Is there anything else I can help you with?

Seems I have missed something; Jayn tipped me to try live chat to solve my ghost problem, something that I have actually never tried before. After stating my problem, the kind person at the other end responded:

[07:00 AM] Naeree:

Christopher, we will restart the region to resolve this issue. Please try to log in in about 15 minutes after clearing your cache and changing your log in location.

[07:01 AM] Naeree:

Is there anything else I can help you with?

WOW. They actually restarted a region just for me! And problem was solved in a few minutes. But the thing that really made me happy was this "is there anything else I can help you with?" question.

That's an attitude I like as a customer.

Thanks, Naeree, for being my personal ghostbuster!

13 of 52 - Send in the Clowns

Four of the olympic games last amateurs are ready for the final against Canada, and that's really cool. Yes, it's a joy to watch the girls win the cross country skiing relay, but somehow the taste is a bit dry in the mouth, because we know the size of the support organization behind it, and all the money spent just to gain those few extra seconds to get a medal. Our clowns had to pay for their own trousers:-)

Viewer 2.0's tight http/media integration promises great possibilities. But to really make use of those you actually have to have access to a web server. And you need a server that is running 24/7, communicating with your vendors or whatever gadgets you use in your store.

Even worse, if you plan to sell anything with an HTML-based GUI or HUD, the end user of your products will be dependent on you keeping that web server running. If you make a glitch, the great menu driven bed with HTML HUD you sold a lot of may die under their naked avatar skins - just imagine how popular that will make you:-)

In short, any product that is dependent on an external server is no longer a self-contained product in-world, but more of a service. This has two implications:

• A service should not be sold as a product with the customer expectations that it should run inside SL forever. Instead, it should be licensed as a service with periodic payment to cover your hosting costs. That's the only fair way to treat the buyers of your products.

• A larger percentage of SL's gross products will be services, instead of ever-lasting products. This will counter the problems of ever-lasting items that is slowing down the economy (if you perceive that as a problem)

Finally, since a lot of the best products will actually be externally hosted services, it will be even harder for amateurs to compete in SL. Just as it is in the olympics. A lot of us will avoid establishing a responsibility to run servers for our in-world customers, leaving those markets to the professionals.

I do wish that LL would start a kind of hosting program for HTML pages and images; they do host our textures now, why should they not host our media based content based on the same model: Pay once for the upload, LL provides the hosting for the common good of all SL inhabitants. I guess the answer is simple: LL really would prefer most content to be sold by professionals. They no longer care for our world - our imagination. Sad.

But I guess in the end, a clever SL amateur creator with a good idea may still succeed in this world - just as our guys in their genius idea of an outfit. So please: Send in the clowns!

Dominos in Old York!

I was working a little with my booth in Old York when Roland Francis, the creator and owner of the city, came by. He seemed to like my dominoes; he actually bought a set and started to fill the open space with bricks. They will be standing there for demo purposes for a week now; I hope people will like them:-)


We got help from an attractive girl in gorgeous white leather boots to test the cannon; it worked fine, but when asked "what is this?" I really had problems knowing what to call it. A game? A decoration? A toy? Any suggestions appreciated!

Anyway, the bricks are now available in Old York, in my shop and on xstreetsl.

The image Steven Jobs did not show...

... but you know you want it!

As of yet we don't know enough about the graphics processor in the iPad to say anything about the possibility of an SL client app. Apple is designing the chip-set themselves, and they have not told anyone if they have found room for 3D hardware rendering with OpenGL drivers. But since even some Mini PCs that Jobs despises so much can handle SL, we can hope!

Update: Rumours have it that the chip inside the iPad is based on the PowerVR chipset, supposedly exceeding the OpenGL 2.0 specs. Cool!

8 of 52 - How to make real money in SL - LL publishes Q4 results

Linden Lab revealed their Q4 and year end statistics this week. It inspired me to put all the dollars I've earned this year in a jar and having my alt sprinkle them over me.

LOL, dream on, Cristopher!

(btw, the dollar bill emitter is on sale in my shop for the crazy low price of L$10 if you can find it in the note rain.... will put up a vendor on the wall real soon now...)

Truth is, it's hard to make real money in SL, but a few people manages really well. 50 accounts took more than USD$100.000,- in profit out of SL last year, the top 25 accounts alone more that US$12 million, that is almost half a million dollar apiece. In sum, businesses took US$55 million out of SL.

The most impressive is that these figures represents actual earnings, that is money taken out of SL AFTER tier and ads are paid to Linden Lab (since I don't expect anyone to process credit to PayPal and then use PayPal to pay tier, much easier to just let your dollar sit on your balance and let the lindens draw from that.)

How do you make that kind of money in SL? That is, half a million US a year?

If you sell clothing, lets say outfits for L$400, you have to sell 337.500 sets a year. That is 925 a day, or almost 40 per hour. And that does not cover your tier, which will be a few thousand bucks, because the kind of traffic you need to handle that kind of sale have to be spread on several sims. And not to mention the cost of ads; you need to spend tens of thousands of lindens every week to make it to the top of the search.

And since no women I know will ever buy an outfit worn by 337.499 other women in SL, you have to have, lets say about 350 different outfits, each selling 1000 pieces a year. And btw, you can't expect any outfit to sell much more than a year, fashion moves on, so you need to create at least one new outfit every day.

It's probably more than a full time job, you need a few employees for clothing design, shop design, customer support and so on. This is a big operation!

Or you could make some expensive goods, like the Kama Sutra HUD. The creator claims to have sold 100.000 copies; at L$3750 a piece thats almost USD1.4 million split on a few years. But it takes a lot of creation and marketing skill to come up with such a success. Not many people do, but at least its theoretically possible to manage it on your own.

Some people makes money on land rentals. If you were in the Homestead marked, you may make US$50/month in net profit per sim, IF you have really nice sims and support. Then you would need to have almost 900 sims for rent to make half a million a year.

As these three examples show, its very hard to set up a business doing this kind of money. Which makes me suspect that these avatars are not in the clothing, scripted gadgets or land rental marked. My guess is that they are making money from the business that is powering the web: Sex.

As I understand it, lots of males are very happy to sign off 30 US/month on their CC to watch porn on the net. SL have the added advantage of anonymity; you can pay for your movies and pictures in L$'s.

You actually just need 1400 horny males paying US$30/month to watch the same porn movies also easily available in RL to make halv a million a year. 1400 customers are so much easier to handle than 337.500,-, and you certainly don't need 900 SIMs to handle them either. If 5 percent of your customers are online at any time, you need the capacity to show movies to 70 people at a time, a feat easily handled by lets say 4 sims.

OK, thats my theory. But does it make sense? Is it actually true? Watch this space next week when I hope to do an actual survey of the sex marked in SL, to check if someone has implemented my business idea already:-)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to my readers, friends and customers! I celebrated by setting up some flags from the countries where I have friends and readers (that is, readers in plural, not just one...); quite a few actually! They are on sale here for L$20 if anyone wants them; nothing fancy but I made sure the proportions are correct: Many flags are in the 1:2 format, but there are lots of exceptions: The Finish flag is 11:18, the French is 2:3, the German 3:5; not to mention Brazil (7:10) and "Danebrog", the Danish flag (28:37, no less!).

I have no special resoltions this year other than to try my best to live both my lives in such a way that other people will be glad that I exist. If I can do that I don't have to sell 10 flags a day to be happy:-)

5 of 52 - Domino Play Time

Finally, I declare that my Toppling Domino game is ready for the shop and on XStreetSL!

I have been working on this game for several months, and it has been mostly fun, although making things in SL really is a pain sometimes.

I got the idea from an old promotional video for SL, where a Linden set up a circle of bricks using manual editing. The toppling bricks was kind of cool, but I thought the process could use some help. So, I made a simple script for a domino brick that would go physical and topple when collided with, and started working on a menu-driven rezzer.

The result is a box that will set up any number of bricks in rows and arcs. It can start the rezzing from any brick in the pattern. There are 3 options for the height of the rezzed bricks: Rezzer height, follow terrain or sensor (which is a process where the brick actually drops a ball to determine the height of the prim flooring beneath).

The process will start with the box rezzing 5 small pieces under the lid, and the lid will open. The first brick will fly out of the box, move to the correct position, increase its size and set itself down on the ground. The other bricks in the box will move forward, and the process repeat it selves.


Doing the arcs was really a revival of my old maths knowledge, using Sin and Cos functions to determine where the next brick should be positioned.

The bricks themselves contains textures for all the possible combinations of dots. When rezzed, the brick will choose a face value randomly. Indeed, the simple script has grown to almost 1000 lines of LSL code... (not to mention all the LSL in the rezzer, in total the kit contains about 2500 lines of code.)


The kit also includes a small Cannon that can be fired to start off the toppling. The cannon has sound and smoke particle effects, and does some physical recoil when fired.

There is a lot of safety built into the kit to make sure the bricks do not bother any neighbours or other people in the SIM.

It will be fun to see if anyone else thinks playing with dominoes in SL is cool, or if it was really only fun for me while making them:-)

Message Box in store

New product in shop and on xstreet: My offline message box recorder:-)

Available in all metal or wood sided, it allows people to record messages you may listen to at your leasure. The recorder will blink a red light when someone has recorded a message.

Honour has been using this in the Drama Dolls store, and as it has not blown it up yet I presume it's safe to use:-)