How to lose three pods in an hour

A theme I've tried to keep with my own experiences is to turn them into Lessons Learned.  I hope this can be valuable for others, so follow along with your hapless host and keep count:

One!  One Pod!  Ha Ha Ha!

Getting the kids to bed and dinner with the wife runs late, so I miss a corp meeting and I'm hopeful I can get into the planned Svipul roam.  I log in to Eve and comms and hear there is a fight going on and not too far away either.  I don't have a Svipul but I hear reference to Enyos in fleet so I jump into one, undock and ... the eve client stops responding.  Oh crap.  I've seen this before, particularly when the computer has been on for a long time, perhaps a swap-space fragmentation type problem, and yes the computer has been on since 7am or so with everyone in the family playing their own games and such.  Sigh.  It's clearly not coming back so I hard reboot the computer.

We have a couple local pirate groups who sometimes will hang out on our home undock and I see that they were indeed there tonight when I get logged back in.  Minus one Enyo and one pod.  Sigh, I was looking forward to more hull-tank frigate fun with a little boost from that pod.

Two! Two Pods! Ha Ha Ha!

Okay, since the computer is rebooted then that shouldn't happen again.  Quick put back in the implants to match what I'm training, throw in some quick hardwirings.  I'm back on comms and I hear the FC mention Algoses.  Okay, I don't have anymore Enyos fit but I do have a couple Algos.  undock, insta-undock warp, align and I'm off!

It sounds like the fight with our Svipuls went our way and the fleet is looking for the next target.  I land on the Pyne side of the gate and I see there are a lot of war targets in system.  I grab local and paste it into AD for fleet intel - and my overview fills with orange flashy.  Well, I guess I found that fleet.  My gate cloak is going to expire any moment, so I need to get aligning out....

But an Algos isn't super agile, is it?  Hello there Stilletto, I guess I'm stuck.  Right, align align so as soon as the Algos dies... I get instantly grabbed again and podded.  Sigh.  I relay the fleet composition to the fleet as best I can recall it, and the FC asks for my lossmail - yup that's a pretty good summary of their fleet.

Sidenote: about now someone on comms starts asking about what I lost, and from the tone of his voice I'm guessing he's about to offer me replacements and I assure him I'm fine.  I'm in that not-poor/not-rich space where I don't need a hand like that from a corpmate, but it is nice that it's the kind of corp where that is available to those who need it.

Okay, I don't have another Ocular and Neural Standard implant pair and I don't like to be down anything on training time.  However, I do have a clone I had moved up to Nennamalia and I can probably get a ship quick there since that's a GalMil hub kinda of system.

Three! Three Pods! Ha Ha Ha!

Cheap Atron bought I undock in Nennamalia and head for the fleet.  I catch up just in time to dive into a plex alongside them and chase after a Griffin.  He jams me but he also burns away from the fight at top speed, so I hopefully took him out of the equation.  Of course it also means no kills, but fights often can't be measured that way.

No new fleets come to challenge us and people are starting to fade, so I turn to return this clone back to Nennamalia.  There's a gang on the Nenna side of the gate, but the swift Atron pops right through that.  Hey wait!  Why did I just see a Einherji on my overview?  D-scan... Nyx?  Okay, I bet people will want to know about that, but I need more info to make sure it wasn't just a POS in the angle of my scan.  We have a perch bookmark, so I'll just pop to that.

No Nyx on the scene any more, but there is a Stilleto... oh crap that's fast.  Align align!  Crap, I'm long pointed so burn that MWD.  Nope, now scrammed too.  Okay, align to station go go go.  The Atron pops, spam warp, nope.  Goodbye pod.  Hey look, I've been Skynetted if indeed that can be verbed - I have two supercarriers in on my capsule kill.  So the interceptors (Crow, Stilleto) and EAFs (Hyena x2) are probably maxed for instalock and the fighters carry the dps.  I see why that's been nerfed into oblivion now, very intimately I do.

I wake up back home in Fliet.  Fortunately a corpmate has a spare pair of +4s for Per/Will so I buy those from him and plug them in and call it a night.  So let's reflect on this.

Lessons Learned

Pod 1: Know your Machine.  I probably should just make a point of rebooting Windows when it's been on all day before playing Eve.  It looks like a common enough pattern.  If you know a pattern like that then you either fix it or bypass it.

Pod 2: Never sit on Gate.  I got caught up in providing fleet intel.  I would have been able to provide even better intel if I hadn't died.  Even just jumping to a perch on the gate would have been better than sitting there waiting for my gate cloak to expire.  I might have been able to get us another fight against our FW enemies (and had a lot more fun myself)

Pod 3: Atrons are fast, Inties are faster.  The 150km gate bookmark was only seconds away from the Stilleto and its point, which I can only assume was linked, implanted etc.  I should have been aligning out the moment I landed and warped as soon as I saw that Stilleto.  I was too caught up looking for the super (which of course was actually at a POS somewhere, doubtless)

Overall: FRAPS everything.  I've been pretty good lately about loading FRAPS up to record fights, though after recording a bunch of non-fights (target flees the plex) I then sometimes forget to record the real fight.  This time I didn't load FRAPS after rebooting.  Recording any of these times could have provided immediate reflection for intel and might have shown other things too - for instance, I wonder just how close it was with Pod 3 - did I miss something in not getting away immediately?

Anything else you'd suggest, dear readers?