Today is a nice day to be off work because your boss' boss' boss got fired

And the title pretty much says it all. It's a really nice day, and the boss of the boss of my boss (the head of our department) was laid off yesterday as part of our parent company's elimination of levels management. It kind of sucks because he's really smart -- he actually knows what he's talking about, rare in a Peter Principle corporate culture -- but he was promoted out of the position where he could do the most good. It wasn't much of a shock to me, but we all liked & respected him, so it was rough on the department. Our new boss^3 (our former boss^4) told us to go home early and don't come back until Monday. And it is a really nice day... not too hot, not humid, there's a breeze blowing... I was even able to convince my wife to come out with me and walk the dog.

Since we sold the Inline Fathom targets, the 7DPF has moved up slightly. I also sold some Doctor Who plastics, but the guy wants to bid on one of the last two sets I'm selling, so payment is pending. That should make the Doctor Who parts game profitable, though I still have to pay for the gas.

This afternoon I've been taking pictures of the Fathom playfield for eBaying Sunday. It's really kind of beaten up, so I'm really not expecting it to sell for much if it sells at all. I've been cleaning it most of this week, and in some cases I think I've taken some paint off. O.o I'll put some pictures up in a later post.

I had two interesting and seemingly unrelated things happen last week. After hearing Python Anghelo on TOPcast, I found a recording of Ayn Rand's Anthem on Librivox and listened to it just to remind myself why I can't stand her work. It's a conventional dystopian society story -- very popular back in the late 40's/early 50's -- but at the end it rears up and spews Objectivism out its anus without warning. The other thing was I got an email from a guy asking for help with one of the first Visual Pinball vpinmame tables I wrote, Lost World. His problem was that my script for the table loads/saves some fairly trivial options to the hard drive, but changes in Microsoft's attitude towards security (from "huh?" to "holy crap we'd better do something about this before we get hit with another European lawsuit!") made it so newer computers don't allow scripts access to the computer's vitals without permission. The script was designed in such a way that it could only set the options by writing the save file then reading it... so bypassing the load function left the options at their script default values, and that kept the table from working. As I told the guy in my reply, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but five years and two versions of Windows later it's a pretty crappy design. And for some reason these two events conjoined in my mind. I realized that if I were a true adherent of Ayn Rand, I would believe that my design was brilliant, and it was the copycats and moneymen at Microsoft who messed it up. And nowhere does Python show that than in his attitude toward Zingy Bingy, which pretty much everyone else who's interviewed says was a tasteless and unreleasable game except, of course, for Python, who still believes it was a great idea that would have saved the industry. That to me is Ayn Rand in a nutshell: You're so self-involved that you are unwilling and unable to admit that everything you do isn't a work of genius.

Hey, here's an awesome quote from the Pinball Wikipedia about Zingy Bingy: "It has been rumored that the president of Capcom Japan was visiting and was given a demonstration of the game, after which he left without a word and, two days later, closed the pinball division."

OK, I promise that's my last rant about Ayn Rand or Python Anghelo unless Stern comes out with a Python-designed Atlas Shrugged pin to coincide with the alleged movie coming out next year.

But let's get back to real pinball stuff. I went to the Mid-Atlantic Gameroom show at the state fairgrounds last week, and I actually had a blast. It was dead... I doubt that there were ever more than about 30-40 people in the room... but that was awesome for me because there were a good selection of mostly newer pins and vids so there wasn't a lot of waiting for anything. The vendors pretty much sucked... I bought two spot targets that I may not have needed for Centaur from noted Eastern Seaboard character Dr. Pinball (I suspect it's an honorary doctorate, but I'm not sure), but the rest were selling neon signs and replacement circuit boards for games. But what the lack of people really meant was I got to spend as much time as I wanted with some great games. Probably 3/4 of them were from MD Pinball Palace, since Mike from that company was one of the show's organizers. The last hour of the show it was pretty much me and the show staff playing, and I was totally spanking machines left and right. First I made it up to Underboss on Sopranos, which pretty much taxed my patience on that game so I'm sort of glad I didn't make it to Boss. On Cirqus Voltaire I worked through all of the marvels and I would have joined the Cirqus if the thing that spotted the "Q" had worked. Right after that I completed the Stiff-o-meter in Scared Stiff, which I've done before but was still pretty cool. I got the #1 score on both games. At that point it was 7:55 and the show closed at 8, so after a quick and lousy shuffleboard bowling game I left while I was ahead. I also spent a lot of time with Champion Pub and Revenge from Mars, had an awesome Fart Multiball in Family Guy, ended up playing a third of all games new Stern has put out, did a bunch of video games that I would rarely play, like shootin' defenseless woodland creatures games, and played an almost entirely working Doctor Who (for a change). There were also a couple of fun EMs. Sadly, my generation was represented by a "fully shopped" KISS that had no playfield lights or sound and played for crap, a Star Trek that was OK, and a Swords of Fury (which I should never ever play because for days afterwards the phrase "Lionman! Lionman!" is ringing through my head). I also had an awesome totally lucky save on Addams Family where The Power kicked in right when my ball drained and dragged it back above the flippers! Kewl! So I ended up having a pretty good time.

The next day I got what I think was food poisoning of the blow it out your ass variety, possibly from the hot dog I ate at the show (but it could have been some old lunchmeat I had, too).

Wheesh

There's a lot of little stuff to write about, and I probably won't remember it all, but we'll see what we can do.

eBay season has begun and that means the return of the DIA. I sold a bank of Skateball targets for $11 which brought up the 7DPF and DIA slightly. The Loser 500 is way up, mainly because I've been spending over the summer with no visible means of support. The Centaur playfield was at least half of that, plus the new tumbler, plus concert tickets, etc. I sold the old rock tumbler for $17.50, so that and the targets are about the only reduction so far other than my spending money. My birthday is coming up next month, and my dad usually gives me a few hundred dollars, plus there are more eBays in the offing. So we'll see how things go.

We've got a few things in the eBay queue right now. I rebuilt and listed a bank of inline Fathom targets and relisted some of the Doctor Who plastics, this time in lots. They've all got bids so far. We've also got the rest of the plastics, the 6 target bank from Fathom, and if I can ever get it cleaned up, the Fathom playfield (which I thought I wrote about, but I guess not... I took advantage of some dog-free time and stripped the remaining parts from it while watching Miyazaki movies -- Kiki's Delivery Service and Laputa... I started watching Laputa in English, but it was so terrible that I switched to Japanese w/subtitles even though I wasn't paying full attention to it... but then, I've seen Laputa enough times that I pretty much know what's going on. Kiki at least has Phil Hartman as the voice of the cat, so that's listenable in English). Success story with one of the DW plastics: When I cleaned out of the cabinet of the parts game, I found a couple at the bottom, including one that was kind of warped. I shot it with the heat gun and plopped it under some old computer magazines I was selling and it turned out flat as a pancake. Very nice. The second set of inline targets from Fathom isn't complete, so I can't do much with those without some spare parts.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Mid-Atlantic Coin-Op Show, which is just up at the state fairgrounds. It's the first year for this show so it will be interesting to see what's there. Usually coin-op shows don't have as much pinball as I would like, but it's so close that I have to check it out. I doubt I'll find the parts I need for the incomplete Fathom targets, put I'm taking them along just in case.

Here's my latest guilty pleasure: When I'm tired of work, I sneak out and play Roller Coaster Tycoon at Continental Bar & Grill, which is just a few blocks from work.

I finally caught up with the TOPcasts -- including the awesome 3 hour Lyman Sheats interview -- and now I've started listening to Talk Pinball, which isn't as interesting but it's still pretty good. There's also only 7 of them, and they don't interview any big names, just guys who run pin shows and stuff.

Not much else I can think of... I'm getting antsy again, since I feel like I'm not making good use of my investment in pinball games. Part of the problem is that when I'm not working I'm getting stuff ready for or selling stuff on eBay, and my remaining spare time is taken up with walking the dog, cleaning the house and paying bills. My wife was supposed to take over the eBay duties from me, but so far that hasn't happened... I've pushed out 25 auctions to her 2 in the last month. She says after her sister leaves (the sister has been visiting this week), she's going to tear into the eBays. We'll see how that goes.

Her sister bought a video on craft soldering, so I watched it to see if I could pick up any pointers (I didn't). But the whole time I was thinking that the video would be so much better if the women doing it were more like Norm and Shaggy.

If this is Labor Day, why aren't I working?

Well, things are moving along briskly and stopping abruptly in equal measure. I am almost caught up on TOPcast shows... I haven't watched the videos yet, but I'm two back from the most current one. Walking the dog for 45+ minutes a day sure helps me get caught up on my podcast backlog. The one that stands out in my mind, of course, is Python Anghelo, who I kind of figured would be a character based on what everyone else was saying about him, but I really wasn't prepared for someone who was so full of shit as he was. He's obviously very talented and I like a lot of his games, but he is so egotistical and completely convinced of his own genius that he was extremely difficult to listen to. First warning: All the disclaimers they put before, during, and after the show. Second warning: When Python told Clay that he should read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if he (Clay) wanted to understand what he (Python) was talking about. For me, Ayn Rand is in the same category as Thoreau... if I had read them when I was in college, they would have totally blown my mind. But because I read them as adults, I have the experience to know that what they're saying is idealistic (Thoreau) or a justification of selfish bullshit (Rand). So the fact that Python likes Rand so much told me a great deal about him immediately. The way he just dismissed people that he didn't consider to be geniuses really got on my nerves. Everyone else is "copycats and moneymen" (please to read quote in Romanian accent). And some of his ideas -- for example, this "Zingy Bingy" thing he kept talking about -- sounded like garbage, and everyone was probably right to think it would have been a colossal failure. After the Python Tapes I listened to the Jeff Powell interview, which was the first one I listened to live, and he mentioned that Python either made up or significantly altered the truth... at least now I know what he's talking about.

My last boss was Romanian, and while certainly not as bad as Python, I see a lot of similarities between them... especially how stubborn she can be and often convinced that her way is pretty much the only sensible approach. I should ask her if she's read The Fountainhead, or at least Atlas Shrugged.

But enough complaining!

I tried fixing the last couple of SCRs on Eight Ball Deluxe with no luck. When I carefully examined the board, I saw that a previous owner had tried to repair the tracing without much success. I'm not up to repairing tracing, and not surprisingly neither of the new SCRs did much. But the good news is that the flippers work again... it might have been fixed when I reseated the playfield fuse, or it might have been fixed by the Pinball Fairy blessing my game in the night. Who knows. I think the bad flippers on Doctor Who were caused by one of the plugs not being plugged in properly or the flipper fuse was blown.

I'm not providing a lot of definitive factual information today, am I?

The New Fall eBay Season has started... I'm pushing my wife to start posting stuff (mainly because it's a lot of work for me, and I already have a job), and she's starting to do so slowly. I'm kind of anxious for her to come up to speed quickly, since we need the money. September is "no listing fees" month -- finally, an eBay promotion that I can actually take advantage of, as opposed to their usual "free gallery pic on auctions posted between midnight and 1 AM on Tuesday the 14th!" -- so between us we spewed out 13 auctions. I'm selling the rock tumbler I bought to test parts polishing, and the first result of the new parts polisher, a spiffed up drop target bank from Skateball. That's right, the Dumbass Industrial Average is poised to move again! After that I've got another drop target bank ready to go, but after that I have to find more stuff to sell.

While I was assembling polished drop target assemblies, I reassembled the 5 targets assembly from SB with Centaur ORBS targets and replace the Harlem Globetrotters inline targets with the Centaur wheel targets. They look great. I did it while watching DVR'd Daily Shows and Colbert Reports with my wife... if you tire him out, the dog will now settle down and let us watch TV, as long as the cat doesn't show up. This should allow me to get a lot more work done on some of the labor-intensive projects I have, like stripping playfields.