from the MP and it doesn't seem to work. Possibly because People Search is down.
So after seeing a half dozen of these People I Couldn't Search go by, I realized it was quite a problem, and went to the forums and the Concierge. Missing or losing 6 customers might be nothing, as these are micropayments of 68 cents or $1.35 per month, but it's a principle. You need People Search for business. And for shopping and many other things. Yes, people often go to the back of an avatar profile, and it's amazing to me how many merchants do not put their stores in search/places or even classifies, but just trust their VIP group and regular group to do their advertising. I have gone through amazing searches sometimes to find merchants using various names for their businesses. Given the silo in which most people reside in SL, "People Search" doesn't seem important. But it is for business -- that is, if you care about customer service, and not everyone does, or has to care.
ONLY A JIRA TRIGGERS ACTION
What happens at times like this, is that the Lindens won't act if there isn't a JIRA. They themselves have no need of People Search -- if necessary, they can reach any customer any time via their account.
I'm banned from the JIRA for insisting that object return on "share" violating group return privileges was a bug, not a feature. I often insist on seeing SL through the prism of what is needed by a Mainland rentals agent and group land simply because no one else will. It's not like a common use case, although it's more common than people realize, as many, many people group their land and rent just to friends or partners, or have small little operations just to lower costs, even if there are not very many agencies for Mainland specifically -- most land dealers are in the more lucrative private island and homestead business. But there are still problems -- you cannot type in a full name and search, it simply won't find anything. You have to ease into it, give it a few letters at a time. It often takes minutes -- long minutes -- because a person's name who has joined and activated will show up, even if you refresh many times. Once it has more than 500 avatars in it, or X amount of land (500,000 meters? Something/) the group becomes very laggy. You try to see the land list -- you can't,
While I don't pretend my problems are universal, they ARE universal for the vision Philip Linden originally had for SL, which was people voluntarily forming communities for various purposes and having the group tools help rather than hinder them in this purpose. The group tools have come a long way from their origins in radical hippie communes and collective farms which made it possible to recall an officer who had purchased the land from his position, and take his land from him.
FIXED
In the event, the Lindens fixed People Search in a little over 24 hours, but mysteriously, never had a message about it on the Grid Status page, and when a new patch that was in the works anyway named "Yorsh" (there are Ukrainians and Russians among the devs and they often give the latest patch a funny name like that -- watch out if they ever have GogolMogol!) in fact seemed to "cure" the People Search borkenness, it wasn't mentioned (but maybe fixing it didn't require a patch and that was a coincidence).
I was startled when someone named "Sir Vix Linden" (they know have knighthood for Lindens in England I guess) IM'd me and asked me if People Search was working, and could I check to see if names I had searched for could be found now. Well, I had already known it was fixed by then, and 30 hours is a long time to go, and in fact I lost two customers who refunded and one didn't rent. Even the kind of self-service rentals I offer seem to require enormous amounts of customer service even so. I wonder if anyone else besides me cared that People Search was gone. Maybe there was a sad Mr. Acorn somewhere, looking for a broken Miss Daisy...
Somewhere someone will have posted a transcript of this session, and I have one I made somewhere in chat, but I'd like to try to deal with the themes articulated.
Oz welcome me and said most of the problems I had expressed in my "Annoyances" post were caused by "security issues," i.e. your AVG fights SL, or some socket has to be changed or whatever. I don't think so, because my set up didn't change, I have the same computer I bought last year (which by the way recently froze during a complicated SL maneuver, I couldn't get it to escape out of the freeze, and when I tried to re-start the computer, it wouldn't boot. So much for mail-orders from CyberPowerPC -- this is a supposed to be a "blazing" gaming computer my son got for me when the usual Dell or HP or whatever crashed -- they never last). I had to get the hard drive replaced, but fortunately I found a Ukrainian computer guy on the West side and fixed it within 4 hours for $250 who was 10 times better than Geek Squad , which I will never, ever used again after they shipped my computer to Kentucky, kept it for 3 weeks, and then said that they couldn't fix computers with "after-market parts".
By that they meant a fan purchased to go with a better graphics card (to play SL), which their own Geek Squad had installed at the Best Buy on their own computer sold in their store, with their own parts from the shelves. I mean, if that is "after market," what is "market"? They didn't want to replace a better fan that didn't usually come with that computer, which wouldn't have cost more than $50. I couldn't get anyone, including my son, to bother with this, so while it was only less than 2 years old, I got a new one. Which is the idea. Like phones. Keep buying new ones, don't fix the old, or make them outdated, that's how Silicon Valley works.
All of this is by way of saying: no, my computer is not "ready to go to Kindergarten" as a Linden once said disparagingly of a user with a five-year-old computer. No, I am not clueless about going through files and looking at help desks and trying to fix things.
With a new hard-drive and tune-up and hence a very brand-clean install of SL, my SL worked no better, and exactly the same. All the performance meters were in the green. No packet loss of significance was shown. AVG was turned on and off -- no difference. Yet "forced log-on" persisted. The problem of needing to log-in to see a profile or a search result, over and over again, isn't related to packet loss or connection or security, I don't think, but prove me wrong.
NO COURSE CREDIT
I told Oz that I wasn't taking his course for credit, so to speak, but just auditing-- these office hours are attended mainly by people who either run third-party viewers themselves or make contributions of bug fixes to the JIRA -- in other words, geeks who actually work on the code, which I will never do (although I once found a bug in the classifieds which earned me a mention in the "Second Life is Brought to You By" notes) -- represented in dragon, supergirl, furry and other form (I believe there were a few other norms there besides me, but basically, most of the avatars there couldn't really be expected to "sit" as they were too huge or too many-tailed...or something. Whirly, who is my favourite geek because she is always helpful and not snarky, with really solid advice that works, was also there.
Perhaps it was telling that this Linden's own office had to be moved from his island to the IETF office (aren't those the "humming engineers"???) because of a rolling re-start, but there it is. I wondered what Oz did to the water on his sim to make it look different. Come to think of it, the land was odd, too. Maybe it's some windlight setting, but I don't have Windlight. More on that in a bit.
BLOOD-BATH AT SANSAR
While people were re-settling, the topic du jour was a mass firing at Sansar, which is the OTHER world that Linden Lab is making. I myself only went there a few times, and found some things were better (putting sound around the lot) and some things worse (you can't have real estate sales) and gave up because I couldn't work some things and there wasn't enough to do. It seemed asynchronous visits of a lot and leaving comments wasn't possible -- so for me, what was the point? I can't go to events on a schedule usually, as I have to do work or family things often in those hours.
As always, there were rumors and not a lot of solid data, but it did seem like there were an awful lot of Lindens fired. OK, some were being brought to SL. "We are bringing back some heavy-hitters," said the Lindens. I immediately thought of Michael Linden, not because he is a rather imposing tall and portly fellow in RL looking like a gentleman of the Victorian age, but because I think he contributed a great deal to the Mainland with the leadership of the Moles, the willingness to have difficult Governance office hours, and even the willingness to accept reports of griefing when it seemed all other systems failed to produce answers. I'm quite sure we don't agree on most Internet and SL philosophical issues, but he was a presence and seemed to be let go merely because he was old in a world of young "rockstar programmers" or something.
MEETING OZ IN RL
I should pause to remember that I met Oz Linden at the SLCC in Boston in 2010. That's 10 long years ago! For me it has been a lifetime, with leaving a job and starting another and yet another, the war in Ukraine, my son's terrible motorcycle accident and long recovery, my diagnosis with a rare immune disease and endless treatments and medications that have changed my life. But SL is still strangely the same, even with mesh and baked on mesh and all the rest. Avatar foot shadows!
I remember having a very long and intense debate with Oz Linden about SL, about copybotting, about protection of copyright, about the decision to open source the viewer (which I thought was wrong), about the whole techno-communist/libertarian thang and the culture of software engineers -- the cult of the "Benign Dictator". Oz has long hair and intense eyes and seems something like a hippie, but I think he's actually too young to be a hippy, and you can't actually be much of a hippie at LL, where you do have to work 9-5 and longer hours. I think he used to do something with telephony or something on the Internet, and this job is more interesting to him, and he has stuck with it for 10 years, which is to his credit. I expect that he believes in the mission of SL, as he understands it, but it was clear from talking to him that he was in an entirely different world than mine. No, planet.
That is, if mine is still the world of the 19th century, of books and translations and Russia and human rights and the UN and OSCE and Rule of Law and such, his is the 21st century electronic online collective and "code as law". I remember waving a copy of Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" there, which I then had Philip Linden sign, can you imagine the irony? But it was the only thing around for him to sign. Even in the new translation, Debord is very difficult to understand and of course something of an asshole, who after the 1968 demonstrations ended in tears and lice, basically sat in the cafes getting drunk every day with various girlfriends with German and French publishers subsidizing him, before ultimately committing suicide. Well, communism is a death cult. But he is important to read to understand the transition from the old to the new world, if you will. Read some of the quotes here, sift out the Marxist clap-trap, and he is talking about how this togetherness program of the Internet actually produces alienation even more severe than the capitalism that alienated workers from their products. Because now they are the product, I guess. The quotation of his I have on my other blog Wired State kind of sums up the SL phenomenon: "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." That is, there is little direct experience nowadays, and a lot of virtuality and imagination.
When you read the stories of Flannery O'Connor (or lately I'm reading Eudora Welty), you see life before the Internet, if you didn't know it or forgot it. People getting up early in the morning to milk cows, not fire up a computer. People dying at home, not hospitals, and then having their corpses washed by members of their community, who came to long wakes and helped out the bereaved. It's all different now; it's actually against the law to have a wake with a dead body in your home in New York State anyway. People fishing, or going to the post office, or going for malteds to the drug store, but that isn't the half of it. Their intricate relationships welded from a thousand tiny details of life before conveniences -- farming, cooking, cleaning, etc.
Anyway -- different world. But aside from the basic transition from atoms to electrons, if you will -- I think that's basically how Philip Linden would describe it, the ability to manipulate electrons in ways you can't manipulate atoms sums up the attraction of the virtual world -- there is just the whole sub-culture of Linden Lab.
THE LAB'S SUB-CULTURE
So even though this terrible thing had happened with dozens of colleagues axed and the other world they made in jeopardy, their boss, Ebbe Linden, was saying "Sansar is still running". I had a vision of the infamous Lee Linden, who once told me enthusiastically, when I was lamenting the fact that this oldbie with a giant laggy submarine could kill the FPS on a sim for everyone else, that sims run best when there are no avatars on them, a kind of early vision of The World Without Us that I think some find attractive.
But nothing could be said about the Sansar Valentine's Day Massacre because internal things like that are never divulged and since Peter Linden has left, I think even the dedicated bloggers don't know whom to call. Good for Ryan Schultz, who persistently keeps a blog on Sansar and SL -- he really loves Sansar, a love I can't say I share, but I appreciate. He had a source within the Lab who told him about this big lay-off. Any rational person would grasp that this was a terrible blow to this world, maybe a death blow. Yet everyone was jumping on Ryan as if he had told an untruth. He didn't tell an untruth. Whether it was 40 or 20 layoffs doesn't matter. The point is that it was a lot, given the staff size. Ryan should persist through this nonsense.
Chic Aeon, whose buildings I like but who is often annoying to me on the forums, huffed and puffed about Ryan not practicing the sacred arcane art of "journalism" because he didn't call the Lab to get a comment. I guess she's never worked as a reporter trying to call the Kremlin -- or even the State Department -- to get a statement on something -- even if not terribly controversial (like me). You can go through these motions, but you might get an answer days later. That's why so many stories in the NYT etc say "At press time, X had not yet commented" or "Efforts to reach X were unsuccessful at press time".
If I want to report on Surkov's departure from the Kremlin -- which I believe I was the first or among the first English-language sources to do on Twitter -- I'm not going to wait to get the Kremlin take on this. There won't be one. There will be double talk when there is one 48 hours later. The story is now, and in dealing with a black box and an authoritarian government -- which is what we are dealing with in SL even if LL is an American company more open than the Kremlin certainly (or the State Department, I suppose), on THIS kind of story you have to report what there is, the end. Especially if you are a blogger doing this unpaid in your spare time, and nobody else, even the paid fancy Silicon Valley reporters are bothering. Um, did you see TechCrunch or Protocol or the Politico tech daily or Arc Digital or ANYONE report on this big lay-off at Sansar? Of course you didn't. It might well have been the proverbial tree falling in the forest. But Ryan did, so good on him.
It's really sad, however, to see him now falling all over himself to apologize -- maybe because he had to speak at a high-profile educators' conference and was worried about fanboyz' backlash. He should NOT have apologized. You are NOT required to query every statement you make on your blog with the Lab WHEN YOU HAVE A RELIABLE SOURCE. Hello! Have trust in your own journalism! Yes, it's "nice to do" and a courtesy -- but when the Lab did this, they didn't have the courtesy to immediately put out a notice that day explaining why all those people were leaving. THEY didn't hasten to reassure the public, especially the small circle of users, that it was still running. So the problem lies with them, not Ryan, who reported in good faith. I can't emphasize that enough. This isn't a fuck-up. It's not something to apologize for. It's something to keep doing. If his source was just some gossipy prim-a-donna on Plurk, understood. But not with the source he had.
COPYBOT
It reminds me of the time I reported that the Electric Sheep -- who are no more -- developed and used copybot for a client. This was the absolute truth but because there was so much controversy about it, they didn't want to admit it. Their own staff person was in LibSL, the griefers' and "reverse engineers" (perverse engineers, if you ask me) group which reverse-engineered the client forcing the Lindens to open source it and who conceived and executed copybot because they hated the permissions' system (which Lindens can override, of course in god-mode). One of their associates bragged about copybot, demonstrated it, TP'd me to a sim, and proceeded to duplicate my avatar several times and leave it there slumped in the usual bot position, which is always detectable (I guess because real people will either have on AOs or they move around more organically). So yeah, I had a direct source. I also knew who else in LibSL was involved who was on the Sheep's staff -- he talked to me about it. That their client's purpose and the Sheep leadership's purpose was to have concerts on different shards simultaneously, and not steal copyrighted material doesn't matter. That was their official story; but honestly, they couldn't really vouch for all the hacker dudes in their midst. They were in deep with copybot and helped it invade the world. That I didn't call the Sheep first to get their pablum press release doesn't matter. The story had to be told from the sources available, which were solid.
I was forced to print a retraction that in fact I knew was untrue and later verified just to retain my position at the Herald. I was scolded like Ryan was scolded -- worse, as the stakes were higher and the whole world was threatened with copybot and its backlash -- and it was claimed I should have gotten the leadership of the Sheep to comment. Why? They didn't see fit to explain themselves to the world; those of us in the weeds had to see it in person and feel it on our backs first. Did they call the Lab before they deployed copybot? Did they tell the public their reasons for deploying copybot? No, they didn't. Are we, as vulnerable users to be profoundly affected by copybot entitled to blog about what we know when we know it? Indeed, we are. Let's not be children here.
Sorry, but there's a duty to the truth here, and tip-toeing around corporate sponsors -- which the Sheep were of the Herald -- was not my obligation. Nor is it Ryan's, as a blogger in good faith who loves Sansar, to kow-tow to the Lab worthies. If anything, LL should thank their lucky stars that a blogger cares enough about their little-used world to blog about it as much as he has.
I left the Herald eventually as I was griefed mercilessly with Herald editors' connivance. An awful business. Blogging is not for the faint-hearted when you are dealing with the black box of an authoritarian/totalitarian society.
Ryan should also not fault himself for overdosing on Coronavirus. As an immune-compromised person just blocks away from a hospital with a suspected corona case -- a hospital I have to go to myself often -- I'm not indifferent to this real potential global disaster. It doesn't even have to be a global pandemic in the way feared for it to do enormous amounts of damage. It's already cost business for small shops and cafes in Chinatown, where no one will go now. I hope Ryan will stay on this topic in the angle he took on it with virtual worlds.
"We admitted we were powerless over alcoholβthat our lives had become unmanageable..."
So that Sansar topic was glossed over, and now on to the viewer. Whirly forthrightly announced that People Search was hosed. Thank you! Just acknowledging there is a problem is the start to recovery! She hadn't been able to make a JIRA -- but honestly, a full report from a customer such as I gave to Concierge ought to be enough, and if they can go and log-on with their own bog-standard SL viewer, they'd see.
"Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity..."
HOW MANY USERS LOG-IN WITH FIRESTORM?
So I asked: how many people use the SL viewer versus Firestorm or other third-party viewers? I knew it was a lot -- virtually all my customers, and there are thousands, use Firestorm. I refuse. A few newbies or merchants who feel they need to follow the official SL viewer developments for all customers' sake do use it. But basically everyone uses FS instead -- for area search, which is a boon for cheating in hunts. I think that's the basic reason for FS and the basic use case. Yes, there are other reasons having to do with a user interface that is easier or nicer or cleaner or something; various features that SL has abandoned (like being able to post directly to Flickr or Twitter).
A key reason that the SL devs could so casually dump the ability to post to social media -- because it's a pain to keep up with the twists and turns of Twitter, FB and Insta developments and match them to SL -- is because they felt absolutely no lobbying force screaming about this, other than me. Likely I was the only blogger who found it great for blogging, and since they retired it I have stopped posting to Twitter and Flickr, because it requires taking a snapshot (which has been broken as well) and saving it and uploading it -- too many steps. Twitter broke with SL more than a year ago, and I stopped posting there -- it was too hard to blog without the ability to instantly send the SLURLS and pictures, more than anything.
If this had happened in such a way that Firestorm couldn't go on using it, trust me, there would have been such screaming in the land from the masses of Flickr users that the Lindens would fix it at least for that. (They let Twitter go easily as there was hardly anyone but me and a few oldbies posting to Twitter with it; Flickr has many thousands more and the very "Picture of the Day" relies on it in a way -- although not really (and that's why there was little screaming) -- as so much post-production work is done on those that there isn't the need for an instant post from the viewer. Still.
I couldn't get an answer to this simple question: how many. What percentage.
Oz said basically that because people use multiple viewers it was hard to tell and varied widely. But that's not a reason. The Lindens know the answer to this question and can find it. They just don't want to tell, as it will reveal that 10-20% of the user base uses a viewer that they spend entire days fixing sometimes in vain. I bet it's that low, maybe lower. That some might use both viewers can't obscure this issue. For one, you could say what the concurrency is -- at any given time of day, the overwhelming number of users will be on Firestorm. What would cause a Firestorm user to go over and use an SL viewer? Possibly only to help a customer, or because FS wasn't working that day (it has its problems). When I downloaded a version of Firestorm a few months ago to visit a friend on Open Sim, I couldn't get it to see things properly on OS, and it messed up the graphics on my computer so badly that I had to reinstall things. I have absolutely zero incentive to use it -- even before my exposes that it was the same set of griefers who used copybot and stole copyrighted items and spied on the user base with phone-home scripts who then developed Firestorm. There are many pious contradictions to this claim. Let me suggest that I wouldn't have to be griefed so heavily with chickens kicked off world and killed and sims crashed if it weren't true. You don't try to silence negative bloggers by ferocious and vicious griefing, including death threats and RL disclosure -- you ignore them if they print falsehoods.
It's too bad that one of the YouTubes proving this was deleted -- I remember showing it to the late Joe Linden and he acknowledged it.
HOW LONG IS A LOG-IN SESSION?
I also asked how long the log-in sessions were. Long ago, Lindens would cheerfully tell you "4 hours, and $2500 spent per session," which was a way to understand the market and its capacities. No more -- they have scrubbed all statistics. They answered this because it's the basic question any VC or even power user would have to understand what they should expect from any investment.
To say that it varies so wildly that giving an average creates a mis-impression is a point I understand intellectually -- the same problem occurs with scientifically-accurate weighted polls that do things like enable people to predict Hillary will become president. Knowing what the statistical average of a premature infant's chance at survival is may be a scientific fact; but it can't really tell you if your infant will survive (she didn't).
That is, there are many variables and so on. So yeah, I get it, but you know, there are numbers, and scientifically valid samples. You can get more or less of an idea of how long a person with ovarian cancer will survive -- you will find the parameters. You can tell how long people are logged on. This is a fact you can compile numerically and look at. There are -- let's say -- 36,000 users on concurrently (I don't think it's more than that but I can't be sure those old scripts Lindens made with this information really still work). You can tell us numerically how many of the same ones are still there at 4 pm and 8 pm, even if the next day, their log-on time is zero as they are little old ladies who only log-on Sundays to go to poetry readings. Oz even mentioned that a boss of his said that averages are a lie, a statement to which Rider vigorously concurred. And I could as well. Except, you know, you can still SAY IT: "Two hours, but you know it's like your Twitter activity. While it might be safe to say you average an hour and you are never on at 3:00 am your time, during elections, you might triple that so it's not a terribly useful number." I wonder why there is this reluctance to tell us whether that four-hour peak of 2006 is now no more. Although it is longer, for those who remain.
BUY FIRESTORM
The mystery is why LL doesn't just buy Firestorm, the way they bought Windlight. That is, they've had their ups and downs with FS; years ago, they made a list of third-party viewer rules that FS didn't want to comply with at first and it has been a tug of war at times. But instead of just friending FS devs and using FS themselves as they no doubt do, why don't they buy it and make THAT their viewer? This is the mystery.
What is it about the SL viewer that they need to keep? Could it be its own ability to scrape data and match it to customer dbases, which Firestorm doesn't have today (we're told), whatever its phone-home aspirations of yore? Even so, you could take the FS viewer, perhaps shed some of the devs who wouldn't go along with the program, and do what you needed to do. All of Silicon Valley scrapes, it's just a question of how much and what they do with it. Google and Yahoo get in my face way more than SL ever could, and FB and Twitter helped the Russians interfere with our elections. How bad could it be? Well, given the amount of private sexual and other confidential chat there is on SL servers, possibly quite bad. But I think there are other technical reasons that the SL devs have -- problems they want to solve because they like tying a bow on things, or problems that FS doesn't set itself to solve, like crossing sim seams. I don't know. I haven't discussed this with anyone for years. But THAT there is some curious block to what should be a purchase of a third-party to go with the inevitable of user preference is a mystery. No Facebook or Twitter would stand for long for that kind of situation -- and maybe that's why Cory Linden works at FB, not LL now.
Then there's this about the hidden user statistics -- which is more my point: I have run non-profit corporations and worked in small businesses and large corporations. In an NGO, you might say, "We need to work on Chechnya" as that's where most of the torture is"; but the donors want to work on Tibet or Darfur, as they see it in the news and they want to feel useful. They don't understand Chechnya. Or Belarus. But if you want to stay open, you have to do what donors want to do, or quit, and try to do a mix and bring them along. Or let's say you work at Xerox. The PC seems like a waste of time. You already have telecopiers that transmit documents and pictures; it's clunky, and the light pen is hard to use (my father worked with a light pen at Xerox in the 1970s; I worked at the Webster plant as a tester and then as a temp secretary at the midtown head office). Why spend time and resources on this other box, when we have our box selling so well everywhere? And the rest is history, as my father was one of thousands of engineers laid off there (and at Kodak) and other companies made a fortune on PCs. Now the Japanese have bought Xerox. My father, who served in Okinawa during the Korean War, used to say "The Japanese lost the war and won the peace" -- with their cars and cameras sold in the US.
So my point is: if you discover that your source of revenue -- a donor or a customer -- wants to do a thing different than what you want to do, or think you should do even for the good of the company, at what point do you have to stop your indulgences? At what point do you have to CHANGE and do SOMETHING ELSE? Sansar was that hope of change for SL and the Lab years ago; it didn't pan out like the light pen/personal computer at Xerox Corp or Chechnya for us (we did a lot on Chechnya but it was too big to help). You have to know when to cash it in, then.
If only 10% of our donors gave to Chechnya, or 90% of our customers were flocking to IBM, wouldn't we have to change? Or go out of business?
But this becomes instead, for Linden Lab, a thinky discussion where you imagine that multiple viewer use complexifies the story, or where you pontificate that variations in individual user hours somehow makes it "impossible" to tell average log-on sessions to see if the world is growing more or less attractive. I mean, count the green dots on Bellissaria sims with your eyeballs, versus, I dunno, Corsica. You don't need to be a math whiz to see what is happening. You don't have to give up your religious belief about "lies, damn lies, and statistics". I mean, count the green dots, guys. Do you see what I mean about virtuality versus reality?
Philip Linden told me once that he realized that the telehub sims were the sim where the most financial transactions were taking place and therefore the most money-making sims -- for the Lab and residents. Yet they moved to kill the telehubs for purely ideological reasons.
There's more. I've written a lot already as I haven't blogged in awhile.
WINDLIGHT UNDER THE HOOD
Now take Windlight. After a few sojourns with the draft Windlight viewer (beta, or candidate, or whatever it is called -- but a draft, like all software is always a draft), I gave up. The world was too messed up. This interference happened even with the regular viewer -- and still does -- on days when there is a strange end-of-the-world haze or glow, or you see the moon in the wrong place (and the sun, too). I notice the SL moon more than the sun, as the sun is a blur -- the moon has a certain trajectory, and when you see it by your left elbow when it is normally above your right shoulder at that time, you know there's a problem.
So here Rider Linden explained something that the Lindens clearly think is an argument that "trumps all," and even seem to take a kind of vindictive glee in it. And that is Windlight is already running on your machine, but it's just that you can't see it.
That is, the code for it is already running in the regular viewer, but the viewer's ability to SEE it is still being tinkered with because it's not working.
To me, this is such an obvious philosophical botch that I don't know where to begin. I think for anyone running an ordinary business that wasn't all like on Slack and virtual, would grasp this.
One thinks of Bishop Berkeley's notion that the world didn't exist when you left the room and couldn't see it; it was always only an idea; it was always virtual (he'd be perfect for the SL staff, were it not for his strict moralist ideas in other realms). Where was the "thing-in-itself" of other philosophers? Well, it wasn't there, and if you stubbed your toe in the dark on a misplaced chair, why, that was only an idea of a chair, an imaginary chair, even if the pain was real.
Rider doesn't seem to be troubled by this at all, and as I said, takes delight in telling astonished newbs and casual normie drop-ins like me that it's running anyway even if they were too timid to download the beta viewer. Except...how can it "count" if you can't see it? In total puzzlement and frankly exasperation, I said, "Rider, it's like a tree falling in the forest that no one can hear. It's like it doesn't exist." He laughed; he had never thought of it that way. I doubt Rider ever read George Berkeley and I decided not to get into it with him. But there's a reason why Bishop Berkeley is not a still-cited philosopher, and Aristotle and Plato or Nietsche are. But no matter. From a purely commercial, customer-oriented point of view (a perspective with which the Lindens are not overly burdened), if your customer can't see your lovely machine you've been beavering away on for years, then you don't have a product.
This failure to grasp the direct, inalienable, organic link between a product and a customer -- who sees it, who buys it -- is why Linden Research, Inc. is a lab, not really a business in even the strange Silicon Valley notion of businesses that have evolved -- which are basically trinkets that VCs become fascinated with and then trade to other VCs when tired or when they see it is going to bust and is only burning cash. Rarely do these motley collections of kids who quit college and live 12 to a room on Red Bull and Ring Dings coding night and day with little adult supervision rise to the point of a public offering with real stock in it -- LL itself has internal stock traded internally.
OLDER, WISER LINDENS
LL has evolved from its wilder, earlier days when its staff members did things like appear in ads and events to boost their resident friends' businesses, hit on residents and cyber with them on alts, or even deck a resident at SLCC in some argument about child avatars or something. More to the point, they have evolved from their collectivist days of wanting to give away everything for free including their own company; even the Mole continent isn't on all perms now, which is sad (there is a particularly nice new Mole willow tree in Bellissaria I'd love to get, and a strange October vardo I stumbled across on Hippotropolis, the Linden sim. I guess they got tired of people selling such content.)
By "evolved," I mean I think they work more with a plan that includes doing unpleasant tasks, instead of the Love Machine of yore, when it was "do whatever you feel like, and then quit if it doesn't work -- or be promoted". I think it is fair to say that the leadership of Ebbe Linden has been the best of the long line of CEOS the company has had since 2003. They haven't had any more turnover than any other Silicon Valley company, but they've had some strange birds. When I think of Philip's enthusiastic idealism about Mainland communities without any awareness of the killing of the Mainland by griefing and ad farms; when I think of the purely idealistic removal of telehubs; when I think of M Linden saying the killer app was "each other" -- as if you could get to "each other" through the gray squares and griefing and borked search; when I think of many insanities over the years (making the parcel boundary appear as a yellow line while in edit mode is surely one of them), Ebbe seems like a pretty square guy (I think he just never stood on a parcel in edit mode). I did meet him once years ago at a tech fair in NY, and he seemed reasonable and normal, not out of the gaming or wild bleeding edge programming worlds like Philip or Rodney. He worked at Yahoo and Microsoft -- normal companies where you have to go by -- as Anne O'Toole used to explain it wonderfully -- customer requirements. The market's demands. Reality. Getting to work on time and having to finish things. You know, like most business is run.
I remember my father used to say this mantra about Xerox and its projects and their weird insanity, and its levels: "Fantasy. Ecstasy. Reality. Search for the Guilty Parties. Reward the Uninvolved."
Those "heavy hitters" once in SL then Sansar -- were they the "uninvolved"? What did go wrong at Sansar?
Bellissaria is not my thing. The other day a savvy new friend named SanFroggy took me on a lovely boat tour of the sims there. I'm not good at sailing because I don't like having to look for directions on the map all the time, so it's nice to have someone navigate. Even so, if I panned out to look too far, I got unseated which was a chore. It wasn't laggy. The sims are very nice. There are some great little hangouts on islands and promentories and craggy mountains and such that the Moles have constructed. No one is sitting in them, but they could. I go to them; people do. There is a group called "Bellissaria Parade" that goes on jaunts around the continent with a variety of funny vehicles created by a member. Bellissaria looks good -- way better than Brown and Boardman with its dead palm trees and ugly street lamps and soil you can't terraform. It isn't crazy expensive like Nautilus or Bay City because you get it assigned randomly with a premium -- it's a little bit like "First Land," only with more randomness and a house. The houses are much better now.
But they all look alike. That gets to me. Still, there are "things to do," and solutions to problems built in (security orbs, decorating panels). So the Lindens have a winner with this project. This is to the credit of Patch Linden, who was once a high-profile resident (I don't know who) and his team of Moles. I can see where Michael Linden, who preferred to make railroads and tunnels and spooky houses and sit around and tell yarns with the nerdy furries, wasn't quite with the suburban Wonder Bread program of Bellissaria. But it's what the customer base wants. Like it or not, the demographics of SL consist of middle-aged women and young men who got bored on war games they beat -- often as couples, witting or unwitting, and some even marry in RL. So what they want to do is cyber and shop, and not necessarily in that order. I can vouch for the fact that most avatars spend more time shopping and decorating their avatar or their homes than they do on sex. And really, how long can you really spend on that? So Bellissaria is perfect. Zindra, with its chain gangs and gags and pony girls and many other vulgarities is still open and the land isn't even as expensive with the rush to Belli. But there are surely more green dots in Belli. The green dots want Belli; they don't want sandboxes; they don't want the Ivory Tower of Prims; they don't want hentai; they want to sit on the porch and talk to their neighbours the way we did in RL 50 years ago in small towns in America.
I remind you and myself that Windlight is a company and a software that the Lindens bought. And while it runs on our machines, as they are thrilled to tell us, we can't see it as it has too many problems. Hopefully when they do get it working for themselves (apparently not even that yet), we won't HAVE to have it turned on but can opt out of it. But I wonder about that. They are heading to a point as they did with 1.23 when they will force a viewer on us simply because they will cease to fix a past viewer. So cling to it as you will, but soon lots of stuff won't work or be viewable, as with 1.23 (which ironically, lives on in Firestorm, in the form of its better search -- which really WAS better for the rather small world of SL than Googleapi is.
LAST NAMES
Last names was promised two years ago. This is something really more important to a sort of middle generation of residents between oldbies and newbies who didn't get to have it and felt it was important. It's probably close to being finished. It didn't get done because -- again -- of the kind of not technical but "philosophical" problems that needed to be solved (really *psychological* problems for ideology-hidebound Lindens).
Lindens are very obsessed with what they view to be "fairness". Their hippie commune/techno-communist days left their mark. I don't know if Oz ever lived in a commune. I have, and there are a reason most communes die, sometimes in outrageous crime and scandal. People might be devoted, say, to meditating and eating organic food, but then, they want to go outside for a smoke or get a Snickers bar.
Human nature is hard to overcome, even with ideology amplified and accelerated with electrons. It seems the Lindens believe they can't just install last names tomorrow (or last year) because it won't be fair to some people who either didn't get them or won't get them because they will cost something (I'm not sure exactly what the issue is). But the hobble here isn't technical, because it is doable, it just takes time, and therefore should cost money.
STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES
And there's a psychology here to the Windlight issue. By telling themselves that it "works on their machines even if they can't see it," or thinking that it's "already is on everyone's machines even if they aren't using the viewer for it" they aren't admitting to themselves that the thing is broken. It's screwed up. It doesn't matter if it's "on the machines". What matters is that it breaks the world, messes up your graphics, and can't be proven to be attractive.
Meanwhile, I could point out -- as not a friend to this 3rd-party viewer -- that Firestorm has Windlight. That isn't enough for me to get Windlight on Firestorm; I think I'd have to be very desperate that I'd even use it for Area Search, given that Searchbert works well for most purposes, although when things are lost up in the sky that's a problem. The FS use of Windlight is very popular. Either to remember it, or because in fact that's how you get it to work, many of my tenants write the Windlight settings on the land description in my rentals. There's tons of them, some made by famous people like Bryn Oh; others just made up by people's friends and they like them. It's a great thing to see and trade. People ask for them and tell you about them and ask you to turn your viewer to them on their parcel or sim so you can see what they like -- it works "not just on our machines" but on Firestorm. So that alone might be a reason to buy Firestorm and cease development on the regular SL viewer. And again, I say this as basically a lifelong enemy of Firestorm who will never download it until I simply have to because there's no other choice -- like voting for Sanders against Trump, which I will not wish to do at all but may have to do. Like that.
That Lindens can be so complacent about something working without people "knowing it," or "working for most people," even as they fuss about some putative injustice in the last names realms lets me know that they are still in la-la land.
They are still not in touch with reality. And as purveyors of virtual reality, they need to be. It could be their undoing.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Sansar is not "still running" if you fired 20 or more employees and the concurrency is what...200? 500 people? Some terribly low number. That's not a world, that's a project that people refuse to kill. The wheels of servers still spinning like flowers in Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over By Machine's Of Loving Grace" -- I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it, guys. Come back and make your main product, SL work.
I feel such a gulf between the reality we experience, or at least I do, as someone daily logging in and trying to wait on customers, with all the annoyances; the unreality of the forums where the fanboyz are in such denial they don't even know what they are fanning anymore; and the Lindens, thinking 10% of the customers using something or 100% of the customers having something deployed yet not visible is "ok" -- I have no words. This is not a way to run a railroad.
In a real business, even in a non-profit, you would kill the project or your group would die. You would have to. And in a business, if you don't shed the unviable, the market will kill you -- and I don't want that to happen to SL.
It really is perplexing to me why an intelligent and dedicated engineer like Oz Linden could find the will to get up in the morning and work on a viewer that only 10% of the customers use. OK, let's say it's even 25% or 35%. But it's not more. How could you keep working on a project, knowing another one was working and all you have to do is buy it?
SL isn't going to die, it will limp along. Sansar may, too. But it's sad that something this expensive and wonderful on which talented people burned thousands of hours of their lives isn't much better. Not even sad; puzzling.
And the other Lindens, working on Windlight. How can you let years go by thinking something is working when it can't be seen? There is a huge gulf of understanding here. Again, Lee Linden: "The servers work best when there are no avatars on them." Go, servers!
The Lindens are about to launch something called "Premium Boost" (or nick-named that, anyway) which will provide various other bells and whistles than Linden dollars, free gifts, sandboxes and of course Linden Homes. It will apparently do things like enable you to pay more and get more than 70 groups, or pay more and get to have 100 spider legs instead of your usual 26...or something.
This opens up coding nightmares, third-party viewer havoc, and of course the further splintering of a world already splintered by the private island/Mainland/now Bellissaria divides; the free versus premium divides; and even the "viewer to enable de-render" versus "having to live with it or try to get Lindens to answer my ticket" divides. The Lindens put a great boon into the viewer -- the ability to return encroaching prims. This didn't use to be possible, and you had to file a ticket and wait for Lindens to appear. But there are use cases when you can't return an encroaching prim. This seems to be when it involves Linden trees. Or when the lot from which you want to return the thing has "access only" turned on to a group or names. Or something. When you try to file a ticket to Concierge, they tell you it's an "abuse report" case they will not handle. They really need to get over this psychological problem. Clean-up problems on land caused by no-show neighbours or griefers -- passive problems of junk on land -- should be dealt with as a simple garbage detail. Maybe it goes in a long queue, but you don't claim it is "abuse" when a no-show neighbour's Linden tree comes fully on to your land. It's a quick return for a busy Linden, not three months of me filing endless ARs that go nowhere.
It's impressive that Vix Linden IM'd me personally about this broken People Search thing. It's touching that Oz said I was welcome to his office hour and that I was something of a special case because I was the first non-Linden he ever met (oh dear, a sheltered life -- and then this!). It's great, it's grand. But I need a Linden to move the friggin' tree from my lawn. I need the edit box not to block the item I'm editing. I need the groups to load. I need -- oh, lots of things, but they don't include a last name or Windlight or extra arms for my avatar. Two will do. Just get rid of the yellow parcel line in edit mode.
