Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Bliss Garden Center

I’ll interrupt my bike ride for charity to consider recent problems in Second Life® concerning stability.  The angst goes on.

April was the cruelest month for Linden Lab® and its customers, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase—as every journalist once did in a better-read era. 

Consider this bit of teeth-gnashing from the company:

April was not a good month for Second Life Grid availability. Our internal outage tracking tool estimates that about 630,000 usage hours were lost to global system failures over the course of the month, which is about 1.9% of the total (up from 0.06% in February and 0.22% in March), and resident surveys clearly indicate great unhappiness coinciding with these failures.

You may read Ian Linden’s entire honest blog entry on behalf of the company if you wish. 

What do these sorts of global failures mean?  These are not caused by an individual avatar, but by the company.  Imagine, if you would, getting up one morning to find your real-life car gone.  You’d assume it had been stolen by criminals or at least towed away by police.  In Second Life, however, a failure of the central database can result in inventory items or money simply vanishing.

This cannot continue.  During a recent failure, items could not be “rezzed” inside SL, and many shown in avatar’s inventories simply were “not found in the database.“  Now imagine that you car is not only gone, but your closet and dresser are empty, leaving you standing in your pajamas.

Or maybe naked.  And you are bald too (Second Life’s hair attaches to the avatar as a separate item).  Here’s the company’s little warning to us:

[7:39 pm pacific] We are continuing to have problems with our asset server cluster. Please avoid any kind of financial transactions or attempting to rez no-copy objects.

[8:42 pm pacific] Asset servers are returning to their proper operating state. The road may still be a bit bumpy for a little while, but a smooth ride will soon be returning.

Bumpy road?

More like potential catastrophe if Linden Lab does not keep essential services up and running.  My only hope in this matter is the commitment to stability that the new CEO has made.  We’ll see.

And I’m bald every day IRL. I can live without my virtual dreadlocks for a while.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts