Grumpy Old Vet

Hopefully you all remembered to watch the launch of CCP's space program dubbed, #Skywardsphere.  In case you missed it I grabbed a couple screenshots of the pod at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, just before it ejected and fell back to the surface.

Hulkageddon V announced so I have reactivated my pirate-alt. :D

I also have a veritable shit-load of minerals sitting in a hanger doing nothing, so I figure I'll manufacture a ton of Catalysts and Thrashers for the event. :)

The last few weeks I have not been ingame all that much due to a number of reasons.  I've been playing with a number of different Linux distros, trying to find the one that I like, my goal being to have a pure-XFCE desktop with no Gnome cruft.  I tried out Linux Mint's XFCE Debian Edition, but it was loaded up with lots of Gnome and, even worse, Mono was installed. So I decided to start removing chunks of Gnome until the system broke, which didn't take long, and I restored back to Xubuntu 11.10.  I had tried Arch earlier, got hung up on an issue, but I have now figured out how to get around it, so I'll probably give it another shot.

Beyond that the Crucible 1.5 patch was a bit of a rough one for us Linux guys, though we have pretty much worked around the problem, which involves switching a library to or from "native" or "built in" depending on whether or not a new patch is available.  It's annoying for now, but EVE still runs, so I'll put with it until it gets fixed.

It has been a while since I have posted anything so I thought I would start out by sharing a Dreddit video that I got a kick out of.  It is very nicely done and they always pick such interesting music for their videos. :)

Otherwise things have been pretty quiet for me on the EVE front.  We had a war last week so I was mostly sitting in station.  That war ended on Thursday, so I jumped at the chance to get some trade route running in and I have some stuff cooking in the factories right now.  With what I have on the market currently, plus what I will be bringing to market from manufacturing and from Jita buy orders, I will end up pretty close, if not over 14 billion ISK.

My goal right now is to get my wallet up to 20 billion ISK.  Once I have reached that point I plan on looking into investing in some BPOs for capital production.  I have to look at the number yet to determine what will be profitable and what isn't.  I would love to be able to cover the whole spectrum of the process, starting from minerals to components to completed vessels, but it will ultimately depend on profitability.

So this past week I have made a bunch of moves on some incredible deals on the market but just have not had the time, until today, to turn them around on the market.  As I am writing this right now I have about 8 billion in product on the market and I'm working the orders actively which I am certain is pissing some people off to no end.  I probably appear to be a bot. LOL

Hey Genofunk, I do use conky and at this point I don't think I could get by without it.  I am at work at the moment, so I don't have direct access to Marax, but I do have the .conkyrc file I edited so I will post the code from it below.

Oh, and I should also note that I'm not the author of this .conkyrc file. I found it on Deviant Art, the original author's attributions are still at the top of the file.

Hope it is helpful to you. :)

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As you all may know I have been planning to build a new computer and those plans have now been realized.  These are just a few photos from the assembly of my new computer, which I have named Marax.

The specs of the machine are:

COOLER MASTER CM690 II Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Case

ASUS SABERTOOTH P67 (REV 3.0) Motherboard

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad-Core CPU

G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) SDRAM (will up it to 16GB in a few months)

Crucial M4 128GB Solid State Drive (Yes, SSD only.)

EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB

COOLER MASTER 800W Silent Pro Gold Series Power Supply

Dual ASUS Black 22" 2ms(GTG) Widescreen LCD Monitors

ElementaryOS Jupiter (Linux) Operating System

So I stayed up until two o'clock in the afternoon waiting for the UPS to drop off the parts for my new computer system. (I work a night shift at my job)  I'm pretty excited, I have not had a decent computer in quite a few years so it will be really nice to running a capable system again.

My last decent computer was the victim of several power surges over the coarse of a summer, about three years ago, where we had an unusual number of electrical storms.  At the time this happened I wasn't playing much EVE due to friends moving on to other games and I was pursuing other activities since it was summer.  So I picked up a giveaway Dell Optiplex GX280 from my job, stuck an Nvidia GTS 8800 video card, 2GB of RAM, installed Linux and have been surviving on that ever since.  Needless to say, it wasn't the greatest system on the planet, but for my activity level it worked and I was still able to get ingame and do stuff when I wanted to.

Enter the Incarna and Crucible patches creating a renewed want to get back into EVE and that GX280 was really starting to show her age. There simply wasn't anymore tweaking I could do with Linux, nor was it cost-effective to upgrade the hardware further, to keep her in the game.  Upon my acceptance into PNDI I knew I needed to get off my ass and order a system. It was actually something I had talked about doing for a while but just wasn't motivated enough until now.

So I just wanted to share the good news with everyone.  I will be posting pictures of the build, the final result, the OS install and all that fun stuff.  I am also thinking about making a dedicated post that documents the exact steps I follow to install EVE-Online on Linux in case anyone else might be interested in doing the same thing.

Oh, and for some ingame news, I am making a ton of ISK manufacturing and selling a certain group of products on the market which happens to be in high demand at the moment.  So far I'm up a billion ISK with another billion ISK in profits about to come in over the next couple days.  Once the market balances out, which it will quite soon, I am going to start looking at doing some invention and, if profitable, T2 manufacturing.

A real-life friend, Mozenrath Ashpool, has started to play EVE and he needed a little help raising some ISK.  So I brought out the Poptart, my Orca class industrial command ship, and met him up in Zaimeth.  He brought out his Retriever class mining barge and we spent a couple hours mining Kernite and catching up.

During the op we were approached by Xeno Irish who was looking for some salvage. We agreed to let her have the salvage as neither of us had a Salvager turret fitted.