If you've decided to go ahead and join second life there are a few things you'll have to do...

1. Go to the website www.secondlife.com and sign up. You will have to fill in some information about yourself -just bare facts to have you on file so don't worry that it will ask you for your credit card information. I meant it when I said it was free to sign up and download. You will have go choose a name for your in-world Character- Your first name is your own, in this life you get to choose your own name from birth. *laughs* For your last name they have some computer generated names on file for you to choose from. You will also be asked to choose your character. It doesn't really matter what character you choose. I would suggest to choose one of the gender you are so you won't be walking around as the opposite sex. *giggles* The characters you choose from are very basic and you will get to modify and customize them later on in second life after you gain some knowledge on where to look. Also please put in a valid email address. This is so that when you get an offline IM from someone it will show up in your emails so you won't miss anything. This is not so they can spam you with repeated offers of various kinds. You will be directed to download and install the second life program. I would suggest you take a look at the system requirements to confirm that your computer will be able to run second life. It is a very high graphic program and takes up space, RAM, and processing space. Do NOT try to run several programs with while you are using this. You may be able to get yahoo but even then it will slow your computer down unless you have a super high speed computer (not internet but computer). You'll also be asked if you would like to join a community. This really doesn't matter; it is just a place where you will log into. Some communities have helping areas and nearly all of them have mentors on hand to help and guide you if you ever need assistance.
2. After you have finished downloading the program and went to your email to verify you account information you are ready to sign into second life! Just load up the program and type in your first and last Second Life name and password and hit login. It will take a few minutes to load but when it does you will be in an area and viewing your second life character from behind. You may also get a tutorial guide at the top to help you out and show you around the controls a bit. But here I will give you some guidance....

• To move around in-world use your arrow keys

• Up-forward

• Back-backward

• Left/Right- Turning your avatar to face in that direction.

• B. On your screen you will see a few items of importance so I will go over them with you. Let's go left to right, bottom to top to make it easier.

1. At the very most bottom to the left you will see a little chat icon bubble which will toggle the local chat bar above it to visible or invisible.

1. You will also see a button labeled Communication with an arrow to the right of it. If you click the large communication button (not the arrow next to it) you will bring up the contacts list. In this menu you will see a Friends and Groups Tab at the top and to the right you will have the Im/Call, Profile, Teleport, Pay, Remove, and Add options. Let's quickly go over each of these to get familiar....

• The IM/call button allows you to open a chat dialog box and start IMing a person in your friends list. At the moment you are new so you have no one to test this out with. But what you would do is highlight their name in the contacts list and then press the IM/call button.

• The Profile button allows you to open and view the profiles of those in your friends list or whoever you have highlighted in the list. (We'll go over the profile later on in this tutorial...)

• The teleport option allows you to select an person in your contacts list and offer them to bring them to your location, hence the name "teleport" being that it is instantaneous but only if they accept your request. Others may teleport you to their locations and you will be asked to accept or deny it.

• The pay option allows you to select a name and pay that person Lindens or Second Life dollars (again..we will go over this later in the tutorial)

• Remove allows you to select the name and remove that person from your friends list.

• when clicking the Add button, you will bring up another dialog box labeled "choose resident" and underneath it you will have a text box where you may click the person's name in and hit the find button. When you highlight their name, you click select and then add. It will send them a request to add them to your friends list. Once they accept you will get a dialog box at the lower right hand corner saying they are online and now will be able to see when they are online or offline. If they are bold then they are online.

1. Now if you click the groups tab at the top of your contacts box you will see a blank box where the groups you join will be added. Every time you join a group their name will be added to the list. Everyone can join a maximum of 25 groups. In the right side you have another serious of buttons similar to the other set in your friends list with a few variations. You still have the IM/call button which allows you to IM the entire group. the Info will bring up the group information box, activate will activate the tag over your head to a certain title, Leave allows you to leave the highlighted group, Create allows you to create your own group for 100L and search brings up the SL (Second Life) search engine to search groups of the keyword you enter.

1. now that we've gone over your contacts lets have a look at the tab at the bottom labeled "Local Chat". Local chat allows you to type and talk to others near you up to a distance of 20 meters. Beyond that they will not be able to hear you and you will have to shout. To do this you just type in what you want to say and click the arrow next to "say" to the right and select shout. To just type and say you can just hit enter on your keyboard or to shout a shortcut used is control + Enter. Shouting allows people over the entire Sim/Island to hear you. Be careful of shouting too much because it can be seen as grief or harassment and you could be banned or reprimanded for it by the owner of that location.

Now close out that dialog box by clicking the small X in the right hand corner or your small dialog box. It will disappear, leaving you with the image you had before.

At the bottom next to the communications button you have the fly button which allows you to fly and move around easily. The controls are basically the same but the down arrow makes you fly down instead of backwards.

The snapshot button lets you take screen shots and whatnot but costs 10L to upload in-world.

clicking the search button will bring up the SL search engine. This will be your best friend in second life and your greatest resource. You can search anything in here. Clicking it will bring the main page and some ads of shops in SL. at the top you can type in any word you want to search such as "clothes", "hair", "mall", "park", etc. and it will bring up several options and pages to browse through. You will see small icons next to your links, (a green crossroad sign=location, person icon=a person's name, two people icons= a group, and calendar=event).

I will go into more depth on each of these in another blog...

close out of that box and you will see next to search a build button which you do not have to worry about at the moment since you will probably not have the ability to build on the land you are at. The map allows you to see where you are and navigate through second life. Will go into more detail in another blog.

Your inventory...Now clicking on this will bring up another dialog box labeled inventory. This is basically where everything you collect in second life will be stored including clothes, hair, skin, shapes, shoes, furniture, etc. You have two main folders "My inventory" and "my Library". The my inventory already has folders in it for later use when you gain items but they are empty at the moment. The library contains some default items that you can get familiar with later on...

Close out of that box and let's move up...

You see a button labeled local chat above the talk bubble that we first discussed. and next to it you will see a text box where you can type in things that you would like to say and press enter to talk more easily with people than bring up the dialog box. The chat box is handy when you want to go back to see what someone has said earlier but it makes it more difficult when you want to move faster. Next to the text box, you see the gestures menu and a little arrow pointing down. Clicking on it will bring up a list of gestures that your avatar can perform with animations and text as well as audio. You also have a little musical button and if you click play you will be able to hear parcel music that is playing. You have a volume control next to that to lower or raise your volume settings. The talk button next to it allows you to chat on microphone with others. You can see how will be able to hear you by a little white dot over their head. Although some people have it activated but cannot hear due to having volume off or other problems.

Now you are familiar with the basics of your second life user interface. In my blogs I will also give links to Linden video tutorials that may prove helpful and useful to you as well...