Social networking

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13 Sep 2007   Life

Despite loving technology of all sorts, I have been hesitant to join the whole social networking game. I have even been skeptical of the blogging concept. When the social networking websites started showing up all those years ago, I had really just written them off as a passing fad, like so many other things have been.  Obviously that hasn't been the case.  Social networking sites like digg.com and del.icio.us are quite popular, along with several others.  Far be it from me to counter the masses anymore.  I've started playing with digg and del.icio.us now, and I have an account on technorati to keep track of the blog's statistics.  I can see the attraction to the social networking concept, even though I'm sure I have yet to see the full benefit.  If you haven't joined any of these sites, I can actually encourage it now.  If you're already a member, please feel free to add me to your network.

VNRI and Empire Research

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12 Sep 2007   Games   Eve Online

Rather than spending an excess of time on a bunch of posts about my Eve Online activities over the past year, I think I'll just make this post a quick summary, and consider this the 'starting' point for further posts about my in game activities.

My first six months in eve were spent with the Venus Brotherhood. Overall, this corporation was a good place to learn my way around the game. I spent that time building up skills, primarily on the manufacturing and research side of the game, building ships at minimal profit for the corporation and various other similar activities. As time went on, I got delusions of greatness and decided to start a sister corporation to launch a POS tower in high security space for Venus Brotherhood. As I was raising funds for this process, several things happened that made it evident that I didn't want to maintain too tight of ties to Venus Brotherhood. Even though I still consider many Venus pilots to still be friends, the lack of leadership while at war was very disappointing, and with the launch of the POS tower, it was time to take my own path in the universe.

In February of this year, I launched VNRI (Venus Research Initiative) and spent approximately 600 million isk to launch the POS tower. After getting a bit of business very early from Venus Brotherhood members and some brief advertising through some of the trade channels, I found out that a friend of a coworker had started an alliance, Empire Research, whose purpose is to provide POS based research slots to alliance members. After a quick vote, I joined the alliance and converted the labs to be available to alliance members. This simplified the process of handling operations and increased tower income tremendously.

Well... That covers most of it. Since joining Empire Research, I have made a sizable amount of money from the POS. Business was very good for the first 3 months or so until the alliance had war declared against it by another alliance, 'The Privateers'. While the direct damage from this war declaration was minimal, it did cause several customers to leave the alliance. The past two months have shown pretty heavy losses as a result. So far, business seems to be picking up significantly for September, and if losses are posted again, they will be much smaller.

Now that I'm up to date, it will be much easier to provide updates that will perhaps not be quite so long. Well... they might still end up on the long side, but they won't cover as much ground anyway.