The downside of being a pioneer on the digital frontier ...

New File Room

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I knew when I signed on that this was not always going to be an easy ride.  You don't participate in an online community as pioneering as Second Life and expect that it won't come without a few rather large inconveniences along the way.

What I didn't anticipate was creating a full time, real world business there, and having my office and most of my operations inworld.  After two years of growing from a community of about 10,000 when I started, to over 4 million today, the issue of scaling alone has been an enormous challenge.

So, once again, the system is down.  The co-location facility seems to be a chronic plague in network reliability these days.  Baron and I are both rather frustrated, because it means a terrible productivity loss at a time when we are working hard at reorganizing and expanding.  We expect it now: that we'll be working, and things will stop rezzing, or that packet loss will spike, hobbling the SIM and causing terrible latency, porting failures, data loss and crashes without being able to get back in.  This is the second day in a row where one of us has been dumped and kept outside, knocking on the door for hours after the system drops to it's knees and comes to a standstill.

The Lounge

Baron's been creating a large new office space for us to make it easier to function.  He'd created a lovely Roman villa for us out in the private land we held in Injong on the mainland, our escape from our business sims, which sometimes eat us alive.  Having sold the land to prepare for buying another private island to expand our region, so that we can include our offices and studio, as well as our private home closer to the sim, we've temporarily been working out of a cottage.  It's lovely, cozy, inspiring, but painfully small for the kind of office sprawl I alone create with my glut of files.  So, he knocked out the foundation, creating a massive new level below, so we can recover the cottage area as a quite living space during off hours (these are rare, as we are both complete workaholics and often don't know when to quit), and a separate facility that's actually designed to be a functioning office space.

Today's been cathartic, working in the warm, vaulted chambers of this new cathedral style space he's been making for us.  It smacks of the wartime 40's era we both love, and I'm running around dressed as a happy little moll getting settled hauling files and boxes around and setting up my desk once again.

And down it goes.  It starts with the familiar rubber-banding of objects you're editing, with terrible lag on dragging things out of inventory again to set the office back up, with latency that makes walking through quicksand feel like a picnic.  Chat out of sequence, screen freezes, lMs lost.  You know what's coming.

And here I am.  Ranting at the screen while my avie is still banging on the door to get back in, with probably another 20,000 people doing the same right now.

Alas, it sucks being on the bleeding edge when it's one that you've come to depend on from a business point of view.  Stability seems more and more elusive everyday, and once again, we're trudging through alternatives to diversify so that we don't take such a terrible hit to our bottomline when it seems like the system isn't even functioning half the time.

~banging my head on the wall once again~

I love my job, I love my job, I love my job ...