Island solitude...but not for long

This was the island as we got it - with a little addition or two from Scottish Hawker and a more feeble attempt from myself. Scottish hawker had flagged up that he thought the shape of the island was changing and wondered if our partners rm* were being creative - but we then thought maybe we were all just imagining things. All was fine as I mosied around one weekend; playing around with the time of day, practising hovering, sitting on objects, making my own bits and pieces - here's a few shots of this:




These were my first attempts at building - easy/ready made things; you just go into the tools, select an object shape then use your Second Life 'magic powers' to point and place it where ever you want! Then you can stretch it and move it around as you please. As you'll see, Scottish Hawker's powers are more sophisticated than mine! He also rendered some trees - as he has now got owner level rights (or has gone on AKA the owner!), he can actually create trees and grass and natural looking things that me and the others can't. Unfortunately, there's no images of the trees and grass as it happened a little after this and just before the sabotage happened that I'll blog about soon!




You can see Scottish hawker's great aeroplane like structure that he built on top of my easy to do box, and my less imaginative red object - it's strangely nice being there on your own and flying around.

Coming back to Second Life

It really has been a long time since I've posted anything. Other work just takes over. The project has started in earnest now - a lot of hoops to go through to actually get the island; noone tells you about the practicalities! So here are a few:

1. Buying the island. We had the money but needed to then get the institution to buy the island as it required educational confirmation for the discount - we might have been able to sort this ourselves, paid on a visa card, then claimed back...not sure, but the former option seemed best.
2. Decision made on route to go down, then find a helpful gatekeeper - in our case Head of Finance
3. Explain to HoF that they need to get an avatar and a professional account for this strange new second life world in order to buy the land
4. Help them set up an avatar and go through orientation island, and convince them they are not on candid camera as they do it
5. Pick the shape and location of an island
6. As the HoF is the owner you'll find out that you have no access rights until they set them for you! Which means you going into Second life at the same time to talk them through how to do it, as you figure things out yourself
7. Try to make the island safe from unwanted squatters - we thought we'd done that....but we soon learned that we hadn't!
8. When you're stuck - try to get help via Second Life help section - impossible, unless you're the owner and do it by telephoning the USA, which we had to do twice with the HoF
9. Accept that you'll really have to do this yourself - work your way through it and learn what needs to be done and a way of doing it as unless you have an experienced Second Lifer to hand, it's a case of trial and lots of error
10. This is all from my perspective - you might find it a whole lot easier!