Car Crash

Friday, February 27, 2009

No I am not talking about the SL economy.

This week I got rear-ended by a student on our campus while waiting at a stop light. My car has been totaled and I am trying to juggle a thousand calls with insurance companies, adjustors and healthcare professionals.

I am fine, no scratches but a mild case of whiplash -- sore neck and back etc.

I have not had a chance to post here due to all this drama in RL.

Give me a few more days before life returns to something that resembles normal.

Strange Fruit

Friday, February 20, 2009


Strange Fruit

Second life trees bear strange fruit,
prim on the leaves and prim at the root,
Mesh bodies swinging in the simulated breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the linden trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant mainland,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of palm trees, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning barrel cages.

Here is fruit for the griefer to pluck,
For the casinos to gather, for the lag to suck,
For the forums to rot, for the resmods to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

A Billie Holiday song adapted for SL...

Tip of the Week

Monday, February 16, 2009
I figure I should pass on any good info I get in world to the followers of this blog. So I am going to start a new type of post: Tip of the Week.

This week's tip is:
To keep sculpties from deforming at a distance do the following: click on Debug Settings. On the window that opens, write RenderVolumeLODFactor and change it to 8.

Now remember, when you make this change, it only affects your client and your SL client alone -- unless all your customers go and make the same change the observed results will be the defaults.

Also remember that increasing this value may slow down the 3D rendering on your machine and result in choppy experience. So you may need to revert to the default value of 4.

I hope this helps.

Video from the Rave Globales

Friday, February 13, 2009






It was an incredible night as you can sea and hear in this video taken by Juana Manuel.

I will be hosting more events like this in the coming weeks.


Rave Globales hosted by DJ TEDI

Thursday, February 12, 2009
Rave Globales hosted by DJ TEDI

You are all invited. Come and dance until your avatar drops.
February 12th at 8PM SLT (PST)
Teleport to Mission Home Store island to join the party.

Troy Vogel's Koinonia Church now on SL Showcase

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
I was preparing for teaching a workshop on how to use Second Life for educational projects at universities when I was very surprised to see the church I built for the Koinonia United Church of Christ located on Xenia on the Showcase tab of the search window.

Here's a snapshot of the Showcase Page in the Second Life Client:





The official Second Life website describes the showcase as:
(Source: SL Showcase FAQ)


The Showcase section of SecondLife.com and the Second Life viewer highlights some of the best inworld locations and Resident creations. For new and existing Residents alike, this is the place to go to explore and discover what's most exciting in the Second Life world. Showcase features Arts & Culture, Education & Nonprofit, Fashion, Hot Spots, Music, Photos & Machinima, and Tutorials.

Venues and content featured in Showcase are not paid placements.


Visit Koinonia Website:
Visit the Koinonia Church Website


To visit their church in Second Life click the SLURL below:
Visit the Koinonia Church in Second Life



Here are more pictures of the church right after its completion. The current church looks a little different on the inside as I had to dismantle some of the ceiling due to the subsequent prim shortages of the client.

Visit the Flickr Photo Set

Troy Vogel Build on Main Second Life Homepage!

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I am very flattered that Linden Lab decided to include a snapshot of the Bobcat Village Campus, built by Troy Vogel, on the main Second Life homepage. As some of you know Bobcat Village is the official virtual campus of the Texas State University - San Marcos.

I built this campus for TXSTATE in late 2006, early 2007. To this day I still am the admin of the sim and we try to keep the sim updated and changing slowly but constantly to keep it interesting for our students and visitors.

If you would like to visit this campus please use the following SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bobcat%20Village/129/68/27

Or Simply teleport to "Bobcat Village" -- warning due to the fact that we have several spots that people visit, I can not set a teleportation spot for the whole sim so you will most likely arrive under water. Please towel yourself up before walking around the sim -- it's a PG sim! :-)

Buyers FYI: Known Permissions Bug

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
I have been notified by a buyer that one of my builds, the Mini Belletris, is exhibiting a strange behavior where although the structure is set to mod/copy permissions, when you select a single prim from the linked set and unlink and delete, the rest of the object becomes no mod, no copy, no trans.

TRANSLATION: For those not familiar with all this jargon, if you delete a part of the structure, the rest of it becomes uneditable.

Diagnosis: This is not a problem unique to my creation. It has been documented in the JIRA bug tracking system for Second Life. It is a problem with Second Life. Here's the link to the bug in the JIRA bugbase: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3456

As you can see Linden Lab does not consider this to be a high priority item... so please vote this item to get it more exposure and get it fixed before more items get this bug.

I am not 100% sure but I think this bug spreads by cloning objects from one build to another which is let's face it how most of us content builders work. Content creators, be careful while working on new builds.

To test if a build of yours has this bug or not do the following: (this is an object you created from scratch)


  1. Make a back up first
  2. Set the permissions on the linked object to Mod / Copy / no Trans
  3. Set the object to sell -- set it to sell as original (it does not really matter if it is original, copy or content for this bug)
  4. Buy the object
  5. Now select one of the prims on the object using "edit linked parts"
  6. Unlink this part off of the linked set
  7. Delete the single prim you just unlinked
  8. Select the Linked Object
  9. Check the permissions under the General tab
  10. If all permissions are now grayed out yes your object is affected by the bug. Read below for possible fixes.


Fix: For those of you that have already bought the Mini Belletris, as long as you don't try to remove parts of the structure you will have no problems with it. If you want to change the structure -- try doing it without deleting any of the objects.

In the meantime I am working to re-build the Mini Belletris from scratch, unfortunately the only fix available is this one at this time.

I have tried unlinking, duplicating and other operations with little or no success. I am still looking for remedies that do not involve complete reconstruction.

More than likely new builds you create scratch will not have this problem. I have tried to create the bug using brand new plywood cubes and could not replicate the behavior.

I will send out a notice when the fix is in place.

Thanks for your patience.

Please Add to Your Picks

Sunday, February 1, 2009
It is very important for the success of my store to be included in people's picks. The picks affect me two ways.
1. They give Mission Home Store good word of mouth advertising
2. The search engine in SL favors stores and land plots with higher number of picks listings.

If you have added Mission Home Store to your picks before, please revisit my sim and recreate the pick as the old one is probably pointing to the wrong place -- as you know we moved recently. The new store location is at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/231/115/26

I would like to thank Arius for reminding me that I need to get more people to add me and my work to their picks.

Once again I am much obliged for all the help, support, and patronage.

Yours truly,