Category Archives: Second Life

My Adventure As A Wishfarmer Begins

So I promised that I would start blogging more — about everything, but in particular about the projects I’ve been working on these days, which are mainly in Second Life.

Well, I’ll finally start making good on that promise today, and I’m really excited about keeping you more in the loop on what I’m working on, so you can help me make it better.

The Second Life learning curve is a brutal one, but I know that soon, if I keep at it 24-7, I’ll eventually absorb all the necessary data to effectively mesh with the grid.

Until then, I’m taking as many notes as I can about all my experiences during this precious time, when I still feel like a “Noob” (a SL new user), so I can incorporate them into my writings and teachings accordingly.

It’s been a while since I’ve really taken on the mission of mastering something new like this. In 1996, although I knew very little about computer programming at the time, I decided I wanted to learn everything about Web Standards — especially HTML and XML. Thanks to several members of the W3C’s staff and its original XML Working Group (who spent countless hours on the phone and writing emails to help me learn all the details), in just a few years, I was teaching XML for UC Berkeley Extension Online.

Then, in 2001, I decided to ramp up on Copyright Law in the hopes that it might somehow combine with my technical skills to perhaps play a role in helping to turn the copyright situation around. That time, although I wasn’t even sure myself where my research would take me (and again, as a result of countless individuals taking me under their wing, to help me learn quickly), I found myself a co-founder of Creative Commons, working with Lawrence Lessig.

So, as you can see, these leaps into the void seem to pay off for me, generally, in both the short and long term. I consider this to be another such leap.

This latest endeavor also ties in nicely with the graduate and undergraduate level teaching on social networking and virtual worlds I’ve been doing for Prof. Michelle Wolf and Prof. Marie Drennan at SF State’s Broadcast Electronic Communications Arts Department (BECA). I’m having a blast learning these new interactive education concepts and technologies from The Wishfarmers, and I am eagerly incorporating them into my own bevy of teaching knowledge and materials.

I guess by now it’s pretty obvious that I truly believe virtual worlds have the potential to help shape and improve our lives. And not just the lives of those online, but also the those out in regular old “meatspace.” It seems clear to me that virtual worlds are no more a fad or passing phase than the Internet itself.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself, and it’s usually best to start at the beginning…

Pete Worden Live From NASA Ames – In Second Life – 9:30 AM PST/SLT

NASA gave me the OK last night to invite you to the virtual version of a little event,
The Next Generation Exploration Conference-2 , that’s taking place this week at NASA Ames Research Center.
This morning, (Tuesday, February 12) at 9:30 AM, Pete Worden will be kicking things off.
Here’s the SLURL to the:
NASA Sun Amphitheatre.
Gary Bukowski from The Wishfarmers and I helped them set up last night.
What a blast! (And I, too, am becoming a Wishfarmer! 🙂

Big Tuesday Going On “Somewhere out there”

I’m going out to go vote right now…… and I’ve already said “go obama” and all that…
But in reality, I’m much more fixated on virtual reality right now, as I’ve been working with a group of people called “The Wishfarmers” that you’re going to hear me start yappin’ about… as is my way… when I get infatuated with a new project.
Come to my metaverse playpen, and click “play” on your video and audio controls.
It’s pretty cool, courtesy of
Electric Sheep Artist Spot Draves.
Spot will be doing an exhibit in the
Node Zero Galleries in early March.

Teleport

How To Teleport Friends To Your Location

Summary: This post explains how to send Friends teleport requests. So they can easily transport to your location with one click from wherever they are.

Second Life A-Z

Second Life Step by Step

Second Life Utilities (SLUTS) A-Z

Click on the “Friends” button (Now “Communication” in the latest version) on the lower left third of your SL window.
Select the friend who is currently online that you wish to send the teleport request to. (The friends online will be bolded and at the top of the list.)
After selecting the friend, click on “Teleport.”

A window will pop up asking you “Offer to teleport to your location with the following message? And then a form box where you can type something in. The default is “Join me in location X” — Click OK.
Your friend will receive your teleport invitation and can click on it to teleport to your exact location.

(I emphasize this because, as my friend noted last night, if you are flying around, and floating when you send your teleport request, your friend will be teleported to that location in the sky, and if their “fly” isn’t on, will fall to the ground! 🙂

Let me know that these instructions work for you! (Or not 🙂

Fooling Around With Hoverpods With Losta Hax

Summary: In this post, Losta Hax throws down a hoverpod object and I hop in and take it for a spin.

Second Life A-Z

Second Life Step by Step

Second Life Utilities (SLUTS) A-Z

Losta Hax (Losta Hax’s Pad) and I have been messing around with vehicles a lot this past week. Originally, I didn’t understand the value of vehicles in Second Life. It seemed like, hell, if you could fly, what else would you need?

But as I first learned when Eric Rice (SL – Eric Rice) first took me on a helicopter ride a few weeks ago, vehicles are fun dammit!

Here’s a little movie of us trying out some hoverpods.

You can see Losta floating in the hovercraft while I watch as he throws down another copy of it for me and I apple/click on it, and touch “ride,” and hop in.

Grid Down Again

Update! – This turned out to be a billing confusion issue, and all was well with a few clicks this afternoon — I was getting different errors last night, but I don’t think there was any real outage this morning. Many apo-poly-logies for the false scare! (and to the Lindens that be 🙂
~~Second Life blog is pretending it isn’t happening, I guess…~~
Oh well, lots of backlogged Second Life stuff to blog about….

Financial Turmoil In Meatspace, Courtesy of Second Life

I’m thinking there’s got to be some kind of land grab coming on for the land that used to be occupied by all those gambling casinos. Does anyone know anything about this?
Or will the Linden gods just make all that land “go away?” 🙂
Meanwhile, in the real world,
one company’s IPO is in a shambles, due to the turmoil on Second Life’s economy from the gambling ban:
Crisis in Second Life Financial Sector Deepens
I’m starting to really dig Reuters’ Second Life site.
(You can go there inworld, too.)

Continue reading →

Beach Balls Out of Control In Second Life

Second Life A-Z

Second Life Step by Step

Second Life Utilities (SLUTS) A-Z

Summary: This post describes and shows picture of a beach ball that is self-replicating as an example of one form of out of control object that, combined with many others like it, could constitute a type of “grid attack” within Second Life. This event happened on Saturday, July 28, 2007.

Losta Hax Being Chased By Self-replicating Beach Balls In Second Life

I was already writing this up before I read about how grid attacks were taking out Second Life (Here’s the SL Blog on the subject.)

Here’s a more informative link about the nature of these attacks, actually.

Anyway it’s even more relevant now that this all seems like it could be part of the same larger grid attack.

So here’s Losta Hax‘s story…

Losta was vehicle shopping over at Abbotts Aerodrome, when he noticed about 7 or 8 beach balls sort of rolling around behind him.

They seemed sort of out of place there on the landing strip, and he was thinking they must have rolled over from the property next door or something.

He turned his back on them for a moment, and went back to shopping (more on the lovely vehicles he bought and how he learned to operate them later). When he turned back around to look at the balls, there were three or four times as many, and he could see them “popping into existence,” one after the other.

Soon, he was standing in a pile of beach balls, and had to fly up to escape them.

A little more explanation – for newcomers as yet unfamiliar with “grid attacks”

One example of a “Grid Attack” is a program that causes objects to replicate without end, (much like a Denial of Service attack takes up a website’s resources, causing it to crash).

Were Second Life’s resources to be genuinely used up, simply by the sheer numbers of people legitimately using the site, it would be sort of a Slashdot effect for Second Life. (Rather than a D.O.S. attack, in which programs, rather than people, request a site’s web pages over and over again, in a non-legitimate fashion.)

Second Life Research Threads

So there are a number of different threads of my second life research that are all finally coming together now. Many of them parallel to my first life research 🙂
Flying Around In Second Life

Education
One key theme is education. There’s a lot of learning going on in Second LIfe, despite the system’s inherent technical limitations when a bunch of people congregate in the same space and start moving around and doing things. (Oh, so much more on this soon!)
Software Development and Design
Second LIfe Utilities (SLUTs) – are all the little software applications being written for and to be used within and around Second Life. So far we have two different Twitter integration apps, for example, SL Twitter and Squawk.
Another cool site/application is Sloog.com – SLUT for tagging people, places and objects in Second Life. More on this soon, but for now, just go here and touch the display to add it to your inventory.
“Slogging”
Blogging about Second Life is gaining traction all the time. I blog about everything I do, so blogging about Second Life is just a natural progression of that. Now I see I’m not the only one (and hardly the first) – I look forward to learning more about the slogging community and will start an index for it soon like everything else.
More and more people are vlogging their Second Life experiences, but most of these movies still don’t come out very well. I’ve been working hard to make some cool movies in order to share my experiences with you.
Art Galleries
I’ve always been the artsy fartsy type, although I never finish any of my art films to date, and haven’t even bothered yet to get any of my arty shots or my rock and roll photography online. (I’ve been a photorapher/videographer since I was about 14.) I’m getting excited about all the opportunities for artists in Second Life.
Museums and Libraries
My original pet project in all this was connecting together all the Museums and Libraries in Second Life. I’ve been talking to a lot of cool museum curators and librarians and there seems to be significant interest and enthusiasm for my doing so.
Virtual Real Estate
Yup. You’re right. This one’s a new interest. I cared not about real estate until I wanted to buy some in Second Life and encountered obstacle after obstacle. Now I’m bent on finding a way to make the process easier for people, and starting to keep track of everything I’m learning about this space.

How To Get Around In Second Life When Teleporting Is Down

Summary: Here’s how you can change your preferences to give you a chance to specify your “Region” ahead of time, before you log in. This way, you can still move around manually – logging in and logging out – until the teleporting functionality is fixed.

Second Life A-Z

Second Life Step by Step

Second Life UTilities (SLUTS) A-Z

So, as I’m about to explain in more detail shortly, all hell is breaking loose in Second Life today, for a combination of reasons (grid attacks due to the usual exploits, reaction to last weeks’ gambling shutdown (displaced users needing somewhere to go), and the system still recovering from its shakeup after the power outage in San Francisco last week).
I logged in today to a bunch of users on my IM logging into a dark area and unable to teleport out.
Currently, everyone’s having a hard time teleporting around because the system is so overloaded.
But I’ve been able to get around okay because, earlier today, Devlon Duthie (SL-Losta Hax) found this handy work around so you can at least teleport to the region that you wish. So I thought I’d better share it with you.

1. Click on the “Preferences” button on your web login screen.

2. At the very top of your “Preferences” window, check the “Show Start Location on Login Screen” checkbox.

(You’ll also want to have the “Always” radio button selected underneath it, but that seems to be the default.)

Here’s how the bottom of your login screen looks before you make the change, and how it will look after right after you’ve changed checked the “Show Start Location on Login Screen” in your “Preferences.”

Before