Our group’s swim up bar is completely finished being built.  I am happy with the final outcome.  It looks really good and my group did a good job in building it, especially since in the beginning when we first started this class, no one knew how to build in Second Life.  Now that we are done with the project, all we have left to do is the paper and the sheet that says what everyone did.  Today in class I just explored around Second Life.  I went to an area called Las Vegas games and paid $20 lindens to play Solitaire, and then won back $12 lindens.  I also traveled to an area resembling Harry Potter, which was very cool.

During class on Monday, November 17 our group was trying to gather different bar supplies to fully furnish our swim up bar.  I was searching for bar taps, which go on the bar and are connected to a beer keg.  This makes it easy for the bartender to get several different types of beers from several different taps.  However, the ones that I found were all over 400 lindens, which I couldn’t afford because I only have 340 lindens.  I will continue to search for more inexpensive ones in the future.  However, today I can’t even get on Second Life because the server isn’t letting anyone go on.  It is annoying in that I had to come all the way to class and can’t even get the work I needed to get done of Second Life finished.

Today I walked to the music building for class.  However, when I got there I was told that class was cancelled.  I still went on to sign on to Second Life anyways, since I’m sure we were still supposed to get on.  However, the Second Life program would not let me sign on nor would it let anyone else in the class.  I waited for a while for it to load, but nothing happened.  This same thing happened to me the last class.  It took about 25 minutes just for the program to start up.  Perhaps Second Life is experiencing some technical difficulties that it needs to work on.  With these continuous problems it is going to be hard for our group to finish the project.  We have done a lot so far, but some finishing still needs to be completed.  Chapter 9 is the last chapter in the Second Life book to be read, and blogged about.  I am very happy about that although I have found that many of the chapters in the Second Life book were not that bad to read.

I posted this at the beginning of the school year but decided to move it to the class discussion section on my blog because I felt it fit better there.

September 19, 2008

For our group project, my group was assigned semiotics.  Semitoics are images, signs, texts, etc…  Mostly just focusing on the visual aspects of what we saw through secondlife and analyzing them.  I spent the whole class period exploring different parts of secondlife and snapping photos.  I chose to go in depth in analyzing three seperate photos.

During last Friday’s class, if you were on second life, you recieved 300 lindens.  I also recieved 40 more lindens from the person that owns the land that we are building on.  I am very happy to finally have money on second life, but don’t know how to spend it.  I don’t want to waste it so I still look for freebies, but hopefully eventually I will spend it on something that will improve our swim up bar.  However, we are having trouble adding new things to our land because it keeps saying we will overflow the parcel if we place anymore objects down.  We are trying to figure out how to get around that.  On Wednesday our group is going to discuss how we are going to write the paper, and who does what.

Today in class my group members spent a lot of money on a grotto for our swim up bar.  When we went to put the grotto in our pool we found out that our space was too small and the object was too big.  It wouldn’t let us place the object down.  We tried to figure out how to shrink it but we can’t figure it out.  We need more land if we want to use the object.

Last night, my two friends and I went to the computer lab to do some homework.  I have talked about secondlife to them before, but they still didn’t understand what it was.  So I logged on and let them navigate my avatar around and do whatever they pleased.  I have to teach them a couple of things such as where to type in places to go, how to actually teleport and how to talk to other people who IM you.  At first they thought it was just a computer game and couldn’t believe that I had a class that was just centered around it, but after a while I couldn’t get them away from the screen.  They were fascinated with it and one of my friends even said that she wanted to create an account!  They went into a dance club and the owner was talking to them and telling them that they needed to be wearing clothes, since they took off my avatars clothes because they wanted her to wear something else, but didn’t bother putting them on until they got in the club.  They ignored the girl and got booted from the place.  I told them they need to pay attention to the conversations at the bottom of the screen to see if anyone is talking to them.  They finally put clothes on her and went into another club where they proceeded to make friends with someone.  In the end, I thought it was really funny how they first reacted to secondlife, as opposed to how much they liked it when we left the lab.

Today in class it was really interesting because no one actually met face to face, but instead our class met virtually on secondlife.  To be perfectly honest, our class doesn’t necesssarily have to meet in person ever, as long as everyone has access to a computer that can access secondlife and is going on at the same time, all of our class periods can be conducted through secondlife.  I think that is really cool especially since you can actually use an avatar to approach different classmates and communicate with them right there.

Lately in class we have been working on a new assignment.  It is a group project where each group has to build something different in secondlife.  Our group has decided to build a swim up bar.  I think this will be really cool to see once it is done because of all the cool details are group has come up with.  We have decided to build a pool with a bar that people can swim up to and order drinks.  It will be surrounded by palm trees, cabana’s and tiki torches.  We have been searching everyday in class for different items we need in order to build this bar.  Since we don’t have any money, I have been looking for freebies.  So far I found a few useful items, but not enough stuff to build the bar yet.  I am still a little confused on how to actually build stuff in secondlife so am hoping that in a future class that I can learn how to do that.

Today in class we talked about virtual reality and what makes the place we live in an actual place.  Such terms as atmosphere and the ability to touch and see things are what makes our location real.