Press Release: Bay City’s Annual Tree Lighting 2020

The eleventh annual tree lighting event at Bay City in Second Life will take place from 1pm to 4pm SLT on Sunday 6th December 2020. The event will be held at the Bay City Fairgrounds in the North Channel region. There will be dancing, ice-skating, live performances, refreshments and much more.

The silent auction is back again this year to support Child’s Play Charity. Bay City has raised over US$3000.00 for Child’s Play at the annual tree lighting events and charity car washes so far.

It’s time to celebrate Christmas in Second Life with friends and family.

Here is the full press release below…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Marianne McCann
Bay City Alliance
marianne.mccann@gmail.com

BAY CITY’S HOLIDAY EVENT IS UPON US ONCE AGAIN

Eleventh Annual tree light, concert, and fund raiser coming in December

BAY CITY, SL (29th November, 2020) –

Coming to Second Life® for the eleventh year in a row is Bay City’s annual annual Tree Lighting event on Sunday, 6th December 2020 from 1-4 pm SL.

The event will be held at the Bay City Fairgrounds, in North Channel ( http://slurl.com/secondlife/North%20Channel/128/128/24/ ) and will feature GoSpeed of KONA stream and live performances by Maximillion Kleene and Wolfie Starfire. The event will also feature ice-skating, dancing, refreshments and plenty of fun for everyone!

As part of the event, a silent auction will again be held to support Child’s Play Charity (www.childsplaycharity.org) and a. We are asking Second Life® designers and artists to participate by providing fun, interesting, unique, or other transferable items (or a no-copy object that the auction winner can give to you to redeem their prize, if the item(s) have to be no transfer). Please contact Marianne McCann to participate.

Auction will end at the conclusion of the event. All proceeds from the silent auction and from donation bins at the venue will go to Child’s Play Charity. Child’s Play is a 501c3 non profit organization offers online communities such as ours an opportunity to help seriously ill children around the globe during their hospital stays with the purchase of games and gaming equipment. Bay City has raised over US$3000.00 for Child’s Play at the tree lighting and at charity car washes held in Second Life®

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 group for Residents of Bay City.

For more information, or to participate in the event, please contact Marianne McCann.

Please spread the word.

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Winter Wonderland Is Open At The Bellisseria Fairgrounds

Check the the Winter Wonderland over at the Bellisseria Fairgrounds in Second Life. The event started 28th November and runs through until 4th December 2020. The magic of christmas has arrived.

Enter the tunnel and explore the magic.

View from the sky

Lovely place to visit

There are loads of other winter attractions located on the Second Life Destination Guide. There are plenty of photo opportunities during the month ahead.

Poll: Has your Second Life experience improved from the recent grid wide region uplift to the cloud ?

Please vote in the poll below and share your first impressions in comments. What would you like to see next ?

Results will be published at the end of November 2020.

Linden Lab Introduces The New Second Life Public Calendar

The new Second Life Public Calendar

On 19th November Linden Lab introduced a new Second Life public calendar where everyone can view upcoming Linden Lab sponsored events and user group meetings. I think this Google web based calendar will be very useful indeed for the Second Life community. It would be nice to see this calendar somehow built into the Second Life viewer etc under the Help menu soon.

• View here > second.life/calendar

Don’t forget you can click the +GoogleCalendar icon in the bottom right corner and add it to your Google Calendar which is very neat indeed. Click on any event on the Second Life public calendar to see when the event will take place, the location and description of it.

Here is the blog announcement…

We’ve heard your requests and we’re introducing a new public Google calendar that will have all Linden Lab official events listed. This new calendar offers a convenient way to get an at-a-glance look at upcoming User Group meetings and other Linden Lab-sponsored events (such as the Second Life Book Club and upcoming Winter Wonderland snow fight).

To access the web version of this calendar, go to second.life/calendar, no login is required. 

You can additionally use this ICAL feed link to add it to your own personal calendar. You can also click the +GoogleCalendar icon on the bottom right of the web calendar to add it to your Google Calendar. Or, copy over individual events that you are interested in by clicking on the event and click “copy to my calendar.”

If you see any errors then you can reach out to Strawberry Linden at strawberry@lindenlab.com.

100% Of Second Life Regions Now In The Cloud

Within the past few hours Linden Lab have finished moving all the regions on the grid to the cloud. Congratulations Linden Lab 🙂

The official confirmation came from April Linden on Twitter today. Well done to the Uplift team for moving all regions way ahead of schedule.

The team just finished up moving all of the regions to the cloud! We did it, before our goal of Thanksgiving!!! Uplift isn't done, we still have things to move, but getting the regions done FEELS SO GOOD! 💜

— April Linden (@LindenyApril) November 19, 2020

Stlit Homes Release Update

Patch Linden confirmed today that the Stilt Linden homes release will take place after Turkey Day.

[10:57] Patch Linden: What’s today?
[10:58] Patch Linden: Thursday

[10:58] Patch Linden: Guess what?

[10:58] Patch Linden: 100% of the regions on the grid have now been uplifted!

[10:58] Patch Linden: That’s why it’s been restart city, and that’s one of the things we had to get past!

[10:59] Patch Linden: Alas, the team still has some stuff to do caused by the various interruptions that’s all created, but that puts our immediate timeline for release to after Turkey Day.

[11:00] Patch Linden: We’re so close, we can taste it, but the team also needs time with their families too 

[11:01] Patch Linden: Thank you everyone! ❤️

Exciting day for Second Life news I think.

Second Life Main Grid Regions Uplift Almost Complete

As of Wednesday 18th November over 50% of main grid regions have moved to the cloud via Amazon Web Services. Today it’s believed that the rest of the main grid regions will be uplifted to the cloud.

There is scheduled maintenance today from 7am SLT through until possibly 4pm SLT (maybe sooner) The lab will be performing rolling restarts during this period and so there could be issues when rezzing objects inworld.

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AWS (the cloud)

For example Oak Grove is running on AWS. Click on About Firestorm or whatever viewer your using to find out if the region is running on AWS.

You are at 175.6, 115.7, 20.4 in Oak Grove located at ec2-34-220-149-232.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (34.220.149.232:13004)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Oak%20Grove/176/116/20
(global coordinates 255,408.0, 256,116.0, 20.4)
Second Life Server 2020-11-12.552183

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Linden Lab (data center)

You are at 145.5, 171.6, 24.0 in Debug1 located at sim10376.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.51.26:13000)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Debug1/145/172/24
(global coordinates 239,249.0, 343,980.0, 24.0)
Second Life Server 2020-09-11T22:25:15.548903

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Once completed Debug 1 and Debug 2 regions will continue to be hosted at the Linden Lab data center. The next phrase of the cloud uplift will start in terms of improving performance etc. I would expect that to take place sometime in 2021+.

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Scheduled Maintenance

Rolling Restarts and Uplift for SLS Channels

Nov 19, 07:00–16:00 PST

We will be performing rolling restarts for regions on the SLS Channels on Thursday, November 19th, beginning at 7:00 AM PDT. During this time regions will also be Uplifted to the cloud. Please refrain from rezzing no copy objects and remember to save all builds. Please check this blog for updates.
Posted on Nov 17, 14:56 PST

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Hopefully before the end of today all regions on the main grid will be in the cloud. Good luck Linden Lab.

The latest uplift updates can be found on the Second Life Forums in the Server section and on the Second Life Grid Reports page.

I will blog more when new updates become available very soon.

Second Life Region Statistics – November 2020 Update

Latest grid numbers via the Second Life Grid Survey

As of 15th November 2020 there are 25, 302 regions in total which includes 16, 785 private estate regions and 8, 517 Linden regions. The total size of Second Life in square kilometres is now 1658.19 (KM). The grid has been growing steadily since September 2020 with more private estates and Linden owned regions. The adult and moderate regions have increased over the past few weeks however general regions have dropped by a small amount.

In the past week 103 regions were added to the grid with 82 being new private estate regions and 21 Linden owned regions. This is great news that Second Life is growing again and these latest grid numbers is a positive sign. I think the recent announcement about private estates becoming available again has helped. Interest for new private estates has already started to go up again in demand.

The lab have recently added the new Stilt Linden home regions (over 190 regions) and more regions are expected to arrive in the weeks/months ahead. This will improve the Linden owned regions total counts going forward.

Since 29th December 2019 there has been an increase of 680 private estate regions (2020 = 562 regions) and a loss of 118 Linden owned regions in Second Life.

Linden Lab Confirms 50% Of Second Life Regions Are Now Running In The Cloud

Great news to share with everyone today is that over half of the regions in Second Life are now running in the cloud. Yay!

Just got official confirmation from Strawberry Linden within the past hour. The heads up came from April Linden who is the Engineering Manager at the lab.

Hi Daniel, this is Strawberry. I have confirmed with our Sr. Engineering Manager, April Linden, that over half the regions in Second Life are now running in the cloud.

From the sounds of things it looks like everything went to plan for moving 50% of the regions into the cloud this week. Hopefully the remaining half of the regions will be moved into the cloud within the next 6 weeks or so.

Great work Linden Lab 🙂

More Stilt Linden Home Regions Added

Today Linden Lab have added roughly 17 more Stilt regions and 4 more houseboat regions. In total so far there are now 156 Stilt regions. The mean average for the new Stilt Linden Homes is fractionally over 25 to a region. There will be thousands of Stilt homes available to claim very soon. Probably within the next few weeks or so once all the regions pass the QA process.

Exciting times ahead for those that want a new Linden Home. I’m sure in the mean time the lab will add more Linden Home regions and hopefully connect the Stilt regions to the log homes continent. More log homes are expected to be built in the days and weeks ahead. The railway line on the log homes continent is set to extend further in the weeks ahead.

The Newer Area – (12th November 2020)

Before – (7th November 2020)

I will blog more when new developments happen.

8th Annual OpenSim Conference – 5th & 6th December 2020

AvaCon announced last month that the eighth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference will be held on 5th-6th December 2020. The conference will take place on the OpenSim Conference Grid and everyone is invited to attend. The main focus will be on OpenSimulator software and OpenSim development.

Registration is open for volunteers and other roles however tickets to the conference are limited. If you are interested in OpenSim then this may interest you. I have been to a few OpenSim conferences in the past and I found them to be very good indeed.

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Hypergrid Address: http://cc.opensimulator.org:8002/

About

The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2020 features two days of fast-paced presentations, panels, performances, and workshops that spotlight the best of the OpenSimulator platform and community. In the evenings, we celebrate another year of discovery and wonder as DJs and performers host dances and parties. 

More details at https://conference.opensimulator.org/