How to explore

Like everyone in Second Life, we use the teleport system all the time. It's the only way to get around any kind of a long distance, or to get from islands to the mainland and back. But the teleport system is like riding the subway. You see the area where you get on, and you see your destination, but you don't see anywhere in between.

When there's time, I like to treat the endpoint of the teleport as a starting point for exploration. If I search for something, find a likely location for it and teleport there, once I've done what I came to do, I walk outside the building and see what's around. If there's a road, I walk it. If flying isn't restricted in the sim I may go up for a look. If i want to go faster, I can run or fly, or maybe use a vehicle or my AKK Stables horse.

Another fun way: Go to the map showing where you are, use the slider to zoom out, click another spot and teleport there. You never know what you'll find.

Of course, just like real life, what you find may be interesting and intriguing, or it may be just a wasteland of dime-a-dozen malls, spinning FOR SALE signs and casinos. But unless you look around, you'll never know.

Service, Please

People who run businesses in Second Life must understand the importance of customer service. Just like in real life, some creators are happy to help their customers use their creations, and others seem to vanish right after counting your money.

A case in point from our own experience: We bought a castle from Qabalah Quintus. When we needed some customization, he built us replacement pieces with no hesitation. When he upgraded our model of castle, he provided us a new one with a nominal upgrade fee. Anytime he was online and we had questions, he answered right away. If he was offline, he answered as soon as he could.

Result: We'll be pleased to recommend him to anyone we meet looking for a castle home.

As pleased as we were with his service, however, the castle itself just didn't work for us. After living in it for a while, we found it a little small for our needs and a little out of place in our area. So we shopped for a new one and ultimately bought a high-priced but roomy one from another designer. It featured a control panel to allow the owner(s) to control door locks, window tint and other variables from a single interface, and also had a building aligner tool that is supposed to pull all the pieces together once rezzed.

The aligner worked. Not much else did. Morgana started trying to set up and accidentally delinked the prims that made up the central piece. The designer came over to help only after about a week of repeated IMs.

Once it was set up, things were fine until we realized thet only Morgana had access to most of the control panel menus and I was limited to tinting the windows. No problem, we'll just change ownership to our group (a group that includes just the two of us). So she did, and voila! We now have the same priviliges with the panel. Only one problem: The prviliges we both have are the limited set I had before the change. Now she can't get to the rest of the settings either.

We figured out how to lock the doors with a voice command, but when we did that, the windows turned black. Untinting the windows also unlocked the doors.

So we IMed the designer again. And again. And again. Over what has now been at least two weeks, maybe three. Granted it has been the holiday season, but that's a long time, and we still have had no response. We finally solved the door locking problem by buying a new set of doors from a different creator and installing them ourselves.

Result: We'll tell other people that his building is fine, but his scripting is bad and his service (unless he does finally respond with a really good explanation for the silence) is terrible. And we won't buy anything else from him.