//Work

First up is work. Things have been going great! [...]]]> So, yeah, i know.. it’s been a while. It’s been a combination of things that have kept me from posting anything; mainly laziness i think. But i have my laptop at work today, and it’s lunch time, so i figured.. why the hell not? It’s about f-ing time.

//Work

First up is work. Things have been going great! I’m still learning more than my brain can handle every day and I’ve been put on a multitude of projects. Well, one project but a bunch of tasks. The issues i thought i was going to have for a while, like understanding how everything is layered and how they like to structure things have come and gone. I’m really starting to understand the bigger picture of how everything works together.  Things are picking up now though, there are release dates that have to be hit, and code that needs to be pushed. And there’s a new guy. He seems pretty cool, and seems to know his stuff. And most of all, has replaced both Zach and I as the new guy. Though we’re still noobs.

//Eve

I’ve become re-addicted to Eve. I know, i seem to say that a lot. But this time does seem a little different. ONYX Heavy Industries has a good bunch of people in it, and I enjoy hanging out with them while online. Heck, there have been a few time when i wouldn’t even be in game, and i’d just be doing my thing (programming or whatever) and chat on teamspeak.

//Development

Speaking of development, that bug has bitten again too. I’ve been working on this http://www.blackmesacorp.com/eveCharCheck. It’s going to become a site that allows directors in corporations to check character’s Limited API keys and see if they can really do all the things they claim (based on the skills and certificates they have). There is currently only very limited functionality, but i hope to expand on it soon once i figure out some major bugs. Something between the ale Eve API libraries and my database libraries is colliding.. and i’m not sure why it’s doing that.

//Social gatherings

I’ve been hanging out too. Not as much as i used to, but i think that’s good too. Sometimes i just want to be alone at my house.  I went and saw The Crazies the other weekend. It wasn’t a bad flick for a horror/thriller/action-ish movie.

//New computer parts

I bought a new monitor the other day, it’s wicked. I am now rocking two 22″ LCD monitors! So much desktop space! They’re Acer x223w‘s and they’re fabulous!

Thursday – 9 July 2009

I wake up around 7-ish to find that my backup of all my music from my old server (natalie) to [...]]]> It’s monday again And it’s back to the real-life grind. This weekend was a lot of fun. Let’s all hop into the way-back-machine and i can tell you of my adventures!

Thursday – 9 July 2009

I wake up around 7-ish to find that my backup of all my music from my old server (natalie) to the new server (natasha) had failed sometime during the night .. sad panda indeed! So i restarted the transfer hoping that i would be able to get a few more gigs of music over to the new server before it was time to hit the road. As i waited i watched the new episode of Top Gear and Bleach. It was getting close to leaving time so i shut down all my machines and began to dismantle all the connections. Then i remembered that my computer only had a 10/100 NIC in it, and that if i was to do any proper leeching i should probably take the gigabit card out of natalie and put it in my desktop (allison). I did this and rebooted my machine to make sure that the new card worked. Well, of course it didn’t. So i hopped on my laptop, headed over to the DLink website and grabbed the drivers.

I hit the road sometime around noon (instead of 10am like i’d planned). I got to the U of L campus around 1-ish and unloaded my gear. Dark (Vickers) was nice enough to get my stuff up to my seat while i went and parked my car. I get to the main hall and find my seat. I begin to get everything hooked up when i realize i’d forgotten my wireless reciever for my keyboard and mouse at the house!  I quickly went and set up natasha up on server row and then headed out to walmart for a cheap keyboard and mouse. I got a logitech keyboard for 11 bucks and a mouse for 9. Not bad for a quick buy with no shopping around. I get back and set up my computer and start the process of making sure everything works. Internet, check, Steam online, check, remote connection to my server, check. Everything looks good to go! So what’s a person to do now? PLAY GAMES! I played some Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and a few other games. In the middle of a game of Left 4 Dead we hear this huge POW! Dark’s power supply had blown up! So a few people who were also having computer issues left with him to try and find replacement parts. Sean and Kristina made it up that night to get their stuff set up and played a few games too. Thursday has started to blur into Friday..

Friday – 10 July 2009

I woke up around 6am in front of my keyboard. I’d tried sleeping on the floor, but without a pillow it wasn’t comfortable enough to get a good night’s sleep. Even my day pack wasn’t soft enough. So i just put my head down and got a few hours of sleep. I hopped into the local IRC server and chatted with some of the other gamers that were just woken up/still awake. After walking to my car to get my some fresh clothes and brush my teeth i came back in to grab a quick bite to eat and see what all i could find on the network to leech. Oh so much goodness!

I really can’t keep straight all the stuff i got. Mainly games i’d wanted to try out but never wanted to spend money on due to hearing mixed reviews. I got some movies that i’d wanted to see, but for the same reason as the games i never bought. Maybe i’ll actually get the ones i really like

DODGEBALL!! That’s right, we had a dodgeball tournament. Real life dodgeball, not some weird computer version. We had a team in. The prizes weren’t bad for a for-fun tourney: 6 and 4 GB sets for the first and second place team isn’t a bad deal!! We only made it three rounds before we got beaten. If you want, there’s footage on youtube, just search for “Million Man Lan 8″ and there should be a bunch of videos. It was fun none-the-less. Well, back to gaming!

Around 1 or 2 AM i decided that i would catch a ride to the hotel that some of the guys had gotten, a real bed (or maybe atleast nice floor) and a shower was well in order! when we got there it was only me and AK and.. i got a bed! it was so nice to be able to sleep in something like a normal sleeping position!

Saturday – 11 July 2009

I wake up, take a shower, and head with the rest back to the gaming hall. We get there, play some games and prep for the Left 4 Dead tournament we’d signed up for. There were a total of 10 teams, so the last 4 teams to sign up had to battle for actual tournament slots (10 teams don’t fit into a binary tournament setup). we were one of the first, so we got a free pass to the second round It wasn’t good enough though, our first match we had to go up against another xBS team. We played hard and we came out victorious! Our second match didn’t go so well. The other team got through to the end as survivors and took a huge lead. That was the only time that anyone finished a map, all the rest of the maps the survivors died. But like the dodgeball, we were there for fun, and not so much the prizes.

Moar gaming…

Falling asleep in the back of my car…

Sunday – 12 July 2009

I wake up in my car thinking.. i should have cracked the windows..

I change clothes, brush my teeth, and head back to the hall to find that it was only me, Sean, and Kristina left from our group. I guess everyone else packed it up late in the night. So what should one do about this? Get some last minute leeching done!! I was getting some really impressive speeds from some of the FTP servers people had running. Up to 10MB/s.  Around 10 I started to pack up my computer and haul stuff to my car. Sean and Kristina finally woke up and did the same. We went to Denny’s for breakfast and then headed back home.

Once at the house i cleaned up my area in the office a bit (might as well since the computers were out) and then set my computers up again. I then took a most needed shower and thought i’d take a nap. That nap ended at midnight.

So right now my body is totally confused as to what time it really is. And my sleep schedule will probably be pretty messed up for the next few days. But it was well worth it. I think i’m going to go to the next one in January.

Over all, that’s been a nice chunk of cash out of my pocket. I guess it’s been coming though, i haven’t made a [...]]]> So over the last week i’ve been spending money pretty freely.. I bought ArmA II, I bought parts for a new server, and just now i bought new wheels and tires for my car.

Over all, that’s been a nice chunk of cash out of my pocket. I guess it’s been coming though, i haven’t made a really big purchase in a while. When i mean big, i mean more than 1000 dollars. This should be my fix for a while now.

Anyway, on to what i bought. ArmA II is a video game that’s more like a war simulation than anything else. People, weapons, vehicles, plants all behave as closely as possible lik their real life counterpart. Very Intense.

I also bought parts for a new server. Natalie, my current server has treated me very well for the last 5 years or so. But yesterday when I started a backup of my desktop machine (so i could have a nice clean install of XP for next week’s Lanwar) … … let’s just say it’s still backing up the 220GB’s of files right now. My network is faster than the I/O on my hard drives! So I put together this machine (keep in mind that i wanted it to be inexpensive AND upgradable).

GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P Motherboard (Supports up to 16GB of RAM!)

AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz Processor (Plan to upgrade to something else later, like a Phenom II or some such)

AllComponents 2GB RAM (2GB to start, i’ll want to end up with 16GB eventually)

ASUS EAH3450/DI/256M Radeon HD 3450 (I don’t need fancy graphics for a server)

2x HITACHI Deskstar P7K500 HDP725050GLA360 (0A35415) 500GB (The plan is to do RAID 0, striping)

COOLER MASTER Elite RC-330-KKR1 (nice case with power supply included!)

And finally the new wheels and tires for my car. I got them over at TireRack.com and I’m having them shipped to Big O Tires in Radcliff (a feature of the site, which i think is bad-ass). They should be there by Tuesday, so i should have a new server and a new set of wheels and tires before Lanwar starts.

This should be an exciting week!

Let’s start back on Friday. I really didn’t do much, mainly read, nap, play video games, mow the lawn, drink beers. Speaking of the lawn.. a few days earlier we’d put down some weed killer and it seems to be working. Now all that [...]]]> I’m not a dad, oh no sir. But my dad is

Let’s start back on Friday. I really didn’t do much, mainly read, nap, play video games, mow the lawn, drink beers. Speaking of the lawn.. a few days earlier we’d put down some weed killer and it seems to be working. Now all that needs to be done is get the lawn feed out and get that grass back to being the dominant plant in the yard. I’m serious, half the lawn is brown with dead weeds atm!  Anyway, back to the weekend.. I got a call from Michelle! It was the first day they were allowed to use the phone, so that was pretty exciting Friday night i went out with some friends. First we went to BW3′s for dinner, which was delish and then to some bar in Louisville, The Electric Cowboy or some such. It was ‘eh’.. Not really my scene. Lots of cowboy hats and older people and yeah well you should get the picture.  I left pretty early, it was only midnight i think, and went home.

Saturday we had our weekly SoNotSoft meeting. We talked about what kind of moves we want in our game and tried really hard to come up with a lengthly list. There’s only so much you can do with a pencil i guess. After the meeting Josh came over and we played Counter-Strike, we both suck horribly and soon decided that food was more important than video games. We ended up going to Kanzai in E-town. Man i love sushi! The Thai Chilli Roll was exquisit! I was invited to go to a River Bats game with Sarah, but to be honest I didn’t feel like driving all the way back up to Louisville. So I went back home and played some video games and took a nap.

Sunday I was up early and hit Walmart first thing. I’d heard that ammunition supplies were low (besides every gun owner always saying ammo is low). It was true, there were only 4 boxes of .40 S&W left. I bought three of them. I got back to the house and got out my pistol and made sure that it was clean and not covered in rust My dad came over around 12:30 and showed me his new rifle. A sweet M1903. We headed out and got to Knob Creek Gun Range around 1.  I fired a few magazines of ammo through my pistol (Springfield XD-40) and then tried my dad’s new rifle. Man does that thing kick! After only 5 rounds my shoulder was pretty beaten up.. After i found out later because i wasn’t holding it quite right So now i have a nicely bruised shoulder. After we’d finished we went back to my place to clean our weapons and eat some food. Sean started up the grill and put burgers on. Things took too long i guess, so dad left, since he still had to go take the dogs on a walk. And then Kristina came over and kidnapped Sean for dinner. So i was there with a grill full of burgers. There’s no way i could eat them all Instead i played some Eve. We were trying to run some wormhole plexes.. we didn’t do too well. Apoll0s lost his domi and Scab lost his apoc. I got a bit frustrated and logged pretty much right after that. I went back to reading a new book (Relentless) for a few hours before i went to bed.

Now it’s back to work for a few days before the next weekend, which will be pretty busy too. Family is coming in starting on Thursday for the family reunion my dad is hosting this year. Saturday we get a tour of the Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown.

My corp, Legion of Black Mesa, has — since the last time I posted — left Capital Storm and has joined up with United Freemen Alliance. Many of us have moved out to 0.0 to [...]]]> I haven’t made an Eve post in a while. No worries, I’m still very loyal to CCP and their very awesome game.

My corp, Legion of Black Mesa, has — since the last time I posted — left Capital Storm and has joined up with United Freemen Alliance. Many of us have moved out to 0.0 to help with the effort to claim sov, as well as make iskies   Things are going a bit slower than I had hoped. Many of our players don’t really seem to be making the move out to Geminate as quickly as I personally would like them to. On top of that, people that used to be blue to us are now red, and have been pewpewing it up in our space. This makes me uncomfortable, because i don’t like shooting at friends.

On the plus side though, we’re planning on putting a tower up soon, and hopefully we’ll be able to start doing small scale corp mining ops out there. Some of that ore is really nice.

Eve Apps

Carnes and I have been working on some webapps to help pilots with their carebearing.

Exploration

Personally I like Carnes’ tool the best, the exploration tool. It can be found here. It’s IGB only, so you’ll have to check it out in game. Basically it helps keep track of what systems have been scanned, what was found in them, and if those things have been cleared or not. This should help people save probes, so they don’t scan out a system that someone else has already cleared out. The only downside to this is that the IGB is extremely slow. But i guess if you’re waiting three minutes for a scan, the IGB’s slowness isn’t that big of a deal.

Mining Shares

I wrote a quick mining share calculator, here. Basically you choose your region, update the prices for it (it’s a manual input right now — I use the average prices for each mineral for the day; from the market history tab). Once that’s done you can put in the mineral yields from each mineral type, choose how many shares you want, check if there’s going to be a corporate share added (for corp ops, or whatever), and click calculate. The results will be shown as an ISK amount and how many of each mineral. I’m still working on getting it to work in the IGB, but it’s a bit more complicated than I thought.