Sigh

I wonder what happened to the pictures from the last post. I'll eventually track it down. Blasted technology!

Edit 7/15/11 5:27pm: I still have no idea what happened, but the pictures are back. An educated guess is that operator error caused by learning Mars Edit, somehow got the location of the pictures confused.

Last Days of Caledon Downs

I could see the end coming... the Downs was often less than full, and occasionally very empty. This does not signal a long and happy life.

I was a founding resident of the Downs - I asked the Guv to be placed on the waiting list for Caledon land (oh yes, children, in the Days of Yore, demand outstripped supply) and my name on the list came up around the time that the Guv opened the Downs. But, despite what seemed to be an ideal central location, the Downs never regained the traction it lost when the Steampunk Resource Centre left.

RJ house number 2

My original house, next to Glengarry

Miss Mariya Obolensky's property

The Caledon Downs Airfield

Miss Spinweaver Radmussen's house

Miss Belisa Bing's barn and, in the distance, house

 

The Duport Camp (Mr. Weird Duport)

On the Move

The paintings were all off the walls. I carefully put away the last of the china and used a wrinkled lace handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my brow. The Victrola - a gift from the Aether Salon - was carefully stowed away. Only the furniture remained in place, and the movers were scheduled to cart everything away tomorrow.

As residents of the Steamlands well know, the entire area - and especially Caledon and its nearby environs - is subject to wide-scale tectonic changes. Most of those occur very quickly and unexpectedly, as the revelers on Mondserrat (or, more recently, the residents of Cala Mondrago) can attest. Fortunately, we residents of Caledon Downs had ample warning of the impending change and could pack and move in an orderly manner.

Still, as I locked the house door behind me, I felt a pang of nostalgia. This was my first home in the Steamlands - and, until this point, my only home. Were I selling it to a happy newcomer, or perhaps a couple expecting their first child, any regrets would be tempered with the happiness of seeing someone else take pleasure in the house. Neighbors came and went with regularity, but all were good people.

For the moment, I was homeless. However, the Guvnah takes care of his people, and kindly helped me negotiate for a property on Aether Isle, in the shadow of Steam Sky City. I engaged my trusty airship, the Hangover Two, placed the china, Victrola, and other mementos in the cargo hold, and set a course due west.

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In another possible telling of this story, the Guv has decided that the weak land market and low occupancy rate in the Downs requires him to close Caledon Downs. I will indeed be residing on Aether Isle. Mrs. Volare has kindly suggested a metal roof to better repel debris falling from Steam Sky City; given the mischief that goes on up there, I might need something even stronger.

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In all seriousness, I'd like to thank Des for how incredibly easy he made the process. I know shrinking Caledon's size can't be easy for him, the decision being made palatable only because the alternative - continuing to lose money on a sim that's not close to being full - is even worse. While he has every right to be grumpy about the situation, he was his usual incredible going-out-of-his-way self in getting me (and the others) out of the Downs and settled elsewhere.

Under the Italian Sun

Wanderlust came over me once again, and I decided a nice Italian holiday was in order. Off I set to Il Principato di Melioria, a small island principality circa 1780. Mr. Aldo Stern, late of Caledon, Miss Sere Timeless, and Miss Dio Kuhr, late of Deadwood, now own the historical-themed sim. (Miss Kuhr writes of her experiences here and here.)

I arrived at the dock on a beautiful afternoon, eager to explore the city. As many of these quaint towns are, the dock area is heavily built up, with small homes and shops compressed together, doubtless from the time when the Roman Empire was still mighty.

The town does boast one large villa, with exquisitely manicured grounds (above). The plaza (below) is charming at sunset.

The small shop above shows that, tourist money aside, Melioria is at heart a working city.

The coffee shop is the central meeting point of the town. I helped myself to a steaming cup. In the Italian style, it's quite (*cough*) strong.

Eager to shed some layers of clothing after spending the day in the hot Mediterranean sun, I hastened to the beach, and the changing stations.

I was intrigued to see that the principality has become prosperous "thanks to low taxes, a very relaxed approach to trading and banking practices, and a welcoming attitude towards well-born tourists (and their money)." A lesson that bears reminding.

IT Support is Hard at Work

I've been in the process of moving my SL machine (and main blogging machine) from a gracefully-aging H-P mini-tower to an iMac.

The H-P was doing okay in most tasks, with the exception of the Second Life client. On good days I would get somewhere around 12 fps; on bad days the number would be in the single digits. I'm not quite sure why this was the case, because the machine itself hadn't changed, but perhaps the clients have become more demanding over the years. In any event, the iMac regularly gets frame rates in the low 20s, which makes the whole experience so much better. (And thanks to Mr. TriloByte Zanzibar for his blog entry on the new iMacs, which not only convinced me to make the jump but saved me several hundred dollars, as he (correctly) said that all of the models would be fine running SL.)

I have changed Difference Engines on a number of occasions - often enough that I sometimes think I started out with Mr. Babbage's original Engine - but this is only the second time I've tried moving things across platforms, and the first one doesn't really count.

Back in 1985 or so, I had my very first Engine, a beige box of a Macintosh. It crashed a lot, required endless disk swapping (as it had only one floppy drive - never mind that external floppy in the picture above!), and was slow as molasses, but it got me through college. For graduate school, however, I needed something a little more current, a little more compatible, and, preferably, a little more portable, so I bought an absurdly-expensive Toshiba laptop (the T5100, if I recall correctly, a 386 CPU with a gas plasma display, which gave the screen that red glow) (back when one could call them laptops without the liability lawyers descending). It was a nice machine, and I did a fair amount of work on it, until it was stolen one day. Switching from the Macintosh OS to DOS wasn't such an ordeal, as I had only a handful of files, all on 3.5" floppies. Boom, done.

This time around, I had years of detritus, including a staggering amount of crud in my "Documents" folder, a whopping 156 GB of stuff in my (pre-iTunes) music folder - God knows how much of it is in iTunes at this moment and how much of it isn't - and 4-5 GB of pictures, many of them SL-related. I've had two Engines running far more than I wanted to in an already-hot room. Add to that the hassle of setting up a new backup routine, and... this was a lot more fun when I was younger.

In any event, I hope to get things sorted out sooner rather than later.

No Mill is an Island?

In Caledon SouthEnd, I encountered an unusual sight. No, not the giant Ferris wheel; that's been a fixture in SouthEnd from the start. Take a look in the distance. Is that a stone building on an island? I moved closer to investigate.

Not only was it a stone building on an island, but the building turned out to be a paper mill, owned by Miss Trilby Minotaur.


The mill has no shortage of water!

Why I Undertake as Few Home Projects as Possible

This is a story of how project spiral out of control.

Last winter wasn't terribly harsh, as these things go, but we had one very heavy snowfall - a power-line-falling, branches-snapping snowfall. I lost a number of branches on a pine tree. Though I thought I had cleared the dead branches in early spring, I saw some dead ones some weeks ago through the kitchen window.

One recent day, after arriving back home from work, I remembered that the following day was recycling pickup, and I remembered the dead branches. Although the temperature was 87 degrees, I figured this was the work of a moment. Five minutes, max.

• walk back to grab the dead branch, only to realize it's higher off the ground than I thought
• jump to grab dead branch, then wrestle it to the ground, only to find that it's bigger than I thought
• drag branch to the front and find a leaf bag
• grab loppers to make pieces small enough to fit into the leaf bag
• having noticed a large weed behind the pine tree, take loppers out back once more
• start lopping the weed, which has grown to the size of the fabled Beanstalk
• realize that there are several more just like it, plus a few weed-lets in an earlier state of growth
• drag the pieces into the open where they can be chopped to fit into the leaf bag
• drag the leaf bag and recycling bin to the curb
• go inside and try to stop sweating profusely

Total time: 20 minutes. A factor of four from my original estimate.

A happy July 4 to everyone!

The Really Lost Gardens of Apollo

Having read that the famed sim The Lost Gardens of Apollo was closing, I decided to pay one last visit. I hadn't been there in several years - no doubt part of the owner's problem - so I'd report on how the sim has changed, but I can't really recall my earlier visits. Still, some gorgeous sights.

Steamlands Consolidation?

From Mr. Mornington's blog (via Mrs. Volare on Twitter):

Hot on the heels of news that Steeltopia may be closing, it seems the massive Victorian community of Antiquity is about to go the way of Atlantis and sink into the depths of that vast Linden Lab blue ocean.

It sounds as though the reasons for each are very different, and I don't care to speculate about any of it. I will say that I'll be sad to see them go - particularly Steeltopia.

A silver lining to this, if it comes to pass, would be an increase in the occupancy rates in the rest of the Steamlands (and, perchance, an increase in the average selling price of land from zero).

In My Car

Wandering the world on foot is a great way to savor the sights, but occasionally the accumulation of worn shoe leather, blisters, and chafed spots becomes too much and one pines for a different mode of transportation.

I was minding my own business on Linden Route 12 when first a tank, then an automobile came down the road, both driverless. This piqued my curiosity, so I reversed course and followed them.

Although both vehicles weaved across the road, neither left the highway. I wondered if I could induce one or the other to take me part of my way, so I climbed behind the wheel of the convertible.

After some time, I thought I might try my luck with the tank. This turned out to be trickier, as the tank felt no compunction about rotating its turret in my direction and firing a shell at me. Once I clambered to the turret, all seemed well.

Curious, I tracked the vehicles to their origin, which turned out to be on a different road altogether, Route 9, at the Putiki Fold Bus Terminal. The vehicles are made by Miss AnnMarie O'Toole. While the vehicles themselves are all free, each costs L$100 for the auto-navigation script.

Bus terminals aren't much in any life, I suppose.

I took a taxi north on Route 9. On occasion, I would encounter another vehicle heading in the opposite direction. A little dance would ensue - perhaps two sumo wrestlers trying to push the other out of the ring would be a better metaphor - and eventually the two vehicles would have enough room to pass one another.

I was impressed by the scripting. Whenever the vehicle started to veer off the road, it would make small corrections to find its way back on again. The biggest obstacles were the sim crossings. Every so often the taxi would be far off the road and it would take some time to find the road again. Nonetheless, I went through dozens of sims without a hitch, finally reaching what I thought was the end of the road...

...only to discover that the road continued as an underwater tunnel!