Why I haven't done any work on the Terminator

Or blogged about it, for that matter. It's because I've been a busy little barracora lately, and for a change it's mostly pinball related.


My goal was to finish my first major update to the Pinball Locator before I went to PAPA, and gosh darn it I did, by about 2 days. I reformatted the database to make it easier to wrangle, point-coded about 80% of the locations and added a distance search, revamped the add and edit functions to make them faster and easier to use, added a search by count of games by location, and I carry the search parameters around so you can refine your search easier & you can return from an add or edit to your previous search and see your updates immediately. And since the heavy lifting is out of the way, I can now easily add much smaller features and not go another 2 months without an update... or at least not for a while, anyway. Reaction so far has been positive... some people pointed out data errors, which I fixed last night. And there are a few bugs... the game count doesn't recalculate properly and if you edit the last item in a search you won't return to that item when you're done. I should be able to fix those today or tomorrow.


And then I went to PAPA on Friday. This time, Mrs. Entropy went with me, which helped a lot on the hell-ride coming back. My stated goal was to defend and exceed my mid-60's title from last year. I put in a pretty good entry that got me up to #6 in C Division, then did two crappy entries that didn't do much. I had only dropped to #9 when we left, but by the time we got home I was down to #17. Yesterday I watched as I sunk lower and lower on the list, and when I went to bed I was one below last year's place. Somebody did me a favor in the wee hours, though, and when I woke up I found that I had tied last year's ranking. I didn't exceed it, which was sad, but there's always next year.


One thing I did do better this year was know my games and what to do. I looked at the C Div games before I left and familiarized myself with the rules to a game that I didn't know (Creature from the Black Lagoon). When I got there, the first thing I did was do a practice game and scored a healthy 144 mil on a game that I used to just flail randomly at. If I had done that well in the tournament, I might have managed a healthy top 30 finish, but I couldn't get my multiball going.


What I learned this year is that next year I need to stay the whole weekend. Getting one fairly good round on Friday is fine, but you need to prune and maintain your entry with subsequent entries like you would an ornamental shrubbery. Plus you get to goof off & play pinball all weekend, not just for one day, and leaving early Sunday evening will probably make the return trip merely a purgatory ride.


Mrs. Entropy had a good time. Revenge from Mars -- her go to game -- wasn't working so well, which forced her to get out and play some others. I need to break her of the habit of double-flipping, though. She ended up having a pretty good time, and we had some chats with other league members we met there.


Sadly, the cool poster design I blogged about last month was not the default t-shirt.


My daughter, in her capacity as Assistant to the Curator of the National Pinball Museum, revealed to me that the inventory of games she's been undertaking shows that they are a little short of newer games for their pay-to-play area. I suggested she might talk to some of the big deal collectors and ask them to loan some machines to the museum. I suggested that I might be able to temporarily part with Eight Ball Deluxe and one of my DMD games (if I could get either of them working reliably). So we'll see how that plays out. By the way, I am full of good ideas for the NPM: I told Zoe last weekend that she should get some flyers to the PAPA people so they could include them with the tote bags they give out to entrants. She did and they did, so hopefully that will get the word out a little more to the heavy-duty players and the rest of us.


And finally, league: I finished in the top 4 of A Division, just barely squeaking into the playoffs. I basically need to do OK, have the person below me not have an awesome night, and have the person above me have a crappy night. I did, she did not, and he did, so I'm in. Of course, I'm competing agains two PAPA B Division finalists and an A Division competitor (#65 out of 80, but that's in frickin' A), so I'm pretty much just hoping I won't soil myself. I think I get some game picks, so I ran some preliminary numbers and I have some ideas of what to do.


Now I have to go finish cleaning the Terminator.