Well, my folks are here, which means my boring little routine is all shot to hell.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing…  It’s fun having them around.  It is great to see them again, catch up on what’s been going on, hang out, see the sights…  But I’m a creature of habit, and disruptions are weird no matter how nice the cause.

And to make things even weirder, their visit is deviating from the norm as well.  Normally they’d come up here sometime in July, or maybe September…but this year they’re here at the end of August.  And normally they’d stay for a full week if not longer, but this time they’ll only be staying for four days.

Got to see CONCORD in action for the first time last night.

I was out in my Retreiver, around Korsiki, mining some Veldspar.  The rats out there aren’t terribly impressive, it takes them quite some time to beat down my shields…  So I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.  I had my web browser up and I was tabbing back and forth as my cargo got filled up or rats showed up.

A couple rats did show up, I launched my drones, and watched the rats explode.  Then I tabbed back into my web browser.  At this point I was paying even less attention to EVE, because the rats generally show up in waves and it should have been a couple minutes until more showed up.

But then I noticed combat sounds coming from EVE.  And I could see in the background, behind my web browser, that my shields were going down.  So I tabbed back over…

At first I didn’t understand what was going on.  I looked around for some blinking red [+] symbols (that’s how NPC rats show up in the overview), but there weren’t any.  The only thing around was another human player in a frigate.  It just didn’t make sense to me.  What was this player doing?  Should I launch my drones?

Then, before I could decide what to do, CONCORD showed up.  About a half-dozen fairly large ships that quickly destroyed the little frigate.  Very impressive.

I guess that guy was just trying to suicide gank me for whatever reason…  Didn’t work so well.  He only got through my shields and half of my armor.  And that’s after the previous wave of pirates had already beat down my shields a bit.  I can’t imagine he would have had much luck ganking anyone.

Looks like McCain has chosen Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his VP.  Very interesting.  I’m certainly surprised, as is just about everyone else.  I don’t think anyone mentioned that name anywhere until this morning.

I don’t know anything about this Palin person…  And I guess it probably doesn’t matter much, since there’s no way I’m going to vote for McCain…  But it certainly makes things a lot more interesting.

I wonder how many of the unhappy Clinton supporters are now going to vote for McCain just to see a woman as VP?

I wonder how many really fundamental folks will not vote for McCain because women shouldn’t be VPs?

I wonder if the fact that she is a woman, and much younger than him, will stir up anything?

I’m very curious to see how this all plays out now…

Slashdot | Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research

After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs’ fundamental physics research lab. Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software.

Wow.  This strikes me as an incredibly shortsighted move.  I can easily believe that their fundamental physics research didn’t make them any money…  I can easily believe that they didn’t actually come up with a single product they could actually slap a pricetag on…  But they were responsible for some absolutely groundbreaking innovation.  Our modern telecommunications industry simply would not exist if it weren’t for these folks.

It seems like this is a very common trend…  So many businesses are only worried about their bottom line.  Anyone who isn’t actually generating income for the company is considered dead weight.  The problem is that you don’t have anyone left to actually do pure research.  Nobody to come up with the next big thing.

And it isn’t just here in the U.S. – it doesn’t seem like anyone wants to do pure research anymore.

I’m currently training my Mining Barges skill up to level 5, so that I can eventually fly a Hulk.  Mining Barges, being a Spaceship Command skill, requires a lot of Perception.  And since I was focusing on mining and not flying when I rolled up this character, Perception is one of my worse attributes.  So it is taking forever to train up Mining Barges.  22 days, at the moment, until it completes.

I was sitting here, lamenting the fact that I hadn’t put more points into Perception.  Pondering just how long it would take me to finish up Mining Barges.  Wondering about what other skills were going to need lots of Perception.  Wishing I’d gone with something more well-rounded maybe…

And then I realized that I could plug in an implant to improve my perception.  Obviously I’m still limited by the fact that my Perception is starting out low…but I can make it better than it currently is.

So I took a quick look at the market and found a +3 Perception implant that was reasonably affordable.  There’s better implants than that, but they’re much more expensive.

Now, with my implant, it is only going to take me 19 days to finish training Mining Barges – instead of 22.  Saved myself 3 days of training time.  And now I feel like a noob for not thinking of this sooner…  I could have shaved off more time when I was training Amarr Frigates and Cruisers…  Oh well.

Of course, there are lots of other implants out there…  I can boost all my other stats as well.  They aren’t cheap, so I won’t be buying all of them right now, but I can speed everything up quite a bit.

Last night they kicked off the Democratic National Convention…  And Terri, being the political junky that she is, had it going on multiple TVs in the house.  No matter where I went, there it was.

Lots of rousing speeches, lots of pundits, lots of arguing.  About what I’d expect.  But then one of the commentators on MSNBC made a very strange comment…

In referring to someone’s speech he said that it was “very scripted.”

It’s the Democratic National Convention.  They’ve been planning this for months if not years.  They’ve rented a venue, flown people in from all over the United States, arranged tons of press coverage.  They’ve got speech writers, and teleprompters, and a pre-recorded documentary on Teddy Kenedy.  Scripted?  You think?  Maybe?

These folks are politicians, not comedians.  It isn’t like they improvise all this stuff.  Of course it’s scripted.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing some more work on my blog’s theme.

I still haven’t found any drop-in replacement that I like, so I’ve been making small tweaks to my existing theme.  I’ve got a new header, for example.

Last night I discovered a great new plug-in: Category Icons by Brahim Machkouri.  It lets you replace the text categories with icons in your posts.  And one of the complaints that Terri had is that my blog is just too black.  So, I’m breaking up all the black with some colorful icons.

The icons, for the most part, came from the Buuf set by mattahan on deviantART.  I strongly recommend downloading the icons yourself…  They’re absolutely amazing and the little pictures here on my website don’t do them justice.