More Blog Guilt

Ugh! I realize that all I've done is create captions for pictures. My thought is that later, when I have more time, I'll fill in the blanks. How do other bloggers find the time!

Anibal

Anibal is my newest friend. Here we are looking at art together. He was a newbie at ISTE when I was a docent there one morning. He lives in Portugal and is six hours ahead of me so we bump into each other at odd times. His young son often watches what we are doing in Second Life so it is my challenge to find new and interesting things to do that a five year old would like!

New Educator Pilot Program

ISTE members and newbies met tonight to hear George Linden and discuss the new pathway for educators into Second Life.

Alfredo and Mandie are Building

While I was at a meeting in Real Life, Al and Mandie were building an awesome wall. They did a great job. Mandie seems to have had the shape and Al had the carefully trimmed png from our trip. I added my barrel. :P Things are moving along. The search for artifacts is on! Oh and Bigreal, the shipbuilder says we are wrong about the deal we have with him. He is not giving us resell rights for the price we are paying. He charges a lot more for that. I think we can live with not reselling instead of paying more. Mandie came up with a super idea for ownership of all these things. If we have things that are not transferable, like these ships we will buy them with an avatar that we all have access to. The avatar can belong to VSTE and we can pass it along to future VSTE members, afterall the organization will outlive us.

Two Ships Under Way

Here is the picture I thought I had earlier. My friend, Susan, asked to see this. I have GOT to go to bed now!

Proud of Cyrus

My friend, Cyrus, spoke at ISTE tonight about his work in Second Life setting up a classroom for university and professional college students. He did a good job of explaining the process for anyone who is interested and doesn't know where to begin. I was proud to see someone up on the stage that I know so well. I was really nervous for him and couldn't even listen the entire time! Silly me! I guess I know him so well and have known him so long I was overly empathetic, as though I were up there. I can't imagine ever being in that position. There must have been 40 or more avatars there at one point. For the first time that I can recall there were griefers, too. One female avatar drove her sports car right up on stage. Cyrus handled it very well. It was an SL moment, that is for sure!

Building

Al and I stand on the deck of the newly created Discovery, October 13. It's so exciting to see the ships being created. Al and Mandie have also been trying their hands at building. They have each created their own versions of fort walls.

Virtual Pioneers - Harlem Tour

Oronoque Westland, on her first SL presentation, took us on a tour of Virtual Harlem in Second Life. We saw the bookstore first and the classroom above it. The bookstore had displays of books on Harlem and they were directly linked to Amazon for purchase. In the classroom we could see a schedule and assignments and Oronoque gave us a brief history of the project beginning before SL days. The second stop was a brownstone, Caribbean House. There were four floors with an awesome authenticity to them. Inside were steel drums, piano, and a sitar. Then we went to the Lafayette Theater. Chat kind of broke down at this point. Like the rest of the tour the Lafayette Theater represented a real place in NYC. There were more stops after this but my connection was so laggy I left. Please Linden Labs, fix this latest version of the viewer!

Shipbuilders

Today Mandie and I met a couple of shipbuilders. We saw a ship in a store that we thought was similar to what we wanted for our project and I IMed the builder, Chase. He was very nice and interested in what we needed. After some discussion he introduced us to a master builder, Big, who was also interested. We learned a lot about ships in SL, for instance you can't really go all the way below deck because water would be in the lower deck at the same level it is outside the ship. There is no way to keep it out. Also, because avatars are about 6 to 7 feet tall, a scale model of a ship would be impossible to use inworld. Big has agreed to build us three ships for 20,000 Lindens. We will have full rights and be able to sell them to try to recoup some of our money.

Jamestown Trip

What does a Real Life trip to Jamestown have to do with SL? Hmm You will have to find out later. Al, Mandie, Jazmemo, my husband, Willoughby, and I all went to Jamestown, VA on October 4th and took about 500 photos. We got close ups, landscapes, portraits, and video of docents. It was so much fun. I bought two books to read and the others got various copies of artifacts. I love these people I'm living and working with in RL and SL! We are having so much fun meeting people, getting to know each other better, learning to build and edit.