Back From Hiatus

I haven't posted here since Crius launched.  This summer has been characterized by burnout in pretty serious fashion.  You could trace my burnout back specifically to some financial troubles that have taken most of the summer to clean up.  In all, I've been trying to figure out what is worth investing my time into, and keeping up appearances in EVE hasn't really been one of them.

The long-and-short is that though Crius represented a significant and important improvement in quality of live for industry, personally, my heart isn't in grinding space money.  This is largely due to a need to rebuild tools coupled with the lowered direct margins.  This would be surmountable, if I had any interest in growing my personal wallet above a 10B waterline.

Extracurriculars 

Computer Case Painting: #PCMASTERRACE

Instead, I spent the summer trying out some new projects.  First, I've been working on my general geek cred with something a little more creative.  It should be finished this week just a little after the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel launch:

More pictures should be out this next week.  I'll probably do a whole /r/diy post here once it's totally complete.

More Data Projects

I have some pretty big data problems at work I've been trying to digest.  I'd like to build new methodologies to explore that data, but hammering at work data after-hours is a great way to go completely mad.  Instead, I've been working on some IRL/EVE market data scripting.  Specifically been playing with Quandl a bunch, and that has reignited the sparks on a lot of half-baked scripts I had sitting idle.

This has sparked a two-way development scheme that is paying dividends on a lot of fronts.  Quandl/IRL data is serving as the test bed to write really "good" code; the kind that is clean and extensible.  EVE/CREST data is giving me the sandbox to try "new" code and work out mistakes and structure in a better behaved environment.  

The end goals are:

• Become familiar with plotting software
• Become familiar with neural network tools/methodology
• Learn high parallelism code: threadding/GPU

On the Horizon

Hydrostatic Podcast has been one big pull back to the game, and I have some ambitious plans for a new show in addition to the podcast.  During the Alliance Tournament (grats Camel Empire), there was an ad for an EVE market show.  After checking it out, I said to myself, "I bet I could do something like that".

To commit to a regular stream like that, I knew the pre-stream work was going to be the breaking point.  So, I've been working on a batch of scripts to help scrape and generate the visual aides automatically, so I can just broadcast without much issue.

Sample outputs:

• Mineral Report
• Advanced Material Report
• SIG1.5 group

I plan to have episode 0, of the yet unnamed project, airing this upcoming Thursday night US (Fri, Oct 17 0200 in game).  I expect the show to be ~1hr weekly.  I'm targeting Thursday night so people can have the info they need to speculate on the weekend.  Check out the draft show notes and let me know what you think!