Rewinding to a few weeks ago…

A notification appears on my display, “New EVE Mail”. Computer, read new mail.

To: Ghosts of EMC
Subject: Null-Sec

We have decided to make the move to null-sec, everyone should join Fusion Death Inc. as soon as possible. and wait further instructions.

Regards, The Board.

A few days later after being accepted by Fusion Death Inc.

Today is the day, we’ve moved all our stuff over the past few days so that it can be moved into our territory and are now ready to set off, after plotting a course and gathering up we set off to null-sec.

Under way for a while now it’s been pretty quiet in low-sec, we did encounter some people here but nothing posing a threat, till now things went smoothly but something tells me it won’t stay that way for long. One of my comrades just notified us that the system up ahead is also known as the “scary zone”.

Arrived in the “scary zone” no signs of hostiles, okay guys align to the next gate and warp to it. 0.3 AU removed from gate, almost there, ugh, what’s this. We are stuck in what seems a blueish bubble with some electric current running through it, “What’s this ?” I ask one of my comrades. “That’s a warp bubble” he replies “It will prevent you from warping”

“Oh, so… what do I do now ?”

“Well you approach the gate and jump through, unless there’s hostiles than you’ll want to find the fastest way out of it.”

“Ok, no hostiles, I’ll approach the gate.”.

Suddenly one of my comrades yells through the comms “I’m being chased by a 30 man fleet, I’m trying to shake ‘em off. Continue along the set course”. Nearing the gate, activating gate, jumping.

Approx. 20 minutes later…

Welcome home, a familiar voice says through the comms. We’ve made it into our home system, after a tour around the Control Tower we were directed to the station a few jumps over to repair our ships and to get some rest after the long  journey down.

And so a new chapter begins…

Lately I’ve started focusing more on post quality, so I’ve started looking for interesting and useful resources to aid me in the process, and as I’m currently doing Day 2 of ProBlogger’s “31 Days to Building a Better Blog (The E-Book)” (Which is writing a list post) I decided to share the things I’ve found.

ProBlogger

ProBlogger has a lot of information on how to improve your blog, even though it’s mostly focused on making money with your blog the information is valuable for any type of blog. I can highly recommend following “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” which is a free 31 day program. And I also recommend scrolling down on that page because there’s a few hundred links listed for every part of the program of which most also contain interesting and useful information.

I’m currently following the improved E-Book version of the program which can be found here.

Copyblogger

This website has been recommended to me by Mynxee it also contains a huge amount of information from writing to SEO to blog themes.

Guide to Love for the Lonely Blog

A post written by Mynxee containing some tips specifically for EVE blogs, however you can apply the tips on any other kind of blog too.

BlackHatWorld

BlackHatWorld is a forum that primarily focuses on making money on the internet, however the Blogging and Whitehat SEO sections contain a lot of useful information for almost any blogger, and the forum also has lots of other information that might be useful to you.

Using the forum is completely free, however they have some things you can pay for but they don’t really have a benefit for us bloggers.

How to Be Your Own Best Editor

How to be Your Own Best Editor is a book written by Barry Tarshis, Mynxee has recommended it to me and so has Venom Orchid. According to them and to reviews he writes in an engaging manner and also adds in some humor.

Even though this book is about editing and not about blogging, I’ve put it in here too because it’s an important part of it. I don’t have a copy yet so I can’t tell you if it’s good myself, but I’ll have one soon and I’ll probably review it once I finished reading it.

Wrapping up

Well that wraps it up for my list of useful blogging resources, I hope you will find this post useful and that it will help your blog a lot.

If you have any more valuable resources please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the post.

I’d like to thank Mynxee for providing me with a link to Copyblogger, writing the “Guide to Love for the Lonely Blog” and both Mynxee and Venom Orchid for recommending me “How to Be Your Own Best Editor”.

I thought I’d just whip up a post for this to use as a reference myself, all credits for the data go to whatever source they came from, of course you should always check EVE Survival for mission specific directions but this might be useful in other situations.

Drone Damage Types

Rat/NPC Damage Types

Sources

• OGRank
• EVElopedia

Note: if you think any data on this page is incorrect then please post a comment with the correct data and a data source.

I was talking to an old corp mate of mine a few days ago and I was looking for a new corp and they had room. So I tried to apply but I got the message that I couldn’t apply because the CEO doesn’t have the Ethnic Relations skill. I asked my friend if the CEO could train it, and tonight I asked if the CEO trained it already.

Xeross155 > But does CG have Ethnic shizzle now so I can apply ?
Rammit > we will all watch ethnic jokes we talked about it last night
Xeross155 > I’m talking bout the character skill -_-
Rammit > oh
Rammit > wow I feel stupid
Xeross155 > You seriously discussed ethnic jokes with the corp o.O
Rammit > yes

Well it’s been a while since I posted a log on here so it’s time for another one, it’s been a busy week both at home and at school.

First of all I got my internship, I had an employment interview at a school this morning, and after talking a bit about my experience in the IT, a run through of my tasks and a sort of tour around the building I was accepted. I’ll start my internship at Friday 5th of February, I would’ve started at the 4th but due to circumstances there wasn’t any time for my “mentor” to get me going on Thursday.

Other then this next week we have the terms exams again so I’m preparing for them a little, luckily this time they’re all on one day instead of spread throughout the week (They take 5-20 minutes each and there’s 3 of  ‘em).

And lastly I’ve been dispatching the new navigation system to all websites that use my CMS. and I’ve been training Adv. Weapon Upgrades in EVE to IV (Maybe V) so now I can fit additional modules because of the powergrid savings.

Well that’s it for this log, stay tuned for the next one (or next post).

~Xeross

This morning I arrived at school, got my stuff and went to the classroom only to find out I was an hour early, fortunately this gave me some time to talk with the internship coördinator however he wasn’t present. They said he’d arrive at 8:30 but he still wasn’t present at 8:45 so I decided to go to the OLC (Open Learning Center, Huge room with lotsa computers) and catch up on some school work.

At 9:25 I shut down my USB Ubuntu and head to the classroom. After figuring out questions we had to answer through brainstorming around a central subject we went to the OLC again to find stuff about the subject. In this case development in hardware (CPU, graphics cards, storage devicers, etc.).

For CPUs and graphics cards it’s just a bigger, better, faster, stronger kind of thing and that’s about it and with storage devices we have SSDs. After finding the required information I had to resize my casper-rw file (This is where USB Ubuntu stores all changes) because it was full, this took 15 minutes and after that I could boot back into Ubuntu.

Once it was done booting I started looking on the internet how I could run my password manager from within linux (It’s a .NET Framework executable). Fortunately there’s Mono which allows you to run .NET applications on linux, after installing the packages I tried executing the password manager and it worked, so another step into switching to linux.

After this I decided to go look for some oldschool games (Dracula: Reign of Terror, Knights and Merchants, etc.) that would run on the school computers. I installed both of these games through Wine and tried playing them. Dracula works pretty well however Knights and Merchants is being buggy (However that’s probably fixable). Hereafter we went back to class to “Report our findings” and after this I had some more time to toy around with Linux before we had to discuss our portfolio and internship efforts with our mentor.

Then I took the bus home and found a reply from the internship coordinator that he reviewed my qpplication letter and résumé and that he made a few modifications. After this I sent them to the Elementary School that I’m applying to, and I already have a reply for an application meeting/conversation, however the date might need to be changed.

Other then that I gathered all my stuff from all around New Eden and hauled it to my main base of operation, also tweaked some of my market order prices and well that’s about it.

~Xeross

Today at school we got another “Skill Training” called “Troubleshooting II” somehow I couldn’t focus on it because I was building a USB linux OS.

However I encountered 1 very weird (And typically Microsoft) registry key, if this is enabled you can get Windows to crash into a BSOD by pressing the right control key and pressing scroll lock twice while holding it, for more info linky.

On other news, I made my first kill today in EVE Online, check out my Captain’s Log of today for more info on that.

~Xeross

Captain’s log the 6th of January 112yc, 20:31.

Today was a good day, I’m still flying solo in my Rifter and slowly gathering more knowledge and experience about fighting other pilots.

Today I undocked to continue my journey through low-sec looking for some fights, however I didn’t accomplish this today, though I did get my first kill.

While travelling through low-sec I got into a system and found a lonely Mammoth together with a Retriever in an asteroid belt, as I neared them I locked them and opened fire, however the ship’s systems warned me I was in CONCORD secured space, slightly confused I checked my navigation computer and found that I was in Empire Space, so I cancelled the gunfire.

After making this discovery I tried to think of a way to still get the kill, and that’s when I spotted some wrecked Guristas ships which my ship indicated where killed by their drones. So I approached one opened it and ignored the “This is someone else’s kill” warning.

After this the Retriever warped of and I requested a convo with the Mammoth pilot, he accepted it and I asked him if his friend had any drones left (And if he could send them after me), he said his friend didn’t and I decided to wait for him to come back.

After a few minutes the Retriever pilot arrives back in a Caracal, I quickly targeted him and started orbiting him at 500m distance, I activated my afterburners, damage control, webber and warp scrambler. He started firing at me and so I also started firing at him, after a while it seemed that I was at the losing hand, my shield were nearly depleted and his halfway through however, after a while his armour started burning up a lot faster then mine and it looked like I might win, after a while we were both in structure but fortunately his decreased faster then mine and a few seconds later his ship exploded.

So after this I decided not to destroy his pod and send him back to the clone vats as that would make CONCORD take actions against me, I warped to a safe place in the system and waited till I could dock again. After this I docked and now I can proudly say I made my first kill.

After that I continued to roam low-sec and thought I had scanned down a Bantar, however upon arriving at the site all that was there was a Jaguar that locked me and so I lost “Rifter II“, after this I went back to get “Rifter III” and continue my roam but I haven’t been able to scan down anything interesting after that.

Now I’m docked in a station in low-sec and resting to continue my journey tomorrow. I’m also thinking about joining the Blood Money Bootcamp which is opening their doors for new recruits the 17th of January.

And finally I also got some more notes regarding PvP, I’ve updated “Attachment A” of yesterdays log.

Computer, save secure file, end recording.

Well it’s the 5th of January 2010, second day of school, now a very quick run through.

We had to look up some info about programming and source code (What’s a programmer, What’s source code, etc.), however there was 1 thing particularly interesting, a guy named Jan Sloot who was a TV Mechanic (Or something like that) invented something that could make 16 movies fit on something that normally can only contain 64KB of data.

You can find more info on it on Wikipedia, and there’s also a documentary and a book. He probably invented a way of storing that instead of bits used switches with more then 2 values. People also say he invented a compression algorithm, however this has nothing to do with compression, just the way of storing it.

EVE

When I got home I fired up EVE to take my new Rifter for its maiden flight, just check my Captain’s Log for today.

~Xeross

After being unable to use the computer for almost anything I finally fixed my Windows 7 installation (Link), so now I can finally get back into my normal rythm. I’ve installed EVE, CoD2 and WoW so I’m ready to roll again.

I’ll be primarily focusing on getting the corp website online when doing anything EVE related, my CMS is as good as finished so I just need to implement the design and EVE specific modules.

Other than that I can get back into blogging and following everyone’s blog again so that’s good too, and ofcourse continue helping out my clients.

Well that’s it for this update, I’ll be writing a detailed post on the Windows 7 issue soon.

Regards, Xeross