Happy Hippo

Many of you have probably heard about the hippo awards already, but for those who have not, it seems the jury at Linden Labs decided that I'm the hippo of the year. Actually I have no idea what what the Linden Innovation Awards has to do with hippos, maybe it's about the Hippo bug in the viewer (you can trigger a bug by Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H, it seems to be a demo bug for beta testers to check dump creation or something).

But nevermind, Hippo of the Year has something funny to it, it sounds a lot less formal than Innovation Award Winner or Contributor of the Year :-)

On top of the Apple computer which was known as first prize in advance, Linden Labs threw in some Land (rent for a year) and some Linden$ for good measure which is a nice touch. I especially like that the winners in the other categories don't walk away empty handed ... this whole open source project is about sharing and collaboration and without the others, for example without the compile instructions on the Wiki, without pre-sorted bugs on the JIRA, without help on sldev, I wouldn't have come very far with my efforts.

What should not be forgotten are two groups of hippos though. One is Hippo-Lindens, that is those Lindens who go through the nitty-gritty of patch importing and dealing with end users and their problems on a direct basis. Rob said in his speech that I'm at times a fierce critic of Linden Labs, but reading this blog back hopefully proves, that I also give credit where I think credit is due. There are "Lindens drive me nuts" moments, but also "Yay Linden Labs" posts. On of the moments which made me respect Lindens was yesterday. I've been (and still am) pretty harsh with my opinion about the last voice release, but giving me the award anyway and throwing in some unexpected extras --despite my recent posts of hard knocks-- has class and I fully acknowledge that.

The other group which should not be forgotten is Hippo-Users, which includes many of the readers of this blog who provided feedback, to the time (and trust) to mail crash reports, repros, downloaded test viewers or worked with me on trying to locate or fix specific problems or who just wrote blog posts or emails or IMs with a heads up or patted me on the back.

Oh, and there's my girlfriend. A lot of the work I've done on the viewer (which were phases of an almost fulltime job) was on time not spent with her. Enduring that is very hippo! Yay Sue, I love you!

So, thanks everybody involved ... hippos rule! :-)