Recently I was reminded that Second Life …

Recently I was reminded that Second Life is still the best first experience for any teen or adult coming to virtual worlds for the first time. It came after speaking with new virtual worlders who came to OpenSim before Second Life. From their description I realized OpenSim is still far from being suitable for anyone’s first virtual world experience, unless of course that person is too young to participate in Second Life.

As long as it remains free, Second Life, even with its steep learning curve, offers more return on a beginner’s time and learning investment. Both offer about the same in terms of creativity. But Second Life offers more potential for most to make that essential connection with a real life community or interest that will hold their interest. Second Life is the yard-stick against which everything else is measured. Anyone becoming involved with virtual worlds must understand and participate in Second Life and so might as well start there.

Combine these realities with a personal goal to help the most people get the most out of their first virtual world experience and a recent influx of newcomers to SL, from work and elsewhere, as well as word of Nebraska and Linden Lab’s renewed efforts to connect with and help beginners and you will understand my decision to redirect my limited free and volunteer time from OpenSim to Second Life initiatives, more to VUC greeting, mentoring, community building, and development. Introduce Second Life first then OpenSim later for those who are ready for it.

OpenSim remains my favorite way to preview content from my desktop and participating with my kids, but Second Life has already given me years of creative outlet, real friendship, and community involvement any OpenSim could not match for some time to come, perhaps in the next few years, but even then SL will remain the best experience for any beginner provided it is a guided entry, which happens to be the focus of the renewed VUC Greeters effort.

If your Second Inventory loaded items no …

If your Second Inventory loaded item is not appearing after “restoring” (uploading) them to OpenSim or Second Life just remember to clear your cache and restart your viewer. They seem to consistently appear after that.

It will be interesting to how these ‘w …

It will be interesting to how these ‘walled garden’ virtual worlds like OpenLife do over the long term. OpenLife clearly has no intention of staying compatible with the OpenSim developments including the ability to connect to the wider HyperGrid. That said, organic plant life sounds interesting. With control of the server and viewer (despite its legally questionable pedigree) should make this easier.

Twitter does beat Second Life for the ap …

Twitter does beat Second Life for the application they are talking about. Who needs a bloated 3D viewer and immerse experience to build community, network, marketing and friendships–especially with those whom you would like to meet. Such business use was never the primary intent of Second Life (and OpenSim for that matter) and thankfully people are coming to that realization. Still, many do find these business uses happening organically in the Second Life and OpenSim communities where Twitter and OpenSim are working together for such business collaboration. The ThinkBalm community is one that I am aware of that is emerging here.

It has been said a thousand times but no harm saying it again. Use tech that fits a need, not tech for tech’s sake. In the case of economizing on travel, not to mention a dozen other business applications, virtual worlds make business sense.

I am sick of reading “this tech beats that tech.” Hype really is damaging. Comparative hype is an even more potent subspecies. It makes people jump on things for no reason other than hype and others abandon good tech for the proper application.

One of the greatest things to come from the slow decline of sponsored journalism is reality replacing hype. I would rather read the novice opinions of a dozen bloggers and tweeters over a few highly visible, highly sponsored news channels, magazines, commentators, book authors, and self-proclaimed industry leaders and innovators. Vive the meritocracy.

Skull attachments, like hair, in wrong p …

Skull attachments, like hair, in wrong place and Sacha on IRC explained how to get around this quirk. It seems that attachment points are only saved when you detach and take something into inventory. If you don’t do that, when you relog the attachment will be on your skull but too high. If you really want to get specific look for ’saving attachment on point UUID’ in your OpenSim console when you remove it. Like others, I keep the console up when running my preview OpenSim instance on my desktop, often while viewer is not full screen so I can see what every viewer action is doing to my sim.

I finally figured out how to get rid of …

I finally figured out how to get rid of the black bars in the current SL or Hippo viewer when first connecting to an OpenSim. The clue the tipped me off was that when first connecting to my desktop sim the “Uploaded asset data for transaction …” would scroll across implying that something cached or available in the viewer was being uploaded as the default skin or shape. If I used a viewer that did not have the info cached for some reason it would upload a corrupted shape or skin and that would become the new default. So here’s what I did.

1. Drop the desktop db
2. Restart OpenSim
3. Delete the Application Data/Second Life directory entirely
4. Startup SL browser pointing to SL itself
5. Load the Test Avatar from the Character menu under Advanced
6. Strip
7. Create a new skin and shape in inventory
8. Wear them from inventory.
9. Log out of SL
10. Log into desktop OS using same viewer
11. Watch for the “Uploaded asset data for transaction …”
12. Notice bars gone now

Rough, but that seems to have done the trick.

Finally figured out how to turn off all …

Finally figured out how to turn off all the shell extensions that are causing explorer to crash when I try to edit the properties of a Second Life startup icon to point it at an OpenSim instance. ShExView is the tool I used. Turned off all the pinks. Magically no boom after that. I’ll add back the ones I end up missing. Half of them are stupid, unneeded additions anyway.

Found this excellent tutorial for gettin …

Found this excellent tutorial for getting MySQL running on Windows desktop OpenSim. Linked to it from the opensimulator.org MySQL config page, which otherwise is horribly out of date.

Posted responses to cokes avatar ad on b …

Posted responses to Coke’s avatar ad on both Eightbar and Massively. I am a little surprised to read all the heat around that ad. If Coke’s idea was to generate a little bit of controversy and viral marketing from the online buzz about that ad it seems to be working. I couldn’t stop playing the ad. I love it. Like I commented there

My personal favorite was the super hero ambivalent to the mother in need and the mother texting while swinging her child.

I found this ad a pleasant, perfect walk down the fine line of showing how avatars are becoming mainstream virtual representations of ourselves and the importance of staying logged into real life. Both are critical parts of society today. It is not one v.s. the other.

I often wonder when I meet a stranger in real life what their avatar would be. Just today while walking around the store, helping a few reach things from the top self (like I am of suitable stature to help there, pfff), and admiring all the people enjoying their day at the store buying milk, eggs, cereal, beer, whatever. I do think about what is the person inside that real life avatar. People, in general, rock.

I have always admired Caleb Booker’s in …

I have always admired Caleb Booker’s insights like this exquisite blog post discussing The Anatomy of an Avatar. He particularly caused me to revisit an issue I thought I had settled for myself, text v.s. voice chat. As I reflect back, I remembered some important realities about my virtuality.

By far the deepest, most real relationships ever fostered in my experience in Second Life where founded on voice. In fact, voice became the means of fun times when wife and I and our friends would attend virtual social events and have so much fun talking to other while our hands were busy with virtual surfboard waves, hang-gliders, bouncy balls, or poking through profiles as we whispered about people over our private line. I miss those times. It has been a while. I think it is because I have been in OpenSim regions so much these days and none of them have voice enabled, yet. It will definitely be a good thing. Although I suppose I could use skype, it just doesn’t come as naturally as selecting ‘voice chat’ with an avatar.

However, one of my most rewarding relationships, professionally and personally, has been purely text via chat and blogs. I imagine this is much like some of the more recognized correspondence relationships I have read of in the 1900s.

At the end of the virtual day, my relationship is deeper with those who I have spoken with as well as IMed. Voice not only creates huge efficiencies in virtual collaboration, it is just more natural for more people.