Issues of Pride and Sloth

This last weekend had been quite annoying for me, sometimes in a good way, but more over in a bad way.

An Issue of Pride.
We are of course going back to Fitted Mesh here, and following my repeated headbanging last week over this, you can assume that I didnt drop the subject.

Teaching yourself something is always key to being very good at what you do. Without knowledge, you will constantly slip up, get stuck, and either fail, or bug the crap out of friends as you stumble along.
Having worked with rigged mesh for two years now, and listening to the fact that the "workflow is the same as rigged mesh" when it comes to fitted, I assumed this was a logical progression.
I never claimed to be an expert or a guru on rigging - its something I am still learning about day by day, but fundamentally I learnt about rigging through a process of trail and error, but most importantly, learning from other people who have been kind enough to share their knowledge.

As of right now, I have Hemi in world, wearing a fitted mesh boot - the same boot I was using for experimental purposes. Although it still needs vast amounts of weight painting work, that boot is pure fitted mesh, it behaves as expected with the sliders although I have to say, the one size fits all theory isnt true - fitted mesh isnt a magic pill for curing fitment problems and you may still end up with 2-3 different items depending on how the items are rigged.
In short - it works and the reason it works is because after looking at Fitted Mesh for a week, I realised that my pride was the weak point. I thought I could do this by myself, but as I said above, I am not an expert or guru. So, I swallowed my pride, and turned to someone who is an expert and the very first test I have done with new knowledge and tools, has worked out.

Where now? Sadly, nowhere. Fitted mesh is still in beta, and its now the process of waiting for things to progess to actual release. So, that project is now on hold.
Quite a shame really, as the boot itself, works both in the Experimental viewer, and the regular viewer.


An Issue of Sloth
This one is not actually directly related to SL at all atlhough it is indirectly causing me massive trouble.
In the UK, the gatekeepers our of internet services are British Telecom - a company who for those that have dealt with them, are pretty much loathed.
Having worked on the internet since 1996, I have sadly had a lot of expiernece with BT, and its fair to say I would rather shove wasps up my backside that deal with them ever again.
They are unpleasant to say the least, and sadly even when you dont deal with them directly, they are the gatekeepers, and even through the many service providers, they still cause you problems.
I was with Sky for a long time... then one day, I couldnt use the internet on an evening properly. I bought Unlimited Broadband from them. BT had imposed a 40 Gig download limit per month on them, and because they were having to use BT's services, I got data restrictions. In the end I had to move.
I moved to O2 Unlimited... everything worked well for a year or two... and then BT once again started causing trouble resulting in me being forced off their service!
I then moved to Talk Talk, who have in fairness been very good, but this time BT has caused an even larger problem that isnt just affecting me that has been coming slowly to a head now for nearly a decade.
In 2002, I moved to Sky broadband and I was told "sorry, you cant have our full service as the local exchange is still under BT's control and we cant put our equipment in - they have said they will be unbundling that exchange soon."
I kept checking on the status of that upgrade to the exchange, and sadly nothing happened.
Back then, the exchange in question was dealing with probably 1000 houses, of which remembering the year, not many of them had the internet.
Since that time, a lot has happened. Due to the proliferation of the internet, the % of people using the internet has gone up massively - in my area 90% of homes now have broadband. So that would be roughly 300 to 900 connections.
Except, there is a secondary issue - local development. over the last 12 years, huge housing developments have been going on local to me adding more and more to the load on that exchange. In fact its closer to 3500 houses now. That is 3150 houses, all trying to get online through an exchange that was originally developed in the 1990's, for at max 1000 homes.
The result is quite frankly horrifying. At 10am in the morning, I am getting a stable speed test of 6 megabits a second. What I should be getting from my connection.
However as you move through the day that speed slows and slow, until at 9pm in the evening, I can only get 0.3 megabits a second.
This, is similar to doing 60 MPH on a motorway, and then at peak times dropping to 3 MPH.
The sad thing is, it has taken me 12 phone calls to talk talk and 2 engineer visits to actually explain what the problem is.
BT have known this was going to be a problem now for over a decade, and going back to Sloth, they did nothing about it until now, as it seems, it has taken a member of parliment (government) and the head of the Fibreoptic Openreach project to have to get involved in a panic.
The largest irony is, most of where I live is on Fibre Boardband - 100 Megabits per second or more.
It is just this one area where its not been deployed due to that exchange not been upgraded.
They are currently doing an emergency deployment of Fibre to our area as the problem has now moved to critical... and after 6 weeks of shouting and grumbling, I finally find out that by the end of Feb, fibre boardband may be availabe to me, and not in the nick of time.
The funny thing is, the exchange in question is still not being upgraded and is actually being bypassed with the fibre system going to the master exchage nearly 10 miles away.
Sadly though, this means my SL connection is almost untennable on an evening - at speeds less than dial up due to the sheer congestion of the current network, SL struggles to work.
That of course means that by 5pm, I have no choice but to stop working on SL - its physically impossible to do more than get IM's.
Roll on March please...