Corvans Creations… Musings on a Second Life

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Still kind of sporadic on the increased contact side, but we’re taking baby steps.

So Miss and I are actually talking things through and recognizing that we both want things to improve and not, in the words of Eddie Izzard, to slowly collapse like a flan in a pantry.

We’re talking more, and in doing so remembering what it is we’ve both been missing. This is all good.

What’s clear is that we both need to step up more, both need to reach out more. We’re working on it. It is a challenge for me, to be the one initiating, not least because that’s the role I end up with everyone else, I’m the one who has to make the decisions, start the ball rolling, take care of everyone else. Not as good at taking care of myself of course, and seeking an area where I don’t have to be the one who is responsible…

Once again, I missed my posting deadline yesterday. If this seems to be getting to be habitual, you’re right, it is. The more pressing question is why is it becoming habitual? Miss Tara has directed me to post every day for the next week to make up for missing yesterday’s posting, so I’ll be exploring that in some depth over the next few days.

For the immediate moment, I’ll say this. Yesterday I went to bed surprisingly early and in all honesty, the thought of doing a blog posting before I went to bed never entered my head, mostly because this blog is about my journey… and there’s been no journey to speak of to blog about. In just under a month, it will be one full year since Miss collared me and she’s still my best friend, the one I turn to when things really hit the skids… It’s just that we’re becoming so disconnected from a Miss/sub perspective. She’s moved on from SL in a major way, only in-world on Tuesdays for the weekly discussions, and we talk on Skype once or twice a week, usually with others of the family. Quite the change from when we used to spend a few hours a day together at Forum and either talked or texted at least twice a day.

More thoughts, exploration in the next few days.

(oops, forgot to hit Publish on this one last night)

So the holidays are coming, starting with Thanksgiving this week here in the US and leading to the Christmas/New Year’s break. Time perhaps for some reflection on the last year? On Christmas day it will be one year since Miss Tara collared me. Hard to believe it’s been a year really. I’ll be reflecting on the year and the future in the next few weeks, there’s been ups and downs, hardly surprising. Things have settled down into a fairly steady state though and I do want to spend some time reflecting on that steady state, but that’s for another post (how’s that for a teaser? ).

On the DC Designs side, things have stagnated a little, I think my ADHD is getting the better of me there. I’ve got… um… three major projects underway and they’re all just creeping along. The projects are:

1. A replacement for the now-defunct megaprim.sl (yes I know the SALT hud is out there, and PrimSearch, but megaprim.sl had search flexibility that PrimSearch just doesn’t).
2. Bane Custodian implant and Maintenance Station.
3. Upgrades to Chat Enhancer and Ultimate Titler to bring them up to my new framework (which will allow me to complete my hosting provider migration too)

The main framework is pretty much complete, though the RLV scripting is still giving me some trouble. I’m sorely tempted to severely simplify that piece in the interest of getting something completed. I’m anticipating that over the December break I should be able to make some serious progress.

Meanwhile on the FL front, my wife and I are looking at the first holidays where we’re not going to be spending them with family, just the two of us. There is major estrangement between her and her family, and our son is in college now, and doing his best not to get caught in the middle of it… which means he’s spending Thanksgiving with them and Friday with us. If we had the financial means, we’d travel to visit my family instead, but it will all work out fine in the end, we’re not going to let the nonsense ruin our happiness because we’ve got the most important thing: each other.

Been a couple of weeks since I blogged, and I’ve got a week beginning that’s frankly not going to be all that much fun. I’m a little behind at work because I was sick last week, plus the beginning of this week is interrupted by a couple of appointments this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Not the best way to catch up.

Missing blogging last night didn’t help either, it’s not like it hasn’t been a regular assignment for the last, oh, 8 months or so. I guess I’m back to that struggle I’ve had off and on with endowing Miss with authority and ownership. It’s been a bit of a rough time for us as an us lately, she’s been very busy in FL, I’ve been very busy in FL, our timing has been off for weeks. When she’s got time, I don’t, when I’ve got time, she doesn’t. Even when we’ve scheduled time, something has managed to conflict for one of us. This Thursday looks like we’ll connect fine, and yesterday she was able to come in during the Forum’s Halloween dance. We’re both committed to keeping going, to reconnecting. Still, we’re struggling a little to figure out what that looks like and to make it happen.

It will, I have no doubt.

I did just realise it’s a pattern I’ve seen before in myself, a pattern that to some degree I’m repeating at work. Cycling between things going very well and things going very poorly. With work that cycle has been mostly on the poorly side since my wife’s stroke, though that has improved a lot over the last few months. Still, I am on a down cycle with work at the moment, nothing dramatic, but it’s there. Same is true with… well frankly, with everything else. I know it’s temporary, and I know that today marks the beginning of the upswing. I would like to see these cycles end up more along the lines of going from very very good to merely very good instead

Miss and I haven’t really had any time together lately, FL has been extremely busy for both of us and we end up missing each other with scary consistency. She’ll be online, and I’ll be busy doing something outside SL, or I’ll be in SL and she’ll have company over, etc. etc.

The good news is that we’re still in close contact, and that everything is going fine. It’s actually, in a backhanded sort of way, good what’s going on at the moment, life is settling down and we’re both finding that our lives are getting busier.

So, not a lot to report other than that life in general is pretty good.

Some good, some not so good, some progressing.

Miss and I have been not connecting lately, seems like when I’m around she isn’t, and when she’s around I’m not. We’re both feeling it, and we’re both finding it disconcerting, and we’re both committed to finding ways to reconnect. All is well. In fact, we both missed an anniversary this last week: This last Thursday marked six months since she permanently collared me. I’ve only ever been in a collar that long once before and in a lot of ways it really didn’t count. This one does. It’s hard to even imagine anything else.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting productive again at work, at home, in SL. I’ve released new versions of Chat Enhancer and Ultimate Titler, finally getting a couple of pieces together that I’ve wanted to for ages: In-place, automatic updates and modular updates. The in-place updates came about because I’m scheming like mad about my Bane Custodian product that’s in development. The thing is, a fully restricted bane simply cannot apply updates the way normal people can, it has to be totally automated because they may not be able to touch, they almost certainly cannot rez objects. Plus, I plan to have a whole line of plugins for the Custodian, so modular updates are a total necessity. As is my next generation script framework and backend, but that’s beside the point

All in all, I’m feeling good about how things are going. I’m making measurable progress, I’m feeling good about myself, except for some ennui about Miss and I not having any real time together (and to be clear, that’s on both of us, I’m not pointing fingers), I have no real complaints at all. Oh, and the ball of fluff we recently acquired at home is certainly helping. She’s an eight week old kitten and she’s definitely keeping us on our toes!

Last night around 21:00SLT, my hosting provider went off the air. Well, to be fair, one of its datacenters went off the air. Welcome to the Internet, outages happen. What disturbed me was the total lack of notification that this had occurred. All I could see was that my domains were dead, and worse, my products were unable to get to the database to get their settings.

As I scrambled to get notices out through my Hippo Groups, and via my message board at the main shop location, it occurred to me how my customer service differed from my hosting provider’s. I did my level best to notify everyone of the nature of the problem and the best ETA I was aware of. My hosting provider is still this morning just saying “We were given time to do a safe shutdown but that was it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience” Note that they had two other datacenters up and running, their main website was running as were their forums. They had a power outage a couple of years ago that took down one of their datacenters and they sent emails to all customers notifying them of the outage. Apparently that’s beyond them now.

So… I’m taking action to prevent the sort of outage we saw last night. It is not acceptable for my products to simply stop working because of an outage off-world. This is going to result in some significant changes internally, but for the most part they should be invisible to you, my customers. I’ve been working on a new script framework for my products which will provide much more flexibility in handling hiccups like this, as well as some nice shiny new features like fully automated, in-place update delivery. I’m also in the process of moving corvans-creations.com and dc-designs-online.com to a new hosting provider. One consequence of this move is actually that dc-designs-online.com is essentially going off the air for about a month or two since ICANN rules say you can’t move a domain that’s less than 60 days old. Once things are moved over, I’ll put a redirect up so that dc-designs-online.com will point to corvans-creations.com so that transition should be pretty painless. The move of corvans-creations.com should be painless as well, though there may be a brief outage once the domain transfer actually happens. I’m working hard to minimize the impact of that.

I take customer service very very seriously. I want people to be delighted with my products, and delighted with the support they receive for my products. An unexpected, unplanned, unannounced outage like we had last night is not acceptable. I’m going to make sure that no matter what, even if I get hit by a bus and all off-world/in-world services associated with me go away, your purchases will continue to operate properly.

Pun only slightly intended. A shortened week thanks to the long weekend, though a productive one both in SL and in FL. I’m making some serious progress on a couple of projects of mine (watch for an announcement soon over on the DC Designs blog).

Miss and I spent some time together, played some Greedy, got started on the new Twisted Hunt, generally doing well.

Then Thursday happened. At the risk of outing myself a little bit, I live in San Bruno, California. For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been watching the news lately, well, we had a small incident Thursday evening: An entire neighborhood blew up. We live about a mile away from the location where the pipeline exploded, I was sitting outside on our balcony when the explosion occurred and it sounded like an F-18 flying right over…. but an F-18 flying over doesn’t stay the same volume for 30 seconds or more. It wasn’t until we heard the sirens that we knew something was seriously wrong.

So far the death toll is at 6, there are 4 people still missing, 38 houses completely destroyed and they still aren’t sure how many others are damaged. It’s a real mess, and a few hundred people are still displaced. We’re just glad that the winds did not shift during the night and push the firestorm towards us. Not fun, not fun at all.

Today marked Miss Tara’s Master’s fourth anniversary with his first sub. We had a party at my place, I set up the dance floor, booth, etc. and had great fun DJing again. It’s been too long since I DJed. Time to resurrect the Wednesday Hump Day parties I think. It did get me thinking a bit, it’s now over a year since Miss Tara became my protector, and a little over five months since she put her collar on me for good. Our relationship has evolved in that time, but never wavered. I’m as much hers now as I was the day she locked her collar around my neck.

Will be celebrating our fourth anniversary? I don’t see why not, something serious would have to occur for that not to happen.

Meanwhile, Miss is back home and getting ready to return to work tomorrow. Her recovery is going well which is a huge relief.

As for me, I’m making some progress on my new Inventory Management system, and work is shaping up. All in all things are going pretty well.