Hello Again, DuroSports Fans,

I am me, Vladimir Concescu, Chief Product Engineer of the DuroSport Electronics Company.

I am now backing from the Second Life, after what some engineerings is calls “Nero’s Folly” — virtualized Prism DuroSport in the Second Life — so while I loveing my Avatard, stays in the First Life for now.

Speaking of the loveing, am telling you now my loveing for the new TV Show the “Heroes.” Are you hearing of it?

Just before the disastering in the Second Life I am beta testing the upcoming alpha versioning of DuroSport Videotron, and all the nuclear bombings on “24″ scared me. Run, Jack Bauer, run! from all of the nuclear bombings! Bombings!

So is the channel switchings for the beta testing for the Alpha versioning of the DuroSport Videotron, and saw cheeringlead very like cheeringleads I meet during the MySpace producting researches. Only MySpace cheeringleads mostly walking from huge fires, not inside of. Seeing pretty mirror lady all scary. And saw chiselyfaced man flying like my Avatard in the Second Life. Flying! In the First Life!

Then I’m seening white-eyed painter of the future. Is painting teenage cheeringlead girl. In the future! See Nero, teenage girl is future as I am writing!

Suddenly, I am remembers old folking story passed over in my family for many many years. Decades, maybe even centurions. From fathering to childrens and back to fathering. Its a family lengendary! About future-painting painter who is painting the future. Which is comes true.

Chillys running down my back. Thinking that legendary is my family only, but is the “Heroes” creator distancing relation? Will attempt contaction via the MySpace, but now am having new favorite TV Show: the “Heroes.” Very excitement!

As I have told you all, we are very excited about our new store in The Second Life as well as our new virtual Prism DuroSport. I have asked the legendary Madmann Legend to write about the making of the virtual media player. Here is an exclusive behind the scenes look at how it all came about.
- Nero

Greetings, I am me, Madmann Legend.

Wow… sorry, I’ve been working around these Moldovans too much. You’d be surprised how easy it is to soak that up. They made me change “Loading, Please Wait” to the more Moldovan-correct “Making Load, Please To Waiting…” Just thinking about it, I’m making load right now.

I’ve been asked to write a few words about helping to bring the DuroSport 6001 into Second Life. I suggested “moist”, “juggernaut” & “dyspeptic”, but they wanted a whole bunch strung together into sentences, so here I go.

When I was first approached by my friends Blu & Sandry (aka LogSpark) to assist in this project, I was told we would be making a virtual version of the Prism DuroSport. I thought, “A glass jockstrap, what a marvelous idea!” I hadn’t yet encountered the most unique media player on the market. Or whatever.

Being a number-crunching geek & criminally insane came in very handy on this effort. Although the First Life DuroSport uses incredibly large numbers in its DRM scheme, they seemed not be enough when put into the infinite possibility of Second Life. Our initial attempts were, well, let’s be honest here… disastrous. Music was escaping from the player at an alarming rate. For a company whose motto is “Your Music Will Never Escape”, that wouldn’t really fly. I kept raising the numbers, till they were like huge plus 13…. but still we had random sightings of herds of wild Fall Out Boy mp3s all over the north end of the grid. Pretty sure we got ‘em all, but they breed like mad in there. Ebi Ebi put the last one down himself, just like in Old Yeller.

Which brings me to my confession. After the Fall Out Boy incident, I got frustrated and just told the big-ass numbers in the DuroSport 6001 “TIMES INFINITY!” Worked pretty well in grade school, in Second Life, not so much. The resulting load on Linden Lab’s server made the grid shaky for about a weekend. So what, you never screw up where YOU work?

So the introduction went well, despite all the protesters… They haven’t paid me anything for my work, just offered me something called “coup futures”. Supposed to be like pork bellies, I guess. I get paid if an Eastern European nation changes governments. Or whatever.

At this point I’m just glad to have this project completed. Your music is safe, even in Second Life.

Or whatever.

It is always very disappointing when the perfect weekend does not end perfectly. Our Fiscal New Years celebration was going very well. Almost too well considering how things have been for DuroSport in the past few years. It seemed a bit suspicious.

Then the phone rang. Normally I would not answer the phone while I am in The Second Life. It breaks the illusion of being in a perfect world where anything is possible and no one complains about the size of your portable media player. Unfortunately, I was not in The Second Life when the phone rang. In fact, I was barely in The Second Life all weekend. The Second Life kept crashing, and when I would log back in I looked like a woman — someone named Ruth. It was all very disturbing. Apparently the DuroStore grand opening was so big that we broke The Second Life.

The Linden people were not aware of the power requirements of the virtual Prism DuroSport. That is something they should have planned for. They will have to buy more powerful servers now that DuroSport has come to The Second Life. Now that many avatars are setting up our players in their virtual homes I would not be surprised if The Second Life crashes more frequently. Please do not blame DuroSport if this is the case.

Anyway, as I was saying, the phone rang. It was a lawyer for The Star Trek calling to say that he was exercising some obscure clause in our contract and canceling their exclusive partnership with DuroSport. There will be no more Star Trek DeMastered download service.

He did not give a reason, but I believe that The Star Trek is afraid of one or two slightly bad reviews. It is well known that Trekies have thin skin and can’t take any criticism at all. And their lawyers are worse.

So that is that. DuroSport is now looking for new partners for our DuroView download service. If you are a representative of a famous TV program please contact us immediately.

To The Lindens I say, “Please upgrade your servers to support our virtual DuroSport players”.

To the Star Trek people I say, “Go to hell! Everything my uncle Oleg said about you was right”.

Fortunately we still have our theme song. That is one thing they can never take away from us. Thank you Amin Paine.

I will see you in The Second Life. Where I am Nero Rang. And sometimes Nero Ruth Rang.

p.s. I have posted some photos from our store on The Flicker. You can see a few of them on the side of this blog. These are for the people who do not have The Second Life.

Today we are wrapping up the most exciting Fiscal New Year celebration in the history of the DuroSport Corporation. On Friday we announced our new theme song and yesterday we announced the opening of our first DuroStore in The Second Life. On top of that, our new SL-6001VRMP is the biggest DuroSport ever. There has never been a more exciting time to work for the DuroSport corporation and I thank all of you for your ongoing support.

But there is one more thing that I forgot to mention.

Starting today DuroSport will be partnering with The Star Trek on a new video download service. We call it DuroView and we think you will agree that it is the future of online video. You will find more information about this partnership on the DuroSport website, and of course, the official Star Trek website.

I would like to take a moment to talk briefly about the history of DuroSport and The Star Trek. It is no secret that my uncle Oleg was very unhappy with the Trek people many years ago. My uncle spent several months developing special technology for the original pilot. Things did not work out and the arrangement ended on very poor terms. Later my uncle noticed that quite a bit of The Star Trek technology was copied from ideas in development at DuroSport. I will not repeat what my uncle used to say about The Star Trek because this is a family blog.

Fortunately those days are behind us now. We know a good opportunity when we see one, and so we are burying the ox cart and working together for the common good of both companies.

Here is the best part: If you are a Star Trek fan you do not really have a choice. If you want to watch the new “DeMastered” series you will just have to buy the newest DuroSport media player. I am very sorry, but there is no way it will play on your pathetic little Zune.

We know how The Star Trek fans are. They are like drug addicts. They will buy anything associated with the Trek. And so we will sell many DuroSport players as a result of this exclusive agreement.

I was reminded of how rabid the Trek fans are the other day when I ran into a kid on the pier at the Moth Temple in The Second Life. He was running around with a light saber screaming “I’m a Jedi knight! Get out of my way, I’m a Jedi knight!”. We had a slight run-in and I put him in his place. Then later, I was worried that the incident might cause problems while we were negotiating this new Star Trek deal. After many years we have finally patched things up with the Treksters and now all of a sudden we are at war again. Then someone in our office pointed out that Jedi’s are from Star Wars. Apparently Wookies are too. That is good to know.

At any rate, we are very excited about this new partnership and we encourage other famous television programs to contact us about partnering as well. The nice thing about this deal is that it is exclusive for The Star Trek, but not exclusive for DuroSport. That is because the Moldovan lawyers are smarter than the Hollywood lawyers.

I am happy to say that all of us here at DuroSport are about to have our best year ever (except maybe for Vlad).

I will see you soon in The Second Life. Remember, I am Nero Rang there.

I will be the first to admit that I was skeptical about The Second Life. At first it seemed like just another thing to distract me from doing my real work here at DuroSport. I am humbled to say that I could not have been more wrong about The Second Life. I will tell you why.

Some of you probably live near an Apple store. They are everywhere. It is obvious that the company has no quality control. How can they open so many stores and still provide good customer service? And yet people continue to shop at the Apple store because they have no other alternative. Apple is all anyone knows about anymore. They have virtually eliminated the Tandy and most other computers.

You are probably wondering why DuroSport does not open its own store and attempt to beat Apple at its own game. That is a good idea, but not as easy as it sounds.

First of all, we have very high standards. Much higher standards than Apple. Because of this we have been very cautious about opening a store until we could absolutely assure that our customers would have a shopping experience that is identical in every way to the one they would have if they walked into the main DuroStore in Moldova.

But you did not know about the DuroStore in Moldova, did you? That is because most of you have never been to Moldova. The bloggers who came here last summer know all about the DuroStore and they will tell you that the Apple stores are pitiful in comparison.

Of course, there are other reasons why we have not been able to bring the DuroStore to the so-called “free world”. In a word: regulations and red tape. There are so many permits and inspections required that it is almost impossible to open a store in the United States. You call this capitalism? Why can’t we just pay someone to make the problems go away (I think you know what I mean). That is how it is done in Moldova.

Then there are the environmental regulations. We are big supporters of the fish and the birds, but it is well known that pollution is a natural part of the electronics manufacturing process. It also turns out that our retail outlet generates certain pollutants that, for some reason, are not allowed in the United States.

There are no idiotic environmental laws or zoning regulations in The Second Life. Thanks to The Second Life we can finally bring the DuroStore to the masses without compromising our high standards.

Starting today the entire world can now visit an exact replica of our Moldovan DuroStore without ever leaving their homes. No passport is required. No security clearance is needed from Moldovan Secret Police. You now have no excuse not to visit the DuroStore!

The Second Life has allowed us to overcome all of the limitations of physical reality. It is like a world that was made especially for DuroSport.

Come see for yourself what a real electronics store is like. After you do I guarantee that the next time you visit an Apple store you will laugh at the pathetic overpaid hippies they employ at the “Genius” bar. Our employees are not so scruffy.

When you visit us you will see that in The Second Life we have been able to make the Prism DuroSport 6000 everything we ever wanted it to be. We have been able to overcome the inherent technological limitations of reality. You will be amazed.

I must admit that all of this would not have been possible without the help of the very kind people in The Second Life. We could not have achieved all of our goals on our own. By now you are probably aware of the problems we are having in our engineering department.

We are fortunate to have partnered with a company called The LogSpark. The LogSparkers were finally able to engineer a DuroSport player as we have always wanted it to be. As a result our new SL-6001VRMP is massive. It will crush the Zune in The Second Life — literally. And hopefully even some Zune fans for good measure.

I want take this opportunity to personally thank The LogSpark team: Sparky, Sundry, Ebi, and Madmann (who doesn’t seem so angry in person). They are everything that Vlad is not. Great work!

There will soon be meetings where we will discuss the possibility of outsourcing all of our product engineering to The Second Life. This will almost certainly put the Pütz back on the fast track!

If only there was a way we could release a new product without having to wait for the start of the next fiscal year. The accounting team all have hangovers today so there is no one for me to consult with on this. It will have to wait until next week.

In the meantime, please come visit the DuroStore in The Second Life. Use this link to get to our new store. You will need The Second Life software, but do not worry, it is free and it runs on most popular computers – except for the Tandy. Hopefully they will fix that soon.

Please come back here for some more exciting news tomorrow. It will be Fiscal New Years Day and we have another very special surprise for all of you.

Until then, I will see you in The Second Life (just ask for Nero Rang).