Evolution

Downtime. And I'm at home on sick leave. Arghhh.... (or, as my lovely sister Chey puts it: "We're not addicted... we can stop anytime..."). I used the time to organize my SL projects on my harddrive, and doing so, found some old pictures! A while ago Chey held a rez-day party for Xubi, herself an me, and she asked me for old pics. If only I had them by then. OK, here we go:

Me, 4 weeks old, newbie skin, newbie clothing

Preparing for St. Patricks Day

The first (and last) piece of clothing I made in SL when I was 6 months old.

The skeleton avatar I used quite often, nicely demonstrating the notorious transparency bug.

My first office in SL (more or less exactly 10 months after I joined), for 50 L$/week including 50 prims.

Me and Chey skydiving at Abbots Aerodrome. The jumpsuit is out of a freebie box, and I wore it quite a lot before I made my "Bob the Builder" outfit. This photo is older though.

Snowmen art

Alpha-blogger Veyron Supercharge posted some hilarious sculptures involving snowmen here and here. Now I found another installation along these lines myself:


Visit it at Labyrinth while it lasts.

Pity me

I'm on sick-leave, which might sound great but isn't if you have the go to the restroom every couple of minutes. I'll spend most of it in-world, and I'm pretty bored. You're all invited to cheer me up :-)

Dues paid

What a strange day. Readers of my blog know that my love-life in SL was not very successful. However I managed to retain a friendship with my ex-wife Djanna, and since she knew I worked on skins in the past she asked for my assessment on new skins she intended to buy. In that process, she very cautiously asked for a loan. After hearing that that would be no problem for me, she then replied "OK, then in January you get xxx Linden$ from me" - where XXX was about twice the amount. To my suprise she did in fact remember a previous loan AND the partial rent of our joint property.

Talking about money I decided to take a look at my transaction history, only to find that - on the very last day covered in the report - the alt of my first SL-love sent me 800 L$. I contacted the alt (who in the meantime is the main account since the original account got deleted), and she told me it was old dues, and that she never forgot them and had to pay them back as soon as she could.

Both incidents actually made me feel better. Not because of the money involved, but because of the underlying intentions.

Ouch... that hurt. Tagged by Caterin

Last night when we were iceskating, my friend Caterin threw a snowball at me and hit me. She threw another snowball at me earlier that day - she tagged my blog for one of those popular memes. Funny enough being a RL blogger for over two years now, I never got tagged before. So this is not only an SL premiere for me, but an overall premiere. Thanks Caterin!

The rules:

(1) Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
(2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
(3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
(4) Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

Well... let's see...

1) I barely change my outfit - it's so hard to find decent male clothes, once I have a new set I keep it until inventory loss seperates me from it
2) I can only handle up to 3 parallel IM conversations
3) I have a lot of ideas, but never really seem to finish things
4) I once tried to talk my favourite RL band to perform in the Dublin sim, but didn't manage to sufficiently describe the attractiveness of a SL performance
5) Even though I know it's to no avail, I still pop in at Midas every once in a while to check my balance
6) I have a crush on Cat
7) When I was new in SL I gender-bended quite a lot
8) I still miss Sonne

So, what does all those random facts tell Dr. Freud? Let me know in the comments.

And then let's see how Nicholaz, my lovely sister Cheyenne, great tutor Natalia, charming Véronique, my new elf friend Elusyve, SL explorer Eppie, fantastic in-depth blogger and sex-worker Lillie and my shot at celebrity - gorgeous and witty Vint will do!

Update: *sigh* - 3 from my list have been tagged already

Making a point for translations in Second Life

To many, Second Life appears to be a US dominated community. But every one of you ran into the occasional French, German, Italian or Japanese user already. True, English is the predominant language on the grid. But you'll be surprised how many ethnic communities there are throughout SL. As you know I run a translation agency in SL, so my daily challenge is to raise awareness that even though English is widely used and accepted, you are missing on opportunity to not support other languages as well. And also if you have offerings for your German or French commune, you are missing on opportunity if you don't address the English speaking population.

In order to make my point, I had a close look at the key metrics published by Meta Linden, as of early October. Unfortunately, these statistics only list Countries and not languages. And it also does not list the total number of users, but only the countries by activity and hours spend online. As much as I had loved absolute numbers, I decided to go for countries by activity since this is the important number to my clients anyway.

To my best knowledge, I broke the countries listed down to languages, for example splitting Spanish speaking users from the US count, dividing Belgium into French, Dutch and German users, as well as taking away French users from Switzerland. Then I focused on the languages I am offering translation services for, and tried to calculate their share on the active user community. The result looks like this:

Language Percent
English 39,7%
German 15,1%
Spanish 11,8%
Japanese 9,4%
French 8,3%
Portugese 5,5%
Italian 5,3%
Dutch 4,9%
100,0%

I am well aware that this statistic is - like all statistics - rather skewed. However I think it comes rather close to what I see in SL on a daily basis, and what my clients seem to have realized as well.

As one conclusion to push my point I decided to give a 10% introductionary offer to new clients. If you plan to go international with your second life business, now is the time to do so. And if you think it's too expensive: the majority of translation jobs we do is less thann 1000 L$ in translation fees.

When do YOU plan to go international?

Shameless vote whoring

Unnoticed from the majority of SL residents, the JIRA system is a way of reporting bugs and feature requests to Linden Labs. Nicholaz has a great article on it here and here. I reported some issues to JIRA too, and I voted on other issues. Here are my favourites - take a look at them and eventually vote for them too:

• MISC-208 - More than 25 groups
• MISC-686 - Eliminate script delays
• VWR-27 - The notorious "transparency bug"
• VWR-489 - Multiple attachments per attachment point (that truly would come in "handy")
  
• VWR-1449 - 3 new avatar clothing layers (finally wear a tattoo AND underwear)

What are your favourite JIRA issues?