Teach42

Last week, I spent two full workdays in Second Life, delving into the nitty gritty of how things are actually put together and learning some very basic scripting. Of course, when I say learning scripting, I actually mean looking at other people’s scripts and learning how to tweak them to suit my needs.

This wasn’t an individual journey though, and I was thrilled to have so much support from friends and acquaintances alike. It really made me appreciate just how powerful having a network to draw upon really is.

I wanted to learn how to create a typing animation override, so that whenever my avatar was typing, a laptop would appear just beneath his moving hands. I found a script that I could use, but was struggling with finding a free laptop that I could apply it to. Fleet came to my rescue and found a fantastic laptop that I could tweak to my hearts content. All I had to do was delete the keyboard and mouse (which I learned how to do thanks to Kathy Schrock), slap the script in, and then tweak the position just a little. For bonus credit, I added a DEN logo and a screenshot from unitedstreaming. Voila! Instant cool looking laptop!

I had pretty similar experiences learning how to hyperlink objects to web pages and creating clothing. Meg Ormiston sent me the basic templates and together we stumbled through creating things like logo shirts. Here’s a picture of Meg with her matching shirt and poster.

At this point, people see some of these things and think that I’m some sort of expert or guru when it comes to Second Life. I’m not, I’m still just a total newb who has learned a few tricks. But what’s key is that I’m taking advantage of my network and learning what I need to accomplish my mini-goals. I have yet to meet anybody in SL that was too busy to answer a question or lend a hand. And I haven’t even mentioned Ryan Bretag and Kevin Jarrett, who have booth been extremely helpful as I fumble my way through this. It’s an amazing world within a world. If you haven’t given it a try yet, you should dive on in. And don’t be a stranger. I have the perfect outfit for pouring you a nice tall glass of Kool-Aid.

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