Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Any other Tuesday.

It's snowing outside and the kids are home from school. Another 5-10 inches of snow expected with 1/4 inch of ice on top. Excellent! It is on these days I am most glad to work from my home and not have to drive into the "office" an hour away. Like most Tuesdays to day begins with coffee and time with my wife and kids before I head down to my basement office. It's a chilly 54F as per usual and I flip on my trusty electric oil heater and soon the room is filled with warm air and will peek out around 75F. The cat is all ready camping the heater with his nose as far between the radiator sections as he can get without burning himself. The gently purring has become a familiar sound.

Next I press power buttons around the room bringing to life 4 LCD monitors, 3 computers, 2 keys boards, 2 mice, and a webcam. The work day begins with checking of the overnight emails to see what broke and how it was fixed. Then I pull up my task list and calendar to see what meetings are approaching and what I need to focus on today in the never ending swirl of corporate Information technology. It's right about now that EVE online is fired up and I start to go through similar activities. Check my mail, scan calendars, a quick o/ in a few chat channels, and then next comes the task list.

I typically start the day with a starting my 20 PI planets back up. Many clicks are involved in the process and I typically try not to talk to folks in game while it's done. At work in the real world I am checking daily reports have run, manually running and troubleshooting the data mining scripts for those who don't.

On this Tuesday however my day starts a little differently. See today is patch day and the release of Incursion 1.1.0 inside EVE. So rather than sitting down to click on extractors I am anxiously watching download and install bars. I am excited to see the new character creation systems and aware that it might impact my days work. So I get as many tasks done as I can while I watch the bars. I also know that PI changes in a big way with this patch and am excited to see how the new system can reduce the many thousand clicks a day I have endured. There are new pretty explosions and some new nav bar and contract system. Eve gate gets an over haul too.

I finish fixing a troublesome script as the last installer checks and replaces .dlls and other chunks of the game on my second client. I fire up the first client that is all downloaded and ready. I all ready know that I am not yet going to see the new goodies. As I accept the EULA I see the all too familiar "STATUS: NOT ACCEPTING CONNECTIONS" and thus begins the waiting for the CCP worker bee's to get the system checked out and ready for us to play. Some days this wait is short, other days it's the training length of Caldari frigate IV. So I go back to work and start into the structure and content of a technical document designed to teach internal IT staff how to navigate and administer Virtual Servers for off shore developers. All ready I am yearning for a break from this remedial but important task.

Today at the time of posting my two mains have portraits that look like this ZombiNutz on the left SonofBraben to the right:















Once the CCP bee's have buzzed there lot, we shall see what new faces and names we all have amongst the stars of New Eden. I am looking forward to rediscovering old friends with new faces.

Cheers

EVE SOB

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