Call the doctor!

This went on way too long and the servants didn't even say anything about it, but someone had to knock Roderick down a few rungs. He's fairly sickly so how hard would it be to trick him into something that would distract him for a few minutes and just go down to check on Madeline? The guy has to sleep sometime, and I would just go down and knock on the crypt door. The worst thing that could happen is I hear echos but if Madeline had been knocking on the door for even a day, I am pretty sure she would quickly answer with resounding cries for help.

And there were plenty of servants who technically serve her too, why couldn't they call a doctor? Roderick has obviously gone mad, so their paycheck is probably up in the air anyways! A good word from Madeline couldn't hurt anything. But before we even get to trying to save her from the room I helped bury her in, I would have checked to see if she was actually dead!

If the culture has caught up enough to know that the deceased should get a wake or at least a string around their finger would indicate to me that I should give this a few days to see if she wakes back up. I'm no doctor but I assume if a person is breathing, they are alive, but then again I don't have a medical degree.

Problems in Communication within SL

Second Life has gone from a computer geek's dream to a social network and now its become communication between educators and business people but where does it go wrong? When does the communication run into problems and maybe even cause some problems of its own. While I have not used Second Life as a serious communication device, I can speculate on the possible problems that one could run into from my own limited experience.

Maybe this is because I'm a newbie to the program but using the voice application I ran into some problems. The first was trying to talk to another avatar. I could not seem to find the keys to turn on the microphone for SL and ended up having to type while a French man spoke to me. Once I had found the voice control I had to hold down the keys, which for the life of me, I cannot remember, in order to keep the microphone. Overall the voice controls were difficult to find, use, and evidently, remember.

The only other problem I can foresee in Second Life would be a question of etiquette. If all the participants in a conversation are typing than the chances of them overlapping in quite high. Especially if someone is talking and the other is typing, the one talking has full advantage of the other and can run the conversation to their benefit. But this is not new, maybe to SL, but not new to conversation, as people have always seen the benefit of over running another person's side of the argument, just look at political debates. This is not a problem that the makers of SL can solve but rather something the users can control; play by our rules of etiquette or we won't play with you.