Torley Lives

If your net-surfing adventures today have been disrupted by missing images, files failing to download, and other wack borkery, it could be related to the Amazon S3 service failure. Linden Lab and Second Life are affected too, because we host a number of things — including the viewer downloads and my video tutorials — via S3. We’ve redirected the former, but the latter are in limbo until this ceases.

Aside from a lack of elegant upload tools, S3 is generally very reliable and the last time I’ve encountered such a problem (in memory) was on Feb. 15, earlier this year. But today’s outage is worse, going on for several hours now, and it’s also added to Twitter’s woes — yup, no images on your Twitter account is related.

The blogosphere is burning, and I wish all the best to the folks working on getting things back to “normal”; you can see updates on the AWS Service Health Dashboard and click “more” for updates.

I of course posted an update to my latest Second Life blog post and am anxious for this to be over.

I had a fantabulous time taking questions and receiving answerage on Teen Second Life yesterday. Thanx to George, Amber, Lexie, and Mia Linden of our Volunteer Team (aka VTeam) for organizing this and making me feel so welcome. Thanx also to Mia for moderating and getting the transcript up so quickly!

There was a lot of energy, and amidst some really fun questions like:

“have you ever been griefed while shooting a video tutorial?”

I was thrilled to see some familiar faces I sometimes ping on other social networks like Twitter and Flickr. Here’s a BIG thanxies to Daniel Voyager for not just the picture above, but being a growing link star (this ability, I can relate to) and maintaining a helpful and enlightening blog.

Of course, I had to wear my Watermelon Dazzle Bat avatar crafted by Sylver Bu (you may’ve seen it on lindenlab.com), and encourage the aspirations and future of our precocious Resis. When I was a teen, I wanted just about nothing more than to have role models I could aspire to, so now, it’s my turn to inspire in kind — *touched*

you guys rock and like I said at the end, I hope to do followup… including filming more video tutorials on TSL.

Mindjunk is exactly what it sounds like: mental clutter that sits in your head and makes you more anxious and fearful, taking up space without doing anything effective for your life — or Second Life. It sells papers (or their virtual equivalent), but it isn't true.

Alas, while I mostly enjoy Hamlet Au's New World Notes, I'm not happy with repeated mindjunk like this:

As with WindLight, it's likely that dynamic shadows will only display optimally on the most powerful (and expensive) computers, threatening another balkanization of the SL experience.  (Not to mention frustrating builders who've spent so much time figuring out how to add artificial shadows to their work.)

No.

• A computer that exceeds Second Life's System Recommendations can be bought for under US$500. Take any fair setup optimized for gaming/multimedia — glean knowledge here — and make sure it has a beefy enough CPU and RAM. An 8800GT, which is more than enough to run Second Life and many top-notch games on the market, can be had for under US$150, and even less if you shop around. And even then, there are cards under US$50 that will still show off atmospheric shaders (WindLight) in all their glory.

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I love seeing insightful concerns about exceptional achievements: the saga of WindLight (atmospheric rendering) is an exceptional example. Team WindLight had help from many Residents who shared their worries, and through months of office hours, debugging, and polishing the product, it shipped on a foundation of community trust — intense, copious amounts of valuable dialogue which is still being expanded on recently, e.g., Avatar Rendering Cost.

Throughout it all, we learned many things, including:

• Any change (good, bad, whatever) gets complained about. Most changes get used to.
   
• The most important complaints/questions rise to the top without effort. They should be congealed into a FAQ for easy access, which they were.
   
• Many complaints become moot. Some do solve themselves (or at least appear to). As in, "By the time you complain again… there's not a problem!" Or sometimes, fixing one problem also resolves a few more.

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