The mayor’s picnic
Dear Miss Nikita,
My mother told me that if I did a good job with this story, you might get me a job writing for the Tattler when I grow up.
On July 21 my mother and father and I went to the New Toulouse mayor’s picnic. The weather was very good, and there was a cute little guy named Manfred playing music for us. There was a lot of good food, I had a frankfurter, some baked beans, and potato salad, and some punch, and for dessert I had a slice of pie! Mother and Daddy had the same stuff, but Daddy had green punch instead of red punch. He called it “groan-up punch,” and he and Mother were laughing and winking about it.
Then Mr. Henri, in his blue and white suit, stood up and gave a speech. The nice lady Fran called him “the merde de New Toulouse.” I laughed and asked Mother, but she shushed me and whispered, “The mayor de New Toulouse.” Or something like that.
Mr. Henri talked about some happy stuff and some meetings he had, and some hard script stuff. That part was sad. I remember when Mother got me a script for my cough, and it tasted really bad, so I felt sorry for Mr. Henri. Anyway, he said we did very well with reducing our script stuff, but the scripts grew back or something. He said it was okay—he was very proud and happy to live in New Toulouse, and he was proud of all of us who live here. I was happy, because everybody was cheering and happy when he said that.
Then Mr. Henri said we showed that we could do these hard things again when we had to. He said we would have to do it again before Mardi Gras, and he said we needed to be safe, because it was hurricane season. Then everybody cheered again, and Daddy was happy, and Daddy and I got some more green and red punch.
Then everyone started dancing again, and I got to scratch the little gray cat behind the ears, and she purred.
Your Intrepid Reporter,
Annie
[Editor’s note: She’s hired! At least for the Social Page! But for the exact details, we contacted the mayor for the text of his speech, below.]
Hello New Toulouse!
I wanted to have a party describing how we had eliminated our script lag and how we could try to tackle texture lag this fall, and what a great community we have here. I am delighted to say that two out of three ain’t bad!
As we’ve discussed before, I called Linden Lab Support back in May to ask them how to reduce lag. Basically they said we have too many scripts—some of them are poorly written scripts—and we are texture-heavy.
But what to do about it? We share NT. Script time is a shared resource. Those scripts are in our private possessions, but they affect us communally, like loud music from your neighbor’s picnic. So I turned to Soto Hax for help, and Soto built us a very neat little tool, the Parcel Script Time Scanner, and gave it to us so we could individually check our script load. And it worked, wonderfully.
When I asked Linden Lab Support for help, our script time was 16–17 ms. They advised getting it into the 12–13 ms range. We distributed Soto’s tool, and within the span of a few weeks, we had driven script time down to 11.98ms. That’s no guess—that is the average of sixty samples on June 22. Below 12 ms! And YOU did that, all of you. Pat yourself on the back, I don’t know when that has ever been done before.
Except today our script time is between 15 and 16 ms. It grew back! But that’s okay. We did exactly what we wanted, all of us. Together. It’s a very neat example of community effort in SL, and thank you for letting me witness that. And today’s numbers tell us something else. We just can’t rest with regard to these things, we have to remain vigilant.
We can do it again, when we need to. I’ll probably ask you to pay special attention to script lag during Mardi Gras season, when we have those huge crowds. But for now, please accept my thanks for participating in this wonderful little experiment, and beating our goal! Thank you!
Now let’s enjoy this picnic. Please thank Fran, for organizing this picnic!
And please thank Pazzo for the beautiful new street signs!
And please thank Niki for the awesome streetlamps supporting those signs, like she supports everything else!
We have some new residents. Most folks here are our neighbors or they want to be our neighbors, so say hi to someone you don’t know!
And watch out for hurricanes!
Oops, I have to stop, I must be close to using up my exclamation point budget for the month, so have fun and enjoy the music. Don’t forget to take care of our DJ, Manfred “Mani” Hancroft!
Annie Loiseau received the Perfect Penmanship award in Miss Fortune’s class this spring. One time she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and had to wear a cast and couldn’t climb trees for a while.