Day: May 14, 2016

Bay City at Eight – and goes Silver with Child’s Play

Posted on by Inara Pey

Eighth Concert Poster (texture)Bay City celebrates its eighth anniversary on Sunday May 15th, and the Bay City community is marking the day with a another special time of festivities and fun to which everyone is invited!

Activities will kick-off at noon SLT with a parade line-up at the bandshell in Bay City – Harwich. At 12:30 SLT, the parade will make its way down Route 66, and proceed to the Bay City Fairgrounds in the North Channel region. GoSpeed Racer of KONA stream will be providing the music throughout the parade, which will be followed by at live concert from 13:30 SLT onwards at the fairgrounds.

The line-up for the concert this year comprises (all times SLT):

  • 13:30 – 14:30:  Zachh Cale. Influenced by Elton John, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, jazz standards, and many of the greats, he re-interprets rock and pop songs in unique way on piano/keyboards
  • 14:30 – 15:30: Maximillion Kleene. With a range from CCR to Foo Fighters and Train to Jason Mraz, he rings a vast repertoire of quirky, classic, and current covers to Second Life
  • 15:30 – 16:30: Noma Falta. Brings her own bluesy, soulful, music to Second Life, and brings the experience of fronting for numerous rock bands on RL concert.
Parade route and performers - click for full size
Parade route and performers – click for full size

Anniversary SLurls

Bay City Goes Silver

The event will be a cause for a double celebration. On Friday, May 13th, Marianne McCann announced that Bay City and the Bay City Alliance have received special recognition by Child’s Play charity, which Bay City has long supported:

Thanks in large part to our donations from our annual Hot Bay City Nights and holiday Tree Lighting & Silent auction Events, as well as the generous Linden Dollar gift from Ivan Suen, Bay City is snow listed as a Silver Level sponsor on Child’s Play’s website.

In addition, our donation kiosks are now transferred over to Child’s Play Charity. They have announced this on their website at www.childsplaycharity.org/misc/secondlife. You can learn more about the organization and their efforts there.

Congratulations to all at Bay City for their continuing efforts in supporting Child’s Play.

About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance

Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City.

 

Of outages and feedback

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeI normally keep a close eye on outgoing communications from the Lab, but this week I’ve had other things distracting me, and so haven’t been keeping an eye on the official blog for posts and updates. My thanks therefore to reader BazdeSantis for pointing me to April Linden’s Tools and Technology update, The Story Behind Last Week’s Unexpected Downtime.

April has very much become the voice of the Lab’s Operations team, and has provided us with some excellent insights to Why Things Sometimes Went Wrong – a valuable exercise as it increases both our understanding of the complexities inherent in Second Life, and also what is likely to be going on behind the scenes when things do go drastically sideways.

April’s post refers to the issues experienced on Friday May 6th, when a primary node of a central database failed, with April noting:

The database node that crashed holds some of the most core data to Second Life, and a whole lot of things stop working when it’s inaccessible, as a lot of Residents saw.

When the primary node in this database is off-line we turn off a bunch of services, so that we can bring the grid back up in a controlled manner by turning them back on one at a time.

There’s an interesting point to note here. This is the same – or very similar – issue to that which occurred in January 2016, which again goes to show that given the constant usage it sees, Second Life is a volatile service  – and that the Operations team are capable of turning major issues around in a remarkably short time; around 90 minutes in January, and less than an hour this last time.

Both events were also coupled with unexpected parallel issues as well: in January,  the database issue was followed by issues with one of the Lab’s service providers – which did take a while to sort out. This time it was the Grid Status service. As I’ve recently reported, the Grid Status web pages have recently moved to a new provider. A couple of changes resulting from this have been with the RSS Feed, and integrating the Grid Status reporting pages with the rest of the Lab’s blog / forum Lithium service. However, as April also notes:

It can be really hard to tune a system for something like a status blog, because the traffic will go from its normal amount to many, many times that very suddenly. We see we now have some additional tuning we need to do with the status blog now that it’s in its new home.

She also points out that people with Twitter can also track the situation with Second Life by following the Grid Status Twitter account.

April’s posts are always welcome and well worth reading, and this one is no exception. We obviously don’t like things when the go wrong, but it’s impossible for SL to be all plain sailing. So, as I’ve said before (and above), hearing just what goes on behind the scenes to fix things when the do go wrong helps remind and inform us just how hard the Lab actually doe work to keep the complexities of a 13-year-old platform running for us to enjoy.