The Slow, Inexorable March of Progress

I feel like I'm getting next to nothing done on the pinball front, mainly because I am. We've got less than three weeks before people start arriving for my daughter's college graduation and our house and palatial grounds are in quite the state. My wife has been sick with pulmonary issues for going on three weeks now, so a lot of the work is falling on me. So it kind of sucks to be me right now.

On the plus side, Mrs. Entropy and I went to see a Kevin Smith Q&A last night, which was pretty cool. Not really pinball-related, aside from him mentioning The Accused once, but there it is.

The Doctor Who power driver board problem ended with a whimper, not a bang. I ended up re-swapping the new board back into the game for testing, but once I did that everything worked fine. I guess it was a bad connection... and the real way to fix that is to replace the connector and the pins, but that's way more effort than I'm prepared to exert at this time. So I'm leaving it be until such time as it becomes necessary to do something about it. Go Fightin' Procrastinators!

I started setting up the T2 cabinet... I would say "she's got legs, you idiot", but I've used that joke already. I installed the legs, attached a new backbox latch that I didn't remember buying, then screwed in a backbox bolt that I had around (I'm hoping to get a second one in Allentown next weekend)... for whatever reason, I had three sitting around in a parts bin, and I used two on DW once I found out I needed them.

Anyway, I was going to put on the speaker panel and mount the backglass, but for whatever reason the speaker panel doesn't fit properly... the metal hooks don't fit snugly on the wood, but instead hang up on it... and since the speaker panel won't go down all the way, the backglass doesn't fit properly, so it's all a mess. I have to look carefully at why the speaker panel doesn't fit, maybe file down the wood or something.

League has had its ups and downs. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in the playoffs in MD... going into week 10 I was #4 out of 4 with a girl 1 point behind me (or should I say, a girl!?!), so I needed to have a good week. Unfortunately I had an OK week... I held my own on Doctor Who (for whatever reason I can't do crap on that particular game despite having no problems getting great scores on my own) and came in second. Next up was an awesome game of Shrek... when my third ball came up the other two guys had 50 Million and I had about 1 million, but then I did a spectacular 76 million point ball (including an extra ball). When I was done, people actually applauded my performance! *blush* That was good for first place. Then I came in second on Eight Ball Deluxe, but finished a distant third on Six Million Dollar Man (damn you, Steve Austin!) for zero points. So when the unofficial back of the napkin scores were toted up, I had 9 points and Rebecca's 11, so it looks like I lost out by one point. To a girl!?! The official scores haven't come out yet, but I'm not expecting much.

In VA I'm doing OK but I definitely don't have a lock on a playoff spot yet with one more week to go. Because I had a couple of sucky weeks, I actually played in the bottom group, even though I'm in A division. None of my group was there, so I ended up playing alone and pasting everybody's saved scores, getting a 19 out of 20 points. And unlike earlier in the season, this time I actually deserved it... two of my scores were pretty good, and the other two were reasonable. Unfortunately, now I'm being accused (good-naturedly? maybe...) of gaming the system by deliberately losing so I could play in the lower groups and get big scores. These people clearly think I have a much better understanding of the scoring and grouping dynamics than I do... for example, I can't figure out why I'm still in A after a couple of losing weeks. So anyway, now I'm #2 in A but with a couple of guys nipping at my heels point-wise, which means I'll have to post some solid scores on Monday to avoid being taken down. We'll see how that goes... usually when the chips are stacked against me, I have a history of choking on my own vomit.

But to end on a positive note, in practice on Monday I scored a career best 650M on BS Dracula... I think I stacked up several multi-balls, which is the way to get huge points on that game, and I was within about 40 mill of the high score.

Frenzy o' Bloggin'!

Boy, it has been a while since my last confession. After a week of allergies I got up at 4 this morning feeling clear and unable to get back to sleep. I took care of a bunch of morning duties, then found that our hot water heater was once again failing at its primary task... which means that all the time I'd allocated for a hot shower is now available for the titular Frenzy o' Bloggin'.

We got a crapload of snow in the Mid-Atlantic region this winter, so it was mid-March before the weather improved and the mud abated enough to allow for all that cabinet sanding I needed to do. So I moved and cleaned until there was space for all of the cabinets to exit into the backyard. It helped that I had just gotten about 15 sq ft of new real estate in my basement because we replaced our indoor fuel oil tank with a new one outside (not only because it was 10 years beyond its 40 year warranty, but also to solve the problems of our boiler not starting in the morning when you want to take hot showers after being sick for a week... oh, yes, believe me I am bitter). I stripped the cabinets as much as I was going to strip them, then took them outside one at a time and sanded.

Overall it went pretty well. I started with the T2 cabinet that looked like it had spent some time at sea. The inside sanded up just fine... I used one of my wife's palm sanders and got the job done pretty quickly. Sanding the bottom was another story... little chunks of wood kept dropping out of the cabinet sides, probably because the water messed up the integrity of the wood. In the end, it looks a lot better as long as you don't peer at the sides too carefully. The good T2 cab and DW went pretty well, too. I wasn't able to sand off some stenciled text on the bottom of T2, and there were some stains on the inside of DW that I couldn't get out... possible leftovers from the soda that apparently was spilled in there at some point. But they all look way better than they did before, and sanding the bottom was a lot faster than the evening I spent scrubbing the grime off the DW with 409 and a Magic Eraser. I'm pretty happy with the results, and when I was done all of the cabs were parked in the space where the oil tank used to be, somewhat out of the way. And the space near my games where the DW cab used to sit is now clear, giving me an extra 9 sq ft of extra floor space. Time to buy a new game!

Another project that I needed to get around to was testing that hacked up driver board I got back in November to free up the DW driver for use in T2. I took out the board that was in DW a few months ago, put in the new board, then let it sit for a few months. Finally this weekend I got up the gumption to do something about it. Following Safe Standards of Behavior for Strange Boards (you don't know where they've been!), I only plugged in the power plugs from the transformer and measured voltages at the plugs where power comes back out. Everything looked pretty good, though I was a little worried about the 50V coil power showing up as 72V (I've since learned that this is normal). So I plugged everything else in and was happy to find I had a completely working game!

Almost. :P The one thing that was weird was the flippers seemed less powerful with the new board. This was especially noticeable when hitting the Cliffhanger Ramp from the upper left flipper... whereas before you could make a good sturdy shot up the ramp, now the same shot barely got the ball around the loop. Several games worth of testing showed that it wasn't me, the flippers were just slightly weaker.

A trip to RGP was extremely unenlightening. It seems like no one read my entire post... I mean, I am a trifle long-winded, but still. Everyone -- even Clay/Shaggy! -- wanted to convince me that the problem was caused by dirty optos. So I swapped the old board back in and the problem magically cleared up. I was kind of despairing, but then rgp mega-poster TheKorn came through with some potential goods, saying I should check the connectors and fuses because they may work but might have problems when push came to shove. It does give me more board troubleshooting to do -- and I need more board troubleshooting that I need to do like I need more holes in my head beyond the ones I already have -- but at least it's something to go on.

Finally, league update. I was ever so briefly #1 in A Division in the Virginia League, largely through dumb luck. Guys I was playing against had terrible weeks, one guy didn't show up, etc. I couldn't really expect that to last for a whole season, and it didn't. I am now just outside of playoff contention, and with 3 weeks to go I don't hold out much hope. In Maryland I had kind of a funny week... since I was sick, I decided not to go and used my saved scores. The guy who got to pick the first game picked one that I didn't have a saved score for, which gave me a forfeit. But then, the next two games they played were OK scores, but way better than the other two guys did. My saved score for the final game was crappy, but my two middle scores were enough for the win. I'm squarely in B Division playoff contention with just 2 weeks to go... though I gotta say that I had my druthers I'd druther t'were t'other way around... the MD prizes suck compared to the VA prizes.