Howdy! I’m going to start blogging again, starting right now.

After such a long hiatus, my main problem was deciding what to blog about. Obviously, I could blog about anything at all; but I needed a topic that was somewhat interesting (or else why bother at all?), and yet nothing too topical, since I don’t suppose many folks are checking in every day at this point, I needed a topic that wouldn’t quickly get stale. That rules out politics and the weather, which is probably just as well.

And so, for the next few days, I’m going to blog about a little experiment I’m conducting with Second Life, a role-playing game which I just downloaded yesterday.

Second Life is a virtual world, where “you can be anyone you want,” they say. Only, that’s not quite true. When you create an account, you can type in your desired first name, but you have to pick a last name from a pull-down menu. So I couldn’t be who I wanted to be, which was “Sean Gleeson.” And so in my Second Life, instead of Sean Gleeson I am “Macon Hay.” Get it? Macon Hay.

Here is what Macon Hay, now one day old, looks like, which is as close to my real self as I could get it.

And here is what there is to do in Second Life: walk around among millions of rectangular wireframes, which will resolve themselves into a richly textured virtual world, probably, if you have a few minutes.

According to the promotional literature, there are ways to earn money in Second Life, by finding treasure, performing services, and mulcting the other players. And so here is my experiment: without investing a penny into the game, not one red cent, I am going to endeavor to earn at least one hundred American dollars, in real money. (At current exchange rates, this would be about 30,000 units of the local currency, the “Linden dollar,” which is worth only slightly less than the Mauritanian ougulya.)

Can I do it? I promise this much: I’ll do it, or fail in the attempt! And blog about it, either way. Stay tuned, if you’re tuned.

UPDATE: First quarter earnings.