Madelaine McMasters

Rolig Loon wrote: I wish everyone a relaxed, safe holiday season. I hope you enjoy health and friendship in 2014 and that the new year brings you new opportunites to grow. Thank you Rolig! I too wish everyone a happy holiday season and a wondrous 2014. Thank you all for keeping me company here over the last year. Let's do it again! Maddy

Good morning, Hippie!!! I think you'll find it's easier to decorate the tree now that I've laid it on the floor for you...

Hi Lola, The edit window may well be hiding behind the toolbar buttons. You can temporarily drag them to a side or the top of the viewer window to expose the hiding edit window, them put the back when you've moved it back on-screen. You can also right click on a toolbar button and select "Remove this button" from the menu. You can put it (and others) back by right clicking any button and selecting "Toolbar buttons..." from the menu, or by selecting "Toolbar Buttons" from the "Me" or "Avatar" menu.

Good morning, Hippie!!! It's a winter wonderland outside this morning. Six inches of snow on the ground, more coming, and it's all snowman snow!!! After I eat a path down the driveway... I'll turn my attention to building a snowhuman... Good morning, Kids!!!

Hi Talarus, I think you're dealing with two separate issues. I'm not sure what's causing your crashing, but Rolig's suggestion might help. As for the constant updating, that's a known issue caused by a goofup in naming the viewer. Oz Linden describes the error and the solution here... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Second-Life-3-6-12-284506-Dec-4-2013-04-55-18-Keeps-downloading/m-p/2375155#M22105 Good luck!

Tiana, your inventory has most likely not been lost. The local cached copy of the inventory list on your PC has probably been corrupted and must be rebuilt. Clear your cache, go to a quiet sim (no/few other avatars) and log out, then log back in and wait for your inventory to rebuild. Here's the SL wiki entry for inventory loss... http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inventory_loss Good luck!

I'm not in PS at the moment, and it's been years since I've done this, but here's how I think I'd do what you want. For example's sake, let's say you want a 480x480 pixel image with 32 pixel wide drop shadow on the right and bottom, and no shadow on the top and left, making a full 512x512 texture. Start by making the alpha channel. I think you click in the channel column of the layer palette and click something on the bottom to make a new alpha channel. I believe it defaults to black, which is full transparent. (I can never remember if black is transparent, or if white is, so if I got it wrong, reverse black and white in everything I say). Now, you want your artwork to be fully opaque, and the shadow to go from opaque at the artwork edge to transparent at the texture edge. To make such a gradient, create a fixed size 480x480 pixel marquee and move it 16 pixels right and down from the top left corner of the canvas. Next, you want to fill the marquee with white, using the bucket tool (and I think you have to click the B/W icon somewhere in the lower left to do that, or use the color picker to get white paint). Now you have a white (opaque) rectangle centered on you canvas, and you want to fuzz the edges to make the drop shadow gradient. Select the entire image, open the Gaussian Blur filter, set the radius to 16 pixels (half the shadow width). Now you have a shadow gradient 32 pixels wide, on all sides. But you want your image in the upper left, fully opaque, so you pull up the marquee again, locate it in the upper left and fill it with white. This paints over the shadow on the left and top edges of the image. Your alpha channel is complete, now return to the Layers tab and fill the entire image with black, the color of your shadow. Open your artwork document and crop/scale it down to 480x480, then copy it into the upper left of your new texture document, then make sure the new alpha channel is enabled. In the layer view, you should see your artwork, with the red alpha highlight over the black areas on the right and bottom of the image. If you export that as TGA, the artwork area of the texture will be opaque, and the black border will go from opaque near the artwork to transparent at the texture edge. If you want a softer shadow, you can adjust the levels/curves of the alpha channel just after applying the gaussian blur and just before painting in the white marquee in the upper left. If you darken the alpha channel, the shadow becomes softer. But you must do that before painting in the fully opaque area with the marquee, or your artwork will become translucent. You may find Rolig's way easier, as her example is a hell of a lot easier to follow than mine. Good luck!

Hi Fresa, In addition to Freya's admonition to be patient, and to make sure your internet connection is fast enough, your problem may be due to a difference in the way your new computer connects to the internet. If your old PC was on a wired connection, and the new one is running wi-fi, that could be an issue. SL is highly intolerant of data transmission errors. A good wi-fi connection will work well, but a degraded one will upset SL long before you notice it in other applications. So, if you continue to have SL woes with your new computer, look to the quality of your internet connection first. Good luck!

Go back to bed, Hippie! See what happens when you wake me so early to put up the lights?... Good morning, Kids!!!

Hi Callie, Torley Linden has a spot set aside for just that... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Here/125/127/23 I just visited and it's still there and working. Good luck!

Hi Hippie and Kids!!! Beware of dog snowball...

To continue on the "rocket surgeon" metaphor, my father did small contract work for NASA, and infected me with his interest in space. If you look at all the things we had to know in order to get people into space, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, materials science, psychology, nutrition, medicine, economics, etc., you might eventually conclude that everything is rocket science (or rocket science is everything?)

Hi Chrissie, In addition to KarenMichelle's advice for doing a clean install, your constant "update" messages may be due to an error in the packaging of 3.6.12. Here's Oz Linden's explanation... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Second-Life-3-6-12-284506-Dec-4-2013-04-55-18-Keeps-downloading/m-p/2375155#M22105 Good luck!

Hi AvantGarde, Groups are closed 48 hours after the membership level falls below two. Although you paid to create the group, you pay nothing to keep it, so you are incurring no additional costs. To ensure that the membership count stays at one (you), make the group invitation only.

Uechi, the denizens of the Answers forum are residents, just like you. We're no more able to fix SL issues than you are.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: As far as what matters in SL, one can just as effectively be a giant prim cube. Or wear a house on your right hand - and go about things just fine. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussions/The-day-I-became-CABIN-MAN/td-p/459867/page/2

Innula Zenovka wrote: Most older vehicle scripts use link messages to control script in the wheel prims, to turn llTargetOmega on and off. Now you don't need to do that, since you can use llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast to control PRIM_OMEGA. Note that you can control all four wheels in one call, by saying llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_SET,[PRIM_LINK_TARGET,wheel_1, some params,PRIM_LINK_TARGET,wheel_2, some params...]); And I think (correct me if I'm wrong, Innula) that if your wheels are simple textured cylinders, Steph's suggestion to rotate the texture is best, as llTargetOmega's rotation vector must be changed if the vehicle's front wheels are steerable. Texture rotation doesn't care about prim orientation. llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | SMOOTH | ROTATE | LOOP, 0,1,1,0, rotation_rate, 1); for example.

Hiya Piggs! How many sims must I own to qualify for a reduced monthly rate and what are the rates? Here's a very old (mid 2010) article on the subject. I've no idea what the current state of affairs is, nor even if that story is accurate... http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/06/will-lab’s-over-half-off-sale-for-large-landowners-continue.html

I do like the irony of freezing by overheating, but that may be the cause of the problems. The GeForce 7300 family is, by today's standards, low performance. It'll be working it's li'l heart out to render SL, and if the cooling system can't keep up, the operating system may start throttling the clock to the graphics hardware. When that happens, the result is often a crash of the SL viewer. When I had this problem on my old Mac laptop, a cleaning fixed it right up. If you have a system monitor, as Mari suggests, peek at the GPU temperatures and see if they're high. If there is some means of monitoring GPU loading, you may also see loading start to rise after the temperature stabilizes at some high temperature. That will be evidence that the OS is slowing down the clock to limit temperature, resulting in the GPU having to work even harder to keep up. Eventually it won't be able to and... whoosh, down you go. Good luck!

Paratrex wrote: That's mostly people's ALTs and newly added BOTS. I know people with over 20 ALTS. The lab has never given a way to measure either one of those population factors. Yet the lab has given a way to see that the population is declining. If you are suggesting they're spinning the numbers, they should fire the head of spin control.

Ceka Cianci wrote: Paratrex wrote: No wonder 35,000 people stopped logging into this stupid game. Concurrent users use to reach upwards up 80,000 now it's lucky to have 55,000. Ahh, but you have include in that number all the ALTS and BOTS. Do you all keep up with Tyche Shepherd's Twitter. https://twitter.com/tycheshepherd ? Would you like a visual of what I'm talking about. Here is the lasted batch of regions going bye bye. http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/virtual-business/8523-new-sl-sims-past-week-87.html#post1871943 ya it used to be around 30k regions at it's peak if i remember right.. now at a little more than 26k regions? that doesn't sound like too hard of a hit since then really.. down 4k in regions over all? Unless you compare SL to the world it inhabits, which has grown ~15% since the SL concurrency peak...

Hi Tahlia, In addition to Steph's advice, I'll add that as you go around shift-clicking on things to add them to the linkset, shift-clicking on something already collected into the set will remove it again. This takes away some of the stress of gathering things up. If you get a little too click happy, you can backtrack. And if you don't yet know which prim you want to be the root, you do not have to wait until the end to shift-click it. You can gather up all the bits, then at the very end, when you've got a good look at all the highlighted stuff in your set, you shift-click the prim you want to be root... twice. The first shift-click removes it from the set, the second shift-click brings it back in, and makes it the root, since it's the last one in. And as Steph notes, if the thing you unlinked contained scripts to do magical things, those scripts may have depended on the linkset being linked up in some particular order. You are unlikely to accidentally put it all back together in the right sequence, so you'll either have to peer into the scripts to figure it all out, or do what I do... throw the damned thing away and decide you never liked it in the first place. ;-) Good luck!

steph Arnott wrote: I not really understand that, I was just saying do we go back to the days of the brutal win to work and the unfortunates starve, maybe I translate it wrong. I certainly don't want to go back to those days, which is why I think happiness should be part of the equation, and that may argue against using U-3 to gauge unemployment in the US. If someone wants more work than they have, we should acknowledge that. Around the world, if the trend isn't towards increased happiness, I think we're doing something wrong. Fortunately... And if happiness is the thing we're pursuing, I think we have to understand why we feel it... ... and that because happiness is comparative, it's hard to understand why someone else is happy. This may explain why few Americans would want to live in the (currently) happiest country on Earth... Guatamala (eta, or Norway!). (Yes, one could argue that this "happiest country" ranking is fluff, but I think there is enough truth in these ways of looking at it to warrant consideration.) If there's a point to what I'm saying, I can't find it. I'm just waiting for one coat of varnish to dry so I can apply another. ;-)

steph Arnott wrote: It means more profit and no responsibilities. ADDED: A old man i know here in UK say when he work on the docks the formen threw tags, those strong enough fought for them to do a days work. I'm a believer in Locke's "the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness". The US founding fathers may have agreed, they scribbled "Life, Liberty, and the Purfuit of Happinefs" into the Declaration of Independence. Notwithstanding their terrible spelling, I think they were pretty smart people. I suppose we forget that the Declaration says we have a inalienable right to pursue happiness, not a right to catch it. We do have to put in some effort ourselves. And therein lies the human potential for disagreement over human potential.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: I just figured if they could pull a random number out of their butt so could i. How is a part time employee unemployed? A part time employee may well be under-employed. I have friends who are not able to find full time jobs because employers avoid mandatory benefits for full time workers by avoiding full time workers. A local supermarket closed here several years ago, reformed itself legally, free of previous contracts. They then re-opened in the same building under a new name. The previous staff had been nearly all full-time, receiving health insurance and retirement benefits. The new staff is almost entirely part-time, no health insurance, no retirement benefits. This may be the new normal, and economics may necessitate it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand what it means.