What I Did On My Weekend, by Gaea (aged nearly six months)
Ahoy there, folks. Don't think that just because I'm not doing Question of the Week anymore that you don't have to listen to me babble. I have plenty of babbling to do. Bwahahahahaha.
As you may have noticed, things went pretty haywire over the weekend. Now, I work a few weekend shifts, and one of them happens to be quite early in what I consider my day. (To explain: I am awake at very odd hours.) I don't have a fancy home office or anything, my computer is about four feet from my bed, so I usually wake up, pummel the alarm clock into submission, go back to sleep, pummel the alarm clock again nine minutes later (oh, the wonders of "snooze"), roll out of bed, and hit "enter" on all of the screens I use for work, which I've set up the night before with everything all ready so that my sleepy brain can cope.
This routine went very, very well on Sunday, until nothing worked. I believe my exact response was something along the lines of "gnuh?"
I tried the forums. "Gnuh?"
I tried the oceans again. "Blarg."
I tried the oceanmaster chat program. "Whuh-eek.
I was aware that some folks had been having trouble connecting for a couple of days due to some ISP iffiness, and really should have guessed it was related to that, but keep in mind I'd been awake perhaps fifteen minutes at this point, and I don't drink my caffeine in the mornings. (Cola for breakfast being a bit weird, even by my standards.) Naturally, then, I drew the obvious conclusion: my internet was down. I rebooted my computer, then went to yell at the modem. By the time my computer was back up, my internet actually WAS down, which fortunately only lasted about thirty seconds, because by this point I was wide awake and panicking a bit — there's not many people to cover a shift at that particular time of day if someone doesn't show up! Fortunately, it's also a time of day when you're all relatively peaceful except for the odd conniption, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility for my partner on that shift to keep an eye on my oceans as well as theirs, but nobody wants to be That Guy/That Gal.
When my internet came back after the longest thirty seconds in recorded history, there was a missive from Hera on my screen, to the effect of "it's not just you. Everything's gone. For everyone." Imagine my relief! My shift consisted of hitting the F5 button a lot until I remembered that I have a plugin for Firefox that I can set to refresh a tab for me. Someone saw puzzlepirates.com a couple of hours in, but it was later deemed to be a hallucination. It was quite a peaceful shift, but on the whole, I think I'd rather be dealing with the odd conniption fit. Much more entertaining, and less likely to lead to me waking up with keyboard-face. Not that I fell asleep. Honest.
Posted by Gaea in General | Sep 02, 2008 | 18 Comments | permalink
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Posted by Sharktail, Sage
I had the same thought when I logged on. I reset the router, rebooted my laptop, played with some links -- it took me nearly twenty minutes or so to notice that it wasn't any fault of mine. Heh.
With that said, a poetry contest seems like the perfect way to tie up the mahem. All I had to do was take a look at the title to know that I just had to enter. ;-)
September 02, 2008 at 08:41 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by Gaea
"Other websites? Whaddaya mean, other websites? Three Rings is the whole of the internet, maaaan!"
September 03, 2008 at 03:36 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Pleun
Having been relaying the status on the connectivity issues for other flagmates for some time already, i was lucky enough to realize exactly what was going on. I had more of an "oh bugger, now i can't get on anymore either" reaction. Still unsure about what the hell was causing all those problems, i did email hypnos about it spreading...
But uh... conniption? What?
Oh and btw, there is absolutely notting wrong with cola for breakfast! Notting... Okay nowadays i start with a cup of chocolate milk... But if i'm out of that...
September 03, 2008 at 03:39 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Ghyslaine Rhodin
Whenever Y!PP doesn't load, the first thing I do is try something huge, like Google. If that doesn't come up, it's usually me. The next two things I did were a ping and a trace. Then, I emailed the results to support and tarted to Dirtyfoot that America caught Europe's connectivity issues.
I personally don't drink cola of any sort. Tea, coffee, "water" with b vitamins and guarana, sure. But carbonation's a terrible thing to do to a perfectly good caffeine, especially in the morning.
September 03, 2008 at 08:18 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Gaea
By conniption, I mean sometimes a couple of people will get really annoyed at each other and do a cyclical complaining thing, which takes time, or there'll be a mass disconnect, which (understandably) people get upset about and can result in a bit of cleanup, especially if people were in Atlantis at the time! (Dude, where's my war frig?) Oddly, people with completely unrelated issues will tend to petition all at once, as well. :-)
September 03, 2008 at 09:41 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Greyrat
Yeah, I got up at 7:45 specifically to help out with the Malachite blockade.
I kept thinking of those poor flag royals, straining at the leash to go at it, but being totally denied.
I also thought: Gee, this is the first time I've seen this happen in the year or so I've been playing; I bet they still get some real hissy fits about it.
Then I went for a walk with my husband.
RL FTW! :)
September 03, 2008 at 10:00 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Skw, Malachite
I would tell my story on how I figured out was happening but I didn't. Luckily I was dropping my brother off at college during this whole time. And I heard I got back like 50 minutes after everything got back to normal.
September 03, 2008 at 10:04 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Sxygrl, Sage
It's was really interesting to me, I normaly don't log on early on Sundays, but since I had no school Monday, I decided I would make the best of the morning and jump on YPP early. I rarely play for more than 2 hours a day, but I found the simple fact that I couldn't log on, or check the forums to see why I couldn't got me into a trance that trapped me infront of the computer for what I think was 5 hours. What a waste of a Sunday.
September 03, 2008 at 11:21 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by Deedeeiam
I was one of the people that couldn't access it the day before. Woke up, and it didn't work. Went outside to suntan and just checked the computer when I flipped sides. It was enjoyable.
September 04, 2008 at 05:55 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Skidwanlus
I don't know what you're all talking about. I (as usual) simply drew the magic circle of chunky and called upon the power of the holy waffle. Logged on without a problem. There was nobody else there, though, so crew chat was unusually boring. I believe I ended up running around and insulting the skellies and chatting with the sleeping turtles (which is how I usually spend my time anyways). Sadly they don't talk much.
Also I apparently can't answer simple math questions on the first try.
September 04, 2008 at 10:11 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Deedeeiam
I swear the math question is set to randomly tell you that you are wrong. >.>
September 04, 2008 at 05:40 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by IVdripper
Wait, what do you mean you are not doing QOTW anymore?
And what is this RL you all speak of?
IV(clueless in cyberspace)
September 04, 2008 at 07:48 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by Fiercepirate
/me points IV to the last QOTW..
http://blog.puzzlepirates.com/gaea/entry/qotw_eleven_summation
September 05, 2008 at 12:19 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Pletoo
Hmmm...must have been quite a stressful weekend if you aged nearly 6 months!
September 05, 2008 at 10:28 AM PDT | permalink
Posted by Gaea
Time goes by reaaaaally slowly when there's no Puzzle Pirates.
September 05, 2008 at 03:27 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by Addihockey of Sage
Wow, Sounds like the same story I had Gaea =P. I woke up, fell asleep again, woke up AGAIN, then finally limped out of bed. When I tried to log onto YPP, it didnt work, so I thought that PP was fixing the oceans since they have been a bit spotty lately. So I decided to go onto YPPedia to make some new pages. Then, it displayed an error message saying that the address was not valid. So I tried the forums-same thing. I decided to reboot my computer (wow what a coincidence!). But to no avail. Half the day I was trying to log on, so... yeah, until I almost phoned the internet compony. But I didnt and went to play outside :P. -Addihockey
September 07, 2008 at 07:21 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by Ianthe
Whenever I wake up and immediately want to go on PP, I don't even have to get out of bed. I just drag my body to the computer desk in my room, thus keeping my legs toasty while my computer wakes up. =]
September 13, 2008 at 02:04 PM PDT | permalink
Posted by bubbsies from virdian,
i got Firewall on at the moment, but it may just be YPP, i dunno if my little brain will be able to figure this one out..
but i need that little brain..i guess, defenitaly working out these random math questions!
November 19, 2008 at 08:38 PM PST | permalink