My alarm clock goes off in the morning….  Do I check work email first?  no..  personal email?  no.. Veyron’s email!  oh yes!  Heaven forbid I’ve also had a Second Life dream - nice to be not only be able to fly in dreams but in Second Life.

When I started in Second Life, it was just that - Second Life.  It was sort of interesting, a nice little diversion.  Some neat things to see, kinda tinker around with this avatar and some clothing.  Then I discovered the people and how interesting they were.  Then the people became far more interesting than sites in Second Life.  Then Veyron started creeping into CyberSpace.   Now Veyron has a better social life than I (who ever that is) do.

Once I was teasing Gideon Televison.   Gideon was starting to notice that he was being taken over by Gideon.  Slowly but surely.  Gideon was creeping into his daily life.  Then I called him Tyler - which started him laughing even more - because he knew what I meant.  Tyler from the book and movie Fight Club.

Tiessa has had some interesting real life experiences driven by Second Life, things that would never happened without

Slowly but surely it seems our virtual selves start to take over our real selves.  This seems to be confined to Second Life.  Jennyfur Peregrin pointed out an interesting comparison of how World of Warcraft and Second Life affect her.  Once she logs off WoW, she’s done.   It now seems I never really log off from Second Life….

-Veyron

Oddly enough, it turns out that Vint and I share the same rezday.  I didn’t really realize it until I saw her posting.  Sort of a twilight zone sort of thing…  Anyway, it has been an interesting year full of ups and downs.  From a Second Life perspective, I have meet a lot of people I really love and respect.  People I would have never meet and interacted with otherwise.  I always think now if today was my last day in Second Life I would remember these experiences forever.

On the Second Life relationship front, I seem to have found myself in a strange limbo, of not knowing who or what I want anymore.  Thinking I know what I want but I’m not sure I can have it.  Every time I get tied down in a SL relationship I feel constrained, yet when I’m not I feel alone.  It seems to be a catch-22.

I’ve also noticed over the last year my evolution in clothing tastes.  When I started out, I made an attempt to try and control spending.  I knew that might be a problem.  Obviously, that was a failure.  :)  I started out dressing fairly cute and stylish, but nothing outrageous.  Then I moved on to more gowns, dresses and evening wear.  All very “normal” sort of outfits.  Then I think the turning point was a chance visit last January to Dark Eden.  This was the turning point to more exotic clothing.  While I continued to buy “normal” clothing, the more interesting articles started to become more the norm to buy and wear and normal clothing became worn less and less.

When I started in Second Life, it took quite a bit of time, money and effort to get the look that I have.  The body, skin, hair, and clothes all took a lot of coordination and effort.  Now it seems to be a lot easier, at least from what I see.  I have a thing about being individualistic.  Yes, I did dye my hair wild colors when I was in high school just to be rebellious and different.  The last thing I want to be is a Barbie clone.  While looking attractive and seductive is a lot of fun, and to be honest it is part of the whole environment, being a clone is not.

By around March or April it seemed to me more and more Barbie perfect clones were running around, complete with notecard recipes on how to get a perfect avatar.  That’s about when I stopped being as much of a fashionista and more of a costume fanatic.  After all, if I can look like anything I can start to appear really interesting.  This also started the game of how exotic can I look.  You’ve seen pictures of me as the demoness.  This sort of becomes a minor obsession.  It can become quite challenging to get all of those bits attached to an avatar and working together.  I think at one point I was using every attachment point on the avatar - everyone.

I also found I was pretty much in love with my shape.  I think most of use who have been in SL for a long time are very attached to their shape.  It is their core of their being in Second Life.  It’s what you see pretty much all of the time.  Sort of narcissistic, but I suppose it is some form of self love or perhaps an reinforcement of self in an abstract world.  In Real Life you don’t see your self the same way all the time.

One of the bigger events in Second Life was a Dark Eden party.  It’s where I met Etain Peregrine and Charissa Korvin.  Charissa got me going into City of Lost Angels role playing game in Second Life.  Not by asking me to join, but by my own curiosity.  Joining CoLA turned out to be a really good thing for me.  It gave me a sense of belonging to a group and a common goals.  Something I am really having fun with.  I also like being able to dress up, role play - oh and being evil is fun too…  we have cookies.  I also like to try running around and shooting people now and then too, when the need arises.

Regrets, I regret not taking enough snapshots of places and people.  Something I need to work on.  I regret that Second Life changes so fast and thing disappear so quickly.  I regret not being able to give attention to all the people I should.  I love and hate IM’s.  They are like leeches.  I wish the Second Life world was smaller so you could walk up and talk to the person you are IM’ing, instead of talking across the world.  But then you have privacy.  It too is a catch-22.  It’s like a multi-line telephone.

Second Life has also been rough on Real Life.  At times it’s been a real vampire on my Real Life.  I think we’ve all been there where we have allowed SL to take too much out of Real Life.  It’s an equation, SL + RL = c.  If you give to SL, you must take from RL.  Usually that means loss of sleep.  Sometimes I regret spending too much meaningless time in world, othertimes I wish I had been there when I wasn’t.  I don’t regret my Second Life experiences, I just wish I had more time for both Real Life and Second Life - maybe I need a Third Life. 

I’m looking forward to another year.  Another year of fun and play.  I’m sure it will be interesting.

-Veyron

Last post I mentioned about how to give your avatar an email address with LindenPost.com. To take it another, logical step forward, you can give your avatar it’s own identity in cyberspace, separate from your own. This has a number of advantages. You get to keep your identity private, you get a semi-custom or custom email address and you can keep things separate. This is a step-by-step guide to how to do it.

We are going to leverage the wonderful Internet system we know as Google. We are going to use it as our operating system. But before we do that, we need to make sure your identity is separate from your avatar’s identity. The easiest way to do that is to run a different web browser than you run now.

This part is Windows centric, but the gist of it will work on any computer. If you regularly use Internet Explorer, the easiest thing to do is download and install Firefox. Firefox is going to have all the tools we need to use the Google Operating System anyway, so you’ll need it. Already use Firefox? You can’t really have two installations of Firefox easily. Here’s another solution, Portable Firefox from PortableApps.com. Portable Apps is a great set of free tools you can download that will run from anywhere. Usually installed from a removable USB drive. You can then take all of the software tools you might need anywhere you go. I put a USB drive right on my keychain and leave it in my purse. If you don’t have or don’t want to install Firefox on a USB drive, I believe you can install it locally on your hard drive. Another tool I find very useful is KeePass to manage passwords.

Now that you have different Firefox installed that has a separate identity from your own, we can go create your avatar’s identity. First step, go to Gmail and create an account. Let me know if you need an invite, you shouldn’t as Gmail is out of beta. If you need an email account to verify Gmail with, the LindenPost.com account would be a good choice, as your avatar created it. Gmail can also pull the LindenPost email via POP3.

Now you have a Google identity. From this point we can build up on this. Here are some Google add ons that are useful to add:

• Personalized home page is useful.
• Google Reader is very useful for reading blogs. I use it all the time.
• Google Notebook for storing notes and other bits you might come across.
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets for doing documents related to just your avatar.
• Google Calendar to keep track of those important dates for your avatar.
• Google Home Page, if you want your avatar to have it’s own home web page.
• Picasa Web Albums, 1GB of images to store online and serve up.
• And of course, Blogger, to blog for your avatar.

Next, we can integrate some tools with Firefox and Google. The Google Toolbar is a really good add-on for Firefox. If you’re signed in, it can tell you if you have Google Email, new posts in Google Reader, get at your Google Docs, make posts to Blogger, and it can store your book marks in Google History. Google History is sort of good/bad. It can track your history do a customized search and store your book marks, etc. It’s an avatar’s life, so it’s mostly harmless and fairly useful.

Another useful Firefox add-on is CustomizeGoogle. It makes a large number of improvements to the Google experience through Firefox. A couple of good changes to make is change to use https over http for a few of the Google services.

A add-on from LifeHacker is the Better Gmail extension. It adds a large number of tweaks and upgrades to Gmail. This extension might break at some point when Google makes changes to Gmail, but it should get updated as Google makes those changes.

A really useful add-on is Gspace. It makes your Gmail account a portable storage device you can use through Firefox. Gmail gives you over 2GB of storage, and Gspace lets you use it for storing files.

A more complicated upgrade is to Google Reader is the Google Reader Theme. It has a fair number of extensions to install and upgrade, but it makes the Reader look nicer.

One piece of troubleshooting advice, if you have trouble installing an extension with an error code, go in to Portable Firefox and increase the amount of cache used from 0 to some number like 16. Restart Firefox. Install the extension. Restart again, and then change it back to 0, restart and clear the cache. If you have Firefox on a flash drive, you do not want Firefox to cache to it. The reason it is set to 0, is that the flash drive is slow and it will wear out the flash drive eventually.

Lastly, you can add Google Talk. If you use Google Talk on your own Google account, you can run another copy in Firefox under a different Google ID. Go to the Google Talk page and launch it within the web browser.

There you are. Your avatar can now have a life of it’s own in cyberspace.

-Veyron

There has been a lot of discussion since Linden Labs announced that voice will be added to Second Life. Akela Talamasca made some interesting points about that person didn’t sound like I expected them to. There is of course the point about the handicapped or the socially challenged having issues with voice. What I think it will really come down to is two major points, at least for me. Privacy and usability.

Information can not be un-given. Once it’s out, it cannot be taken back. Text is text, my voice is my voice and distinctly my voice. I don’t want to have what I say used against me sometime in the future, perhaps far in the future, when I’m not an being an avatar. I’ve considered using some voice cloaking software, but that seems extreme. I’d more inclined to use it if a voice was a generated part of the avatar. Makes sense, everything else on an avatar is an artificial computer construct, except who is behind it controlling the avatar. And that follows into the my next thinking.

Usability. When you’re talking with someone you are either talking or waiting to talk. Unless your trying to talk over someone, only one person can talk at a time. When texting is going on, there are multiple conversations going on at the same time. I can actually queue up what I am going to say, and I get the great advantage of being able to have a moment to reflect on what I am about to “text” before I hit enter. It’s pretty hard to remove your foot from your mouth once you have planted it firmly between your teeth.

You can also be IM’ing people left and right while chatting. We all do it. You can usually tell when someone is doing it. This would be something very hard, if not impossible to do with voice.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the possible annoyance factor…. I have not seen any real comments about how annoying voice could actually be. Think about how annoying howling and yowling in a club is as text and some basic audio is now, can you hardly wait for it to come live over streaming audio? Oh, and let’s not consider the possibilities for griefing. I will make a prognostication right here, right now. Some griefer will figure out a way to blow a 90+ decibel sound through the system and right into the headphones people are wearing. I can hardly wait for the news flash on that one.

Audio spamming, err, advertising. You think ugly spinning billboards are a problem now? Wait until they start yelling at you at 90 decibels. Buy my 16m lot next to yours for an extortionists price to stop the screaming…. I’m not naive enough to think that this will not happen. I’m sure Linden Labs has some smug plan to prevent this from happening and will be shocked when someone smarter than they are figures away around them. Or worse they have taken on the usual laissez-faire attitude and stuck their head in sand pretending that none of this will actually happen.

Lastly, two other minor points for me. I spend all day at work talking to people. When I get home to play on Second Life, the last thing I want to do is keep on talking. I also rarely turn on the steaming audio in Second Life. I like the peace and quiet at home.

Finally, I feel the immersion factor of Second Life I so enjoy might be ruined with voice. The people’s avatars I see and meet I feel are real to me. Just like the places. I feel voice might break the spell.

Within a year or so once the voice option is mainline in the Second Life software, I expect their to be a bifurcation of the user base. The percentage, and probably large at that, of older avatars will not be using voice, while the newer avatars, not knowing anything else, will be yammering away with voice. The two groups will look at each other with puzzlement…. Then the next wave will be live streaming video, but then at that point, what is Second Life? Skype?

Call me a Luddite, but text it to me baby….

-Veyron