JC Compositions hits 30 videos!

My Compositions playlist is now up to 30 videos. That means, in the past year, I've uploaded 30 of my original musical pieces to share with family, friends, and whoever just happens to stumble upon them and may like them. So, go ahead, have a listen! ;)

Egyptian Drums Song

Dearest Memories

Haven Your Wworld - Old England Building Contest

Here is the contest entry board.  It gives you a folder with
notecards for information, and landmarks to check out.

To kick off the summer events, Haven Your World is having a building contest for the next two weeks, from June 7th -June 21st. Here is the information as follows:

Who?
Haven Your World
Hompage - havenyourworld.com/
URI -http://grid.havenyourworld.com:8002
Contact: Cheryl Haven

What?
Building contest with an Old England theme.

Prizes:
1st Place - A Home region for 6 months with 2000 prim allowence. (details of the regions can be found at havenyourworld.com/index.php/own-land) and your build featured on the new welcome region.

2nd Place - A Private region for 6 months with 1000 prim allowence. (details of the regions can be found at havenyourworld.com/index.php/own-land) and your build featured on the new welcome region.

3rd Place - A home plot with 6 months free rent on the Sheffield region or a store plots on Meadowhall (landmarks available in the information packet) and your build featured on the new welcome region.

4th Place - A home plot with 6 months free rent on the Sheffield region or a store plots on Meadowhall (landmarks available in the information packet) and your build featured on the new welcome region.

We may also select other creators to have their builds featured on the new Haven Welcome region.

When?
June 7th to the 21st.

Where?
Old England building competition Sandbox, London in Haven Your World.

slurl.com/secondlife/Sandbox%20London/120/125/21

*Note* You must sign up for Haven Your World, and then sign into the Haven Your World grid in order to hop to this location.

Why?
Haven Your World is currently looking at creating a new welcome region for new users coming into Haven Your World. We have made a start on this on the region named Welcome. You are free to visit the landmark, which is included in the Old England building contest packet, which you receive a folder for by clicking the above shown sign found on the sim.

This is what the information packet folder looks like.

Don't Like SL's expensive land prices? Try Opensim!

For anyone who's on SL and still continuing to gripe about land prices, here's my humble assessment of what to consider, give OpenSim a try!

You can compare the costs between SL, Virtual Highway, and Haven Your World here:

SL: http://secondlife.com/land/pricing.php
Virtual Highway: http://virtualhighway.us/vhweb/land-purchases/
Haven: http://www.havenyourworld.com/index.php/own-land

Just on full region alone, having all the prims available and all that, the prices compare like this:

SL - US$195/month (15,000 prims)
VH - US$50/month (Commercial w/15,000 prims) - US$75/month (Private w/40,000 prims)
Haven - *US$40/month (City Region w/15,000), *US$50/month (County Region w/20,000 prims), *US$65 (Country Region w/30,000 prims), *US$80 (State Region w/40,000 prims)

For Haven, the * is there because it's calculated from Euro pricing, which fluctuates a little and is rounded to the nearest US$5.

 But yes, pricing does depend per grid, but no OpenSim grid asks for anywhere close to the expensive cost that SL has for a full sim.  And at places like Haven, you could have your own full sized sim, with limited prims (Haven's is 1,000prims) for about as much, maybe less than a 16 oz latte (currently about US$3.25).  That beats out even SL's least expensive tier at US$5/month that only allots you 117 prims and only 1/128th of a sliver of land.  You can find 1/64th plots of land in many Opensim grids for free, with a larger prim allotment than that.  So, hands down, on basic pricing alone and prim allotment alone, you get much more for less on Opensim than you do for similar land options on SL.

So yep, I'd suggest that anyone that is having issues with paying for SL land tiers because they are so expensive should give Opensim a serious look.  And, of course, I'd advise them to check out Haven Your World and Virtual Highway first.  And, for those daring enough, they could even try operating their own grid, which, the software is free, and they would have virtually unlimited land for free to themselves, and can explore what land/prim and pricing allotments they would like if they were to put their own grid online. The main cost to a grid owner depends on servers and how they setup getting their grid to be accessed on the internet. But even there, you could have hundreds of sims to your own allotment for the same price, and often less, than you would have to pay for one full sim on SL.

Sorry Phoenix-Firestorm, But You're Fired

That's right, I'm finished using Firestorm.  Phoenix used to be my go to after Emerald folded due to their mismanagement, and I looked forward to seeing what the Phoenix team could do.  And there were some decent things about Phoenix, and I even liked some things about Firestorm. However, since January, I've become increasingly annoyed at their decision to cancel support for the viewer that got them where they are now, and becoming overly obsessed with server side baking - especially how they made themselves sound like the only crew out there among the third party viewers doing it.

Well, I have an answer for that: Singularity 1.8.0.

That's right, Ms. Jessica Lyon, while you and the Firestorm crew were all out there calling that the sky is falling, and that 1.23 type viewers are completely incompatible with Server Side Appearance (or Server Side Baking, as you've been touting it), Siana Gearz and her crew at Singularity have been working diligently (and silently, I might add!) to ensure that Singularity would not be one of the Third Party Viewers left behind when SL flips the switch to server side baking.  More so, they added mesh upload and some pathfinding goodies for SL, as well as a sure to be great asset in OpenSim with the export permissions tab and and the ability for grids to add custom menu items. All this and more on a 1.23 client!

I'm sorry Ms. Lyons and the Phoenix-Firestorm team, but you've made it clear that you don't give a hoot about Phoenix, which is the very client that initially made it possible for Firestorm to be around today.  I'm also sorry that you had to use belittling of people still using a 1.23 client as too retrograde for you and your team. And I'm especially sorry that you chose to scare people into switching to Firestorm because you made it sound like you were the only viewer that was working on Server Side Appearance, and even making people choose whether to use the SL version of the client over the OpenSim one, because you couldn't make it possible to flip a switch internally in your viewer.

But, you said it yourself quite well, Ms. Lyons, about why one should part ways, so I'll take your advice and  let everyone know of the third party options, like Singularity. For I have done everything I can think of to be supportive of Firestorm, and even thought that the OpenSim version was a good idea.  But I have decided to move on to Singularity, and wish you the best, while I find enjoyment in Singularity and it's continued support of v1.23 technology, as well as working to keep it relevant in the current versions of both SL and OpenSim.

JC Compositions (playlist)

So yeah, I have a fancy-schmansy playlist for my music compositions.  Not so much a Ioh Acta update as just a general one.  If you like music, and want to check them out, feel free. And if you happen to like any of them, feel free to like and share!