Happy Halloween!

"Trick or Treatin'" by Tomais Ashdene

We don't traditionally celebrate Halloween in Sweden. It's only existed here since sometime during the 1990's, mostly as a result of some clever marketing targeted at small children and teenagers. The only places I know of that celebrate it are daycare centers.

I am still on the fence whether the tradition will stay with us or not, but as there is money involved in the sales of costumes, makeup and - last but not least - pumpkins, it may follow and grow with the kids now being indoctrinated with it. So we shall see... However, I am hoping not, because there is so much about this holiday that - in Sweden - just screams alien invasion and commercial greed.

To those of you who love the tradition, who have grown up with it and to whom it is a part of your cultural heritage I wish you all a very

H A P P Y    H A L L O W E E N !

Support Ticket #01587329 XII

Illustration from Vintek.net

"Hello Theresa,

I hope you had a great weekend and Inaugural Day.

Let me give you an update on what has been going on and the results of my testing with invaluable help from my family members Guyke Lundquist and Dej Mycron. They have been very patient and supportive and have also given me assistance through it all.

On Thursday evening, after I had pulled down the bandwidth on Bock from 1,500 to 500, as recommended by Alexa in the Jira, it seemed that we might have gotten the problem in hand. The repetitions in local chat, IM and payments seemed to have gone away even at laggy stores and I was very happy but did not dare rely on it until further testing had been made, so as you may remember I told you I was cautiously optimistic.

Friday and Saturday I spent in first life nurturing an end-of-the-workweek-coma on Friday and a head splintering headache on Saturday.

When I returned to SecondLife again on Sunday the repetitions also returned when I left the home sim without any of the settings being changed (i.e. the bandwidth was kept at 500 initially). I then got so frustrated that I yanked up the bandwidth to 5,000 and went to a two hour long membership meeting of the Second Pride. Lo and behold, I did not repeat once, neither in local chat, nor in IM.

However, after the meeting had finished I went out shopping and to my utter dismay and confusion the repetitions returned again, first at 5,000 and they remained even after I had pulled down the bandwidth to 500. This happened while testing at the stores of KMADD, Burley, Kalrau and Greed (Sey). When I was at Greed Guyke suggested I create a new alternate account and that we do some parallel testing with the new account and Bock. So I created LadyCruellaMcMillan (someone had been talking with me about animal-abuse earlier that day). Well, the strangest thing happened while Bock kept repeating in local chat and IM and with payments the new Lady Cruella had no problems at all, none in the least.

This got me totally confused and to the brink of total madness (as you may notice I sometimes like to exaggerate wildly). I had two accounts running on the same computer, one with problems ad one without! Well, even if I was not quite at that point I was still feeling absolutely despondent and felt that we would never get control of this problem. We stopped the testing for the day and I ended it with deleting everything in my Inventory that I had amassed since September 2012. Luckily I have not been shopping a lot lately...

I am going back in today, feeling refreshed and eager to try again. I will get back to you with a new report on the results later today.

Hugs,
Bock"