The Missing Island

Jan is in London, John is in Italy, continues...

John emailed me this photo of the view from his hotel window in Milan. Lovely!

Our friend Mary arrived today in London so I'll get to have dinner with her tonight, yay. Then tomorrow she flies to Italy to join John for their Italy excursion.

Get ready, there's going to be a lot of Second Life on the blog, since I'm here alone in London. Even my best friend Kirsty is not around because today she's going to NYC for a few days. Solitude is nice but...

Plus I'm sick. On Sunday I had woken up with a sore throat. Yesterday my sinuses were congested. Today I am really sick. Damn. I haven't had a cold in ages so I guess it's time.

So what's up with the missing island? Well, today I logged onto Second Life to discover that one of my islands was missing! According to the Second Life web site 400 regions were not available due to network issues between their two server facilities. (I don't know who thought it was a good idea to have servers in both San Francisco and Dallas but it sounds like a recipe for disaster to me). So what happens in a virtual world when your server goes down? It pulls the land out from under your feet. Literally. There is a photo taken from my newer island showing the blank space where my first island should be. Then after a few minutes the first island came back online and reappeared. Hilarious!

And there is a photo of the medieval bridge a friend of mine built. It's really beautiful, he is very talented. Notice in the "missing island" photo that some of the bridge is also missing. In order for the bridge to go across the water between the islands it had to be divided into sections, with one section on one island (server) and the other two sections on the other island (server). So when you walk across the bridge, your avatar switches servers as it moves from one island to the next. Fascinating, weird and, most of all, hilariously fun.

Comments

[Robert]

That is funny, even while understanding what's actually going on. So glad that can't happen in real life. As crazy as I seem, I'm not sure I could handle something like that.

I'll come visit, I know you're lonely. See you around!