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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.

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.

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.