Trikassi Enterprises 2020

The 2019 recession slowly lifted leading to more favourable market conditions. However in 2020 there was a significant raw material shortage that created continuing uncertainty.

As our headline figures below show, there was an overall improvement in growth.

Headline figures (2019 in brackets)

Year on Year Net Growth 17% (8%)
Before PLEX Profit: 28% (18%)
End year corporation book value 348 (304) Billion ISK

Trikassi Enterprises 2019

The recession that began at the end of last year continued through most of 2019. Our Raitaru has been the only active capsuleer owned factory in Sobaseki until recently. There are some signs that economic conditions may be improving, but sustained recovery is not yet certain.
Whilst the corporation is still profitable, our growth has been at a much reduced level.
The price of PLEX was high in summer, reducing net profit.
We had one nuisance War Dec that did not affect us significantly due to robust contingency planning.

Headline figures (2018 in brackets):
Year on Year Net Growth 8% (47%)
Before PLEX Profit 20% (109%)
End year Corporation book value 304 (274) Billion ISK

Trikassi Enterprises 2018

Manufacturing conditions in Eve have been sub-optimal this past year. Technological innovations in moon mining caused a flood of minerals onto the market, depressing prices with a knock-on effect to manufactured goods.
Towards the end of the year this overproduction was augmented by falling demand resulting in an economic recession in Hisec. The result can plainly be seen locally, with factories being shut down and mothballed.
In the third Quarter we suffered an annoying war declaration which disrupted our activities for several weeks, though fortunately no assets were lost.
The price of PLEX fell significantly in the first half of the year, then rose to its previous level.

On the good side our station remains open, attracting an increasing number of users by having the cheapest rates in system. We acquired Blueprints for several new lines such as Battleships and various Modules. Our old products continue to be profitable though at reduced sales volumes.

Headline figures (2017 figures in brackets):
Year on Year Net Profit 47% (55%)
Before PLEX Profit 124% (99%)
End year Corporation book value 274 Billion ISK

War! No one killed shock horror

Finally, I got the "nice space station you got there, shame if it should get blown up" message.

In EVE hi sec, within the territories of the big NPC empires, there are police. However a contribution to their benevolent fund will cause them to turn blind eyes to shenanigans. These are called WarDecs.

The rules for blowing up space stations are intended to prevent Corporations in different time zones from making surprise attacks when the other guys are fast asleep. First, attackers have to knock down the station's Shields. A week later, they can come back to destroy its Armour. Finally after another week, and that was today, they can destroy it.

Now my corporation specialises in arms dealing not combat, we are small, defenceless but wealthy so we hired mercenaries to defend us and the extortionists backed off without a fight. Hopefully they won't try that again, it cost them money and a complementary Bounty on their heads. It cost us a few million ISK as well, mostly in lost production, but we can make that up in a few days.

Spacesheeting 63

The transition of EVE downloadable data from XML tables to SWAGGER has reached the point where the old system has been discontinued, which leaves me no choice but to convert.

SWAGGER is more complicated as it uses temporary tokens to get access to private data. This allows third-party apps to display your secret stuff without having access to your password, and that isn't easy to implement with a spreadsheet! However, a nice person wrote a guide:
SSO_Authentication_in_Microsoft_Power_Query

Right now I have the tables up and running, the next task is to get the many spreadsheet references to point to them. Which, with INDEX MATCH arrays, is a pain.

[added] Finished! Took six weeks!! Everything seems to be back to normal, updating generates a lot of error messages but these can be ignored.

I'm not that wealthy!

According to her EVE Character Sheet, Ori is worth 82 Billion ISK. Now while as a corporation CEO she is not short of funds that is plainly untrue, so what was going wrong?

There is a Character Assets XML table that can be downloaded via the EVE API. This doesn't include some things which are on the Character Sheet such as cash and escrow but still...

The XML had a column with mixed Tables and nulls which Excel wouldn't expand, so I had to create a second table to get this flattened out, it held the contents of containers and ship fittings.
Annotating the tables revealed an accounting glitch. The corporation transports goods from the factory to the market where they sit in a warehouse before going on sale. A corporation warehouse would be absurdly expensive to rent at a trade hub so the corp uses Ori's personal storage hanger which is free, and this comes up as her assets.
So that was around 40 billion located. Where was the rest? It turned out that sales orders were also being credited to Ori, only when items were sold did the cash arrive in the corporation bank account. And there on the order sheet was another 37 billion!

Another glitch was found whilst doing all this - the API ignores personal stuff in player owned space stations. This is unlikely to be corrected as XML is being phased out.

Spacesheeting 51

'51' being the version of the EVE spreadsheet I've reached!

Following the conversion to Power Query all seemed well. There is a bug I created myself by deleting worksheets without disconnecting downloads on them, but that just requires pressing a button twice.

Meanwhile the devs have progressed from one API front end, CREST, to another, SWAGGER. Noticing that it had a useful price list I ventured into it armed only with my shaky knowledge of JSON and it was as tricky as I feared. Why is every entry called 'Record'? Much searching followed until I realised that the 'List to Table' button was the magic one.

Time to upgrade

After seven years, a new desktop PC! The previous one has served well with only one hardware failure, the power unit.
So as before something middle range for about the same price and rely on Moore's Law to make it better.
250GB SSD
GeForce GTX 1060
Intel i7
Aero Cool DS200 case+fans

It is, as advertised, silent.
I could have used a shift everything over utility, but that would have taken accumulated junk with it so I'm only moving specific files and where possible downloading and installing from scratch.
So far, no drama. If anything over enthusiasm, since Windows was grabbing settings from the old machine without asking!

And then I hit an Excel snag. Excel 2016 has integrated Power Query into the main program, it was an optional Addon for earlier versions. In doing so the old XML table downloader seems to have been broken, it fails to Save Maps correctly.
So I had to convert. Power Query is more generalised and is indeed powerful, but it's a complicated pain to learn. There is a button for everything, but where is it?
Today came the big test, running the converted sheet on Excel 2016. Success!

[added] Time to check really old programs: Webedit and WS/FTP are both Win95 vintage, mirrors of their folders have followed me faithfully and... they still work. A test edit of a website page uploaded with no complaints.

Oops

Oh dear - not been killed in EVE for a long while. I forgot that War Declarations only expire 24 hours after the clock runs out and got ambushed in my big fat freighter.
In EVE you wake up in a new clone minus your expensive implants and with a depleted bank balance, a totally unpleasant experience.

Nothing of Interest

The big change in EVE last year was a new range of player owned space stations, so my Corporation built one. It's a robot factory called "Nothing of Interest" orbiting the innermost moon of a gas giant, a pretty spot.
Editing the spreadsheet to take account of the various advantages not renting factory space provides has been tricky, but if I've got it right the green lights say we are in for a profitable year. Assuming no one decides to blow it up that is.

Spacesheeting 2.0

The EVE spreadsheet continued to grow last year and now has graphs. This one measures the progress of my manufacturing corporation Trikassi Enterprises. Spotting bad trends that can be corrected has been a considerable help, overstocking (the orange line) for example.
The dark green line is the book value of the corporation, currently about $1,500 in RL money though unlike Second Life I can't cash it in. The Corp does pay for the game subscription, $30/month for my two accounts.

Spacesheeting

To make stuff in World of Warcraft you need a hammer. In EVE Online you need a spreadsheet.
This is just a corner of my currently 1.2Mb monster, which pulls down data from game databases and tells me what's worth manufacturing. It also does stock control.

I had old XML maps that weren't being used and Excel wouldn't tell me how to delete them. I was looking in the wrong place, the DATA menu and not DEVELOPER which has the XML management section. Bah.
The next step will be to compile a raw material shopping list.

Farmville is eating the Internet

The xkcd webcomic has a new edition out of its Map of Online Communities. Go take a look (the map enlarges if you click on it).

What the map does well is to place otherwise unconnected Internet communities into perspective. For example, political bloggers who suppose the wired world reads their every flame may be chastened to find the map needs an enlarged inset to show them. In some regions one group dominates - Warcraft on MMO island, Skype in messaging, and Facebook as the biggest nation.

Multiscreen

The only problem with my big (37") TV screen that's been doubling up as a monitor is that its text display isn't good; using programs with unadjustable text size (such as Eve Online) causes serious eyestrain. So I looked around for a reasonable size monitor and came up with a 22" LG E2250. It's an 'LED' monitor, an improvement on pure LCD.
Connecting via a DVI-D lead was no problem, Windows7 auto detected and multiscreened - that's where you move the mouse off the edge of one screen and it pops up on the other. The specific LG driver needed a nudge to install.
Text is now clearer by a lot. The LED improves on backlighting, making the picture brighter.

More fun in space

My carebear trader character is leaving a totally safe space station in her cargo ship. But nowhere is safe in Eve...

Oriella undocks, a small ship warps in and blinks red at her

[ 2007.05.06 12:36:44 ] (notify) ACiD360: You have foolishly engaged in criminal activity within sight of sentry guns and must suffer the consequences.
[ 2007.05.06 12:36:46 ] (notify) ACiD360's Ishtar has started trying to warp scramble you.

WTF? I'm taking damage, but not a lot. Maybe I should repair shields or something? Oh nevermind, here they come...
A squad of police ships warp in.

[ 2007.05.06 12:37:06 ] (notify) CONCORD Police Captain has started trying to warp scramble ACiD360's Ishtar

BOOM

ACiD360 > lol
ACiD360 > damn
ACiD360 > this aint lowsec
ACiD360 > im so stupid
Oriella Trikassi > er.... yes
Oriella Trikassi > especially against a transport
ACiD360 > yep
ACiD360 > shit happens^^
Oriella Trikassi > nearly spilt my beer there

Did we not kill them?

How do I introduce this one? It's a conversation overheard on a chat channel within Eve, my online game. In a star system in a distant galaxy two spaceship pilots are in conversation, unaware that I'm listening...

KtB > Hey sam :)
sammual > hye man
KtB > How ya doing
sammual > great u
KtB > not bad not bad man
sammual > cool
KtB > Right, when i say :)
sammual > kk
KtB > rdy?
sammual > ye
KtB > hardeners on.
sammual > ye
KtB > Go go go

{they set off bombs in the hope of blowing up larger ships in a surprise attack. This alerts Concord, the police, who warp in and blow their ships up. They are now, Darth Vader style, in their escape pods}

sammual > argh
KtB > Lmao!
KtB > did we not kill em?
sammual > er no
KtB > eh lol
sammual > damn
KtB > have you gotta target em? lol
sammual > i dunno
sammual > maybe
KtB > holy shit look at concord lol
sammual > lmao
KtB > lmao
KtB > eh wtf
sammual > k lets go back to station
KtB > lol
sammual > lol
KtB > confused lol
KtB > erm
KtB > ive got a mining drone
KtB > stuck to my pod
sammual > lmao
KtB > :S
KtB > can you see it?
KtB > look at me when ya get to station
sammual > man we suck
sammual > lol
KtB > haha i know lol
KtB > how did it not work :S
sammual > dunno

{and this is why I play these games!}

Currin Trading

Eve on-line (link on left) is my current MMORPG and it's pretty good, or so says mmorpg.com where it's currently rated at #1. It's an SF game in which the characters are spaceship pilots, flying around mining, trading and shooting at each other. Anyone who remembers the legendary game 'Elite' will be immediately at home in the Eve universe.

My character happens to be a Trader, hauling all manner of goods between space stations trying to make an honest ISK (InterStellar Kredit). Now while Eve has a complex market system and allows electronic ISK transfer it doesn't have a banking system, so players have stepped in to fill this void with all manner of investment schemes. Some are genuine, raising capital to build space stations for example, but others are...

The most famous heist to date has been that pulled off by the Guiding Hand Social Club, a mercenary group who were hired to wreck the finances of a player Corp and stole 20 billion ISK in doing so. One player wondered if he could better this and the just published Currin Trading tells how he 'liberated' 30 billion all on his own in a classic Ponzi scheme. Fascinating reading.