the corner office

HP have digital cameras which can 'slim' their subjects (via Aquila Online). You could get really philosophical about what that says about modern society, but I suspect this is a feature which could backfire.

Her: did you use the slimming feature for the photo?
Him: yes
Her: why, do you think I need it?

Front-end development is not my thing, but I've done some Struts development, and recently, I've been doing some JSF work. I'm by no means an expert in either framework, and I'll probably look back at this in a few years and laugh, but I have to be honest, the flexibility and complexity that JSF brings just doesn't seem worth it. I was banging my head against some obscure rendering-order issue in JSF the other day, and found myself thinking "I miss Struts". I never thought the day would come when I would think that.

My Eve Online character's career is taking something of a commercial slant - mostly running courier missions and doing a spot of trading. This is mainly because it's a fairly hands-off way of playing, and because it appeals to my Inner Accountant. My Inner Accountant gets along quite well with my Inner Geek, who finally had a Project again: gather up lots of data from the game markets etc, build a simple app to stay on top of things, and see what sorts of obscene profits I could make. It's been a fun distraction.

All of my less than exciting endeavours take place in what is known as hi-sec space, where apart from the extremely rare suicidal nutter who tries to get a few shots at your ship before the cops arrive and blow him out of the sky, you have nothing to fear. I like this, because I can leave my chappie flying around for ages on end, while I'm *koff* studying or working on other things.

Predictably, the real fun happens outside hi-sec space. Each system has a security rating between 0 and 1, and anything 0.4 and under is 'low-sec'. Police presence becomes sparser as the rating goes down, and by the time you get to 0.0 space, it's the Wild West meets downtown Hillbrow.

I haven't ventured into low-sec much. Too much adrenaline. In my first month I made the silly mistake once of accepting a courier mission to a 0.0 system, and ended up having to fly down a corridor of low-sec systems to drop off a parcel. Getting there was fine, but the baddies had spies out, and there was a waiting party for me on the way back. Some git blew up my ship and then squished my escape pod just for good measure, too. His theory was that since I was a n00b flying in unsecure space, I must've been someone's alternate character and a spy, and therefore had to be destroyed just in case. I was rather a good sport about it and the chap invited me to join his pirate corp. I politely declined.

Getting podded isn't the end of the world if you're a new character, since if you're insured you just get a good-as-new clone and a free rookie ship and you're right back in the thick of things. It grates me that someone has one of my frozen corpses though (somewhat reminiscent of the old Diablo ears). Since then, visits to low-sec systems have been few and far between.

Anyway, that circuitous waffle leads me to the real point of this post. Some bloke decided to take his brand-new character, and head straight into 0.0 space, and see what happened. It might not make much sense if you haven't played the game, but it's still something of a hoot: The Eve Online 0.0 Experiment.