To Eve or not to Eve

Doh ! Another evening goes by where I didn't reactivate the Eve subscription. Guess I got kinda distracted tonight :

Think I got 4 Stargates out of the way and then it was tapping in a blog post on the techie zone about my Acer laptop, bought just before Xmas. (Linky!)

I had the response back from the petition I put in about my account getting hacked. CCPs reaction here is a little behind what I've heard of what happens with hacked Warcraft accounts. With WoW, the account gets the money given back and trashed items appear in the mail. You lose a little from the configurable items but not really that much. With Eve, it looks like I'll just get the money back. That's good from some points of view as a lot of the ships that were sold, I wasn't using anyway. But ... the price to Buy an item in Eve is almost always more than what you get from Selling, so I'll lose game cash from a couple of things :

Configurable items - will need to buy the configurable bit again
Buy/Sell difference.

My main Empire ("safe" space) ship was a Nighthawk, last time I looked they were 250 million to buy and 200 million to sell. So that's a 50 million cost there. Plus quite a few millions for the configurable items. I'll have to take stock when I go back in.

Can't really see why they couldn't dig in the backups to restore the character totally to an earlier time. Maybe it's a policy decision, maybe it's just too difficult to dive into backups. Smacks a bit of lack of effort on the part of the people running the game. I'll head back into Eve soon, it just seems a waste to reactivate at 11pm at night when I'm wondering what my bed time will be :-) And I've been managing to distract myself quite well lately ...

(Too much telly!)

Still don't know where I'll be working this time next month. Some of the support that was promised has failed to materialise. Maybe that's a hint to get a bit more proactive ?

It's affecting a few people and in curious ways too. I'm desperately trying not to show anything (show no weakness ethic) but I think the uncertainty stress is what's behind my stiff back flaring up. The back has been getting more distracting lately, sometimes to the point where it makes my thinking fuzzy. Constant low level pain does very strange things to the mind.

There's a contrast too with a couple of us. I'm not too bothered about being pushed out, as I know I've been on my project far too long. However, me, my boss and his boss are painfully aware that my tasks are ongoing essential tasks that cannot be neglected. So I've not fought the "post disestablished" thing because I knew it was time to move on but maybe it would have been better for the project if I'd dug the trench instead of escape tunnel ? The contrast comes with another person who's being pushed out, they're fighting to keep the post, not wanting to let go.

We have a few who are looking jealously at the people in my position cos they'd actually quite like to leave. Fewer people means the ones left behind pick up more work, which is tough to take when they're overworked already. Despite the image the media like to give us, we civil servants work damn hard. Same as any place, there's the lightweight waste of space passengers and the people who work themselves into early graves. One of my Mischief Campaigns is to keep a grin on one of those hard working people :-)

Uncertainty causes all sorts of stress. It's an unwelcome distraction that gets in the way of you focusing on what you were intending to do.

After the Norah Jones album on now (Feels Like Home - good album!) I'll be looking for sleep ... I'm needing the sleep to help me combat the stress. While I have the weight under control right now, I do tend to comfort eat. Had to stop myself from raiding even more chocolate earlier ...

The uncertainty stress is hitting another of my colleagues like that too. Stress about one thing tends to make you notice the "normal" stress things more. So with me, it brings out the soreness from my broken bits. With my colleague, the uncertainty stress is bringing out what she's most worried about, which is being bigger than she wants to be. Sleepypete's opinion ? She hasn't got a problem :-) The inner beauty still shines out just as much as it always has and she got a disbelieving look the other day with the weight thing.

And I've probably put enough in that last para to get me strapped in to a torture chamber (with "training room" sign on door) with the Equality and Diversity course locked into a machine.

The only way of really dealing with stress is to identify the cause. Without knowing that, you can't begin to identify how to beat the problem. And it has to be the root cause too, like my aches being down partly to the cold but mostly they're due to uncertainty stress. Or my foxy colleague getting conned into thinking she's bigger than she wants to be due to the stress of Big Change Coming.

There's a few more facets of stress I'm experiencing at the moment - uncertainty with the job is a big one but I also seem to have a clock chiming quite loudly at the moment with apparently not many options. Let's just say I have toys I'd like to share with someone special. (Hey ! Who sniggered ?! ;-) Trouble is I don't know who that special someone is yet.

Lol - and here comes yet another E-Harmony advert like some sort of hint ;-)

Erm - I started this post talking about whether I'd be getting back into an online game didn't I ... Oops !

PS Where did I leave the cookies ?