I've only used Second Life a couple of times and in either time I didn't spend enough time to have a good feel for the experience - I'll confess I'm not a gamer, unless you count the occasional GT5 and Rock Band - but Mary pointed me to a recent event that seemed compelling.

You may have heard about Sun's DataCenters in Broomfield and in Santa Clara. Greg P and Dean Nelson recently hosted an event at Second Life that focuses on how to improve cooling through different arrangements in those Data Centers. Check out Mary's note or go see the video; I found it useful and even entertaining. You can also go directly to the Sun Pavilion in Second Life, the artifacts are there, but I couldn't figure out how do something like play with the airflow simulation during my short visit.

On a related topic, we have been talking about doing an online event for the GlassFish v3 FCS launch. If you are interested in applying to be in the organizing committee, send me email with your info.

The MySQL community is united for a noble purpose. Leaving aside their usual differences about release cycles and openness philosophy, the community is united in helping the son of Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL Support engineer, to overcome the difficult challenge of financing a life saver bone marrow transplant. The MySQL project has made its e-commerce site available to help raising the funds as quickly as possible. A very young life is in danger, and many people from inside and outside the company have donated for Ivan.

This is not the first case of open source and life saving tied together. For example, Matthew Swift, one of the lead developers of the OpenDS project, has combined a sport challenge with help for research on Leukodystrophy. Check out his Tri4Joe blog.