I've started building

I started out just building big twisted pieces of art. Now i'm into buildings. Multi-prim builidngs. Here's a pic of one of my first one's - i love the window textures



On my little plot of land - i can get one building at a time. So i build, put it in my inventory, build again.
Next I made a big gallery type space with 10 prims including a window wall and a frosted glass bump out room.
Here are some pictures of the glass bump out room - I put in a little rock garden with pink flamingos. I built a couple of chairs and put them there too.




One of the IC students came by to check out my work - and noticed that my house had no floor - whoops It doesn't have a door yet either but that's ok because it doesn't have a roof so you can just (literally) drop in. I'm going to build a dome to go on the roof. So i have got to figure out doors - they involve scripting. I'm thinking of making a flexi cloth door - i think you could just walk thru it.

bought the island

well - placed the order anyway - for the school of communication. We hope to involve lots of folks around campus.

I thought 16 acres was huge - but it is NOT. Oh man. I wonder how big our real campus is? Anyway - i think there's room for a couple of buildings, sandbox. We can build things in the air - that will be cool.

So i thought of hte first thing I want students to play with - what's the meaning of classroom in a world like SL where you can fly, you don't have to sit in front of each other to "hear" and where text is mostly delivered by text.

I've been playing on my own land too - i upgraded to a premium membership so i could own just the smallest chunk 512 sq meters. Talk about tiny. But i can build and leave stuff around. I found a beach house that fits on my land - turns out my land isn't flat so part of hte house is buried in the ground and part is hanging in the air. I like having part of the floor buried - the grass shows. If i can find a small tree and some plants i'm going to make an indoor garden.

I created 2 groups - IC Students and IC Faculty. I didn't make them open - so people need an invite - there has to be a better way but i wanted to be sure the people were actually from IC. We will use the lists to control access to the island while we play around and terraform.

ok - now I"ve done it

I admit - I"m fixated on SL right now. And i'm probably driving folks around me a little batty talking about it.

So what's my reward/punishment? The school is going to buy an island and we get to play on it. I may get time off to play on it - free toys and paid play time. Man I'm in heaven.

I'm also terrified. I have to convince people from across the campus to play and to put in time to stage events and build cool stuff. And to work it into their classes. I went to Middletown - a build for a class at Ball State - I was so jealous. They did a great job! And I have to convince students they want to do stuff in SL - I hope they take to it as excitedly as the folks at Ball State.

What was I thinking??!@!

The island orders are way backlogged - so we have a little time. I'm going to buy some land with another little grant I got to play on - we can use that for some early projects. And we can leave stuff there - like a dispenser of notecards about upcoming projects or art that students build. My dream is to build an opaque ball wiht a door. Inside are images/movie screens. You can walk around, move the ball, and the pictures move. So you could walk one way and be standing on the movie screen - move a little the other way and the movie screen is on top of hte ball. Like a private screening room. Or we take the opague balls - make little transparent slits - and use them to play bumper ball(G)

I've got to get my hands on a server too for streaming media. We get lots of great speakers - i would love to have a SL spot for presnetations - stream video from the real world, have avatars for the speakers, take questions from the SL audience, port the SL view back into the real world. Not anything different than a lot of conferences has done - but a way to shae some of the really cool speakers from the real world wiht the secondlife world. Maybe alumni could come to the SL home and keep in touch.

Down the road it would be nice to take some of the stuff we learn about sl to the teen grid - it would be a great place to recruit prospective freshmen who are into technology. But that's down the road.

I can't wait!!!

lots of events

Maybe it's because there's so many more people in secondlife - or maybe i've just been more diligent at looking at the events list in hte Search Menut - - but....

there have been just tons of events and there have even been a lot of educational events in SL recently.

i think events are a good way to introduce new people to secondlife - lots of people to talk with and something to talk about (other than the typical intros). Like going to a movie on a first date (ha)

the big drawback to events tho - if ya have a good one and do good promotions - you get so many people that lag attacks and no one has a good time (like some recent Townsquare presentations by Linden Labs and the new shows at the SL Planetarium). Or you attract griefers (like at the recent big brother opening). So - now that i think/write a bit - - maybe events aren't a good way to introduce people to secondlife.

either way - i'm excigted about all the new fun things to do and see in the world - i'm not the most social person on the planet so thinking of SL as just a 3d chat room was never very appealing. As a destination tho - i think it has a lot of appeal.