Mentors, Kills, Things I've Learned, and Inferno Escalation

I've finally been assigned a mentor, Magnus Ambers.  It's his job to change me from a cuddly kitten to a murderous tiger.  I figure with his teaching I'll be at least this good at running a gatecamp:

I've been setting up as many tacs and safes as I can stomach at any given time, seriously is there a less entertaining part of eve?  But I've finally got at least our home system pretty much covered, and I'm completely moved in with enough ships to last a little while, and I'm ready to get going.

It took me a few days due to having to get settled but I finally got in on my first kill (in null) yesterday, though I did lose my ship in the process.  I was flying my skirmish Rifter and paper tank doesn't even begin to cover it.  We took out a Hawk and I thought my speed would keep me safe, but alas it didn't.

My first mistake was not orbiting at 500m, I realized as soon as I was dead that my orbit was set to 1900m, so my transversel wasn't as high as it could and should have been.  Then in my haste to warp my pod out I clicked on a stargate instead of a planet, 0.o, my pod saver tab clearly wasn't set properly and has since been fixed.  Thankfully though the gate was empty and no further mishaps ensued, but I clearly need to go over all my overview tabs and make sure their set up properly, I can't be letting mistakes happen simply because of an overview that isn't set up properly.

I was able to get the initial point on the target and stay alive long enough for the rest to finish off the target, so it wasn't a total waste.  I'll take only losing a Rifter for contributing on a Hawk my first day.

Other things I knew but now I've learned:

• Don't warp to 0 on a gate - I got caught on an abandoned bubble doing just that, thankfully it was abandoned so I was fine, but that could have ended badly.
• Tacs are of vital importance - I learned this because of the above, can't let that happen again.
• D-Scan is more important that it was in HighSec - I need to do a better job of keeping track of what ships are where, I missed out on a couple of kills because I didn't know they were coming.  This will take some practice.
• Know the map - In HighSec I haven't really needed to know the map very well.  The auotpilot route has always worked for me, I need to get The Syndicate map down like the back of my hand.

One last note: the Inferno Escalation patch deploys tonight, make sure you're ready with a fairly long skill to train in case something goes wrong.  The highlights are:

• No more T1 Meta 0 module drops from NPCs.
• Titan tracking is being lowered.
• Drone alloys are being removed.
• Incursion rewards are being lowered.
• Active effects will now display above/below the HUD.
• We can now make our toons look like smurfs (hopefully...), or at least bi-racial.