But I should start with some actual repairs I did to a machine. My daughter brought home a bunch of her friends for Spring Break and while they were here they played some pinball. While they were playing Quicksilver I noticed a bunch of lights that were out on the playfield. So after they left I decided to do a little routine maintenance on it. First I lifted the playfield and wiggled the lights -- it turns out they were all just bad connections. Then while I had the glass off I wiped all the dust off the playfield. After that I dug out the Stern lightning spinner that I bought a few years ago and replaced the Middle Earth spinner that was on the game when I bought it.
That was an easy and gratifying fix, so I moved on to the ugly-ass "Tokens" stickers that have been on the coin slots since forever. I disassembled the coin slots -- fairly easy, just two screws and friction hold it together -- and pulled the tape off to reveal another quarter plastic and a 25c plastic. Nice! After a half hour of serious goo-gone work to get the tape residue off and running the plastic coin slots through the dishwasher, the whole assembly looks a lot nicer. 
Two easy fixes that only took me 23 years to get around to!I picked up some more pinball music. At some point I found the secret website where a guy was selling music from all of the Williams System 11 games -- I'd heard about it on TOPCast but only managed to find it a few months ago. I immediately Paypalled $5 to the guy and heard nothing for about a month. Then I got an email asking if he had sent it to me, and then about a month after that I finally got it. It's good! Two CDs and very complete.
Then a few days ago I was browsing around at work while waiting for my program to compile and found this site of more modern music. There are about 80 files, which is great, but I have a few problems with them: The sound quality is a little irregular, and some of the music has odd tempo problems. I don't know if that's the guy's computer or how Pinmame is playing them. They don't have gameplay sound effect mixed in, which I kind of like. But my biggest problem -- and one I can fix myself if I get around to it -- is that they are largely unedited. Most of the cuts are about 1:45 minutes, which is fine for main play tunes but awful for shorter cuts. Really, you don't know pain until you've heard the 2.5 second Mola Ram clip from Indiana Jones played over 40 times. Choose Wisely, indeed. But you can't complain about free, and there are lots of great tracks that are neglected in the other collections I have, like Attack from Mars and Cirqus Voltaire. Overall I now have over a day of pinball music, though there are a lot of dupes.
With all the pinball-related traveling I've been doing, I've run up against the limitations of the FSPA's where to play pinball database. So I put out a call on RGP for larger and more national sites; I got a disappointing two responses. And neither of them have what I need, a distance-based search. I mean, knowing there's a pin in King of Prussia PA doesn't do me any good if I don't know where that is. I was toying with the idea of writing my own database, but at this point I'm thinking more along the lines of adapting a spatial search to the larger of the two (it also has URL-based search params, which are easy submit). Anyway, that's my next timesuck which will hopefully yield dividends.
Finally, the other day I got an eBay impulse buy. eBay's suggestions of other things like the one you're looking at are usually pretty far off the mark for pin-related swag, but on Sunday it popped up "30 lbs of pinball parts", which which at the time was priced just under $30. The thought of getting a big box of pincrap and sifting through it for days struck my fancy, and the seller chose to end the auction in the middle of the day on a Monday which is great for guys like me with access to the Internet at work. I bid and won for $65, which shipping the whole thing was just under $100. I reckon I'll get $50 worth of enjoyment just pawing through it and figuring out what everything is and whether it works or not. I plan to resell what I don't need on eBay, so I anticipate the triumphant return of the Dumbass Industrial Average to track my own personal price to earnings ration.
And really, don't I just need more things to distract me from fixing my games? I most certainly do.
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