Crashing in Second Life

I was in Myrtle Beach, SC on Thursday night for a convention I was filming for my final project documentary in ENGL 4451. I knew I would be missing Techart class, but I wasn't concerned as we are meeting in SL on Thursday nights. I took Nick's Compaq laptop with me to SC to meet up with the class on SL.

I downloaded SL on the laptop at home and tested it out. I was able to connect to the Internet just fine; the computer has enough memory to run SL. So, I was not too concerned about encountering problems with SL while I was at the conference. Ha! What a false sense of security I had!

I signed onto Second Life at 8:00pm from my hotel room. I took about ten steps around the ALOHA'S bar, went to find my friend Jet Good and then proceeded to crash. Augh!

I shut down the computer and rebooted. I signed onto SL again. I was able to stay on for about five minutes then I crashed again. What the heck??

Once again, I shut down. I waited about five minutes and rebooted. I entered SL and retrieved my notecard for my assignment. I teleported to Ivory Tower of Primitives and found the floating text to begin the tour. Once I began to download the notecards in the Ivory Tower, I crashed again! I was not pleased.

I decided that maybe their was something wrong with the DSL connection in my hotel room. I packed up my computer, grabbed a pen and notebook, got a Diet Dr. Pepper, and headed downstairs to the main lobby where there was free wi-fi connection.

There were four other people in the lobby with their laptops. After finding a free chair, I proceeded to log onto SL again. I was able to keep the conncetion much better in the lobby. I wish I had started off downstairs instead of in the hotel room. I was able to get through a good portion of the tour before I lost my signal.

I found the entire ordeal stressing. One minute I am connected to SL and taking my tour, the next minute SL has crashed. I realized as I became more and more irritated that I am really enjoying the SL experience. I decided that as I was unhappy the computer and SL were crashing and that I was missing my SL time.

I had lousy Internet service the entire time at Myrtle Beach. I complained to the front desk manager about the loust reception and was told: "That happens a lot here."

Well, I finally made it home Sunday and have been catching up on my missed time in SL!