Big Bad Wolf and a Pesky Bat: Enhancing Usher

Location: Usher Crypt, looking for Milk-Bones and saying "Nice doggy!"

One thing was clear in Fall, 2011, when I last ran the House of Usher simulation in OpenSim: students wanted more danger.  That means injury and death, things very much in keeping with Poe's tales. The more macabre and premature one's demise, the better!

Second Life content creators have made a number of combat systems that can maim or kill avtars, but I chose Spellfire precisely so I could use some scripted animals from a content creator named "Restless Swords." This animals can also do Gorean-Meter damage, and though that system is simpler than Spellfire, which includes the need for avatars to sleep and eat, I cannot use anything "Gorean" on a university machine, period.

I went to visit Restless (teleport to his shop by the link here) as both Iggy and Roderick to buy some creatures. After some outstandingly prompt service from Restless to get the current updates for the scripted animals, Usher has a wolf wandering the crypts and a bat in the attic.

We'll see what our actors and student avatars do now. There's one weapon in the House, and they'll have to solve some riddles to get access to it, if they wish to defend themselves.

How Customer Service Should Work: Help from eBay

Location: Boxing up stuff to ship

As a "power seller" at eBay (over 200 auctions in the last year) anything that slows down the process of listing an item means a cascading loss of time.

The company recently revised its photo uploader, so it became impossible to edit a listing while the photos uploaded. Normally that poses no problem, but 2 minutes lost during each of 10 listings means 20 minutes lost.

I asked eBay to change their uploader back to the old system, and very quickly--less than a month--I got this reply from the firm:

Dear sellers,
 
In response to your feedback to able to edit listing in the background, we just rolled out an enhancement to address that. So now you will able to work on your listing while waiting for photo upload.
 
I strongly encourage you to test out and let me know your thoughts.

Thank you for your support!

For the sake of conversation, let's compare that sort of feature request to, say, Linden Lab's turnaround time for a problem.  Moral? Listen to your customers.