My nipples explode with delight!

Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession.

The Pinball Wizards show was pretty good, though I took wrong turns in both directions. There seemed to be a lot less overpriced crap in need of repairs this year. I did get to play Xenon for the first time as an adult (yay! but it kept rebooting in the middle of games! boo!), and there were a couple of other good games there. By a bizarre quirk of fate (that I helped along after I noticed it around 4 PM), I didn't play a single EM game, just solid state. Sorry, EM fans, I came of pinball age in the late 70's & early 80's, so that's what I like.

In the quest for Doctor Who parts, I was extremely disappointed. After spending colossal amounts of time figuring out what I need (esp. playfield parts), almost none of the vendors had anything. I ended up getting rubber and a DMD, that's how desperate I was for stuff to buy. I did get new bumper caps, too. The flea market, though always interesting, didn't have anything I needed.

My record for pre-show purchases was .500. Once I found the playfield glass guy (my cell phone couldn't call his for some reason) that went pretty well... $28 seems to be a good price for glass. I was not as happy with the guy with the legs when I found out that I could have bought a set of brand new legs in the show for what I paid for the old rusted ones. (I also didn't have the temerity to ask him if he was a furry). I also ended up buying stuff from one vendor only to find that I could have paid less at another. >:( I also bought leg bolts and levelers.

On the plus side, there was a Doctor Who there, so I got a bunch of pix of the speaker cover and the stuff on the playfield I'm missing. This is the first time I've used my wife's 8 mp camera, and it acquitted itself with aplomb. I'll probably start small and make stickers of the Who-ship for the ramps, which I'm missing.

One thing at the show which I found terribly interesting was someone connected a playfield to a PC running pinmame to (reportedly) great effect... I don't think you could actually play the game, I'm not sure why. This is a bright idea I had a few months ago, and I'm glad someone has actually done it. I trolled on the Internets and found the Pinmame HW page that tells how to do it. This is now Interesting Project #789 on my list. It's really appealing to me because I don't have a lot of space, but I can definitely store a playfield a lot easier than I can store whole games.

Well, now I have all the major boards for Doctor Who, and it should be ready for a partial test... so what do I do? Dither and avoid it, of course! The Big Fear that I'm going to goof something up has risen up, making me find many excuses to avoid working on the game. I did start testing the electrical problems on Eight Ball Deluxe, and developed an obsession with pinball music.

I have been listening to a CD I got at White Rose for $2 with mixes of pinball music. So I looked around, found a couple of sites, and sucked them dry. First I got all the multimedia files on IPDB, which has some good mixes and an interview with Pat Lawlor about TZ. Then I found Brendan's Arcade Basement that has zipped WMAs... they're mostly pretty good, though they tend to cut off abruptly at the end. He had a link to CGMusic, which I guess is a guy who used to work at Williams. These are much easier on the ears. They're in streaming mp3 format, but I had iTunes play them while recording with the insanely useful WireTap (which records in aiff, but I then have iTunes convert them to mp3s), so now they're residing comfortably on my iPod. All told, I have about 7 hours of pinball music -- some dupes, but a lot of good stuff. But there's plenty missing... newer games like Scared Stiff are not well represented. C'mon guys! I demand to hear Elvira making thinly veiled blowjob jokes! So I guess Interesting Project #790 is to record and mix them myself. ^.^;

Excessively uneventful

I just need to point this out... Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children finally came out domestically and we watched it last weekend, and the coolest part comes after Tifa battles the bad guy with the moussed hair. The music is a piano version of the FFVII battle music, then at the end of the battle, we hear the end of battle theme, and it's the ringtone on the bad guy's cell phone. Awesome!!!

Sorry for the trufan gush there. Very little has happened with Doctor Who. Mostly I've been taking carefuller inventory of the missing/wrong parts on the game and honing my shopping list for the Allentown show, which I'm going to tomorrow (eee!).

Hey, I just realized it's been a while since I wrote. I got the last backbox board from an eBay auction last week from the guy I got most of the other boards from (I was happy to note that shipping costs were much, much more reasonable and he used Priority Mail this time). I ended up paying more than I wanted, because the auction ended late on a work night, so I told my wife my max bid. Well, she goofed up and bid too much, but it was only $4 than my max, so it's not that bad. To make things worse, she got me a $40 PayPal gift certificate for our Anniversary, which I found after I paid for the auction. :( There was no joy in Mudville that morning...

I got my first income from the game... I sold some of the sockets I got at auction to the other bidder for $4. YESH!

So, I packed up the car with lists, directions, notes, sample parts, beef jerky, Lo-carb Monster Energy drinks, a couple of tools, my Harry Potter book on CD, Pinball's Greatest Hits CD (remixed music from Pinball games for $2! Neato!), and my wife's camera is charging. Yay!