Sunday, Sunday Rolls Around

I wanted to first begin with comments on my progress in my studying for my PMP.  If you didn’t read the previous blog this part won’t make much sense so you might want to read that first.

Having said that, I must make a slight detour in order to explain that life time learning is something I take to heart.    I will leave the discussion of my varied careers and the timelines associated to that to another time, however I need to interject that studying is not new to me.  Nearly 10 years ago I went back to school for a year.   In that time, I found that the habits of my youth and the drive to do well (i.e. get high marks) had not left me.  In that year I got really efficient at the skill of studying.    I had 5 teens/pre-teens at home to deal with, so time was limited.  I had to figure out how to make each hour spent studying count.

It also helps that I spent 4 years teaching at a community college.  This gives me a different perspective on exam questions and understanding how a teacher can give 25% of the mark to 5 pages that you need to know in detail but only 5% to another 50 pages which are not important.

It is really a skill in organization, which because I have a very good memory means that I get excellent results for each hour spent.  Bottom line is if you don’t have a study plan you are really travelling in the dark.  If you put in the enough time you may well pass, but maybe you could have spent less time by being more effective with each hour or have got a better result if you planned your time.   It has never been good enough for me to “scrape along” with the minimum needed for a pass, and of course this PMP exam is no exception.  So I spent an hour or so putting together a study plan.

I am going to digress at this point.  I will put the "Peggy Lecture - Study Skills - 101: How to Create an Exam Study Plan" at the end of this blog.   I am guessing that this is only going to be of interest to a few of you.  I will tag it with a label if you want to come back to this in April when you are starting to think of your final exams.  

So I will skip to the bottom line.  I did spend 6 hours yesterday studying and I did cover Chapters 1 through 3 of the book.  Then I went out to the REX to listen to some jazz and have a few beers with my date.  A good way to reward myself for a hard day hitting the books!   

The Rex serves a great burger and fries, but they don't have my preferred beer - either Rickard's White or Hoegaarden.  To my taste buds, a wheat beer and a chunk of orange floating in it is not a beer but something else much nicer!  A 5 piece band ,The Jazz Navigators, started the 9:45 set and they were really tight.  The Band Leader, Pat Carey was on Sax and he was joined for part of the performance by a female singer (sorry, no name listed in the REX site and I don't recall it) who was great with a throaty alto voice and a wonderful scat technique.   There was also a  tenor sax  who joined for a number, who I thought it said was a student of Pat's.

We stayed for only a set and a bit as both myself and my date were not too healthy....  Both of us had colds and were leaking fluids at an unpleasant rate.  But it was a nice respite none the less.

More Info on The Rex

Pictures from My Past

The following picture was taken at a house I owned in the Beaches area of Toronto.  The place had a wicked authentic pub style bar, which I could have done without, but the teenagers in the house and Basile, the guy I was hooked up with at the time, absolutely loved.  I must admit we had quite a few parties with hordes of people hanging off the bar and having a great social time!   Ryan, my son who is shown standing behind the bar, is in his element.

Now for a completely different topic:

Lecture - Study Skills - 101: How to Create an Exam Study Plan

The first step in getting a good grade is to understand how many hours you need/have to study and to make sure each hour spent in study is spent well.  No good spending 50% of your time studying something that will only be worth 5% of the mark or represents only 10% of the material.   Time to spend on each topic is a juggling act between importance and amount of stuff to be learned.  So a study plan is important.

How did I do this?  First I looked at my calendar and identified the days and number of hours per day I could study.  Then I decided how much time should be spent for a 1st run through of the material and how much I wanted to reserve for review/extra study (harder topics) at the end.  I decided on 40 hours over 6 days (6 hours per day) and to leave 3 days for review.  That seemed a reasonable maximum, since the original course I took in November took 35 hours to cover all the material.   It makes sense that it will take me  at least the same amount of time again to memorize at least 75% of that content.

Two of those last 3 Review days are days I will need to take off work (without pay), so if I can do well with the initial effort I may not need to take both of those days off.  It always helps to have bit of a motivator to use your study days effectively.

Then I looked at the material to figure out how much time to allocate on each topic.  I did a simple distribution of the # pages per chapter as a % of the available time (40 hours)  to come up with an initial feel for how much time to spend if all sections were weighted equally in importance.  

Then I had to decide how to adjust this based on the importance.   It isn’t always the case that you can find out how each much of a % each topic (or how many questions relate to) each topic area.  At minimum, you need to look at each topic and decide for yourself how important each topic is to the course, and hopefully to the exam.   In my case, the PMI – the PMP exam administrators provide the number of questions per “topic” area, but these topics are not the same topics as the study book I was using.   PMI says that the Planning Processes will have 46 questions of the 200 – so that is 9.2% of the mark.  Unfortunately, there are planning sections in 9 of the 13 topic areas.  So I had to spend a few minutes trying to understand the subtopics and how they were important and just juggled the time around to reflect that.

And this is a few rows of the topic plan I put togethert:

Topic                                    # Pages             Hours

1. Overview                              20  –     5%           .5

2. Foundations                      20  –     5%       1.5

3. Process Groups...            21   –     5%             2

4. Integration                      56   –  10%        6

….

13. Social Responsibility     11    –    2%        3

You will note that Chapter 13 only has 11 pages but I am spending 3 hours on this.  This is because there are 17 of the 200 questions on this topic which is nearly 9% of the total mark even though only 11 pages of the 414 page book covers this topic!

The last step is to map out the hours on a calendar.   Mine is as follows:

Date              -> Chapters

Sat Feb 28 ->1, 2, 3

Sun Mar 1  -> 4

Sat Mar 7  -> 5, 6

Sun Mar 8  -  7, 8

Mon Mar 9 * ->  9, 10

Fri Mar 13 *  -> 11, 12

Sat Mar 14  -> 13, 14

Sun Mar 15  -> Review (or contingency if unable to get 13th off)

Thur Mar 19 *  -> Review

Fri Mar 20 *  -> Review

The asterisked days are those I need to take off work.  I know for sure I will need the 9th and the 20th off work, but maybe I can get away without the 13th and the 19th depending on how things go.

So there is my study plan and I can track it and “tick off” chapters as I get the work done and get a feeling of accomplishment and know that I am on track.

Last night I marked Chapters 1, 2 and 3 completed and I am right on target and starting Chapter 4 today.  I have allocated 6 hours for this chapter.   If I find that I get through the material in less time I can get ahead and start chapter 5 or stop and give myself a break.  If I find it is harder than expected and I am behind, the 6 hour per day plan can grow to an 8 hour day.  So I am covered in any event.

I was hoping that those of you reading my blog who are maybe at school (or thinking of going back) might find my little lecture on “how to create an exam study plan” to be useful.   The other point is that having laid out my plan to you guys I now have another motivator.  If I fall behind I am going to have to tell you – remember I promised to report on how well I was doing each day on my studies?  That is another useful motivator.  Publish your study plan to friends/family and let them help to keep you focused on being on track.  

So with that said, it is on to Chapter 4 for me!

Friday Work Weary

As I trudged home tonight, a cold and biting west wind blew full into my face. The gusts were mixed with enough sleet to make my face sting and it reminded me that the last few days of wonderful warming weather were just a tease.

The weather forecast this evening is for a either snow flurries or snow showers. Hmm, seems to me that is not an often used term. Wiki says a snow shower is a snow system leading to an accumulation of snow between 1-3 inches. Unlike flurries, which are significantly less, a snow shower can bring a decent amount of snow, be it less though than a snow storm or a blizzard. So, it sounds like we are in for some snow.

Welcome back winter… We have been basking in the glow of 2 days of wonderful spring temperatures well above zero. The walk to and from work has been pleasant and although it has not been sunny it felt like spring was here. Snow is just about all gone. Birds were singing and things seemed to be looking up. The smell of bread was in the air! Don’t laugh, my condo is near the Canada Bread company and when they open the plant windows (not during sub zero freezeups!)the waft of bread baking fills the air.

I was looking forward to resuming my habit of long walks. But no, not yet.
Not only that, but it seems I have a bit of a cold coming on. No, I am not a happy camper.
BUT – having said that, I am so glad Friday has finally rolled around. It has been a vicious week of long days and lots of work. Don’t really mind the long days and lots of work, but it does make me appreciate my weekends even more.

So I sit here in front of my nice fireplace (ok fake electric, but doesn’t it look nice?), feet up and Rickard’s White beer + slice of orange in hand. Life is good. Of course it would be better without the snow showers, but what can you do?

I am also trying to improve the quality of my blogs. So I will be posting at least one picture a day – promise! My blogs have certainly not had sufficient visual features lately and I do have a bunch of pictures which I would like to share.

This gets me to the sad news that for the next 3 weekends I will have very little time for fun. I am scheduled to write the PMP (Project Manager Professional) exam which will provide me with the professional credentials for the job I do. Not that I need it to do the job, as I have been doing his sort of work for (I hate to say, decades). The certification has only lately become de rigueur. It seems now that times are getting tough, and I may be job hunting soon, I need to have the “badge of honour”, the certificate, which says I have been certified by the governing body for my profession.

It is a 4 hour exam and there is a tremendous amount of material to be memorized, because they don’t want to know that you can do the job, they want to know if you can use the words they use to describe the 41 processes involved in project management, what activities are involved with each of them and the inputs and outputs of each of the processes. It is simply a memory test and I need to study in order to pass.

This brings me to the next point (aside from getting a bit of sympathy for the work I have to do) which is to explain to my readers how, sadly, this will affect my blogging. Truth is, I am not going to be able to write much in the way of blogs for the next number of weeks. I will write daily as promised, but I have the notion that most days I will just tell you (briefly so as not to bore) how I am making out in my studies. Promise not to recite any of the stuff I am learning for sure 99.9% of my readers would glaze over and stop reading immediately if I did.

In any event, today being Friday I plan to spend only 1 hour to put together an overall study plan for the next 3 weeks. Don’t laugh – I am a project manager after all! The first thing we PMs do is put together a plan for whatever we have to do!

BTW, you will only find the following amusing if you are a PM or have used the scheduling tool Microsoft Project. Sorry, that probably isn't many of you out there. I was looking for a picture to post and found this which grabbed my interest.

But tomorrow I must put in a full 8 hours of effort! Well, at least 6… got a date tomorrow night and I don’t want to be too brain dead!

Enjoy your Friday Night all!!!!

Exploring Peru and the Land of the Incas

My son Jeff has gone on an adventure trip to Peru. He left on Friday to fly to Lima and from there on to the town of Cuzco in the interior of Peru. Sunday was spent exploring the Inca ruins in that area. Monday he started his three day hike through the Sacred Valley and the Condor Pass in the mountains of Peru. It is called the Lares Trek, because it starts near the village of Lares.

Wiki says:

The Lares Trek is a two or three day high altitude hike in Peru starting near the village of Lares. Lares is approximately 40 miles north of Cusco and 35 miles east of Machu Picchu. To get to the start of the trek requires a bus or van trip of approximately 5 hours. The Lares trek route transverses typical beautiful, pristine Peruvian Andean mountain areas.

In the last 3 days my thoughts frequently went in his direction, wondering how he was making out. Today he was able to break his “radio silence” and we all were glad to receive an email. I quote from his email: The trek was by far the most physically challenging feat I've ever accomplished. I took a group photo at the highest point during our trek - 4,500 Meters above sea level, it's a great shot. At that altitude every step you take makes you out of breath.

He spent today exploring Machu Picchu, which is referred to as "The Lost City of the Incas",

From Wiki:

Machu Picchu is one of the most familiar symbols of the Inca Empire. Machu Picchu was constructed around 1460, at the height of the Inca Empire. It was abandoned less than 100 years later.

It is likely that most of its inhabitants were wiped out by smallpox before the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the area, and there is no record of their having known of the remote city. Hiram Bingham, the credited discoverer of the site, along with several others, originally hypothesized that the citadel was the traditional birthplace of the Inca of the "Virgins of the Suns". Although the citadel is located only about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Cusco, the Inca capital, it was never found by the Spanish and consequently not plundered and destroyed, as was the case with many other Inca sites.

Machu Picchu was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1983 when it was described as "an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilization".

On July 7, 2007, Machu Picchu was voted as one of New Open World Corporation's New Seven Wonders of the World. Since one of my “Bucket List” items is to see the 7 wonders of the world, I am very curious and anxious to hear the stories of the trip my son will tell when he comes back. I am sure it is a wonderful sight to see.

Jeff next goes to the Amazon Rain forest to explore until Monday and then on to Lima for a day and then home again on Wednesday. We will all be glad when he is home and we can see what I am sure will be some breathtakingly beautiful scenery pictures.

"There will be Blood"

That is the headline on the article that jumped out at me in today’s Globe and Mail Business Section. Harvard financial guru and author Niall Ferguson is predicting dire circumstances in our future for years to come and even used the term “Great Recession” to describe today’s economic reality. Frightening stuff! He is in Ottawa to participate in the public-policy think tank, Canada 2020 and is featured in a major interview published in the Globe today.

Life today is a little like being in a war zone – but an economic war zone. Bad news abounds and every authoritative voice covers the latest skirmish, the days end tally of market woes and sad predictions for continuing waves of job losses, recession and investment value freefall. We keep hearing that Canada is not going to have it as bad as the US, but also we hear that we cannot recover until they recover since we are joined at our economic hips.

Us Canadians are also are facing a double dose of depression (no, not the economic kind). This damned winter seems never to end and we are yet again enduring a temperature plunge into the -20 degrees, with wind chill. Makes you want to stay home and hibernate – with the news turned off! But I digress…

This morning I heard that with this latest wave of market freefall, which started on Friday, the Dow Jones had reached its lowest level in 11 years and the TSE was at a 5 year low. We will see if the market continues its downward slide today. Hard to be up when all we hear is down.

I like to fancy myself as a savvy investor. OK – that might be exaggerating, but I have my little RRSP and I have a few stocks in my nest egg and I look after it myself. In the last month I have been looking at the current stock market decline as an opportunity. I have a bit of unused contribution room and it seemed to me if I borrowed and topped it up I could get a big tax deduction and at the same time buy into the market at bargain basement prices. Optimism comes from the thought that I can take advantage of the current situation to vault myself into a better place retirement wise, in 2-3 years when we come out of this slump.

Last week I executed my plan. The market was having a small bit of a rally and ever the optimist, I was thinking that maybe the worst was over and I should jump in. I had borrowed the cash to top up my RRSP from my LOC (at the extraordinary rate of only 3.0%!) and it was sitting there not earning any interest. I had researched and earmarked some preferred and common shares to buy which would bring in 6.5% interest. Seems like a good deal to me and if in the coming years the market recovers, and the stock prices go back to where they were even before the start of this mess – I could double my money! No sense waiting, I thought.

I bought an equal measure of some RBC common shares for $30.35 and RBC Preferred at 25.30. I checked today. The RBC shares are trading at $25.80 – victim of this last major drop which started immediately after I bought them. Murphy’s Law! The series P RBC Preferred I bought had not lost any ground. These shares should stay relatively close to the purchase price because they are more affected by interest rates than anything else – like a bond. When rates go back up the price of these shares will go down – before which I would try and sell them or wait until after the shares go through a rate “reset” (they are pegged to the T Bill rate) when the price should go back near the $25.00 mark.

I am hoping by then the price of the common stock will be rising and I can sell the preferred and buy into the slow rising market to come.. In the meantime I am pretty assured of having a portion of my money in a more liquid asset in case I need the money out of my RRSP. I am hedging my bets.

Now, job done, I am best to just forget about my RRSP and just let it be. Watching it won’t help and will just add to the belief that I am feeling a real pinch – or rather blow - from this recession. I am down about 30% in value – pretty typical, I think. Almost all of my stocks and mutual funds are invested in companies which will no doubt weather this economic storm and in the end recover. Maybe that will be 2-3 years or maybe, God forbid, that will be a decade. The only thing certain is that my retirement is now looking as distant as that moon out in the sky.

[Posted with iBlogger from my way kool iPhone]

If I Were The Internet

I wanted to find something a bit entertaining for today’s blog because it is Friday and we are all tired.  At least I am.  I came across a very funny video on the TED talks which makes fun of the internet. 

In this video, storyteller and poet Rives recites his poem “If I controlled the internet”. Rives is the star of the new Bravo special “Ironic Ironic America”.  He is a regular on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and he was one of the co-hosts of the 2009 TED@PalmSprings conference.

Rive’s Poem:  If I Controlled the Internet

 I found the first part of the lyrics and cut and pasted them here for your convenience:

(Source: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/datasets/rives-if-i-controlled-the-internet/versions/1.txt) 

If I controlled the internet?
You could auction your broken heart on Ebay
Take the money, go to Amazon,
Buy a phonebook for a country you%u2019ve never been to
Call folks at random until you find someone
who flirts really well in a foreign language

If I were in charge of the internet
You could Mapquest your lover%u2019s moodswings
Hang left at cranky
Right at preoccupied
U turn on silent treatment
All the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin%u2019
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection
Some days I%u2019m as shallow as a backing pan
But I still stretch miles in all directions

If I own the internet
Napster Monster and Friendster-dot-com would be one big website
That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job
and you%u2019re really just chatting with your palls,

Heck if I ran the web
You could email dead people
They would not email you back
But you%u2019d get an automated reply
Their name in your inbox
It%u2019s all you wanted anyway
And a message saying: %u2018Hey, it%u2019s me. I miss you.%u2019
Listen you%u2019ll see, being dead is dandy.

Now you go back to raising kids
And waging peace
And craving candy
If I designed the internet
Childhood-dot-com would be a loop
Of a boy
In an orchard
With a ski pole for a sword
Trashcan lid for a shield, shouting
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
‘I am the emperor of oranges’
Now follow me OK

Grandma-dot-com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit bath instructions 1-2-3
That links with hot-diggity-dog-dot-com, that is my grandfather
They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage-dot-dad
He forms an attachment to kind-a-ditsy-but-still-sends-ginger-snatch-for-Christmas-dot-mom who
Downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges who grows up to be

Me,
The guy who usually goes too far, so

If I were the emperor of the internet
I guess I’d still be mortal, huh?
But at that point I would probably already have
The lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis, so
I would outlaw spam on my first day in office
I wouldn’t need it.
I’d be like some kind of internet genius.
And me,
I’d like to upgrade to deity and maybe
Just like that

(p-o-p)

I’d go wireless.

Huh.

Maybe google would hire this
So I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus
Until the worldwideweb is as wise as wild and as organised
As I think a modern day miracle-slash-oracle can get, but
Oooooooooo, you wanna bet just how whack and un-p.c. your Mac or PC's gonna be when I'm rockin'

hot-shit-hotshot-God-dot-net?

I guess it’s just like life

It’s not a question of if you can
Its, ‘Do ya?’
We can interfere with the interface
We can make you god hallelujah the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we logon
You don’t say a prayer
You don’t write a song
You don’t chant an ooooohm

You send one blessed email to
Whoever you’re thinking of
At
Dadeladatatatatatatadadeladedadeladedatatam-dot-com

Rives also has a number of other funny videos where he explores some humourous ideas through poetry and stories.  One is titled “The story of mixed emoticons”.   To Learn more about Rives and to see some of these other videos:

Full bio and more links

 

[Posted with iBlogger from my way kool iPhone]

He is Just Not that Into You

Had a nice evening tonight with my daughters Tegan and Laura and my almost daughter, Amanda, We had a girlie movie night and went to see “He is just not that into you”. It was an adaptation of the book by the same name by the Sex in the City Authors Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo.

The theme of the movie is that dating and romance is a minefield filled with misunderstood clues from the interacting characters. It is one of those movies with small interconnected stories with parallel themes and 20 something characters many of which evolve from their shallow selves to ones which are more in keeping with what we women would like to see in real life. Yes it is a full throttle chick flick.

It has a star studded cast – Ben Affleck, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore to name just a few. Lots of other famous folk in cameos and more.
It is a humourous look at how we can obsess about the opposite sex when in a romantic situation. We all have gone through the hell of waiting for his phone call, trying and incorrectly interpreting “clues” and wanting the one who is “just not that into us”. There are lots of situations that we women can relate too. I think that there are also just as many similar situations that the men in the crowd would appreciate as well. Only if any would venture in to see it.

There is a pretty funny web site set up to support this film. In particular, there is a really funny video in which 3 of the guy stars explain that it is not a typical chick flick and why guys should go see this movie.

Go to the following url and choose Videos and then choose Top Ten Cliches http://www.hesjustnotthatintoyoumovie.com/
There is quite a few funny things on this website, for instance, it has a “date decoder” to allow you to interpret what a date really means. You choose the comment and the decoder generates the intended meaning – often far from what you might expect, which was one of the themes of the movie.

Anyway, I had a fun night with the girls and now have entirely run out of steam.
Good Night!

Second Life - An Alternate Reality?

I watched a TED talk last night by Philip Rosedale, who is one of the founding fathers of the Internet Virtual Reality called Second Life.  

Firstly, let me say that I could easily write a 20,000 word essay on what Second Life is, rather than this 1600 word one the topic so interests me.  I am fully expecting that over the next decade or so these virtual realities will become a place where we go – much like the weekend cottagers – for a change of pace away from our day to day concerns and for a dose of wonder and delight.  But I will not.  Let me just whet your appetite to know more and maybe experience SL yourself.

What is Second Life?

The simple answer is that it is a virtual reality internet game which you can download and play on your computer.  It isn't a game in the true sense of the word - there is no end and no winners or losers.  It is more just a place to entertain, like a visit to a foreign country.  It is really though, just a game.  But that is like saying that a month in Tuscany is a holiday.  It doesn’t nearly describe the experience that awaits those that travel to that destination.

From the SL website:

http://secondlife.com/whatis/

Second Life is a free online virtual world imagined and created by its Residents. From the moment you enter Second Life, you'll discover a fast-growing digital world filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity.

The owners of the SL site make available empty grid space.  It is up to the purchasers of that grid space to build (by buying or writing themselves) computer instructions which brings their imaginings into being – at least virtual being.  So, SL becomes what its residents want it to become.  Not to say it is without rules and an economy – it has both, but it is more like the Wild West of the 1800s than a developed society.

My Visits to SL

I have visited Second Life a few times and created an avatar who can travel about in that world and went to the area they have for folks to use as a training area.  An avatar is a visual representation of yourself that is only limited by what you can imagine.  In the few times I visited SL I guess I clocked about 4-8 hours there.  When you are a newbie you start at a place called Orientation Island and here you learn the basics about how to move and how to interact with both other avatars and objects.  You even learn to drive cars and to fly!  From here you can choose to go out and explore or you can go to another place to practice and learn stuff first.  The nice thing about SL is that you can teletransport to anywhere
in SL – as long as you know the SLURL (Second Life Uniform Resource Locator) – it is like a url but for SL locations.

I just went again this morning to visit Second Life and to remind myself about it before writing this blog.  On the sign in screen it said that there has been 1,444,530 logins in the last 60 days.  That is a lot of visitors.  There were, on this Sunday morning at 8:16 a.m., 56,592 real people present in this alternate reality.  WOW!  

What do you find when you go to SL?

Second Life is an amazing place.  If you could take the most incredible imaginings you might have about a place  you might go and remove normal limits about what you can do – but still maintain the concept of a land which is organized as a society with rules and economy and people to interact with – you have this place.   It is a place without limits of what you can physically do, be or experience.  It is a place for explorers and adventurers.  

It is like a board game taken to the maximum extent of imagination – like the game of Life, Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders all rolled into one and turned into an actual world you can live in.   If you think about a Star Wars movie you could actually experience, you might have something close to SL.

There is a currency – the Linden Dollar – and you can both run businesses for profit , on land you have purchased, or be employed to earn money and spend this money – buy items other people have for sale – for instance –on the things you might want to have.  You can even “cash out” and take your money out of the virtual reality, via the LindeX.

This is the currency exchange market operated in SL and as of today 1 US dollar was worth 260 LD.  The LindeX™ is a free market Linden dollar exchange offering residents of Second Life the ability to either buy or sell Linden dollars. Charges are for purchasing Linden dollars and are placed on the same form of payment you have setup in your account settings for your Second Life account.  Prices at this site are set by the market price - I.E. the best price offered by the different sellers of Linden dollars.  This of course means that if the bottom fell out of the LindeX market your Linden Dollars would be worthless.

There are museums (created and maintained by real life ones) and public buildings to explore, concerts to attend (presented by real life bands) and even classes to take (either affiliated with known institutions such as Harvard or Princeton or informal classes organized by SL entrepreneurs as a way to make a living).  CNN has a presence there!    There are even a few real life country embassies there – I guess as a PR exercise, because I can’t see that they could actually help your avatar escape if civil war erupted in that part of SL – not that it could.  

Information from Philip Rosedale's TED Talk

From Philip’s TED talk I learned that the area of land which is included in SL is about 10x the size of the Greater San Francisco area and growing at about 5% per month.  There are 20,000 CPUs joined together to support this virtual world.  There are 250,000 visitors per day and there is 100 million objects of content stored on 100 million terabytes of storage space.  To give some context to this, one might think about a computer game you can buy which might take 4 CDs.  SL is 25,000 times larger than that.  

From what I gather, the demographic is a pretty standard curve from age 18 (the minimum age for residents allowed in SL – there is a teen version available for the younger set) peaking at age 32 and tapering off at age 60.  The hours of use per week actually peak with age 60 and these residents spend 40% more time online than the 32 year olds.   There are 55% of residents which live in Great Britian and Europe, 35% from the US and almost all countries are represented.  45% of the residents are women, but women spend 35% more time in SL.

Is SL for nerds?  Not at all.  According to Philip, the folks who are on SL are early adopters of technology for sure, but they are the most creative, innovative, intelligent and entrepreneurial folks around.   The sort of folks who were the first to buy on EBAY.

Why I want to find time for SL

I spent enough time in SL to know that it is a place I would really like to explore and spend a good long time visiting – just like Tuscany.  However, unlike Tuscany I can visit SL any time I want and it does not cost a cent to visit – I can come home after each visit and sleep in my own bed, so I don’t need to rent any living quarters there.  So why do I not spend more time there?  It is simple – I don’t have enough time as it stands.  There are too many things which need attention in my real life.  

I think that what you get out of SL is as much as you have time to spend there.  The more time you spend there the more you will get out of it.  Being totally immersed in a new culture requires time.  You need to spend enough time at SL to become proficient with the things there to get the most out of the experience.  I do have wanderlust and would like to explore - but there are only so many hours.  Sadly, I have no time, so I am adding it to my life list – to spend a month or more in SL exploring and getting to know the place.

I am hoping that at some point in my real life I will have a period of boredom, a time when other life goals are not so all consuming.  That would be the time to devote to SL. 

How will this virtual reality affect our society?  

Is it a viable alternate reality?

Is it a bona fide reality?

I want to leave you today with something which is both a peculiar thing and also provides food for thought – and perhaps comment (gee, it would be nice if this evolved into a little bit of a dialog – Note to Self: got to figure out how to display comments for all to see under the day’s blog)

Some time ago, there was a news item which I heard which presented the mock worthy item that there was a person on SL who was being sued for divorce.  Yes, you can marry – have a “partner” on SL and even have a baby.  The reason was that he, that is his avatar, started fooling around with another avatar.  At the time, I remember thinking God, people, “get a life” – no “get a real life” and dismissed this as a ridiculous item because I had imagined it within the context of a game which had as its objective an “end game” – something that SL does not.   If you imagine SL as a real vacation spot where you interact with real people, participate in a real economy and social life you then view this divorce as a different animal.  

It is a unnerving  that this virtual world could be so real as to bring together people who actually develop feelings toward one another in this environment and even feel hurt when they were cheated upon. Some folks might even come to prefer their digital doppelganger!  Philip Rosedale’s talk touches upon this theme, if you want more thoughts on the topic.

It may be as our society evolves more of these virtual realities and even relationships become “real” to those we are acquainted with.   I can’t imagine a love relationship physically unconsummated, but perhaps for some the physical aspect of a relationship is less important.   Makes our reaction to the virtual reality divorce a little bit different than it otherwise might be.    What would you say to your friend if she/he confided in you that she/he had a SL Partner?

Where is this is all heading?  It is a bit frightening isn’t it?

Want to find out more?:

http://secondlife.com/showcase//>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life/>

Want to try SL?

Go here: it covers “How do I begin?”

http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417/>

Philip Rosedale's TED Talk covers much more than I have touched upon above.   If you are at all intrigued with SL, virtual realities and the notions I have discussed above, I would recommend listening to his talk.