Recent Game Outages

Wow, so it has been 10 years since I last updated this blog. That's a record that I hope remains unbroken.

The game has stopped working a few times recently, one of them so dramatically that the whole site was down for over a day. Thank you to everyone who alerted me to the outages, and I apologize for the amount of time it took for me to fix it.

The minor periodic outages happened when I took too long in between runs of the maintenance script that compresses and moves the data generated by the game out of the way; This caused the storage space to fill up, which causes the game to stop working. In the past few days I've done a deep cleaning and freed up enough space to prevent that problem from arising for years to come.

The major outage was due to a glitch in routine maintenance by my provider, who corrected the problem swiftly as soon as I submitted a trouble ticket. It was nerve wracking because the symptoms of the glitch looked a lot like massive data loss that you might expect from a malicious hack - but it all turned out fine.

Thank you a million times over to the many players who donated money in the aftermath of the outages. Be assured, however, that the game is NOT in any danger due to lack of funds. I am keeping the donation link up on the site only because I think there are people who would like to show their support that way regardless of the underlying need. My main use for donated funds is to "pay it forward" by supporting creative people on Patreon whose work I enjoy.

At the end of 2010, the year of my previous blog entry, I joined Davis Law Firm as their bankruptcy attorney for Waco, Texas. That turned out to be a good fit, though the office was in a bit of a chaotic state when I signed on. It was the first time I had ever been responsible for managing other people, not just working on my own.

I am still in that same Waco office, but at the start of 2018 it went back to being the Law Office of Evan Simpson: I bought the practice from Davis Law Firm. Unlike in 2010, when I was struggling to get started, I now have a staff of four, experience running a small business, and hundreds of clients.

Law Office Update

Just to let you know, things have been going quite well on the lawyering front. I was going to say "you can tell from my long absence ..." but stopped when I realized that, given my posting frequency, you really can't tell anything from the time between posts.

I have over a dozen clients now, and have successfully filed several cases. After a few months, I decided to share an office with another local attorney who mentored me back when I was just getting started. I still make house calls, but quite a few people prefer to meet at my office. When I'm on the road, I use a nifty little HP netbook with built-in Verizon cellular data service and a (relatively) portable little HP LaserJet 1018. One of these days I'm going to get myself a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Portable Document Scanner, and my house-call kit will be complete.

Oh, and I recently got my 15 seconds of fame on local TV (skip to 1:59 for my first echoey appearance).

Law Office of Evan Simpson

Since getting chat working, I've been busy, but not with the game. I decided to try to make a go of it as a one-man law office. Obviously I'm a computer geek as well as a lawyer, so I'm going to use technology wherever I think it will help. Bankruptcy law is a very computer-friendly area, since the court requires all filings to be electronic, and there are several sophisticated programs that can be used to help prepare bankruptcy schedules. I can get a ten-case license for Bankruptcy Pro, the one I'm most familiar with, for only $250. I have to keep my overhead low, so renting office space is out of the question. I'm turning this into a positive by making house calls. Add evening and weekend hours, and I think I'll be able to help a lot of people who would have a serious problem with taking half a day off from work to see a lawyer. The site for my Waco bankruptcy law office finally got indexed by Google last Friday, so we'll see how it goes. At least to start, though, I expect to still have plenty of time to work on the game.

Chat!

(updated twice) A lot of people have been asking for this feature for a very long time. For that reason, I'm making a beta test version available even though it isn't fully cooked.

The chat panel starts out closed; To see what people are saying you either open it up (using the little down-triangle icon) or say something yourself. To say something, type it in like you would a guess, but with a single- or double-quote mark in front of it.

In the works: highlighting teammates, and the ability to customize who you see in chat (friends, teammates, people playing 4x4 or 5x5, etc.)

Why You Always Test In Several Browsers

I rolled out a new version a few minutes ago. No one was supposed to notice, since the changes were are internal -- making logins and suchlike more efficient, and making it easier for me to introduce stuff like OpenId.

Unfortunately, I hadn't tested my improvements in any browser other than FireFox on Linux, and it promptly blew up and wouldn't let anyone but me and about four other lucky duckies log in. I spotted the incompatibility after a few minutes, and it should now work for everyone.

If it just sits and spins when you try to log in, click on the "Reload Page" link at the bottom of the sidebar before panicking.

And I'm Back

Well, so much for that. For reasons I'm not going to go into here, I'm no longer employed. It's a shame, not just because I'm out of a job, but because I was really enjoying working there. I learned a great deal, and loved the fact that we could help 90% of the people who came to see us.

So now I'm job hunting again. This may also allow me some spare time to work on the game, but I'm not going to promise anything.

In Which I Announce My Full Employment

I got a job! A good one! This is happy news for me, but not so much for the game (at least in the short term). I'm a bankruptcy-attorney-in-training, and between that and my evening classes in Spanish and Philosophy (don't ask) it's about all I can do to fall into bed in the evening. Still, it's not like development of the game has ever gone on at a breakneck pace.