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Well it finally worked! After easily setting up for Voice, Marmaduke Stransky and myself were disappointed to find that it wouldn't actually work - we couldn't see that elusive white dot! Unfortunately, that white dot appeared next time I logged in to Second Life. Ah hah! I thought. Perhaps we needed to log out each time before we can set it up. It appears that now, we don't need to! It just works. I found that out when I visited Kim Pasternack's SL Island to have a trial run. By the way, if I hadn't already tried out Skype with my headset I am sure it would have been a harder thing to work out. The sound quality was okay but it can be confusing if you are used to texting and using IM. I am still working on the voice aspect and should really spend more time on it so that I know exactly how it functions.

Well the ECAWA Conference has been and gone. I presented a further introduction to Second Life which was more heavily geared towards alerting ICT teachers and ECAWA members to the educational uses of virtual worlds. This presentation also included an introduction to setting up your accoung, much the same as I completed at Murdoch University - showing delegates how to begin their Second Life. I also ran a hands on session during which we were able to create only 3 accounts due to the IPs all coming from the same venue. Unfortunately, I had not been forewarned about this aspect of account creation. Needless to say, I allowed a couple of people to take over my avatar so they could get a feel for navigating the User Interface. Several ECAWA members are now represented by avatars in Second Life and are testing the waters informally - with an open invitation to ask for help if they need it! Thanks also to Decka Mah for her permission to use Terra incognita during our try outs and also as a meeting place for new avatars. Without her generosity, we would be less well-placed to try and become more established in Second Life.

Object-Name: Randal Hudson

Region: Cybrary City II (248064, 244224)

Local-Position: (221, 210, 24)

Wow, what a
crazy meeting tonight. Puglet and I decided to surprise Dewey with a
swimwear event. It was fun. Great discussion about PD in SL. Photos to
come.

Ok, here is a pic from the meeting. It shocked a few folks but what is second life if it isn't fun! Our discussion was excellent in regards to teaching folks enough about SL in order to teach in SL. No firm plans as of yet but we are working on them.

Object-Name: Randal Hudson
Region: Terra incognita (278528, 280064)
Local-Position: (87, 93, 28)

We are partying with Decka at the first ever concert on Terra. I will post some pics later. It is 3:00 AM my time and 8:00 PM Australian

OK, I have finally finished my first Second Life script. I had set up B2Evolution for Decka to use on her web site to host blogs for her lab rabbits. Months ago she asked if there was a way to email blog posts with B2 and I said I thought so. I did the research and found that B2 supported blog by email and began looking at ways to blog from within SL. A friend of Decka's, sorry I don't remember his name at the moment, had a blog hud that I looked at to see if it would work. Given the way B2 handles blogging by email it wouldn't work without some serious tweaking. Then I looked at an Open Source email tool that gave me an idea. I experimented with a number of scripts and found it just wasn't going to work because SL added a number of lines of text at the beginning of the email and this would keep B2 from grabbing the email because you have to put your username and password on the first line of the email.

I spent hours trying to get it to work. Tried to find ways to remove the SL text at the top of each email and found that it was near impossible. So I cheated. I went into the B2 code and changed a couple of lines and bingo, it now works. Just gave Decka a copy of the HUD tonight so she could test it out. There are some drawbacks, length of post in particular, but all in all it will be great for just jotting down thoughts while bopping around SL. Eventually I hope to set it up so that you can create a note card and drop it on the HUD and it will ask for username and password and send the email. Now I just have to get cron working correctly to automate the reading of the emails. Wish me luck!

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20/10/07

08:05:34 pm Voice Trial

07:59:41 pm Updates

06/08/07

07:42:48 pm Crazy Elven Institute Meeting

04/08/07

03:07:50 am Concert at Terra

30/07/07

12:08:53 am My First SL Script