Strange Happenings or The Great Bird Rescue

Yeah I know, I know I should write more stuff more often. Sorry, but other stuff kind of sidetracked me.

But today some dumb shit happened, so I got inspired to write a little bit about it:

It was just after 8 pm, I had just started to plan some project of mine and wanted to start on some term paper for university next, when the son of my neighbours knocked on my door.

My apartment is some weird-ass basement dwelling with huge metal bars on my one main window. That window overlooks our houses' central garden. So every time the neighbour's kid goes out to feed the bunnies living inside a huge rabbit hutch in said garden, he walks past my door into a long, winding hallway leading out to the garden. Then he walks past my main window. So we see each other a lot. Since I also get paid to give him private school lessons, we know each other well.

So of course I'm not surprised by him intruding into my work. I just sigh, get up and walk to the door to find out what he wants. Turns out two young jays got caught in the monstrous cat-protection net another neighbours uses. The jays looked pretty far gone by the time I got to take a look at them, so I went back in and called our local animal shelter. I had no idea what else to do, our neighbour up there wasn't home and we didn't knew the kid's father had a key for emergencies stashed away.

Obviously it was too late to get somebody at the animal shelter. Less obviously, the answering machine of the shelter told me I should contact my local police station in case of emergency. Which I did, wondering a bit at the same time if calling the police wasn't total overkill. A minute later I went out again to look after the birds and of course slipped on the shitty and extremely slippy floor in that stupid basement-tunnel leading to our garden. Got a nice bloody gash on my arm from that.

Half an hour later a police car arrived and a nice police man and woman got out. They too looked at the mess and finally called our local animal rescue. Which I didn't knew was a thing. Oops! The policemen took my phenomenal ability to waste their time in stride, though.

A couple minutes later a fire service van with the nice and friendly letters Tierrettung (animal rescue) on the side arrived and it looked steadily better for the by now exhausted birds.

After a while the kid's father arrived while animal rescue and police were just entering the house next door (we had finally determined we'd probably never get a ladder long enough through the long, narrow hallway from the frontdoor into the garden), to get to the balcony right next to the one under the one the two jays were caught in.

Yeah I know, that sounds convoluted, but for some reason the police didn't want to break into someones apartment just to save some birds. And the animal rescue wasn't allowed to. So we kind of had to work around the easy option here.

Luckily by then we got a key to the right apartment, entered together with the rescuers and the police and saved the birds.

The two jays were in astonishingly good shape and after carrying them back down and freeing them in the garden, they immediately took flight. Two birds: Saved.

100% OP success and I learned to call the fire service next time instead of listening to weird robot-voices. A nice end to a chaotic evening.

UK Elections

Just a funny thing: Today I learned two parties are dominating Great Britain, like totally. It's like the USA 2.0.

For some reason this really struck a chord with me, since it pains me seeing people punishing themselves so much.

I also learned: The UK doesn't have a constitution like we have, and parties can have millions of votes and only gain one seat in parliament if they're lucky.

From above, the UK looks like a weird dictatorship with a monarch on top. The people have to vote for a non-main party in such massive numbers it's hard to make any changes.

The UK election system is deeply flawed.

University at Mad

Today is a great day! For two months, the brave students of the University of Applied Arts and Sciences Hannover have waited for their grads in Publishing Architectures to arrive!

And with great lateness, about halfway through the sign-up period for the exams of the following semester, they're here!

But minus the sarcasm, I'm glad this is done with. We were doing XMLs and stuffs to automatically create manuals for a full week, all day long -followed by building a manual for ourselves with what we learned about how DITA works.

It was nice enough to learn, I suppose. At least now if I get to work as a technical writer and my company is using this shit, I at least can work with it reasonably well. But man, cramming the material of an entire semester into a single week should be forbidden.

Now, my term paper had some serious weeknesses build on being overworked and stressed out in it, but it still got me a 2.0 and I will take it like a man. (I guess in the Anglo-Saxon world this would translate to a "B" or something.)

Another step to my Bachelor of Engineering reached.

Next time: Going through my stash of EVE Online screenshots again. Also something about implants, I think.

Mosaic Musings

So, Mosaic happened. Sadly, I was preoccupied with work and getting home in Elite: Dangerous from a month-long expedition into the galaxy, so I couldn't do much in EVE since the patch landed.

But what I'm hearing about the ongoing story seems neat, so I'm hoping I can put in some EVE-time next weekend.

At least I made some money in selling skin-licenses that got converted from my stash of skin-BPCs and skinned ship. Right now I'm thinking how to best sell the small pile of Confessor I've made before the patch. (The Confessor is one of the new T3-destroyers and in Mosaic, the material requirements for building them and the Svipul went up, so if you build them beforehand, you can get a few extra million ISK profit per unit sold.)

Should I wait, hoping for some slight increase in price when the ships over-build by industrials before the patch are churned through and production numbers are normal again? Or should I just dump it on the market now for an easy profit?

Decisions, decisions.

A Loveletter to the Stratios

The Stratios is one of my eternal favourites. Weren't it for my eternally empty wallets and it's eternally high price, I'd probably fly around in it a lot.

It looks good, it can warp cloaked and it has decent DPS. The ability to tank more than a couple wet blankets lazily drifting towards you is a nice bonus.

There aren't many ships like the Stratios in EVE. For me, it's mostly either form or function, never both. The Stratios is one of the few ships were good looks and abilities I actually need meet.

Thanks to having a cruise-missile Raven lying around when the Stratios and her little sister, the Astero-frigate, was added to the game, I was able to grind down loyalty points and lay my hands on a Stratios-BPC. That blueprint copy was then transformed into the real deal.

For a while, I went mad and simply flew around everywhere with my Stratios.

My love for the ship even temporarily neutralized my hate for the strange loot spew system and I went around looking for interesting stuff. Which in EVE-terms means I collected a lot of garbage.

Since back in loot-spew days exploration was a horrid mess, I went into W-Space again. With decent DPS I thought "What's the worst that can happen?"

Something not immediately obvious if aren't experienced enough, the laser-bonus the Stratios has is utterly useless. 50% more range sounds like a lot, but even if you cram everything full with modules trying to get the damage-output higher, it still falls flat on it's face.

If you want to fly the Stratios, better que up some drone skills. Drones are the main weapon the Stratios has. If you want to use the ship in PVP, you can either try energy-neutralizer or blaster weapons to give you an edge. A PVP-fit isn't even preventing you from doing exploration-content on the side, since you can refit with a mobile depot.

The ship after my first warp-out. Lasers alone didn't help, fancy that.

At the time I still was stubbornly refusing to use the Stratios as a drone ship. A combination of lasers and T2-medium drones was what I was going with. Even in a C1-wormhole system, using only medium drones and three medium lasers without damage bonus was a chore. Sleeper-drones are quite hardy.

After a while, this thing showed up and my badly fit Stratios couldn't do anything about it.

Some fancy usage of my covert-cloak and creative warping around allowed me to collect some sleeper-loot under the nose of that sleeper-battleship. All in all, this little day trip wasn't that bad.

So I went home. Which in turn gives me today the excuse to post this picture. I just can't get enough from screenshotting the Stratios! (This one ended somewhere close to the border of Stain. Running gatecamps at 3am in the morning is not recommended.)

For some reason I could never get into the Astero, by the way. I really tried to love this little frigate, but writing this post made me realize I love cruisers far too much, so that Astero I lost a while ago is probably the last one I'll ever fly. Sad, isn't it?