Now that I have a bit of slack before the next major milestone in my thesis, I’ve decided to get into Second Life. Lots of IBMers have been raving about this virtual world, and for good reason—the demo area that IBMers have put up is absolutely amazing. =) You must check it out for yourselves.

I’ve tricked out my avatar in a conservative business suit. Its
appearance closely resembles mine. Stephen Perelgut says I’m
recognizable. Now all I have to do is to find a bounce + wild
gesticulation animation that I can use as my typing animation, and it
will be a terrific replica. ;)

This is Day 2 of my Second Life thing. Naturally, I started looking at
it as more of a programming environment than a glorified chatroom.
I’ve got a number of things I want to build that might be useful for
conferences and exhibit stands. I refuse to spend time fiddling with
the appearance of objects, so all my scripts are in plywood cubes.

By combining various open source script fragments, I built a notecard
dispenser that also keeps track of who touched it. I plan to hook this
up with a registration booth or something like that in order to make
it easy for people to indicate their interest and leave their contact
information.

I want to make a service bell that IMs the owner and makes it easy for
the owner to teleport to the given location or to speak through it.
This will allow exhibitors to wander around while making it easy for
them to be called back to their booth.

I’m thinking of other things that can take advantage of the virtual
environment. Things that can’t be done easily in real life. Posters
and navigation aids that are influenced by the number of people who
have interacted with them, accessories that match-make based on
people’s interests, a chat bot that collects data through a structured
interviews… Yay, a new programmer’s playground!

My name in Second Life is Sacha Kitchensink. When I told Stephen this,
he laughed and said that he wasn’t surprised. Hey, at least I didn’t
name myself after Emacs! ;)

Random Emacs symbol: eshell-unix – Group: This module defines many of the more common UNIX utilities as