Zachh Cale Plays His Favorite Piano Music at the Odaesan House, July 9th, 7PM SLT

Come and join us for a wonderful evening of music and friends.

Seeing Double: Odaesan House appears on another island in SL

I never know who will end up where in SL and what they will see and what they will think. So to kill any rumors before any start, I want to share the following with you.

The Odaesan House, the big mansion on Mission Home Store, is being cloned to Costa Del Mar island as a part of a new estate. The house will find new life as a social center, club, health spa, events venue, and leasing office. I am in charge of the replication process and I am also making some changes to the building to accommodate the functions it will house in the future.

The original Odaesan House is staying put and not going anywhere -- don't panic. I am also not planning to sell the house as a prefab in the future. I may from time to time clone it for an estate that really needs a structure of this kind. I will be very selective and there will be a fee involved for the custom installation.

The rationale behind not selling the house as a prefab is simple. This is a grand structure, it culminates close to 2500 - 3500 prims depending on the detailing preserved during a move. Such a structure also demands 2000-4000 prims just to do it justice with the interior furnishings. Add to that the landscaping etc and you get a whole sim's worth of prims. This is a tall order for most people.

I am approached frequently by wide eyed enthusiast who want to buy the Odaesan House only to have them quit after a couple of e mails when they find out about what they will need in terms of prims. While I love to meet people who are fans, you must understand that the constant process of answering questions, negotiating prices only to have people quit out on me every time is very depressing and a waste of my time.

For future reference, if you do not have at least 6000 prims to dedicate to the project please do not contact me about buying this house. I will never offer a boxed version of the house because the prefab boxing process does not work for a house this large -- it just does not make sense. I need to build it for you with prefabbed pieces so that it sits in the right place, is located at the right sim height, is placed correctly with respect to the water and so on.

July 9th 7Pm SLT Zachh Cale Recital at the Odaesan House

Save the date for the upcoming concert featuring the multi talented Zachh Cale performing on the piano live for our guests.

Check the blog in the upcoming week for more details...

I have neglected you all!

I am so sorry. I was traveling in the first half of May and then catching up with things in the second half of May so I did not have much of a chance to log in to SL much less post anything here.

I am back in world and back to updating this blog.

I have exciting things in store.

Stay tuned :-)

New & Revised Bow Arm Chairs / Couch with 6 Poses, 24 prims!

I completely rebuilt the bow arm chairs and the couch to reduce the prims down to a meager 24 prims for the chairs. I included 6 poses without a poseball and a menu driven interface that lets you adjust the position of your avatar --- and here's the kicker: The chair WILL remember it next time you sit there again. It has a memory of up to 100 avatars.

I used sculpties for the cushions and some of the woodwork. I think you will find that it all works well with LOD, level of detail, optimizations SL has.

Oh yes before I forget, you can recolor the cushions as you like from the swatches I provide. The interface for cushion recoloring is nice and simple and unlike my previous furniture one click controls every cushion.

Please visit my store to pick up your copy today.

I insist that the sculpties I use match the quality of my prim work, this is why I have not been so forthcoming with adopting sculpties and working them into my items. Lately I have found items that I think are up to par and I am doing my best to bring you the best furniture with the least amount of prims possible...

I hope you like the new chairs and the couch.

And as always, thanks for being a supporter of the Mission Home Store Island.

Concierge Group Censored / Closed / Opened / People banned by Linden Lab

Here's my open letter in response to the latest drama going on in the concierge group in Second Life. As some of you may know, Concierge Group is dedicated to sim owners and it is meant to provide a platform for sim owners to get quick tech support and updates about issues affecting the grid. The group chat is supposed to have a Linden Lab employee monitoring and helping out whenever appropriate -- though this last part rarely happens.

Here's the letter:

Dear Linden Lab,

I just wanted to communicate some of my latest observations in a civil, calm, and detailed way to you. For this reason I am writing this open letter to you.

First off, a few thanks. Thank you for innovating and putting together Second Life. Thank you for taking the recent steps to make the experience better by improving stability, uptime and performance metrics. Thanks for doing a good job maintaining fairly good communications with your user base.

Now that's out of the way, here begins the more critical part of my letter. I have been in SL since August 2004. I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly and I really do not want to talk about incidences past. So I am going to dive into the current issue at hand.

As some of us estate owners have gotten a rude awakening lately when we tried to chat in Concierge Group and were not able to bring it up because Linden Lab had decided to take it away without making so much as an announcement. Since then the Concierge Group has been brought back with some threatening statements and warnings from Linden Lab telling us to pretty much behave and mind our language within the chat.

I resent this tone and treatment from Linden Lab. The Concierge Group was intended to be a hotline, a place where estate owners could interface with a Linden rep on call monitoring this chatline. The truth of it is, the only time I have ever seen a Linden on this chat line was back last year when 20 of them showed up randomly as a joke -- yes a joke. In the last 2-3 years the Concierge members, that is your paying customers, have been taking care of each other: providing moral support, technical support, banning information for griefers, spreading news about problematic situations, showing up to each other's sims to help trouble shoot. Through this same time frame I only saw a Linden show up to a sim once due to Concierge chat request.

So is it really surprising that the participants of this group have in time developed shall we say a certain disdain, lack of respect and or dislike for Linden Lab employees? I think not. You promise terms to a relationship and then you do not honor the terms of the relationship, more than likely you will face these very same reactions. It is undeniable that your support team was completely absent from the Concierge Chat in the last few years well except for monitoring dirty language and promptly banning estate owners.... an agility you have not been able to show for even the most serious griefers to attack the grid.

You keep telling us that the problem is with us. I beg to differ. The problem is with you and with your company culture. You see I am not convinced that Linden Lab realizes that it is a business -- with paying customers. Never before in the history of commerce have the paying customers been the ones to get this kind of tone and treatment from the company at hand. Sometimes people get rowdy and silly on chat, this is the internet culture; This does not mean we're a bunch of kids. If your phone line kept going down every other day would you be kind and calm when you call the phone company? What makes you think that you're different than the phone company? Perhaps because you deliver a service that's "cool"?

I got a notice from the Concierge Coffee Group this morning saying that after an estate owner said "Fuck you linden lab" in the Concierge Coffee Group (where we were told to have our free for all conversations), several Lindens got upset and left the group and that we should never act like that again.

Repeat after me *pointing to myself* "CUSTOMER", *pointing to you* "service provider". Let's do it again: *pointing to me* "CUSTOMER paying you hundreds of dollars*, *pointing to you* "Employee and Service Provider". Please get this right in your head.

Your customers can say "Fuck you", you have to keep smiling and do your job that is: a. calm them down b. gather information c. attempt to fix the problem d. document and escalate the issues if not resolvable by you. You may want to take some notes while you're reading this as it seems to be completely unclear to you what you are to SL and what you do in it. Lindens can not leave the Concierge Chatline, you can't. This is your job. If you don't like it please join the unemployment line at your city.

Do you think I behave like this when an instructor comes to my desk driven mad by technology malfunctioning and their deadline approaching shouting expletives, making threats? Do I shut my door and lock them out? No, I calm them down, try to make them understand what's going on, document their problem and contact authorities that can resolves the issue. This is called Tech Support. Please continue taking notes.

I am not a big player in SL but a fair amount of my creations litter the grid. I have no intention of leaving SL nor do many of us in the Concierge Group so I am not going to deliver the usual threats about leaving SL and rallying other people to do the same thing. No. We are not going anywhere. Many content creators and I are here to stay and you're going to shape up if it is the last plywood cube we rez.

Get your act together, start treating us with respect so that you may get the respect you seem to be so desperately craving.

Yours Truly,

Troy Vogel

Abby Calisto's Amazing Linden Bear Collection

It is a must see. I got to see it for the first time this afternoon and got inspired to take some snaphots.

If you want to see the whole set of snapshots go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steelskyblue/sets/72157616228352993/

If you want to see the real thing in SL, teleport to:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/MLCC/74/26/22

The Sounds & The Furry Party Video...

Check out what Juana captured:

SL: Resident Choice Awards. Please vote for Troy Vogel

Click here to vote for Resident Choice Awards

To all fans of my work, please go to the following url and vote for me under "My favorite awesome Architect/Builder" category. Your support is much appreciated.

Sculpty Bow Arm Chairs Now Available

I finally broke down and converted the Stickley replica Bow Arm Chairs to a sculpty version. The conversion was quite conservative. I probably could whittle off more prims if I were to build this from scratch in Blender but even with this version I was able to save total of 7 prims per chair. So the prim count went down from 31 to 24.

Plus to sweeten the deal the new chair comes with multisitter poseball-less sit scripts that allowed me to pack in a total of whopping 6 six animations. The sit script allows multiple avatars to adjust the sit position and stores up to 100 users.

Come and pick up one of these updated chairs today.

I will be revisiting and revising several of my seating options in the next couple of weeks to bring better prim economy and better seating options AND a few surprises.... but you will have to wait for those. ;-)