Newstocks

War 101

Took my first Eve University class last night.

Almost missed it, because I stupidly thought that 2am Thursday Eve Time (i.e. GMT) was 10pm Thursday Bermuda time, when of course it's 10pm on Wednesday. Fortunately, I was online anyway and saw the messages about the upcoming lesson in corp chat, so managed to get myself over to Korsiki in the nick of time.

The class lasted the best part of two hours, and was run by a guy called Angelica, who sounded like he was German. It was pretty good. There were over 20 of us in the class, and most of the time we were just listening to Angelica over TeamSpeak, with the opportunity to type questions in fleet chat.

Most of the class was about war: how to know when another corporation has declared war on Eve University, and what to do when it happens. There was a lot of useful information and by the end of the class I had a full A4 page of closely scribbled notes.

We also got to see our corp's POS or "Player Owned Station". It was a bit disappointing. I was expecting a big station that you could dock in, but it seemed to be just a big pylon floating in space with a few manufacturing facilities attached to it. Apparently dockable POSes are known as "outposts" and can only be built in lowsec space over which your corp has sovereignty - not something that we have.

The last part of the class was a very brief introduction to fleet movement and gate camping tactics, but I suspect I still have a lot more to learn in this area.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Aidan's still not making much sense when he talks, and his vocabulary doesn't seem to be growing very fast. Nevertheless, it's clear that he understands a lot more than he can communicate.

"Close the door, Aidan," we'll say, and he'll go and close it.

"Go and get a can of corn," we'll tell him, and he'll go and get it.

"Point to the cow," we'll say while reading one of his books, and nine times out of ten, he'll point to it.

It's really pretty amazing.

Good deed for the day

One of the gaming blogs that I read had their account hacked today, and lost a number of posts as a result. Fortunately, the blog includes whole posts in its RSS feed, not just excerpts, and my feed reader had already downloaded and cached the deleted posts. So I was able to copy-and-paste them into an email and send them to the blog's author so he could repost them.

It feels good to have been able to help.

Eve University

Finally got accepted into Eve University last night, after another hour-long chat with one of their recruitment officers.

I'm going to move my base of operations up to Korsiki, the location of their HQ, so I can better take part in the classes and fleet operations that they run. It's only 8 jumps away from where I'm operating now - not far, but far enough that it makes sense to take all my assets with me. So I started gathering them up from the stations they're currently scattered between, and spent the rest of my time familiarising myself with the corp's rules and installing TeamSpeak (mandatory for participating in the corp's activities). Didn't even get to run a single mission. Eve's like that: it's easy to spend hours busying yourself with minutiae, be it figuring out a skill training plan or getting to grips with the game mechanics, and never actually leave the station you're docked in. Right now I'm quite liking that slow pace, although it remains to be seen whether that's still the case once the newness of the game starts to wear off.

Interviewing, and repeating missions

Had the first part of my interview for Eve University last night. I was expecting it to be short, something of a formality. What can you ask someone who's only been playing the game for two weeks, after all? But my conversation with the recruitment officer dragged on for a couple of hours, with sometimes lengthy pauses between messages as both of us were doing other things at the same time. It didn't really feel like an "interview" as such, more just a casual chat.

When it came time for me to go to bed, I suggested we carry on the interview when both of us were next online, hoping that he'd tell me that wasn't necessary and just welcome me into the corporation. But he didn't. I'm not sure whether this is a deliberate stalling tactic they employ with all new recruits, to weed out the folks who are keen from those who are not, but I guess I can understand if it is.

Found the first thing that I don't like about Eve last night: agents will sometimes give you missions that you've done before. Considering I've only been playing this character for a couple of days, I think it's pretty lame that I'm already running into this. I levelled a character from 1 to 70 in World of Warcraft without ever having to do the same quest twice. Guess that's one of the reasons why solo PvE content generally isn't considered Eve's strong suit.

Gamefest

I got a stack of new games for Christmas, which I'm slowly working my way through. Here are my impressions so far.

Crysis. This is the game I was looking forward to most, and on the whole, it didn't disappoint. While I question the wisdom of Crytek's apparent decision to optimise it for the next generation of PCs, I still managed to squeeze an acceptable 30fps or so out of my rig, which is now getting on for 18 months old. The early levels were by far the best, being the most free-form and giddily reminiscent of the old Far Cry. But even after you entered the alien ship, and the game started to go on rails, it was still an enjoyable ride. The only downside was the final boss fight. Even though I was playing on the "delta" difficulty setting, it was laughably easy and I wondered if it was actually bugged. I wasn't prepared for the cliffhanger ending either, which felt rather unsatisfying. Overall score? I'd give it 90%.

Unreal Tournament 3. This is a game that gives a whole new meaning to the word "frenetic". I'm a veteran first-person shooter gamer, but UT3 makes me feel like a geriatric, it's so fast. Unreal Tournament 2003, the last incarnation of the series that I played, wasn't anything like as crazy as this - Mandy used to enjoy playing that, but there's no way she'd survive in UT3. I started by playing through the single-player game, but hit one level where my retarded computer-controlled teammates kept getting stuck on the scenery, and now I'm unable to progress any further. Of course, online multiplayer is UT's strength, and that can be a lot of fun. I'll be dipping back into this whenever I need to sate my thirst for an ultra-twitch shooter. 84%

Gears of War. I didn't quite know what to expect from this, but overall I was a bit disappointed. The cover and active reload systems were interesting gameplay innovations, and the graphics were generally impressive. However I didn't like the generally washed-out colour palate that made all the environments seem rather drab, and my game was blighted by stuttery graphics and audio that would inexplicably drop out in the middle of some of the cutscenes. 80%

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I loved this. The environments were varied, the gameplay exciting and the presentation among the most cinematic of any game I've played. But what really made this game memorable were the numerous "wow" moments where I found myself staring at the screen in either awe or disbelief. The multiplayer doesn't seem too shabby, either, with Battlefield-style unlocks, and although I haven't played much of it yet, like UT3 I expect to return to play more when the mood grabs me. 93%

World in Conflict. I've only just started playing this RTS. Although it's by the same developers as the Ground Control series, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I've yet to find myself hooked. I think part of the problem is the silly story, which features the United States being invaded by the Russian army, which somehow sneaks in on a bunch of cargo ships. It also seems a bit too easy - even though I'm an RTS noob and am playing on Normal difficulty, I've only failed one mission so far. It's entertaining enough, I suppose, but just not quite as much fun as last year's Company of Heroes. That said, I've yet to try the multiplayer, which some have hailed as the Battlefield 2 of online multiplayer RTS. For someone who still rates Battlefield 2 as his favourite game of all time, that's high praise indeed. As of right now, however, I'd have to rate this around 80%.

Tongues!

Aidan has just discovered his tongue, and will now happily stick it out at the slightest provocation. He's also fascinated by other people's tongues, and will try to grab yours if you stick it out at him!

Cuddly toys

Aidan hasn't been particularly taken with stuffed animals... until now. This wide-eyed cat is the first cuddly toy he's taken a liking to.

First steps in Eve

My trial period in Eve Online expired this weekend. I was torn whether to sign up or not: I've been feeling uninspired by a perceived lack of variety in the missions and environments and as a result haven't played much in the last week.

But then I realised that the problem was partly due to the character I created. Because of Eve's relatively heavy death penalty, I initially shied away from creating a military character as I didn't want to have to keep risking my ship. So I created an industrialist, and as a result, most of my missions had me mining or building stuff. Safe, but dull, and I ended up getting pwned in the few combat missions I was given because my ship was built for mining, not combat.

So I rolled a new character - Godless Wanderer - and made her a shaven-headed-take-no-shit-Ripley-in-Alien-3 soldier. I've pretty comfortably taken down all the pirates and rogue drones that I've been sent up against so far. The notable exception was when I was ambushed while investigating the aftermath of an attack on a hotel. The enemy ships pounded through my shield and armour so fast I was dead before I had chance to warp out of there.

It's definitely gut-wrenching when you realise your ship is going down. Although I'd insured it for its full value, insurance doesn't cover the ship's fittings, which are pretty expensive too. Replacing it took a fair chunk of my available cash.

So anyway, the excitement of playing a combat-oriented character persuaded me to take the plunge and sign up. At $15 per month, it's the same price as World of Warcraft, although I'm going to keep my WoW subscription for the time being too.

Next step is to join up with one of Eve's corporations - the equivalent of WoW's guilds. I've sent an application to Eve University, a corp that seems to have attracted a lot of praise on the Eve blogs and forums I've been reading. It's designed to help noobs like me overcome the game's near-vertical learning curve by showing us everything Eve has to offer. Hopefully I'll be able to get in in the next couple of days, once my application has been accepted and I've had my interview (yes, an interview!).

In the meantime I'm going to keep training my skills, running agent missions, and trying not to fill up my hard drive with all the screenshots I'm taking.

Digicel

Digicel must surely be one of the world’s most amateurish cellphone companies.

Exhibit A: A logo that looks like it was designed by a 12-year-old using WordPad and a large font.

Exhibit B: The ridiculous upside-down envelopes they send their bills out in. Hold it so the logo and address are the right way up and the envelope opens at the bottom. When I first saw one of these envelopes I assumed it was just one bad print run that they were using up. But here we are, several years later, and they’re still sending them out. Don’t they realise how unprofessional it makes them seem?

Exhibit C: An inability to bill us properly. We’ve set up a direct debit with them, so every month they take what we owe them direct from our bank account. Last month our bills came to $40.50 and $41.50. They just took two lots of $40 from our account. This month, our bills show the deficit in the breakdown, yet the total amount due is just the sum of the new charges this month.

Hopeless.

Tango Fire

Went to see Tango Fire at City Hall last night, one of the performances in this year’s Bermuda Festival. I thoroughly enjoyed it - it was probably the best thing I’ve ever seen at the Festival. The women’s skimpy costumes, sultry looks and sexy moves had nothing to do with it. Honest.

The only downside was that the performance was only an hour long, which made the $60 price of a ticket seem particularly steep. As it happens, we didn’t have to pay for ours, but even if we had, the show would still have been worth it. Quality trumps quantity every time.

Eve Online

This weekend I've found myself sucked back into the 14 day free trial of the massively-multiplayer online space sim, Eve Online.

I tried the free trial once before but didn't continue after it expired because, on the whole, the game seemed a bit dull. But something about the game has continued to fascinate me. The advent of a couple of patches that have polished the graphics (the game is almost five years old and was starting to look a bit rough around the edges) and made space travel slightly less tedious have spurred me to try it again.

I love how beautiful the game looks. I love its intimidating complexity (an online guide on mining, just one aspect of the game, runs to 64 pages). I'm beginning to appreciate its slow pace too. Mining an asteroid typically involves staying still in space for minutes at a time. Travel times are relatively long, even between adjacent star systems. And skills are learned in real time - at higher skill levels it can take literally days or weeks of real time to progress one skill level.

It feels very different to other games, even other MMORPGs, and I think that's a big part of its appeal. In addition to the things I've already mentioned, there are no character levels, and the destruction of your ship usually has serious negative consequences.

But mostly I think I want to like Eve because it reminds me of a modern, more complex version of Elite, still one of the most enjoyable video games I've ever played (back in the days when I was playing on a BBC Micro with 32k of memory).

Moreover, I've been playing World of Warcraft for getting on for 3 years now. Just before Christmas I got my epic flying mount and completed my Season 1 Arena epic armour set. I can't provide the commitment required to raid on a regular basis (even finding the time to run a regular instance is hard enough) and even though I'm keyed, I've resigned myself to never seeing inside Karazhan. And the battlegrounds and guild chat now seem to be filled with nothing but immature trash talk. So WoW is starting to feel like it may have run its course.

Will Eve replace it for me? I have the next 14 days to decide.

Poo in the tub

Question: What do the bath and the toilet have in common?

Answer: they're both made of white porcelain and filled with water.

Guess that's why, when Aidan was having a bath last night, he saw no problem with taking a crap at the same time. He didn't even have the decency to do a solid one.

Needless to say, the cleaning-up operation was not pleasant. Thank God for Clorox Clean-up and a kitty litter scoop!

Sliding

Only a few weeks ago, Aidan used to hate slides. He'd cry and fuss if we took him near one, even if went on it with him.

As you can see from the picture, that's all changed now!

Pandora plus

While we're on the subject of iPod innovations, I'd also like some kind of service that scans all the music in my iTunes library, and taking into account the ratings I've given each song, recommends other music that I'd like.

Pandora was a step in the right direction. However, it won't scan your iTunes library (you have to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each piece of music it suggests based on the artists you tell it you like) and due to retarded licensing constraints, it's no longer accessible in Bermuda (finding a US proxy was too much like hard work, and didn't seem to fool it anyway).

Anyone know of anything?

Shuffle me this

I know Steve Jobs is a regular reader of this blog, so I want to share an idea I've had for the next iPod.

Sometimes when I'm driving home from work, I have no idea what kind of music I want to listen to. So I just stick my iPod on shuffle and point it at a playlist that contains every song in my library except the Christmas and classical stuff.

Sometimes, however, I'll realise that I'm totally in the mood for one of the pieces of music it hits on. So, at the press of a button (or with a single voice-activated command, or something), I'd like to be able to tell it to switch to playing music only from that album or artist. I don't want to have to manually navigate through the menus to do it (something that's pretty much guaranteed to lead to a crash if you try it while driving).

I was thinking all this tonight, while listening to a Dean Martin track that my iPod had randomly chosen. So it was a bit spooky when the next track that it picked from the almost 3,000 songs in my playlist was another by Dean Martin.

Maybe Apple already have a telepathic version of this technology in their current iPods, they just haven't told anyone!

Car wash

So, there's this guy who's started hanging around at Bull's Head car park in the morning. He loiters around the machine in the outdoor lot, asking anyone who goes to buy a ticket if they want their car washing.

By today I found myself becoming irritated at being harassed by him every morning (I've had the good fortune to be able to have the car every day this week). Didn't the Corporation of Hamilton make this illegal? Leave me alone! I didn't want my car washing yesterday and I don't want it washing today either!

But on the other hand, at least this guy has the get-up-and-go to get off his ass and try and earn some cash, rather than sitting on a wall on day long (like the homeless guy who's taken up residence on Par-La-Ville road). And he's always polite. I have to respect him for that.

No idea what kind of a job he'd do if I ever took him up on his offer, though.

Idiots

While driving to work yesterday, I passed a guy on a bike doing about 30kph coming the other way. Unremarkable enough, except this guy was pulling a wheelie.

I'd love to say it was the first time I've seen anyone doing anything that stupid on the roads. Alas, I can't. Only last week I saw another motorcyclist doing exactly the same thing.

Morons. Can't imagine it'll be long before natural selection kicks in.

Book Babies

Yesterday, while mummy was working out her aggression at kickboxing in the gym next door, Aidan and I went to the first Book Babies of the year.

Held every Saturday at Hamilton’s Youth Library, it’s a free, half-hour session for under-twos (or thereabouts). One of the library staff reads a couple of books, and the kids get to listen to some songs and play with a bunch of toys too. It’s short, but fun.

Aidan usually occupies himself by trying to run out the door, stealing the other kids’ toys, or walking around with the plastic pole from the stacking rings toy in his mouth (leading daddy to alternately worry about the number of kids who’ve had it in their mouth before him, and his sexuality).

Good times.

Ball boy

Got home this evening to find Aidan hurling a small, hard, plastic ball up and down the hall with a force unseen before now.

When it bounced into our bedroom and was nowhere to be seen when he went in to retrieve it, he was even smart enough to get down on his hands and knees and look for it under the bed.

He's growing up fast.

Doctor Who

Over the last couple of months, Mandy and I have been working our way through the first three seasons of the “new” Doctor Who (those that started airing in 2005).

It’s a show I remember watching (and being terrified by) as a kid, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the revamped series. Doctor Who was always a bit campy, and even though I’d heard that the special effects in the new series were considerably better than those of old, I wondered if it could possibly stand up to the gritty realism of modern sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Although still served with generous quantities of cheese and some aliens that still look like guys dressed in rubber suits (yes, Slitheen, I’m looking at you), there’s much to like too. Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have both made first-class Doctors, their wit and energy making up for the series’ failings. And many of the episodes have exhibited the creepiness that was the hallmark of the original series (the episode “Blink”, which we watched this evening, being one of the best). Even though Doctor Who is meant as a family show, Mandy has already said that she wouldn't let Aidan watch until he's at least 15!

Season 4 is due to start in the Spring. If you haven’t caught any of the previous seasons, I heartily recommend you start catching up now.

New year, new blog

Apologies to all for the terrible job I’ve done keeping "A Baby In Bermuda" up to date over the last couple of months.

In an attempt to do better in 2008, I’m making a couple of changes. First, I’m closing down that blog and starting this one in its place. While “A Baby in Bermuda” was primarily about Aidan, “Newstocks” will be about our whole family. In addition to updates on Aidan, I intend to post more on the things I’m interested in, and I’m going to try to persuade Mandy to make the occasional contribution too.

As you have probably already noticed, this site is making use of Twitter, the deceptively simple web application that makes it easy to post short, one-line status updates. My hope is that even if neither of us can be bothered to write a blog post, we’ll still be twittering away.

This site is still something of a work in progress (yes, I know the banner image isn’t a link, and I know there’s no feed for comments), so expect a number of changes and additions over the coming days.