My home  is located in the Maria Home region in the OSGrid. My office is located in the Trombly Ltd region of the OSGrid.

Here is how to get there, if you’ve never been to an OpenSim world before:

Step One:

Create a free OSGrid account. OSGrid is the largest of the OpenSim worlds, and is a great place to start. You can use this account to travel to other OpenSim grids, as well.

This part takes a few seconds, and only requires that you have an email address:

http://osgrid.org/index.php?page=create&btn=4

I used my real name for the signup, so you’ll know who I am if you meet me here.

Step Two:

Download an OpenSim-compatible browser. Again, I recommend Hippo. You can download it here:

http://osgrid.org/index.php?&page=smodul&id=7&btn=7

Step Three:

Run the Hippo browser, and sign in with your name and password.

Then go to Maria Home by clicking on the Map button in the lower left, and typing “Maria Home” into the search box. If you click on the “Maria Home” search result, you should see a map come up on the left. Double-click (or hit the “Teleport” button) to travel to my region.

Please remember that the OSGrid is its “alpha test” stage. So if you’re looking for buggy, unstable “beta test” software — it’s still not there yet! Ha ha.

No, all kidding aside, OpenSim is a work in progress. The software hasn’t even reached the 1.0 release yet.  Each time the software is updated, my region goes down for the upgrade. If the new update is unstable, my region stays down a little longer.

That’s the price I pay for being on the cutting edge.

If you’re looking to visit a more stable Open Sim deployment, check out the Folk Cafe and the rest of the German village build on Grid4us. They don’t immediately download the latest patches and fixes — they wait for them to be tested and throughly debugged first, so their platform is much more stable and reliable.