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Mary campaigned for a position in the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management elections. You can head on over to eve-online.com to read up on the CSM. Basically, she would have been part-ombudsman (ombudsperson?), part employee.

She came in at 21 out of 61 and fell just shy of being an alternate candidate (9 seats, 5 alts). With her just getting back in the game after a hiatus, her recent surgery, our move, dealing with three kids and the rest of the stuff that's been going on I think this is an amazing accomplishment. I looked at the spread:

Click to enlarge

and clearly there were either extraordinarily popular folks or many votes from players with multiple accounts. I only wish I could have drummed up more support for her.

I'm really proud of her. She made a great effort to win this and I sincerely hope she gives it another try when they hold elections again. It is truly CCP's loss.

Great weekend. Took the kids over to Kingston on the ferry then drove down to Bainbridge and headed for Fay Bainbridge State Park. Walked on the beach for quite a while (pics coming soon) and let the kids have at the plethora of sea shells. They found a whole scallop or oyster (haven't opened it yet) and an intact starfish; they were quite thrilled.

I managed to get a decent & speedy solo bike ride in Sat and a relaxed one in on Sunday (with Ian in tow). Made an *awesome* chicken & spinach curry which we'll be eating through Tuesday at this rate (I always make too much).

I also managed to get some EVE time in and need to update the corp web site (official charter and new home base).

We got to hear some of "On The Media" tonight (a rare treat these days) and I was very disappointed. Will there be any media channel that doesn't deliberately promote Obama in some way, shape for form? I expected more out of a media watchdog organization. Nader's announcement should make things interesting for a while. Lest we forget, there's still time for martial law to be declared...even after elections are held. Sagging economy. Protracted overseas engagement. Cold war ruminations in the former Soviet Union and China...Pakistan in turmoil. India rising. Lots of kindling for fear.

Now continuing to enjoy a Düvel over the course of the rest of the evening (which may include more EVE) and trying not to anticipate the busy week ahead.

all you can think about when you see a story like this is how long it will take them to upgrade to an ECM - Multispectral Jammer II ...

From the story:

WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of airline passengers will soon be flying on jets outfitted with anti-missile systems as part of a new government test aimed at thwarting terrorists armed with shoulder-fired projectiles.

Three American Airlines Boeing 767-200s that fly daily round-trip routes between New York and California will receive the anti-missile laser jammers this spring, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which is spending $29 million on the tests.

Hey folks... The last day of the year begins with an early roundup of some interesting bits from around the internets:

• If you think you're safer using your credit card at a restaurant than over the Internet, you're very, very wrong. You need to read this one.
• How exactly does 14,800 pounds of ground beef go missing? (Brings new meaning to "Where's the beef?")
• Maybe the DHS should stop oppressing the average folks and take a look inward instead.

When NPR decides to delve into the murky waters of security and technology, professionals should probably take some notice:

• Marketplace reported (wait a bit for the audio associated with that blurb to be posted) on the increased dangers of identity theft predicted for 2008.
• NPR's Morning Edition also covered identify theft and gave a brief nod to Netscape Navigator's demise.
• At the peak, Amazon was selling 17 Wii's per second this Christmas. That's quite a bit of Wii.

It's a gorgeous day out here and the posts may be few and far between for the rest of the day. Mary & I will be taking some time alone at Monsoon tonight and I'll be sure to post some comments on the cuisine.

One last note is that EVE Online looks amazing on a 46" Sony Bravia LCD HDTV. Booted Windows XP on the MacBook Pro and hooked it up with a DVI-to-HDMI cable, piped the stereo out to the receiver and worked the controls with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard (old school) and a Logitech wireless mouse. The Trinity expansion with the enhanced graphics make it look like you're watching a movie. Great fun!

Happy new year everyone!

Well, we're back.

RDN Corp (RDNI) in EVE has re-established a corp HQ and we're once again hunting rats, mining 'roids and system-hopping in the largest virtual gaming universe there is.

If you already play EVE, be sure to say "Ho!" to us in-game. If you don't play, go see what you're missing!

We're mostly back due to the Mac OS X client (it's not perfect yet, tho). Linux users can also now enjoy the game since the same tech enables compatibility with that OS as well, so there's no excuse not to give it a try!

We'll be posting more info on the corp later, but we've got a 5% corp tax rate and are PST-based. We tend to do mining and rat hunting and could really use someone to salvage wrecks. We split all joint sessions equally: mining/refining, rat bounties, loot selling/reprocessing, wreck salvaging/reprocessing.

Before Ian was born, Mary & I used to play a little game by the name of EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role playing game set in space. Unlike World of Warcraft or other games of that MMORPG ilk, EVE is a sophisticated, complex universe where you can be part of - or lead - giant corporations that mine asteroids, forge powerful weapons or devices, wage large-scale battles across solar systems or rule the financial exchanges. You can also choose to go it alone, band with other player-pirates or jump from system-to-system doing system-created missions or hunting non-player-"rats" in the asteroid belts. The graphics were outstanding and the soundtrack was beautiful. Alas, Ian (and life) consumed the remainder of our free time and we put our EVE clones into hibernation until we had more spare real life cycles to burn.

When I found out that EVE was launching a Mac (and Linux) client this fall, I became interested in the game again. Previously, we played on PCs and have since converted all household systems to Macs. We both have powerful enough systems to play the game and I was curious as to how their new expansions changed the gameplay.

The client installed fine, but the Trinity expansion has been nothing but trouble for the majority of OS X and Windows users. On Macs, the client crashes constantly and can cause screen lockups that you need to force quit out of. (Getting kicked out of the game program unexpectedly can cause you to lose your ship, cargo and your cloned-life)

Windows users had it a bit worse - the new code destroys the boot.ini file in many circumstances, which will render systems useless if Windows is rebooted before the file is re-created. A very ugly upgrade indeed.