Jun

2008

Computer – X.X

Im sitting at my computer reading something not on the computer….and my screens go black to power down. I wiggle my mouse to get it to come back and nothing…ENTER….nothing….bang on the keyboard, CTRLALTDEL….nothing. So I restart. Screens have all the booting info on, then I look up and the screens are black again. So I thought, Ill just restart everything….hit the powerbar switch on, then off. Monitors come on, but the PC wont. I wiggled everything inside….banged, cleaned out the dust. There is a light that comes on the motherboard when I have the powersupply turned on. Nothing works. I cut the wires to the power button and hot wired them incase it was the switch…nothing!!!!@!!!!111

Took it out from under my desk…broke one of the plastic feet off the bottom while tilting it. (this thing weighs ALOT) I slid my old dusty dell over in its place and I am using that. I retired it back in Jan 2005 – but it has been used off and on if I needed to duel box games or SL.

Got my email working. Got SL installed. Figured out a few web sites and passwords, like twitter and WordPress (Had to reset some passwords) This will do for now I suppose…but I never had to take my computer to get fixed…I always figured out what was wrong. It could be the powersupply, but this monster has soooo many wires coming out of it – I can hardly make it poke out of the box. No fuse I could see on it either. Just what I want – some stranger being able to poke around on my computer…I dont keep stuff locked up on there…all passwrods are remembered for everything I do – except banking and bills.

*Sigh*

Posted in Real Life, Tech | No Comments »

Jun

2008

To WoW or not to WoW…..

A friend of mine who I met playing World of Warcraft asks me now and then to consider coming back to play WoW. I started WoW back when it first came out in 2005. I played for about 9 months, became the leader of the guild had 2 top level toons plus 1 of each of the other classes…and then it got old and I stopped playing. I tried out other games…but eventually, after a 13 month break and a new WoW expansion coming out soon, I joined again. I found a great guild of people (Centurian Order) to socialize and play with. It became like a family and made you want to log in every night just to say hi, and chat, and do some things together. One of the members, Adondralyn (Jeremy), is the one that wants me to play again. Today, he informed me that his current guild broke apart due to drama that inevitably curses a guild at some point. So he has been given the old website and a bunch of guild bank goodies to form a new guild….which he has done. I spent the afternoon setting up forums for the guild, Burnt Sacrifice.

Not sure how many of you are gamers, but you do get burnt out doing the same things over and over. The thing that keeps you from getting burnt out fast is having a friendly social environment that goes along with the game. You can play the absolute best MMO out there, but if you aren’t in a guild that is talkative, friendly, and active, you will not last in the game for very long. But a game doesn’t have to be perfect if you have a good in-game family to help offset possible boredom.

I’ve learned this from playing EQ2 and City of Heros/Villans. I played City of Heros with my son…and never joined a guild. And I left the game without ever reaching top level or gaining any friends after 2 or 3 months. During my WoW break – I tryed it again when they released the City of Villans expansion. I was invited into a guild called Blood Moon Angels. Many of the member were on nightly, they were talkative, and helpful. I eventually became an officer there and was in charge of events. I quickly made max level with one toon and had many others. The game became fun socially and physically (if you can call the action questing part that).

I did eventually get bored though which happens. After my second leaving of WoW, I tried City of Villans yet again. This time though, most of the old guild members were gone…just a few logged in now and then, leaving me to play alone most of the nights. And after a month or 2, I left…just nothing there to keep me happy. So I thought maybe it was time for a brand new game…So, I turned to Everquest 2. My son and I joined and started having fun. I hunted for a guild and found one that stated they were older members, no kids, mature, and were tradeskillers/questers. Perfect!

Spirited Misfits was the name. Everyone was friendly, they would help if you asked. They got use to me and I got use to them. After 3 months though, I was getting bored…even though the guild was friendly, there wasn’t enough people, not enough bonding by doing events. I am use to there being 20-50 members on at a time from WoW… in EQ2 there were maybe 8 on at the most, and now that it is summer, even less on. I haven’t logged into EQ2 for over 2 weeks now. I don’t have the urge to play. When I play a game – I am totally addicted to it…4+ hours a day every day addicted. So me not wanting to log in at all must mean its over. I did grab one friend from EQ2 though.

It’s funny how you can gain Real Life friends from an Online game. I played Ultima Online for 3 years and left with 4 people I still talk to today, and I havent played that game for 6 or 7 years. They live all over the US…VA, PA, WA, NY…and I have met them all in Real Life. Then I played Anarchy Online and still talk to a few people from that game. Still talk to one from City of Heros, and I have 3 friends from WoW. All my current friends are people I have met in games online. Some people wouldn’t understand this and still look at me funny when I have plans ONLINE as opposed to “Normal Friends” who meet to drink at a bar. To me, going out every Thursday night for a bowling league is the same as me logging in at 8:00 to go raid an instance in a game for a few hours. You have a team of people you are familiar with, that meet every week for the same thing.

ANYWAY….I have to decide whether I want to go back to WoW again or not. Im not currently playing any game. I have been logging into Second Life alot more. WHY?!! Its because I’m meeting new people, all thanks to Jokay and her Jokaydia Island. Helps you stay around when you have things to do, friends to talk to, and people that you can help out, at least thats how my personality works. I’m an introverted helper, and SL lets me be a bit less introverted and allows me to help people learn. Trouble with going back to WoW is that I seem to be an all or nothing gamer. Need to try and see if I can casually play 8-10 hours a week instead of 36-48 hours a week! 😛

Tags: Gaming, Guilds, MMO, Raiding, WoW
Posted in Gaming | 3 Comments »

Jun

2008

How to move your shop to a new location in SL

Safety Girl and Azzurave are now set up and have their Landmarks all reset. I learned from the last move how to do it right. I’ll pass that onto everyone now!

1. Do NOT, bulk select your shop and take it into inventory! This is a bad thing to do! Almost all the time – you will not grab everything. The tiny pieces of your displays will not be selected and will sit there floating in the air….and you may not even know it until you set up again. Plus there is a limit on how many items you can select at once. 256 I believe. Just don’t try.

2. What you should do! Clear out everything in your OBJECT general folder – Make a new folder in your OBJECT folder and call it Current Objects….put all your loose inventory from your OBJECT folder in there for the time being. Reason to do this is, everything you pick up from your shop will automatically go into your OBJECT folder…and when you grab chunks of your displays, they may end up with strange names. This way you know everything you see in the folder are pieces of your shop!

3. Face a wall of your shop and highlight-edit your items on that wall only, then take that group of items into inventory. Do Not Link These Items! Do not take the shop itself yet. If you have alot of items – take that wall of items into inventory in sections. Keep grabbing chunks of your shop until your store is empty.

4. Now you can try to grab your building – I would suggest linking it if you can, ONLY if it is a small building. If you have a large shop with over 80 or so pieces or it is spread out past the linking limit….you want to link it in sections and go buy a rezzer. The building rezzer I use is called Rez-Faux. You can buy it here in game or here on SLExchange . To use one – link a few sections of your building…to make it easy, link the North, South, East, and West sections. You then drop a script into each of the pieces, then take a COPY of those sections and put them in the Rez Box. Now you can click the box and your building will pop out perfectly lined up, and you can turn and raise and lower until you are happy, then lock it in place. Its a great tool to have! Just test it to make sure it works before you destroy your main building. You never know when something might have not been selected.

5. Now go to your new spot, rez your building…set it in place, and start pulling out all your chunks of your shop! Before you pull out each section…click on the floor so you are in edit mode, then pull out the chunk…this way all the pieces are selected and you can move and rotate them. If you are not in edit mode when you pull it out of inventory, you will have to select all the items you just rezzed and you might not grab them all. The reason you didnt link these chunks was to make sure all the prices you set before will still be the same…you will not have to go around and reprice anything at all or set items for sale.

6. The most time consuming of all these tasks is putting new Landmarks in all your items. I am still behind in the times and don’t have my items in a database. Someday!

Tags: Azzura, How To, Second Life, Virtual Worlds
Posted in Virtual Worlds | No Comments »

Jun

2008

LL ups their ranking with me…

Back in April or May, I owned a full mainland Sim, ADRIA. On it I had 5 stores and one more on the way, a nice deck, lots of trees, and my treehouse office. I think I owned it for well over a year…thats $195 a month payed to LL if you don’t know about the cost of tier to own land. My stores were pulling in enough to cover my tier for some of that time, then lag, and lost inventory, and crashes started plaguing people more frequently and people stopped buying or using SL. Now I was paying out of my pocket every month due to only making half what I was. So 2 months ago I decided to pack it up and sell, and just keep the 2 stores that made a steady flow of $L running.

Luckily for me – I sold 2 days before LL dropped the price of islands, thus sending mainland land prices tumbling down down down. My mistake was selling so much land that I had just a tiny bit of cushion before hitting my prim limit. So now I was all compact and once again making more than my tier.

Then along comes Jokay, wandering if I want to help her out on some things, giving me a reason to log into SL daily. That along with being bored playing Everquest II made me log in and stay, and once again start building and messing around. While lag is still horrible, I’m not getting booted and I’m starting to meet some new people. I made a few items and put them into Safety Girl and Azzurave and then “You Cannot Rez your object because the Prim limit of this area has been reached”

Now I need more land! Some of the land I sold was up for sale. The person that bought it from me chopped it up and was selling it, for less then he bought it from me for! So I planned on buying back two 4096 plots…but my bill date from LL for my tier wasn’t for a few days. If I bought it now, LL would charge me $75 instead of $40 just for having more land for 3 days. So, against my impatient personality, I decided to wait.

Three days later, its time for LL to charge me, I went to the land I was going to buy back and….It Was SOLD! Now there was no way for me to up my prim limit in Adria. If I stayed, I would be forever trapped and not be able to expand….if I sell, I’m going to have to move the stores, possibly loosing customers. I chose to move. I contacted someone in Adria that asked if I could tell her if I ever moved…she wanted more land and a better view. I IM’d her and she wanted it, but couldn’t take it all. 🙁 So, I wound up activating one of my Alt accounts and gave her the extra land, leaving me with the ability to buy a 16k chunk of land (Double what I had now)

So I packed up my stores June 18th, 2008. And Sold the rest of Adria. Earlier on, I looked around for new land and found a nice flat spot of new mainland in a sim called RUST SPOT! It was selling for 4.5 per Squ which was almost 3x less than what I sold my old land for. Up sizing for less is ALWAYS a nice thing.

As the night went on, I kept going to my account page on Second Life but they still didn’t charge my account for the month! It was 11:15PM and I wanted to log off and get to bed. The owner of the land wasn’t on so she could save it for me…and I didn’t want to lose this spot…so I bought it. I refreshed my account page and Poooof, it now said my monthly charge was $75, due today! I immediately logged into support and explained that I waited all day and night for them to bill me, and it never happened, and that I’ve been a paying customer for over 2 years…its not fair if you charge me for land I only owned for an hour.

The next day I opened my email and tadaaaa….LL charged me $75. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. I added a note to my support ticket that they charged me the day after my bill date! two hours after I bought the land…please refund my $35…its not fair!

Well….LL escalated the support ticket for review and the next email said, $35 will be refunded to your account! Support pulls through for me for once! I have not had very good luck with them online or on the phone. While my one phone support call to billing did get fixed, I was rudely told that phone support is for emergencies and I should have used online support (Yeah right, and have it take 3 weeks)

ANYWAY – I have a nice new chunk of land….Safety Girl is set up, and Azzurave is half set up. Now I can reopen some of the others too.

Posted in Real Life | 1 Comment »

Jun

2008

Blog???

Ok – my mentor JoKay would want me to do this….Not sure if anyone will care to read it though since I lead a pretty calm life.

Know nothing about WordPress or Widgets. Just got Twitter a few days ago, and Google Reader after that…I’ve had Flickr. Now to get them all to work together!

Of course I need to go home now from work! Eating with my parents and my son, since he is off to Canada for 4 weeks of CAMP! Lucky him! Expensive – but im sure it will help him grow up and be more responsible and independent.

Posted in Real Life | 1 Comment »