Hey everyone, I know it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. To be honest, I’ve felt burned out to a large extent on Second Life. When I got back from vacation, I had over 200 offline instant messages that had made their way into my email inbox. Who knows how many more didn’t make it! The great portion of those IMs were from people who had experienced problems with transactions while purchasing items, e.g. not all items were received or payment was made yet no items appeared in inventory, and so forth. The remainder were hellos, random questions, and the usual variety of IMs I get on a daily basis.

Dutifully and diligently I went through every last one of these IMs, giving everyone new copies of outfits or otherwise solving the problem while explaining the situation. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, particularly when you have a conversation with a good number of those customers. I enjoy that very much, but it does add to the time it takes to get through everything.

I know it wasn’t just me suffering through SL’s myriad of issues, nonetheless, it does take it’s toll. My desire to log in after fixing all of these problems plummeted sharply, compounded by the fact that all of that typing brought back the tendonitis I had hoped to shed once and for all by avoiding computers for a few weeks while on vacation. In addition, the IMs kept piling up at an alarming rate even with me back.

Since that time, the problems have eased off to a degree and the transaction problems have been reduced to a trickle, and I miss so many of the friends I’ve made online. In light of that, my willingness to get back into SL has improved somewhat. However, I’m dealing with increased workloads in my real life job since some co-workers have quit and I have a major project I’m working on. This all conspires to keep me away.

I still think about designing and want to get back in the flow of things, but I don’t know if I can do it “casually”. Running an SL business is truly an undertaking and there is so much more to it than just whipping out designs. It’s a bit psychologically formidable for me to overcome that initial jump start that gets things rolling and into the groove. This is mostly committing to spend the time and to following through the cycle. It’s difficult. I am waiting until my desire to create tilts the balance away from my apathy and trepidation about the daily grind. I have lots of ideas for outfits and designs, but no willpower to open photoshop and begin the process.

Anyhow, I’m still here. I still think about SL. I still log in every few days to clear up my instant messages. I may not be ultra responsive, but I do get back to everyone (assuming I get the IM, which seems sketchy at best sometimes). I’m not going to make any promises right now, but I am fairly certain that I’ll be back to it at some point. Cheers.

I’m back!

I’ve returned from my vacation to Greece which was simply an amazing experience. After spending the most recent week of the two week vacation on the sailboat, I’m still feeling the world move beneath me as if I were still at sea, but that’s fading along with the jet lag induced by the marathon 30+ hours of travel to return home from Mykonos via Athens and New York.

This picture is of the city of Fira on Santorini after a fairly major storm had just passed through.

Regarding Instant Messages While Away

Yesterday I spent basically the entire day going through offline instant messages and trying to take care of issues and answer questions. There were dozens of problems regarding SL inventory bugs: missing pieces in outfits, skirts that wouldn’t attach correctly, payment without receiving the items and so forth. I responded to all of these instant messages which get routed to my email inbox when I am offline.

While I was gone I had my email auto-responder turned on with a message to let people know I was out of the country and unavailable. However, I wound up with dozens of IMs where the content of the IM was clearly a part of a larger message which I didn’t receive. I had many messages to the effect of “ok”, “please help with this problem”, and “thanks”, which clearly were missing things of importance. So, if you are reading this and had something that needed my attention while I was away and I have not already got in touch with you, please IM me since I do not have any indication that there was a problem. I don’t want anyone to think I’m ignoring their issue!

Part of the island of Santorini as seen from the ancient city of Thira ruins

Renewed direction

I have to say that after being in Greece and particularly in an area with such a different culture, I’m feeling very inspired in fashion. I have so many thoughts and ideas for outfits and new directions that I would not have thought about if not for this trip. I have something of a nautical theme in my mind from the sailing experience, an assortment of ideas based on the crazy nightlife of Ios and Mykonos, and such a different taste of general European style. I’m looking forward to sitting down to create new outfits which feel these new influences as soon as I get all of the little life things tidied up that need my attention, but I will say it’s been a while since I had so many strongly formed ideas, so hopefully it won’t be long before some newness hits the racks in Luminosity. I can’t wait to get started.

Pulling into the marina on Naxos

Thank you everyone as well for the well wishes, invitations, and kind IMs while I was away, it felt so nice to come back to so many positive notes.

So tomorrow, I’m off to Greece for vacation. I get to spend a few days in Athens before flying to the island of Santorini. After a day/night in Santorini, it’s off to the 50 foot sailing yacht which will be home for the next eight days as we island hop our way ultimately to Mykonos, stopping at up to 11 other islands depending on what we decide along the way. Another night in Mykonos and it’s time for the long long journey home (something like 28 hours of air travel/transfers to get home).

The track we are taking on the boat is the purple line on the picture below.

While I’m gone, I’m not going near the internet, email, or Second Life. So, I won’t be able to get back to any instant messages until June 1. I’ll respond as soon as I can when I return.

Adiosas!

After a year and a half of the original Toaster, a new version finally arrives. Blame Calico Ingmann for getting me to finally muster up the script fu to do the most requested upgrade.

What the hell is a Toaster and what does it do?

The Toaster allows you to mass produce an object over and over again where each version of the item is the same except for a different texture set. As a creator, you first place your texture sets into the Toaster. Then, you create a prototype of the object you want to “Toast” or replicate, placing the associated scripts in the object. Then, when you Toast, a copy of the object is produced for every texture set.

As one might imagine, in Second Life, creating hair is the perfect application for the Toaster. You create a hair style, then need to texture it with a minimum of a single texture, but often two or more, such as with alpha textures or multiple solids. This can often amount to hours of texturing by hand for a single style, particularly when multiple textures are involved. For the Toaster, however, it takes only a minute to generate hundreds of copies. Not only that, but if textures are ever changed are updated, it’s simple to Toast the same prototype with the new textures. In the long run, the time saved is immense.

Features of v2.0

• Replicates prototype objects
• Copy/Mod/No Transfer
• Use up to approximately 80-100 textures per copy of the Toaster
• v2.0 can use up to 10 textures per object, up from 2 from the original
• Renames objects, appending the texture name after the object name
• Cleans up after itself, deleting all scripts upon object creation
• Long history, tested, and widespread in use by most of the major hair creators in SL in particular
• Looks like a toaster! (new for v2.0!)

Toast!

So with the new version of the toaster and the ability to use up to 10 textures per set, it seems like the uses for it might expand more into other high prim creations such as jewelry, prim clothing, and anything that has the same design but different textures.

How to get one?

I’ve always sold the Toaster through word of mouth from my inventory and it has sold and spread all over the place, way beyond what I had thought. The feeling I’ve had has always been that this isn’t really the sort of thing I want to put in a store and have to answer random questions about. Either you are serious about making things like hair and the benefits of using the Toaster are obvious, or you’re not, and they aren’t. However, I’m set to leave for Greece in a matter of days, so I’m considering putting out a poster at Luminosity for it while I’m gone.

If you own the original Toaster though, the cost will just be the difference if you want to upgrade. Instant Message me soon or it’ll have to wait until June before I’ll be able to get those to you.

Testimonials?

Anyone want to share how much it’s helped, or attest to the Toaster’s usefulness? I know I’ve been dry humped, have a stable of first-borns which were sacrificed, and undying thanks from tons of people. So, any props for the Toaster? Thanks in advance!

Also, if there are any questions about the operation, this would be a good time to ask =)

Free Hair Clause

Wow, almost forgot the most important part (at least to me)! I’ve always added one special “cost” to the Toaster. If you’re happy with it, I ask that I can get free hair! I have to stay in style, so bury me in hair ;)

One thing I’ve noticed on a lot of blogs and in a lot of ads is the Second Life fisheye lens effect. This occurs when you use the mouse wheel, alt+zoom. or use the key combinations to zoom into your character to take closeups. Other than by knowing the techniques briefly presented in this somewhat cryptic SL Wiki entry regarding camera controls, as far as I know, the methods I mentioniond are pretty much the only way that most people know how to zoom in on their avatars. It was the only way I knew as well until a few months back when Roslin Petion of Tete a Pied clued me in to an arcane key combination that compensates for the warping effect. I’m sure there is a large group of others out there know about this, but I want to give credit to Roslin who told me about it.

So, on we go to the semi-secret method. It turns out that the Ctrl key in combination with 8, 9, and 0 do a sort of compensated zoom which the wiki refers to as changing the field of view (FOV).

Here are the relevant key combinations:

• Ctl+8 zooms out
• Ctl+9 returns the camera to normal perspective
• Ctl+0 zooms in with compensation (which makes the difference for closeups)

Below is the same picture taken with both methods. First is the regular old mouse-wheel zoom. Second is using the corrective zoom.

Fisheye Using Mouse Zoom

Non-Fisheye Using Ctl+0 Zoom

I personally think the difference is fairly striking between the two methods. I also think it’s fairly useful for people in fashion, hair, and especially skins to get good closeups that accurately represent what things will look like.

I love it when people chime in with their comments and other secret methods, so please do! I also have a few other questions, such as … was I the last person to find out about this, or is it news to you? And finally, was it useful?