Late For Class...

...even though I didn't know I was going to be attending one until literally minutes before it happened.

I've had incredibly bad luck in terms of E-Uni class scheduling, but that's not the Uni's fault, it's my own personal fucked up schedule that's really the culprit. I just happened to be bitching about it in corp chat earlier and as luck would have it, a class I needed just happened to be about to start, a basic Tackling and Scouting 101 with Acacia Incana. While I do have some very minimal experience in these skills which I got during the class I took with Agony Unleashed a while back, this was something I really needed since so many other classes build on what's taught in this and other basic classes. The problem was that since the class was literally starting in just minutes, I had no time to pick up one of my tackling frigs. I ended up doing the class in my Thorax, and while it was great fun being a target and playing what amounted to "Interstellar Tag", I didn't get a chance to actually practice what was being taught. I learned what I needed to learn from this class, but because I was in the Thorax I really didn't a chance to actually practice it. Not a big deal, but I do think I'll retake it when I can.

In addition, I also learned a couple of important things that weren't in the class curriculum. For one thing, always check your overview settings after a patch. After the Revelations II patch, I lost all of my overview presets, and apparently after this latest one I lost about half of them, which I'd just painstakingly reconstructed about a week ago. Not only do I use the settings recommended in Romble's mp3 class, but I also keep the setting I learned in the readings for the AU class I took as well. The AU setup is slightly different from Romble's and I find it useful in certain situations. Just after the class began, I discovered that most of the Romble settings were gone, and certain settings from the AU setup had vanished as well. Fortuantely, I've now set these up from scratch a few times so I was able to fill the gaps as the class progressed by switching between the settings I still had and doing a few tweaks on the fly. Now, I know the first thing I have to do when I log in again is recreate these yet again. Ah well, I guess I can just think of it as practice.

The other thing I learned was something I should have known, that for me, someone who's done live radio online for over five years, should be filed under "Duh!". Of course, these classes require Teamspeak which I have and know how to use. At the beginning of the class I was having a lot of trouble hearing what was said clearly, and for some insane reason it didn't occur to me that the reason I was having so much trouble was because I wasn't using my headphones, I had the audio coming through my computer speakers. Normally this isn't much of a problem, but the room my computer is in is not the most effectively cooled by the AC, so I usually have a fan going when the weather is warm. The fan isn't really very loud, but it does make that "whooshing" sound fans do, creating a kind of low-level background "white noise". I'm so used to it I barely notice it most of the time, but it does effectively mask a certain amount of whatever audio I happen to be listening to. As a result, it was much harder to follow the conversation than it should have been, and silly me just chalked it up to less-than-optimum TS sound. This made perfect sense since Acacia's British accent led me to believe it was simply the distance that degraded the audio. Once I plugged in my headphones, though, it was like night and day, and I didn't have a problem again. DUH!

Pretty damn lame for my first class with the Uni, but despite the shaky start I'm looking forward to much more. One thing that kinda sucks is that I changed my email on the Ivy League message board and apparently my account has been put on inactive status for some reason. I think I'm supposed to get an email of some sort to reactivate it, but it hasn't arrived yet. If I don't get it by tomorrow when I check, I'll jump in-game and see if I can get someone in the Uni to help me get it working again. Until it is, I can't find out when the next classes I want to take will be held. I totally understand the need for security, but this is really a major pain. I'm getting notices about people posting in threads I'm tracking but I can't read them because until this is fixed I can't log in...grrrr...

Another interesting and cool thing I learned tonight is another of my Eve-Uni peeps is a reader of this blog (Hi Dee! :)). I also discovered that some of my classmates and Acacia didn't know I write one so I guess I'll have to post a link once I finally get back into the site. I do keep track of the amount of traffic this blog gets, and I've noticed that it's been slowly but steadily rising. Of course, like all bloggers, I love it when I see more people reading, and when I see people commenting here and in-game. It's a big reason why I spend as much time as I do on it, besides the fact that it combines two of my favorite pastimes, EvE and writing. Just knowing people are reading and enjoying it makes something that already gives me a great amount of pleasure and satisfaction even better.

Alright, enough for now. Til next time, fly safe.