A Public Thank You to LL

Over the past year and a half I've admittedly done more than my share of complaining about Second Life and its troubles. Before the year ended, it was my goal to write a song giving "thanks" to all of the Lindens that make Second Life possible. Despite my grumbing and poking fun at you in song, I do appreciate all of your hard work.

At the same time, I got to wondering about who the "Lindens" are, what they do, etc. Thanks to Google, I stumbled upon the Second Life wiki article about Linden Lab employees which yielded enough information for the following creation:

44 Lines about 22 Lindens

Torley is the famous Linden
He's the one that does the blog
Robla works in management
He's just another Linden cog
Meta is the data cruncher
for the common metrics team
Poppy Linden finds the bugs
that cause us residents to scream

Pathfinder sends his snapshots
to his famous Flickr page
Mia rounds up volunteers
who do good work but don't get paid
Chiyo Linden is Japanese
we all call her Chiyo-chan
Colossus works with Jesse
keeping live music going strong

Brad is making Windlight
to turn the weather on and off
Bridie helps to fix the grid
when it starts to hack and cough
Elle is the french Linden
she's the one I'd like to meet
Blue Linden is famous
for the avatars that look so neat

He's also known as Cyan Linden
on the teen grid

Frontier's techy articles
I can never understand
Ginsu made the final call
on who or what got permabanned
Catherine's gift at marketing
helps Linden Lab stay in the press
Steve makes the SL Viewer
so Second Life will looks its best
Phoenix works on open source
for which he gets a lot of grief
Harry's making help search better
that should give us all relief
Cory's Linden Scripting Language
is what our world is based upon
but Philip Linden had the vision
so he's the one that ends this song

Thank you Lindens.
44 lines about 22 Lindens.

something funny

Received via e-mail, original author unknown:

A man in Phoenix calls his son in New York City two days before Christmas.

'I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing,' he says. 'Forty-five years is enough.'

'Pop, what are you talking about?' the son screams.

'We can't stand the sight of each other any longer,' the father says. 'I'm sick of talking about this, soyou call your sister in Chicago and tell her.'

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone.

'Like heck they're getting divorced,' she shouts. 'I'll take care of this!'

She calls her parents immediately, and screams at her father, 'You are NOT getting divorced. Don't do a single thing until I get there. I'm calling my brother back, and we'll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don't do a thing!'

The father hangs up his phone and turns to his wife.

'OK,' he says; "the kids are coming for Christmas and paying their own way.'