[donaldscrankshaw] Donald: Back online

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Posted by Donald:
Back online
http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1212410870.shtml


   Back of the Envelope was down this weekend. I doubt that many people
   noticed, but it was rather infuriating to me. The reason for it can be
   found over at the Powerblogs development blog [1]website:

     Yesterday, our service provider sent out this message:

     This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear
     shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three
     walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one
     was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
     We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect
     the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a
     high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our
     backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire
     department.

   Aside from other Powerblogs sites, such as [2]Dean's World and [3]The
   Volokh Conspiracy, some other prominent sites suffered from this
   service interruption, such as Blank Label Comics, which supports
   [4]Schlock Mercenary and [5]Shortpacked. The main effect of this on my
   blogging is that it's set me behind on getting the [6]Storyblogging
   Carnival put together. Hopefully, I'll be able to get that done
   tonight.
   In other news, I submitted "[7]The Office of Second Chances" to
   [8]Coach's Midnight Diner on Saturday. I'm glad to have it done,
   although I'm not completely confident of what I submitted. I didn't
   think "Aha, this is the perfect version of this story," so much as
   "It's due today, I better send in what I have." Not that the version
   that I sent in was a bad version. I'm just not sure that it was the
   best version. I wrote four separate versions of Second Chances. Not
   revisions, mind you, which is merely where I take a story and edit it,
   changing the details but keeping the same basic plot. Versions are
   different enough that they don't tell the same story, and this one has
   had four. The first two were boring, and I don't miss them. The third,
   I thought, was pretty good, but a friend of mine thought it read too
   much like a Young Adult story (I didn't entirely agree), so I changed
   it. I wasn't certain that this fourth version was better than the
   third version, but it is the version I sent in. What I really needed
   was time away from this story, so I could come back to it with fresh
   eyes and then judge it for myself. Unfortunately, the compressed
   timeline for writing this story, and the decision to discard the
   second verison and write a third with just a week to go, didn't give
   me any time to do that. If the story gets rejected, I'll come back to
   it after some time away and see if I can produce the perfect version
   of the story.

References

   1. http://dev.powerblogs.com/posts/1212376328.shtml
   2. http://www.deanesmay.com/
   3. http://volokh.com/
   4. http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
   5. http://www.shortpacked.com/
   6. http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/storyblogging_carnival
   7. http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1201756114.shtml
   8. http://www.themidnightdiner.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/44-SubsOpen.html