The goal of the adventure group is to explore all of the sims on all of the mainland continents in Second Life. And exploring is fun, especially with companions but as our adventure parties have learned in practice, it is hard to keep a party together as we travel, especially when party members crash and just get separated as the Pathfinder (me) heads off in this or that direction. I believe those problems can be reduced if the group uses voice with me, and refers to the “Find on Map” feature to locate me, but so far this has been problematic.

There is a bigger problem however, for me that is. The biggest problem arises in attempting to act as a journalist and photographer trying to document the significant findings of the expedition. The expeditions would go much faster if we just cruised along observing without attempting to record the discoveries, however I expect this venture to take a very long time to complete and I want a record of the journey. In fact and already, I’ve documented several discoveries that I’m satisfied, have made the project worthwhile.

I’ve mentioned before that writing these daily journal entries takes less than an hour each day. In fact, entries that don’t contain photos, maps and landmarks can be whipped out in 15 minutes or so. It’s the preparation of enhancements that takes significant time (up to an hour) and that is really a major commitment in my life. In that regard, I wonder if this is a frivolous undertaking but there is a notion that keeps rolling around in my head that this “undertaking” can be non-frivolous if I do a good job of recording the findings. I wonder that anyone in Second Life has done this kind of thing before?

BTW, the preparation of photos is plagued by some really annoyances like having to convert each of the bitmaps into JPGs, in addition to cropping and other editing work. That means at a minimum, opening and saving each photo to JPG files. Adding JPGs to these blog entries is a time consuming because in the process, Google adds unwanted formatting. If anyone out there knows of a way to mass convert BMPs to JPGs I’d appreciate a little help.

These are the things that are on my mind this morning and, in a way, as I write this morning’s journal entry I’m mulling how to solve the expedition issues. Just for fun, I’m including some photos from recent expeditions, ones that didn’t make it into earlier blog entries.