Welcome to Your Second Life

Hi there. Name's Planetneutral Fackler. PF, for short. I'm all of four days old, but learning fast. Although I like to switch my style up often, here's a picture of me for your reference:



It's been an interesting first week of existence on "the grid," as the Second Life universe is generally referred. Although I signed on to satisfy my own curiosity, it did not take me long to seek out some purpose, a reason to stay in-world (another one of those terms used by "residents" to contrast with RL, or real life). And thankfully, the Second Life Library 2.0 was waiting for me.

The building itself was just about empty on my arrival, but the potential was obvious. I'd heard of some of the other programs that had taken place in-world, including an episode of Open Source with Chris Lydon. Placing the OPAL programming within that context seemed logical enough. Other possibilties are just beginning to be discussed. If you are interested in joining the discussion, please consider joining the Google group and then joining us via participation in Second Life itself. Lori will be posting details of an upcoming meeting, so stay tuned. And as she has already posted, there are a couple of programs already planned.

But even at this early stage, interesting things are already happening. I hope this blog can serve as a way to document said developments. Tonight's big success was the successful configuration of the media player. Here's a screenshot of four intelligent avatars trying to make it work (and one avatar relaxing):



Here's what the media player looks like in working form (showing the trailer for Syriana), although the full-screen option hadn't been set yet. It looks better than the screen capture suggests:



And every evening there seems to be a group of librarians turning up to socialize and find out what's new. Here's a snapshot of tonight's group:



I hope that this project will compel some new people to give Second Life a try. Toward that end, I'd like to offer my services to anyone who is entering Second Life for the first time and could use some guidance. I'm a relative newbie myself, so I can only offer a limited amount of mentoring, but a helping hand is a helping hand. So drop me a line or IM me (AIM, Yahoo) with the username planetneutral and I'll meet you there. Or find me in-world. Planetneutral Fackler's the name. But you can call me PF.

Update: Originally enormous image files have been replaced by convenient jpgs from Flickr.