As you might have noticed, and I hope you have, I’ve changed the blog theme for the first time in almost a year. Or the first time ever if you didn’t read my blog back when it was WordPress hosted.
I’ve been admiring the themes on offer over at Podlogs for quite some time now and I’d been mulling over which one to get until finally, I chose one and boy am I happy! Since the launch of Podlogs, I’ve been jealous of the simply amazing themes and I had been becoming increasingly more fed up with my old theme. So, what do you think? Good change or bad change?
In other news… there is no other news. EVE’s been rather dull lately, with nothing at all going on in the PvP department. For some reason all the low sec systems in the area have had their usual population cut down by around half and I can’t figure out why.
So, instead of that, I’ve been doing something I’ve been meaning to do for years and started training the Advanced Learning skills. I would post up my little training queue but I can’t seem to find a way to copy a training skill queue to the clipboard using EVEHQ. I really like EVEHQ but I can’t help going back to EVEMon and EFT for certain little things that I’m used to using but that EVEHQ doesn’t have.
In other, other news, my lots and lots of free time this Summer means that I have a lot of time to take any EVE graphics requests. You can find my prices at my Custom EVE Graphics page along with some links to examples. Feel free to contact me via email or my Contact page. Although you can also contact me in-game, the end of my current game time is only a few days away and I’m not sure whether I’ll have the money for another time card right away. So until I can be 100% sure that I have more game time, it’s best to only use email or my contact page.
Fly safe.
Earlier today, Tony over at EVE’s Weekend Warrior posted an article containing a great selection of must have WordPress plugins. If you haven’t read it yet and you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you should definitely go and check it out!
The reason I’m telling you this is that I recently installed a plugin called Lightbox 2. This plugin allows images to be shown in a separate box, but still on the original page. I seem to be butchering the plugin by trying to describe its job when I can just show it to you. Click the image below and providing that your browser supports javascript (as all modern browsers should), you should see it appear on top of the page in its own little box.
The only problem with it seems to be that as it is among the last things to load with the page, if someone clicks an image before the page fully loads (as I tend to do) it will open on a page of its own as it normally would. But unfortunately it’s very unlikely that I can change that as as far as I know, that’s the way javascript works in being the last object to load.
And our audience says…
So, the results are in on the newest poll. This time around we had a total of 17 votes (at the time of this posting) spread across three possible answers.
- Actively look for a corporation – 8 votes – 47%
- Go solo – 6 votes – 35%
- Join a corporation but let them come to me – 3 votes – 18%
To be honest, despite the results of this poll being pretty clear, I’m still not entirely sure what to do. While I got some good corp offers from Wensley and Jeneral Jane, I’m still feeling the pull of a solo life. I have a feeling it may take me while to regain my confidence in whether a corp can stay active or not.
Exploring the space lanes
Earlier a reader (and fellow EVE blogger), Kirith Kodachi, contacted me to have a new blog header and forum signature made. Unfortunately the plans for the signature fell through because of unforseen circumstances but the plans for the header were still on. You can see the header below along with a screenshot of the header in action on Kirith Kodachi’s blog.
I’ll post a full post on this set of graphics once the signature plans come back up.
I just installed a comment plugin called Intense Debate (similar to Disqus) that should make the whole commenting experience a little more fun and easy to read and reply. Give it a go and let me know what you think. As you’re going to be the main people using it, I’d really like to know how you’re finding the new comment system.
Now, I’m hoping I’ll actually get comments. The other few times I’ve asked for comments for a certain reason, I never got any. I’m counting on you guys! 
I’ll try and get an EVE related post posted some time in the next couple days. It’s a bit hard at the moment as I’m still sorting things out domain/hosting/blog-wise, but I’ll see if I can get Heather to write up her post during the next couple days.
Fly safe.
As you may already be able to tell, I haven’t been playing EVE as much as I originally intended to over the past couple weeks. Unfortunately that was mostly my fault as I, rather foolishly, decided to re-activate my EVE Online account during the last few weeks of the college term. And as a result of that I was way too busy finishing off college work to get into EVE even for a little while. What little time I did have, I spent playing Spore (which I bought only recently).
Luckily though, my Christmas holidays have now started so I’m going to be gifted with hours upon hours of free time.
During the one or two times I was actually able to get into EVE, I didn’t really get anything constructive done (on my part anyway). I got quite a bit done for Heather though, on the other hand.
After making my way to Duripant, where she ended up starting, I bought myself a few EP-S Gaussian I Excavation Pulse mining lasers and fitted them to my old Pirating Brutix as that was the only ship I took there.
Blasphemy, right?
Surprisingly, after about half an hour of mining we got just over 9000m3, so I decided to stop there as that was roughly the capacity of the Iteron Mk I I bought. I wish I’d known how good a Brutix can be at mining back when I’d started out, I would be a lot richer than I am at the moment. I’m sure that there’s countless weeks of Brutix mining I could have done while waiting for my Mining Barge skills to train. I could be quite a rich man, as opposed to my 5ish mil right now.
That little bit of mining got us a hefty (newbie-wise) 330,000ish ISK, which I split 50/50 with Heather to go towards buying her first frigate. I did try to convince her that I didn’t need the money but she insisted that I took at least half since I did most of the mining.
While I will admit I was enjoying the somewhat relaxing mining, I was itching for someone to try and steal our ore so I could lock the bastard and stop him in his tracks. Maybe do a bit of ransoming while I was at it. Ah well, maybe another time.
I’m going to try and see if Heather will write a blog post about her experience on her EVE trial but we’ll see. I’m interested in how she felt about EVE Online itself and her time spent learning how to play.
Time to see if I can figure out the Authors & Users section of the Wordpress Dashboard.
Fly safe y’all.
