New tires.

Went faster than I expected, and nothing blew in my face.
Feel free to trash the new look in comments and let me know if you find broken stuff I may have missed.

Side note: I couldn't figure how to make the new, blogger-provided template scale gracefully in width (ie use % instead of pixel width for the main gadget), please let me know if you have a tip for that.

Changing tires.

Redoing the layout/template to take advantage of a few new features of blogger/blogspot. 

Expect the site to be a tad messy for the next couple hours.

No apologies, it should be for the better, eventually.

Lucky me…

…I'm sitting poolside, next to the sea, enjoying a good coffee on the terrace.

Oh, and also: I barely ever use EVE-O boards, thanks to the goodness that is eve-search.

That doesn't make what happened with the new forum any less wrong, mind you — so much so that the words are failing me, but not this guy, so go there for a very good expose on the very bad things that CCP did to itself and its community, this time around.

Here's CCP early public response, which is not bad, considering. Timely, yet dev blog only: apparently not news headlines worthy.

Then the news iteration, downplaying that trainwreck as a standard issue:

"We're experiencing technical difficulties, please hold."

And take two of the same, this time reluctantly acknowledging the elephant-sized cat out of the bag…

Then the inevitable very sad dev blog, dripping of the knee-jerk induced cold sweats we've come to expect from CCP in such situations, mixing signals, downplaying the actual threat, excusing massive failure under the "that's a good lesson for the future, I'm sure" umbrella, and attempting to both cajole and threaten the user base into sitting tight and holding hands while shit rains across their collective face.

To be fair, I'm not unsympathetic to CCP's situation, here: industrial accidents happens anywhere.

Still, this one this one is especially egregious and embarrassing, reeks of olympic levels in carelessness and incompetence, and shines a very gloomy light on the apparent change of course from Committing to Excellence (by standards you plebeians can't relate to) and toward Committing to Deliver (regardless of condition).

If it wasn't for the half-assed attempt at blame-the-victim tactics, believe it or not, I'd actually been cool with their handling of the crisis — although obviously not with the meat of the issue: shipping without fixing critical faults that had been reported during testing.

In other news, Incursion 1.4.2 just in, and so is the "Hey, it's we, the CSM6" introductory letter — I'll get back to this last bit, it sounds like fun.

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Update: Kudos to CCP Sreegs for his awesome* tenacity in the dev blog comments threadnaught.

[*No sarcasm, for once.]