Glossary

Yachting has its own language, and virtual yachting does too!  Here are some of the words used on this Website that may need some explaining:

• Avatar: your inworld presence, a 3-dimensional animated person.
   
• Bwind: a programming standard for sailboats that reads the standard “environmental wind” in SL, which is generally 15 Knots from the East.
   
• Emote: how you express a thought or action that you can’t do with your avatar. For example, to show you understood what someone said, you might smile or nod.  You do that by typing /me smiles or /me nods; that will show up as (for example) Dale Irata smiles or Dale Irata nods.
   
• Group: anyone can create a Group in SL with as few as two members. There are tens of thousands of groups, and dozens of sailing groups including our own Island Yacht Club.  You can find groups using the Search function of your SL viewer.
   
• Inworld: inside Second Life. Opposite of “real life,” usually abbreviated “RL.”
   
• Lag: the bane of Second Life.  LAG is the sum total of everything that slows you down--your computer, the Internet, and the load on the SL servers.  There are things you can do to minimize it, but it will always be there. (Abbreviations: “laggy” or “#$!$%&!!!!”
   
• Real Life: outside Second Life.  Abbreviated “RL.”
   
• SLurl: A Second Life URL, meaning a link from your browser directly to a location within the SL virtual world.
   
• Viewer: a computer program you need to enter the virtual world. Available from secondlife.com, with other third-party viewers also available from other sources. Nearly all of these are free of charge.
   
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Copyright 2011-12, Island Yacht Club.  Second Life is a registered trademark of Linden Research Inc. The “in SL” cube logo is a trademark of Linden Research Inc. and denotes a project or organization with a presence inside of the Second Life virtual world.