So there appear to have been some technical issues overnight, which are continuing, unscheduled inventory maintenance has been followed by unscheduled login maintenance. When I try to login to the main Second Life website I get the message above, a plain white screen with the word Failed, at the top left. This is actually a rather user friendly message that tells me all I need to know, basically, something is borked. However it’s not as much fun as the old gorillas with hammers image that used to appear, it’s still a to the point message.
However a point worth noting is that outages of this length and bumpiness are infrequent these days, their service has improved a lot, but sometimes things still go tits up. Older residents have more experinece of problems, I arrived in 2007, when once a week there would be scheduled downtime and then lots of people trying to login at the same time when the grid was supposed to be backup, followed by a flood of forum posts complaining it still wasn’t back, in between posts along the lines of “I’m back in! neener neener! At times that could get quite funny. However as I said, things have improved over the years.
So what do people do on a rainy Sunday when they can’t login, well one of the side effects of Mesh creation is that you can do a lot of work offline anyway, so it might be a good time to catch up with that. Other people might want to read up on scripting techniques or pathfinding, or lions and tigers and bears, the wiki is still up.
Then there’s reading blogs, writig blogs, engaging with Twitter or maybe even getting on with Nanowrimo. There’s always something else to do, there are never enough hours in the day. Some people will be extremely frustrated of course, they have planned events and I sympathise with them, but there’s not much you can really do but wait for the issues to be fixed.
Personally, I am going to sit back, have a coffee and then head to the pub for a pint or two, which fortunately is my usual Sunday routine anyway!