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Rolig Loon

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Everything posted by Rolig Loon

  1. Rolig Loon
    Jessica Williams : In The Key Of Monk
  2. Rolig Loon
    I have never seen that site before, but I would only use it as a rough guide if I were you. The LindeX does not have currency conversion. When you buy L$, you are buying with USD. If you are starting with some other currency (Euros, perhaps, or Yen), you will have to convert them to USD first. That conversion is often done automatically by your bank or your credit card company or by PayPay, which charges its own conversion fees and may use an exchange rate that is different from the site you were consulting. And then, of course, there are the standard transaction fees that we all pay for any trade in the LindeX itself. The bottom line, therefore, is that the site you have been looking at can't be very accurate because it can't know exactly what steps you will be taking between your home currency and L$. Keep in mind also that conversion rates vary, sometimes rapidly. The conversion rate from USD to L$ has been very steady for years, but the same is not true for conversion among RL currencies. The best suggestion I can offer is to overestimate the first few times that you buy L$, just to get a feel for the effective yield rate. Then use your experience to create your own empirical guideline.
  3. Rolig Loon
    Yup
  4. Rolig Loon
    Set the target for the particles to the generator itself, by setting it equal to llGetKey().
  5. Rolig Loon
    It's a script thing. I suggest posting in the InWorld Employment forum to attract a scripter to write something for you, assuming that you are the region owner and have a Premium membership and have created an Experience.
  6. Rolig Loon
    I am convinced that everybody has a personal limit beyond which math is uncomfortable. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it is something to recognize because it can make some parts of your life difficult. It's worth the effort to push against the limit, but at some point even pushing doesn't help. I once tutored the daughter of an MIT professor who could not grasp the idea that a fraction is a division problem. She had trouble even making change, and it frustrated her no end. (I imagine it also frustrated her father, but I never asked.) Basic arithmetic was simply her limit and it was painful to go farther. I reached my own limit well beyond that and learned that the best way for me to solve a nasty math problem is to ask a mathematician. Some math is "intuitive" for me; some is hopelessly confusing. I have no idea why some people have an easier time with numbers than others, but I strongly suspect that it's something we are hard-wired for.
  7. Rolig Loon
    Sadly true. Because all of this made me curious, I just went to dig my Dad's old slide rule out of the box of stuff I saved from his desk. It's junk at this point. Not only has the wood dried out so everything is loose and sloppy, the veneer (plastic of some kind) that has the numbered scales on it has come unglued in places. What an end. I read a biography of Richard Feynman years ago in which they described how physicists in the Manhattan Project sat for hours with slide rules analyzing the results of their nuclear experiments. Feynman would race them to the answers because he had memorized great portions of the logarithm tables and could do the math in his head faster than they could do it with the slide rule. These days a high school kid could get the numbers by pushing a few buttons on a calculator (and without having the faintest idea what the calculator was doing).
  8. Rolig Loon
    If nothing else, they were a good aid to understanding how to calculate with logarithms (which are also a bit of math that's forgotten in schools today). I remember a joke about an engineer trying to teach his son how to use a slide rule. "So, to multiply 2 X 2, you move the slide so that the 1 on the C scale is lined up with the 2 on the D scale. Then, move the cursor to the 2 on the C scale and read the answer on the D scale below. And it's .... 3.999 ..... call it 4. Easy!"
  9. Rolig Loon
    I think our high school generation was the last to actually still be taught how to use a slide rule. My Dad gave me his Log-Log-Decitrig model when I was in (I think) 10th grade and we had to bring one to math class. I got a big, heavy TI "pocket" calculator when I was in college.
  10. Rolig Loon
    The function to study in the LSL wiki is llAttachToAvatarTemp. It doesn't require an Experience to work, but the only way to attach it without asking the avatar's permission explicitly is to use one. Then you'd activate the llAttachToAvatar function in the script's experience_permissions event. If you really want the HUD to detach again in a short period of time, just trigger a timer when the HUD is attached and let it call llDetachFromAvatar (again, in the experience_permissions event). ETA: The advantage of using llAttachtoAvatarTemp instead of llAttachToAvatar is that the HUD will simply disappear when detached, rather than being sent to the person's inventory.
  11. Rolig Loon
    Nope. I revel in silence and in the shared experience of spontaneous typos. What's more, the voices I imagine for people are much more interesting than the real voices they probably have.
  12. Rolig Loon
    Why choose?
  13. Rolig Loon
    Perhaps, but I somehow suspect that they never intended it to be more than a handy way for people to share information one on one. SL was fortunate to have been conceived in the era before Facebook, Twitter and the rest created the expectation that everything should be universally shareable. We make our connections the old-fashioned way, one or two people at a time, on our own terms. That explains SL's appeal to the older demographic, I suppose, and it also explains why it doesn't appeal as much to people who are primarily drawn to the world of Musk and Zuckerberg.
  14. Rolig Loon
    That's exactly where I was going, and it's in line with your earlier comment that This is a social environment but it's not one where people seem to like social engineering. They prefer to find their own groups and companions.
  15. Rolig Loon
    When profiles included that Interests tab, I wonder how many people actually filled in that field. I can easily imagine a newbie wanting to find other Spanish or Japanese speakers in SL. On the other hand, I suspect that most Spanish or Japanese speaking residents probably wouldn't want random people searching for them just because they share a language, so they would leave the field blank. I really don't know whether the field was "broadly useful" or not, and I wonder whether making it searchable would really be popular. I'm just guessing it wouldn't be. In the same vein, I have wondered occasionally why almost nobody posts in the International sections of these forums. There are thousands of SL residents who speak Spanish and Portuguese, for example, but those forums get two or three posts a month on average. I can understand why few people post comments in those languages in the rest of the forums, where English overwhelms them, but why not in the International forums? Language is a basic component of social networking, but not there.
  16. Rolig Loon
    Staying and chatting might be an option, true, but only if it was the end of that conversation. My guess is that a random person stopping to ask detailed questions about my avatar wouldn't be particularly interested in chatting about other things, so in the end it would amount to the same thing. We'd both walk away.
  17. Rolig Loon
    I doubt it, but honestly the question has never come up. The random person rarely asks me anything, especially something as personal as the details of my avatar and her clothing. The most I get from a close friend is usually "Nice dress. Where'd you get it?" I guess if that hypothetical person ever did ask, I'd probably just give a short answer and walk away.
  18. Rolig Loon
    The fact is, SL isn't as bright and shiny and some people think it is, and it's not as dull and gloomy as others think. I doubt there's a "cheerleader" who wouldn't like to see some things work better, and I suspect that even the gloomiest people here stay because they see something worthwhile. So everybody posts. The loudest people don't convince each other to change their opinions much but at least hearing the extremes reminds us all that everyone doesn't see SL the same way. The experience for most of us is somewhere in the middle. (And we get to peeve at both ends.)
  19. Rolig Loon
    Well, it's kind of a wussy peeve, if you ask me. Still, if it's all you've got, run with it. With any luck, a squirrel will hit the local substation tonight, plunging everything into darkness before breakfast and the start of the work week. Then your tiny warm-up peeve will have prepared you for the real thing. Waste not, want not, so they say.
  20. Rolig Loon
    I know Rowan already suggested Meandmy Shadow, but if you live in the right part of the world, Myanmar Shadow might be even better.
  21. Rolig Loon
    There's nothing evil about hyperbole per se. It's a linguistic tool we use to evoke an emotional response, like lots of other tools. I could say, "I like seeing you", but it's much more effective if I say, "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles" (to coin a phrase). We do it all the time (there's another bit of hyperbole). I suspect that when some people seem annoyed by hyperbole, they're really bothered by something else. Some politicians or journalists make wildly exaggerated statements that are built on a germ of fact but are deliberately misleading, for example. And some people make hyperbolic statements aren't just exaggerated but downright insulting: "That hat looks like something a deranged baboon might wear to a wedding", for instance. Don't blame hyperbole for carrying unpleasant baggage.
  22. Rolig Loon
    Yeah, but that's sort of the way RL works too. It's been a long time, but I don't recall anyone letting me choose my own name when I first appeared in RL. Someone else did it for me. Of course, I could change it later (perhaps with some cost and a bit of bureaucratic inconvenience) and I can have any number of unofficial nicknames and aliases. Still, the name my parents hung on me decades ago is a good chunk of my identity. I'm just glad they didn't decide my name should be 114055US5.
  23. Rolig Loon
    Yes, that's often the case even for those of us who are closer to the servers. After all, your own avatar and attachments are already cached on your system, as are many of the bits of scenery in places that you visit frequently. They will rez a little faster than people and objects that you have not seen recently. That's also why we may often rez naked even after the smoke clears.
  24. Rolig Loon
    The naming system has also flip-flopped a couple of times in the past 20 years, so we now have avatars whose system names were created under different rules. I would guess, offhand, that the average SL user may be a bit ticked off by the name they have but wouldn't care to take the time to change it, even if the option were free. The Display Name option (which is free) is enough to satisfy most of the people who care. The one thing that would probably get quite a few people mad would be replacing login names with some soulless machine-generated string, like "114055US5". Unlike Roblox or other games, SL is primarily a social environment. Most of the time we tend to engage each other as people, not as "players", and people have names, not numbers. It is true that in the inner workings of SL we are each best known by our unique UUIDs, so names are a pleasant fiction. Still, it's our comfortable fiction, it's human, and it fits the sort of world SL has always been.
  25. Rolig Loon
    <<< The obligatory relevant cartoon
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