Donating Blood

On the 12th I made my 14th whole blood donation. Blood donation is one of the few things that I have a strong opinion about. For a small chunk of time every three months most people can help save lives. I say most because there are restrictions on who can and cannot donate blood.

For example down here in New Zealand anyone that has injected themselves with anything not prescribed by a doctor are not to donate blood. Also if you've been sick recently you shouldn't be donating blood which has stopped me before.

The entire process is very safe and pretty simple. You start off with a questionerre that covers the restrictions and such before donating blood. This is followed by talking to a nurse who looks at the questionerre and takes a quick hemoglobin count to make sure that it's high enough. After all of this the easy part happens. You lie back in a bed/chair thing while a nurse preps your arm and then sticks the needle. Now this is the most painful bit because while the needle doesn't go in far it is a fair size so as not to damage the blood cells. Then you sit back reading, listening to your mp3 player, napping, anything else that doesn't involve moving about for 10 to 15 minutes while the donation is taken. Afterwards the needle gets taken out, you sit back for a couple more minutes then go and get a bite to eat and something to drink. I'd say this is the best part because who can say no to sugary stuff.

And if you want to get into it even more down here in New Zealand every two weeks you can make a plasma donation where only the plasma is taken out. This is more involved and takes longer but with all the plasma products used the blood service down here is always asking for more plasma donors.

So donating blood is a simple, safe and useful way to help those around you that are in a bit of trouble. And if you're in Wellington the nurses and other donors are good fun and good to chat with.

NZ Blood Service

England and North Wales Blood Service

American Red Cross

Inteceptor vs Covert Ops

To quickly lay out the scene my Alliance is currently participating in three wars. This should mean a pleathora of targets but around home we're either heavily outgunned or heavily outgun. This lead into me deciding to semi autopilot my way to the other side of empire space with my route going through Amarr. That means gate camps.

So to be a little sensible I take my Buzzard along to take care of some old assets that I've decided to retire. I'm flying through system after system with no war targets in local. I also don't notice I'm coming up on Amarr. Landing on a gate I see a single war target in a Stiletto. Thinking 'crap' I quickly jump through and have a brain fart. Instead of warping away I cloak and move off in a random direction away from gate. Stiletto pilot burns towards my last position and bang, I'm decloaked, locked, scrammed and being shot. Not expecting to survive much longer on goes the self-destruct and I slow boat towards the gate thanks to the Stiletto's scram turning off my MWD.

30 seconds later I realize I'm still at 80% shields and there are no other war targets coming to this pilot's aide. I'm sure he thought I would be an easy kill as much as I did. My 380m/s base speed combined with the rockets the stiletto was using meant I was escaping the blast radius. 5 seconds later I hit the gate and jump and quickly warp off to a planet while the war target's agression wears off.

It's interesting how in EVE things can go from crap to relief in a few moments. No matter which side youre on.

The tl;dr version: Rockets are useless against a frig doing 300+ m/s. Even if you do have the target scrammed.

My First Mac

Well I decided I needed a new laptop to replace the one I've had for about two and a half years. So seeing all the stuff for the past few years about how awesome Mac's are I decided to splash out and get a 13" 2.26GHz Macbook Pro.

Positives:

• Very nice body construction. The aluminium unibody is one of the major things that drew me in.
• Multi touch touchpad. The two finger tap for right click is nice.
• Battery life. Compare to the 2 hours at best for my old laptop the 6+ hours is great.
• The little LEDs and button on the side for displaying battery level. Very nice user experiance touch.

Negatives:

• No lights displaying hard disk access. Not a big thing but I found it nice knowing if the hard drive was tharshing itself to bits.
• No fullscreen on Firefox. Silly Apple for having a usability practice of disallowing this. 
• Getting used to how Apple uses the taskbar. Or in their case, the Dock. I'll get used to it but it's quite different to how the *nix distros and Windows do it.
• Lack of middle click. I use this heavily for opening tabs. Comand-Click works though.

On the whole an interesting piece of machinery and I may install a *nix distro on it one of these days.

Edit: Moved one of the positives to negatives as it was in the wrong place.

My Astronomy Cast Question Was Answered

Yay,

A couple of weeks ago I sent off a question to the Astronomy Cast team asking if anything they had said in the four years the show had been around had changed. Oddly enough their answer was, we don't know. And promptly polled the listeners to send in any corrections.

Anyway. I thought it was pretty cool. Here's a link to the episode and my question starts at around the 22mins 30secs mark.

Questions: An Unlocked Moon, Energy Into Black Holes, and the Space Station's Orbit

Team Fortress 2 Sniper and Spy Achievements

I've just noticed that Valve have put back the old way of getting unlocks through achievements with a small change. The Sniper and Spy unlocks are got at 5, 11 and 17 achievements whereas the Medic, Heavy, Scout and Pyro are 10, 16 and 22.

Valve, if you're going to change the unlocks like this then change the older unlocks to match the new way.