Google now has an amazing new feature where you can take a virtual walk through the streets of some major cities. Here's Linden Lab's illustrious headquarters in San Francisco, for example.

click to view the Google street view

You can use your arrow keys to move the camera and rotate left/right.

Yesterday Linden Lab revealed an alternate Second Life client that contains WindLight technology. WindLight is a sky generator that produces breathtaking photo-realistic virtual skies. It means the end of greenish sunrises and puke-brown horizons, at the very least.

There is, however, a pretty big trade-off. Our current sky is "untouchable" -- that is, no matter how high you go, you can never reach it. With WindLight, the sky is less than a kilometer above the ground. It's at about 750 meters actually, which means that you can very easily fly above the sky into nothingness.



This totally destroys the illusion of flight, ruins skydiving, and in your sky home, the sky is distorted as you view it edge-on.

Please vote in JIRA to correct this bug and either raise the sky surface thousands of meters higher or make it "untouchable" like the current sky. Here's how:

1. Go to jira.secondlife.com and log in. You have to log in first before viewing the issue page or you can't vote, for some reason.
   
2. View bug VWR-923 and click the "Vote for this" link on the left of that page.

If you enjoy flight and skydiving in Second Life, or if you own a sky home, please vote. The WindLight sky is very nice, but it must be implemented correctly.

What's special about a Stearman biplane? It's one of the most used biplanes in history. They have been used as trainers, scouts, crop dusters, and stunt planes, among other uses. Between 1930 and 1945, Boeing built around ten thousand of the things, and there are still about a thousand air-worthy Stearmans today.

When I was still new to Second Life, one of my more popular planes was a biplane that looked vaguely like a Stearman. Eventually, I had to take it off the market. I had created it using a kind of hack that let me build a high-prim, physical model, and that hack apparently had the ability to crash a sim on occasion. Oops.

Now, about three and a half years later, I'm revisiting the Stearman with everything I've learned about making virtual vehicles. This high-prim, two-seat replica has taken many hours, but I'm close to the finish now.



Give me another week, and you too can take to the skies in this icon of flight history.

Stearman links:
Warbird Alley: Boeing / Stearman PT-17 "Kaydet"
Wikipedia: Boeing Stearman

And so after 4 days of marveling at how I would wake up each day at exactly 7:26 am, I figured out that my clock had stopped and I'm not actually very smart in the morning.

Fans of Terrabucks Coffee -- the humorous SL parody of our favourite real life coffee shop chain -- can now drink prim-based coffee in real life. Or if your avatar sports the black long-sleeve Abbotts Aerodrome shirt, you can now dress your real-world avatar the same way.

My new Cafe Press shop has all kinds of things you would want, and even some things that you wouldn't want (wall clock, anyone?). All products are guaranteed to contain no plywood and have never been tested on penguins.

Link: Cubey Terra at Cafe Press

OK, it's hardly GQ, but I'm not complaining. In a BC Business Magazine article that's curiously titled "Get a Life", Kevin Chong explores the Second Life business activities of two Vancouver residents -- Nyla Cheeky and yours truly.

Get a Life at bcbusinessmagazine.com. (Registration required.)

Maybe I'm being too picky, but shouldn't that photo of my avatar have the caption "Cubey Terra" instead of my real name?

Besides that minor point, it's a fair assessment of the state of business in Second Life.