And the title pretty much says it all. It's a really nice day, and the boss of the boss of my boss (the head of our department) was laid off yesterday as part of our parent company's elimination of levels management. It kind of sucks because he's really smart -- he actually knows what he's talking about, rare in a Peter Principle corporate culture -- but he was promoted out of the position where he could do the most good. It wasn't much of a shock to me, but we all liked & respected him, so it was rough on the department. Our new boss^3 (our former boss^4) told us to go home early and don't come back until Monday. And it is a really nice day... not too hot, not humid, there's a breeze blowing... I was even able to convince my wife to come out with me and walk the dog.
Since we sold the Inline Fathom targets, the 7DPF has moved up slightly. I also sold some Doctor Who plastics, but the guy wants to bid on one of the last two sets I'm selling, so payment is pending. That should make the Doctor Who parts game profitable, though I still have to pay for the gas.
This afternoon I've been taking pictures of the Fathom playfield for eBaying Sunday. It's really kind of beaten up, so I'm really not expecting it to sell for much if it sells at all. I've been cleaning it most of this week, and in some cases I think I've taken some paint off. O.o I'll put some pictures up in a later post.I had two interesting and seemingly unrelated things happen last week. After hearing Python Anghelo on TOPcast, I found a recording of Ayn Rand's Anthem on Librivox and listened to it just to remind myself why I can't stand her work. It's a conventional dystopian society story -- very popular back in the late 40's/early 50's -- but at the end it rears up and spews Objectivism out its anus without warning. The other thing was I got an email from a guy asking for help with one of the first Visual Pinball vpinmame tables I wrote, Lost World. His problem was that my script for the table loads/saves some fairly trivial options to the hard drive, but changes in Microsoft's attitude towards security (from "huh?" to "holy crap we'd better do something about this before we get hit with another European lawsuit!") made it so newer computers don't allow scripts access to the computer's vitals without permission. The script was designed in such a way that it could only set the options by writing the save file then reading it... so bypassing the load function left the options at their script default values, and that kept the table from working. As I told the guy in my reply, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but five years and two versions of Windows later it's a pretty crappy design. And for some reason these two events conjoined in my mind. I realized that if I were a true adherent of Ayn Rand, I would believe that my design was brilliant, and it was the copycats and moneymen at Microsoft who messed it up. And nowhere does Python show that than in his attitude toward Zingy Bingy, which pretty much everyone else who's interviewed says was a tasteless and unreleasable game except, of course, for Python, who still believes it was a great idea that would have saved the industry. That to me is Ayn Rand in a nutshell: You're so self-involved that you are unwilling and unable to admit that everything you do isn't a work of genius.
Hey, here's an awesome quote from the Pinball Wikipedia about Zingy Bingy: "It has been rumored that the president of Capcom Japan was visiting and was given a demonstration of the game, after which he left without a word and, two days later, closed the pinball division.
"
OK, I promise that's my last rant about Ayn Rand or Python Anghelo unless Stern comes out with a Python-designed Atlas Shrugged pin to coincide with the alleged movie coming out next year.
But let's get back to real pinball stuff. I went to the Mid-Atlantic Gameroom show at the state fairgrounds last week, and I actually had a blast. It was dead... I doubt that there were ever more than about 30-40 people in the room... but that was awesome for me because there were a good selection of mostly newer pins and vids so there wasn't a lot of waiting for anything. The vendors pretty much sucked... I bought two spot targets that I may not have needed for Centaur from noted Eastern Seaboard character Dr. Pinball (I suspect it's an honorary doctorate, but I'm not sure), but the rest were selling neon signs and replacement circuit boards for games. But what the lack of people really meant was I got to spend as much time as I wanted with some great games. Probably 3/4 of them were from MD Pinball Palace, since Mike from that company was one of the show's organizers. 
The last hour of the show it was pretty much me and the show staff playing, and I was totally spanking machines left and right. First I made it up to Underboss on Sopranos, which pretty much taxed my patience on that game so I'm sort of glad I didn't make it to Boss. On Cirqus Voltaire I worked through all of the marvels and I would have joined the Cirqus if the thing that spotted the "Q" had worked. 
Right after that I completed the Stiff-o-meter in Scared Stiff, which I've done before but was still pretty cool. I got the #1 score on both games. At that point it was 7:55 and the show closed at 8, so after a quick and lousy shuffleboard bowling game I left while I was ahead. I also spent a lot of time with Champion Pub and Revenge from Mars, had an awesome Fart Multiball in Family Guy, ended up playing a third of all games new Stern has put out, did a bunch of video games that I would rarely play, like shootin' defenseless woodland creatures games, and played an almost entirely working Doctor Who (for a change). There were also a couple of fun EMs. Sadly, my generation was represented by a "fully shopped" KISS that had no playfield lights or sound and played for crap, a Star Trek that was OK, and a Swords of Fury (which I should never ever play because for days afterwards the phrase "Lionman! Lionman!" is ringing through my head). I also had an awesome totally lucky save on Addams Family where The Power kicked in right when my ball drained and dragged it back above the flippers! Kewl! So I ended up having a pretty good time.
The next day I got what I think was food poisoning of the blow it out your ass variety, possibly from the hot dog I ate at the show (but it could have been some old lunchmeat I had, too).
Let's do My Goodness first. The lamp driver worked out great. Rather than soldering on a new wire to replace the trace, he cut out the middleman with a pretty cool trick: He noticed that the middle leg of the transistor didn't connect to anything on the underside of the board, so he bent it up and soldered it to the trace. Check out the picture: The elegance of this solution is amazing. He also critiqued my soldering technique of the other transistors... he said I used too much solder. When he finished, I plugged the board into the game and put it into the lamp test, and for the first time since I bought the game the left arrow and the Target 1 Ball lit in all their glory! That left only two lights out, so tonight I replaced the burnt out bulb in the left bumper and fixed the Rack 2 Ball by jiggling the wire on the connector. So for this brief, shining moment, everything on Eight Ball Deluxe is working! Let's pause and savor this moment... ahhhh!
