Screw Oursulaert. I’ve headed back to Haatomo. The agents in Ours sucked, and were Gallente, so they had me running missions against my brethren Caldari. Screw that. The money’s better in Haatomo anyhow.
My application to Ex Coelis has gone unanswered.
2006 November 27 UPDATE: Old Jewel Software has released a new version of iPiece that is much improved. Please see the new review.
iPiece is OS X software released by Old Jewel Software that magnifies the screen surrounding your mouse pointer. It costs $10.
While you’re probably thinking, “Hey, that could be useful,” let me tell you that this functionality already exists. And it’s free. And you already have it, if you’ve got OS X.
See, Apple made a preference pane in System Preferences called Universal Access, which allows for things like voice descriptions of your screen, changing the contrast, or zooming in. See that last one? Zooming in?
That’s right. It’s built into the operating system. You can activate it with one simple keystroke: Apple-Option-8.
So what does this iPiece do that the Univeral Access zoom doesn’t? It takes up space in your menubar and subtracts ten dollars from your bank account.
Oh sure, it doesn’t magnify the whole screen, only magnifying a small section of the screen so the rest stays unmagnified, which is marginally handy.
But it comes with a long list of annoyances. Annoyingly, you can’t change any of the preferences without zoom being enabled. Annoyingly, you can’t change the zoom level or the box size without going to the preferences, and none of this can be driven by the keyboard. Annoyingly, it also uses the non-standard method of double-clicking the menubar icon to turn it on, something I’ve never seen in an application before. Annoyingly, the application’s actual icon is annoyingly small and has too much transparant space, which means you have to double-click on a teeny-tiny area to launch it.
All in all, a stupid (and annoying!) OS X application. I can’t see the point of this, and I especially can’t see the point of charging ten dollars for functionality that already exists in the operating system for free. Then again, this is OS X, where Apple fanboys seem to enjoy throwing away their money on useless and frivolous functionality ($100 for a year of .Mac, anybody?).
So iPiece. I’ve installed it, and I’m about to uninstall it. It’s not even worth keeping around “just in case”, because “just in case” is Apple-Option-8, and that’s free.
As a Stupid OS X app, iPiece gets four and a half stars out of five, which means as a Cool OS X app it would get half a star out of five.
I’ve decided that the solo life is over for me. I’ve applied for membership in the Ex Coelis corporation based out of Oursulaert. This means that I have to bid Haatomo a fond adieu.
This also means that I have to say goodbye to my favourite agent in the universe, Atshodan Kiraski. Thanks, Atshodan, for all of the great missions. Even the ones where I had to bail out those Interbus employees, yet again!
I was about to head out for a leisurely trip to Jita to sell some loot when I received an Evemail from Heikama Arikaka. He said that he had a “very special mission” for me that “is of utmost importance to the Caldari State”.
The last one of these “special missions” I did had me shuttle a janitor from one station to another. Needless to say I didn’t have my hopes up for something exciting.
Luckily they come with cash rewards. Pittances compared to the rewards I get for my regular missions, but rewards nonetheless. And there’s all that rubbish about “utmost importance to the Caldari State”, and the little patriotic hamster in my brain likes helping out the Caldari State, so I decided to listen this time.
I met up with Mr. Arikaka and asked him what was up. Response: action! I get to blow stuff up! Something about Guristas pirates, blah blah blah.
But then he said something that riled me up a little: “I request, no actually I DEMAND, that you leave this station immediately…”
Demand? Last I checked, bub, the Caldari State was a free state. If you want to demand people do things go check out those slave-driving Amarrians.
But I did it anyhow. I guess I’m a slave after all, a slave to the almighty ISK.
I’ll be getting a MacBook for work sometime in the near future. While the chief reason I’m getting it is to be able to support Mac software at the Joint Astronomy Centre, this might be a close second.
Looks like McLaren decided that having Juan Pablo Montoya around for the rest of the season wasn’t a good idea, so he’s been released.
It’s sad to see Montoya leaving Formula 1. He always had good quotes from the pitlane and provided much-needed excitement on the track. F1 will be a more boring place without him, and given the recent snoozefests that F1 calls races, watch for F1 to get an Ambien sponsorship.
I was wasting time today running some missions for my agent (stupid Interbus employees got stuck in that war again!) when I got an Evemail from Penakka Kukakka, an employee of Propel Dynamics.
It seems that they had a viral outbreak and needed some antibiotics to cure it, and were willing to reward me richly if I could supply them with some Zemnar antibiotics.
I’m not one to point out that antibiotics won’t help them cure a viral outbreak, especially when they’re offering implants that’ll help my ship out. And wads of cash. Client gets what client wants.
This mission involved a little bit of risk. The Zemnar could only be found in a solar system named Kubinen, which is a 0.4 lowsec system. Still, nothing risked nothing gained. Of course I had to put up a collateral of 50,000 ISK. I don’t know why, I’m trustworthy. I guess they really wanted those antibiotics.
Went through with no problems. A boring little trip. And client got what client wanted. And I got my pay. And that’s what counts most.
It looks like Heather got her wish as Juan Pablo Montoya will be moving to NASCAR in 2007.
Montoya is quoted as saying he wants to “get back to racing”. It’s uncertain why he picked NASCAR as that’s not racing.
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I don’t know if anybody out there can use this information, but somehow I got a Guristas ship log on my Worlds Collide mission. Here’s what it said:
Wow, I’ve just met Korako ‘The Rabbit’ Kosakami himself! He was sailing his TL2+ Condor into the ‘roid facility in Kusomonmon, with a small group of deserter sergeants from the Navy. Man, wait ’til I tell the guys down at the fitting station.
Since I don’t hang out with pirates I have no idea who this Rabbit character is and why he’s a bigshot. A TL2+ ship is something to write home about though, so maybe it’s worth checking out. There are a few mining stations in Kusomonmon and it’s 0.8 space so it’s safer than Haatomo…
