On Getting Down To It

When there is something that needs to be done in WHEN, often the process begins by various people proposing various ideas, others commenting on them, tweaking and refining them until there is some consensus and agreement. This does not mean we all agree with everything that everyone does and very often the views and actions of a particular pilot are hers or his alone and do not reflect the position of the corporation or alliance as a whole.  We have always operated on a very anarchi-cratic basis, whereby people are free to move, fly, pursue their own interests. We appreciate teamwork all the more for having been out on our own and knowing that our next flight could be the last.

There are few occasions however when there is an event or purpose that must be completed without discussion or preamble. When this time roles around, there are the WHEN directors who can and do take decisive action. They are invaluable and their hard work makes the corporation [and to a large extent the alliance] just work. I do  not want to ever be accused of not giving them enough credit, so I am taking this space to pat them on the back. Mick, Penny, Riyu – keep up the good work and keep flying. WHEN would not be there without you all.

In addition to all of this, WHEN has been growing for the last couple months and is now seeing fairly consistent fleet action through the holes we find. Coordination has improved quite a bit as newer players are brought up to speed, both in skills and skill. While it is good to have a dedicated salvager for speedy clean-up after PVE operations, it is not good to begin to expect one particular person to always fill that role or even to let them do that. They need to grow and experience additional parts of the universe around them. As a personal example, I’m even doing something I thought I could avoid for the longest time – training to fly some battleships. While I am loathe to admit it and abhor the large hulls and their pondering pace, they are an integral part of many operations in New Eden. I much prefer … well anything smaller, but will soon be able to fly some of them and eventually even fit their Tech 2 weapon systems.

Other WHEN pilots have picked up Logistics, Tacklers, HICs & HACs, and Strategic Cruisers on their journeys as well. It is exciting to see new members begin to stretch their pods and slide into new roles that they may not have ever considered before. They have all learned to scan to at least a survival level, even if they are not very fast or good at it. There is a lot of pride in getting back into your ship and finding that the corporation has already scanned all the exits, killed a mining fleet, ambushed a strategic cruiser and ran a null-sec plex all between lunch and supper.

On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping

In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.

And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.

The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.

We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.

On Being Gone Without Leaving

Some of you may have noticed that I have been slightly less textually productive as of late. The reason stems from a decision to fly down to the surface and spend some time overseeing the latest colony action from the box seats. I chose one of my planets in the wormhole and got down to the surface to get a real hands on feel for working on a plasma farm.

With the exception of the environmental systems [which are a complete pain at the best of times], the time was a fruitful exploration of what is going on at the root level of the colony that I had set up on the planet’s surface. I worked at all the different levels that I had set up, from extracting raw ingredients to processing them as tier one materials and finally combining those into still newer tier two products. I learned a lot about what goes into keeping the colony running as well as being efficient with the use of materials, layout of facilities, storage logistics and import/export excises [can anyone explain how CONCORD is collecting the isk I pay to import/export from way out in the wormhole?].

The net result of all of this: I was pretty well distracted for the last couple of months and managed to let everything here slide. Things like alliance and corporate operations were delegated, payments and diplomacy were put on hold or handed off, other income and revenue streams were throttled back and general amount of time in a pod was only the barest minimum to cover my ongoing capsuleer licensure. I am especially grateful to the men and women of WHEN who stepped up and carried a lot of extra responsibility during my absence.

On Being a Frog in Well Stocked Pond

The wormholes have been rolling by us at a rate of 2-3 a day. With our static Class 4 exit lasting at most 16 hours we usually have time more than enough time to harvest anything we roll across in the adjacent wormhole systems. If those systems are empty and their connections not holding any prospective targets to hunt down, we’re more than happy to roll the exit and see what else pops up. We’re easily running as many sites as we can possibly squeeze in between pilot availability, wormhole collapse and outside interference. It’s good on the wallet and fun for the participants – so who could want for anything more?

Time – as I posted above seems to be the limiting factor. Were there more of it in the right places, we’d accomplish even more. As it is, I’ve let the posts slide for the last two weeks. I’m behind on keeping up with not getting farther behind. The reasons are all good and I don’t regret them in any way. The first issue that demands more time is the burgeoning role of maintaining the new alliance. Hats off to Letrange on the way he’s managed to even stay sane let alone manage to get some play time in. And he even manages to post regularly. The second is some impending travel that is coming up for myself, and that means a lot of loose ends have to be tied up first. And finally, there are some issues with EVE and CCP that needed to be dealt with.

So, while having loads of fun, I’m a bit tired and looking for whoever it is stole my last billion isk. I’ll be coming for you…

On Saying The Same Thing

A lot of the questions that we get both from new pilots in our organisation — as well as other pilots that we fly with — regard the terminology we use to describe our environment. I realised that the last post would fall into this category as well. It basically describes something that some of use regularly and others of us will use more often. Our resident information super-goddess has compiled quite a list of terms that we use internally and posted them for all to share and learn from. It is a great resource and reference for our pilots and we all hope you enjoy them as well.

Moar Bloot

On Reaching 100 Posts

It had to come sooner or later. I always thought it would be later. I can remember back when I first started and thinking that I would probably never see 100 posts. I’ve never been that faithful at keeping a digital journal and have multiple different abortive attempts saved on various backups through out the house and online. Journals on paper have always been easier for me. Now that I’m here I find I’m at a bit of a loss on what to say. I have several different things that I have been reticent to post about for fear of touching off dry tender or annoying people overly much. Additionally, I so wanted people to see the hundredth post and think, “This is 100 material.”

So, without further ado, I am celebrating 100 posts with the proclamation that Our Eve has been included in CrazyKinux’s BlogPack.

Now that you’ve glimpsed my vanity, let me celebrate by making announcements.

1. The pilots of Dark Star Galactic Engineers [DSGE]- Wormhole Engineers Division have formally split off into a separate, wormhole focused corporation, Wormhole Engineers [WHEN.]. Not new information per se but leading up to #2.
2. As a focused wormhole corporation, we will be foregoing most all high/low/null-sec activities [excepting support logistics].
3. Many of the mission/pvp-minded pilots in DSGE have moved to our sister corporation, Fearless Bandits.
4. Industrial pilots will be remaining in DSGE or with an as yet unannounced industrial corporation.
5. In approximately three weeks, these focused corporations will be joining into an general support alliance built from the ground up to offer mutual support while maintaining individual corporate focus.

All this will allow us to do several things more efficiently. Those who are interested in missions and pvp will be able to do so without the burden of worrying about corp-mates living out in a wormhole. Those who are living out in the wormhole won’t be feeling bad if “so-and-so” isn’t fulfilled living out of a tin can in the wilderness. And the burden of maintaining high-sec research facilities is removed from both of them while still keeping those resources available to them. All this coupled with a fresher set of leadership that is flatter [not so top-down in style] and committed from the ground up to inter-corp co-operation and movement as necessary. At the core of each is a group that get their jollies doing the very thing the corporations are dedicated to. Thus they could also be considered “core”-porations.

And Happy 100 Posts!

Things are happening all around us and changes are afoot. In more ways than just the mild revamp of this site, the more it changes, the more it will really stay the same. We are in the process of making some very fundamental changes to the way we will be approaching our wormhole operations. After a significant amount of thought, discussions and consultations with other experts, we have decided not to operate out of a wormhole from within the wormhole engineers’ division of Dark Star Galactic Engineers. Sadly, this marks the end of nearly a year of wormhole expeditions by the engineers of DSGE.

What this doesn’t mean though is that the people who have been diligently learning how to live out on the edge of the unknown will be leaving that life. We are still all going to be living in the same system and using the same ships and equipment. After much preparation we are decided to cut the apron strings and move out from underneath the protective umbrella of DSGE and work on our own as the Wormhole Engineers. We have big plans for the future and are excited about the opportunities that still lie ahead of us.

As you might have noticed [or not if this is your first time tuning in], the site has been undergoing some minor, um, “tweakage”. I’d like to say that this is all part of the on-going effort to provide consistent quality in a relevant format that is changed and modified to meet the needs of the readers. It is not.

I have been however thinking for sometime to give it a bit of refresh. And in that vein, saw that the original theme had gone through several iterations and point updates. I decided to pursue that as a first line means to freshen up the whole site. It has been an interesting couple of days to say the least and I thought I’d share some of the highs and low points along the way.

Backups were made. This is something that I can’t stress enough and regularly fail to mention. Backups save lives people! We buy clones so we don’t lose our Skill Points. We insure our ships and only fly the ones that we have the isk to replace. Quite to the contrary of my feelings, I regularly fail to make backups, don’t copy files to my server, forget to leave a copy of my flight itinerary with my husband, lose the copy of my passport and notice my clone is out of date two weeks after it lost skill points from being podded. Don’t be that way. FTP was fired up and the entire site was packed into an archive and downloaded. Inside of WordPress the whole thing was also backed up from the Tools menu. Finally, a screen grab of the theme settings was made, “Just In Case.”

Now it was time to update the theme, which conveniently could been done within the WordPress engine. Links were clicked, scripts were run and messages were displayed. Eventually all was in readiness and a trip to ‘Visit Site’ was made. The results were beyond description. Words fail to adequately express how bad all of my layout decisions were when everything in the theme was returned to its default setting. Text was unreadable, headings were off, carefully designed alignments were destroyed, pictures were suddenly missing or in one case pointing to the wrong image. Calamity!

Enter the backups. I briefly toyed with the idea of just reloading everything from the back up and giving up on any sprucing up of the site. But something, somewhere, deep down inside of me wouldn’t let the php win. I was in control. I am the mistress of this domain. I will…. scream and start using the aforementioned screen cap of the theme settings to begin to squeeze things into shape. After about 15 minutes or so, I had something that at least resembled the previous theme and was mildly functional. I decided to head off for bed and think about it at a later point. After coming back I managed to make a few more changes, wrangle some of the CSS back into place and even begin some of the ‘tweakage’ that I had desired all along.

Here’s hoping that it doesn’t just offend all those concerned.

I was looking around at all of the wonderful resources out there for pod pilots. Not a week goes by that I don’t stumble across something new or a new way of looking at the world that we fly in. Everything from training, ship loadouts, and missions to philosophy of play, background stories and general thoughts on pilots progress. I probably fall into the last category more than others.

I was looking at CrazyKinux’s wonderful blog site and even wanted to link in, but couldn’t get the captcha for his comments to work. I’m sure it’s something on my end but it’s frustrating. I’d like to see this blog used more and shared more. It will have to go on the agenda I suppose.

I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in a corporate blog, but since I had the room I thought I would go ahead and give it a go. I’d like to provide a place for my fellow corp-mates and I to post articles and information about flying, living and working in EVE. I think we already have some of the best pilots in the area and am happy to be associated with them. I’ve heard some negative comments about previous incarnations of the DSGE and have been happy to report that none of those considerations still exist.

Let’s continue to work together to create a great place for all of us.