Service Contracts, Bargaining, and Making Textures

I didn't even know the grid was down until this morning.

My car is facing the end of its twelve year lifespan so I went RL shopping last night. One of the strange things about SL is the lack of personal interaction during shopping - people don't bargain or negotiate deals there for objects, and the decision to purchase is a simple yes/no. We have land auctions, but as far as I know there aren't any auction services for tradable items. Hrm. Now I'm wondering if we only bargain for limited resources. Land and services are limited, most inworld created items aren't.

One of the long term advantages of decentralizing SL's hardware needs will be the end of gaps in service like this one. Anytime a machine is "Central" it hurts when it goes down. Expensive machines tend to not have onsite backups. People talk about how clustered solutions do or don't cost less than centralized ones, but I think the real benefit is the lack of critical failure situations. I've worked at a place that didn't think paying the extra $$$ for 24 hour support was worth the cost until they had something crucial running a 24 hr service break on a friday evening. That was one project where I was very glad not to be in charge!

Making the Hawaiian shirt textures is harder than I thought; I don't have a large bank of beach-themed screenshots to work from. I'm having a lot of fun doing it, but it looks to be a slow process. I'll probably release most of the textures as freebies. I rifled thru some of my old collections, but most of them are strongly themed so I don't see much point to bringing them into SL.