I can't take credit for the title, that's from a collection of poems by Tony Hoagland... but it is appropriate, because this blog is pretty inwardly focused.But enough of that... let's talk about ME!
The DIA on the wall indicates a milestone... the Doctor Who parts game is now officially profitable! I saw a post on rgp from a guy who wanted a bi-directional motor board for a Cirqus Voltaire, and I had a spare one from the parts game. I asked $25+s/h, netted $24 after fees, and that pushed me $11 over the price I paid for the second DW. And I still have parts left, too... I doubt there's enough to push the DIA over 100, but one can always hope. The $11 can now go towards paying for the psychic anguish both DWs have put me through.
Other than that, it's been a pretty quiet month in the neighborhood. While I was testing the board for the CV guy, I spent a little debug time with DW. My goals were to fix the non-working upper flipper, test the U20 chip on either board, attach the Dalek, turn off the mini-playfield, which has a pretty checkered past functionally, and fix the sticking right flipper (which after a year or working fine has now returned). I turned off the mpf first, because that was easy. I was hoping the dead flipper was a loose wire or something, but no such luck... I need to do some serious diagnostics on it. Didn't test the chip. Did attach the Dalek, which careful readers will know involves plugging into different plugs than the standard set. I confirmed that the Dalek's GI board is not getting any power, and it's not getting it from the power board. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, but it's pretty low on my overall list. I did plug in the flasher and stood the Dalek up on top so it at least looks like it's mounted. And I worked the sticking flipper a little, which usually helps it. It hangs up on the end of stroke switch, and I really don't know why... it's the same size switch as all the others, and I've tried another switch. I guess I should swap the round thing with the arm that closes the eos switch. That's definitely above the Dalek GI on my list but not a huge priority.
But that's it for the month. I think the most significant thing I did was clean up the floor around DW so I could walk there. I also rearranged the boiler room so that High Speed wasn't blocking access to the boiler... before, Lotta Fun and DW parts were next to each other and HS was in front of DW, blocking easy access to the boiler. Now they're all in a much more orderly line. Granted, LF blocks access to the fuse box, but as long as no electrical calamities befall my house, I should be OK.
TOPCast is finally back. I listened to the interview with Tim Arnold, and it made me desperately want to get out to Las Vegas. There was also a good article on the Pinball Hall of Fame in Southwest Airlines' magazine, which I saw a link to in Boing Boing. I also got eps 2 & 3 of Pins and Vids, but they just arrived yesterday and I haven't watched them yet.
I had a $50 gift certificate from Amazon so I spent it on the third volume of Aussie writer Michael Shalhoub's Pinball Compendium based on his interview on TOPCast last year. Apparently my expectations were low, because this book wow'ed me right out of the box. 300 pages, beautiful full color pages, a crapload of text, incredible detail and interviews... it's awesome. I am hard to impress -- just ask my wife -- and this book floored me. Luckily a $25 Amazon gift certificate arrived Friday so I bought the first volume, which should arrive Tuesday... that way, I can read through the history of pinball chronologically. I should get the money for volume two long before I finish the first book.
No playfield progress to speak of... on the last day of my Christmas holiday, I plopped myself down and wired up a small version of the light controller on a breadboard while watching the first season and a half of the animated Tick (of which each season has one episode missing for no discernible reason... luckily I have my pirated copy I bought off eBay a few years ago, but still...!). That was a miserable failure... no results. What I need to do now is actually debug it... test voltages and stuff. I think it was unrealistic to expect to assemble it and have it just work, especially considering my last experience with assembling electronics was in my intro to EE class 15 years ago. I also got some parts that I can use for a switch matrix -> parallel port reader, which I hope will free me from pinmame-hw's silly hacked keyboard approach to reading switches. The parts are all sitting in a box, ready for me to have a couple dog-free hours of frustrating labor.
And this final note: I've gotten a lot of pin playing in lately out in the world. I had to go in to work on New Year's Eve and they let us out early, so I blew off the family time and got in some Funhouse at the Chevron station a few miles from my house. Also played some Roller Coaster Tycoon at the place near my work, but I found on Friday that they'd replaced it with World Poker Tour. It's a super clean machine, but the right flipper is a little weak, so the left ramp is a little hard to hit. And I took my daughter's last couple of books up to her yesterday and snuck over to Pizza House for a few games of NASCAR. Coming soon: I'm thinking about a trip to John's Place, my self-imposed exile from Crabtown can end now that a statewide ban on smoking went into effect at the beginning of the year (but with my luck, it won't apply to the arcade side), and I'm thinking about doing a 3 hour tour to Pinball Parlour, where they have a whole bunch of games... but the trouble is, they're only open from 7-10 PM, so I have to drive for six hours to get in three hours of game time, and I get home at 1 AM. My wife is going out of town to visit her Dad in a few weeks, so I might do one or more of those then.
I'm always amazed at how much I have to write even when nothing happens...
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