Blah Blah Blah

just so you all know

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i figure i should write here because iā€™ve been quite absent for a while, pretty quiet both inworld and out.

in late october my dad fell ill again, his pacemaker fired a bunch of times and he was stuck in the hospital for about 13 days. he came home in november and was significantly weakened from all that time in the hospital. near thanksgiving my mother had a small stroke and was in the hospital for a few days as well. she is mostly ok, her speech is slurred and she has some right side weakness but we are told that it will go away in time. then my father became very ill and a couple weeks ago we put him back in the hospital to take care of some matters. we were told he would not make it. he requested to come home, to be with his family.

yesterday afternoon my father died in his bed, while i slept (i had stayed up all night like an idiot) and my mother rested in her bedroom. he went peacefully and without pain. iā€™m not sure how much i will be in sl. i have been wandering in randomly because its a good place to escape from crap when you donā€™t have the ability to run away in real life.

long term i know i will still be around, and i thank all of my sl friends who have been here for me during this awful time. its amazing how much kindness you can receive from people who donā€™t even know you in person. i think it really shows just how connected we all are as human beings. my dad hated second life and he thought i was ruining my life with it, but i think he would be happy to know just how many people are there looking out for me and worrying over me right now.

so anyway, thatā€™s whatā€™s going on with meā€¦

well that was a waste of time!

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my video card arrived today and i was so excited to put it in my computer and get everything going againā€¦ except it ended up being the worst video card i have ever purchased!

i am not the best at picking computer hardware, because i really donā€™t know enough about it to make a good decision. i was trying to get something better than the geforce 7300 gt that i had previously, and decided on a geforce 9400 gt instead. the major difference was that the 9400 gt was a pci card, where my other card was an agp. upon installing, i swiftly went to second life expecting a great difference in game graphics, but instead i was faced with 1 measly fpsā€¦ i get more fps on my laptop and its integrated graphics chip! i was so upset, i actually had a little bit of a panic attackā€¦ then i took the card out to my father in the living room and told him to send it back, and we looked up another one. this time we carefully looked at our choices, and instead of an nvidia i am getting an ati card. its an agp card this time, and iā€™m hoping it will do tons better than the other one. my dad is thankfully really good at smooth talking people, and was able to get our restocking fee waved.

this means that iā€™m stuck on the laptop for a bit longer, and that makes me pretty disappointedā€¦ iā€™m not sure when the new card will be here, as we have to send back the old card first before we can order the new one. probably another week šŸ™

small public service announcement

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i figured iā€™d write this up incase someone else has this problem since it seems to be affecting only a very small group of users.

recently for a couple of weeks iā€™ve been having random moments of internet problems. they all seemed to stem from using second life, which was weird, because iā€™ve been using second life for 3 years now, 2 of those years on a wireless connection to a cable modem in my living room. when ever i would turn on the second life client (and i mean any client, gemini, the stable LL release, etc) my internet speed would flux wildly and i would have insane amounts of lag. it was affecting other computers in my home as well. my father mentioned his net slowing down (heā€™s connected directly to the router via cat 5 cable), and my laptop, which i keep gtalk running on, was not doing well either. when ever i was on a voice convo with lucas, it was very noticeable that the internet was fluxing, as our conversationā€™s signal dropped horribly low, and audible voice chat lag could be detected.

so at first i thought it was my router. we tried recycling things, turning things off, changing channels, anything we could think of. after that didnā€™t fix it, we thought perhaps my laptop was interfering with my pcā€™s wireless signal, so we turned that off (much to my multi-tasking dismay) and found that it stopped for a little bit, but then got bad again, so that wasnā€™t the case.

then there was a full night of googling, both by me and by lucas. and finally we found this jira entry titled ā€œvoice client chokes some routersā€. a couple of people described similar situations to mine and to remedy it, they turned disabled voice chat! so i tried that, and it worked! everything is back to normal. no internet speed flux, no sl lag, no other computers affected!

i have no clue why this happened in the first place, but it seems to be fixed by this. unfortunately it means i canā€™t hear people on voice anymore but thatā€™s only a minor loss compared to not being able to move around freely.

if you ask the lindens for help, theyā€™ll just tell you that they donā€™t support wireless, but to be honest i really think they should look into this. like i said before, iā€™ve used second life with wireless for about 2 years, and it seems odd to me that this just occurred within the last few weeks, which to me says something about the new server update they rolled out this month.

so if youā€™re having odd problems with connecting and youā€™re on wireless, try turning off your voice chat! and please do go vote for that jira entry because it really needs to be looked into.