Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, when fans of James Joyce celebrate the day that Ulysses takes place. My wife had her own version of Bloomsday today because she had an appointment with Dr. Bloom. That has nothing to do with pinball, I just thought I'd throw that in.

I saw a great eBay auction description for a prototype Doctor Who game. I personally don't think it's an actual prototype, because the pictures of the Dalek motor assembly look exactly like the Wobble Head kit that I bought last year. But here's the description:

Up for bids is a fantastic operating coin operated arcade pinball machine called "Dr. Who" by Bally in 1992. Plays and functions extremely well including the davit robot topper which is a mechanical moving topper as it turns it's head left to right vice versa while lights up duration it's vocial animation! Sheldon found on Dr. Who machines as it was a prototype that never made it to the regular production due to production costs and Bally was looking for ways to trim production costs hence the mechanical topper. In the production version machines has the non-mechanical davik robot that just lights up during vocial animation. Believe me, it makes the game so much more animated and exciting to play with the mechanical robot instead of the regular version which is a dud (boring). Any questions let me know as the photos should answer your questions as photos of the motor inside the davik robot body are present as well as those showing the different positions of the davik head in mechanical motion while speaking w/ lights.

I have sheldon seen a description that I enjoyed so much. I think if the guy was trying to sound like a foreign scammer, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

I was kind of bored at work today, so while I was waiting for compilations to succeed I took the data from the Pinball Locator, geocoded it using one of my company's products, and turned it into a Google Earth KML file. The initial results were pretty satisfactory for the amount of time I spent on it... certainly easier than writing a web page to do it, which was my original plan. There are a few data errors... for example, you can see on the pic two spellings of Crofton Bowling Center that register as two separate locations. The most discouraging thing about the project is that there don't appear to be many pin locations nearby that I haven't visited. :( Anyway, I'll probably refine the process a little and maybe post a cleaned up version somewhere when I'm done.