Vacation, all I ever wanted

Don't kid yourself: Blogging is a lot of work for something you don't get paid for. I'm only doing it now because I'm at the end of a week of vacation and I got a lot of stuff done around the house, so I feel like I earned some non-productive blogwork.

It's also tough because I just haven't been doing a lot of pinball lately. I have been slowly pushing stuff back and forth in my basement to try to get my wife and I separate but equal workspaces. Getting those spaces up and running is one of the goals of my vacation (including both the week that just past and most of December... we've been trying to get a project out at work this year, so I haven't taken a lot of time off). I did a big push in my wife's space this week, because in order to clean out the dining room for Thanksgiving I had to transport a lot of the stuff into the basement. Remember when I said that cleaning our house is like playing Sokoban? Well, this is case in point.

Currently I'm at an impasse with the cleaning. I'm out of space in the bedroom that will become my wife's space, and when I moved all of the pinball stuff into my corner I ended up with almost no space there. The best solution would be if every room in my basement were about 5 feet wider, but for now we'll leave that for my next vacation in a week and a half.

But this is a blog about Pinball, things related to Pinball, and things largely unrelated to Pinball... I've covered the latter pretty thoroughly, so let's talk about the first two.

I went to the White Rose Pinball Show in York, PA in October. Usually I complain about the overpriced junk, the non-working junk, and the just plain junk at that show, but the Hershey show caused me to reevaluate just what a crappy pinball show is. By contrast, York was great. I had fun, played some interesting games, and had a good time. Surprising fact of the day: I barely spent any money. Being dormant in the pinball department has put me in a position of not needing any parts, so I didn't have anything to buy. I think I spent about $40 the whole day, a new record for me.

One fun bonus thing I did in York: I left the show around 8 and was hungry. Usually I end up stopping at an Arby's or something on the way home, but this time I made up my mind to try something different. Right about that time I passed a burrito place about a half mile from the fairgrounds called Roburrito's. I negotiated a series of right turns and went in. It turns out it's like a punk rock burrito place... as a child of the '80s L.A. music scene, it's just the sort of place I would eat burritos at if anywhere around Derwood had the temerity to be like that. It was a good burrito, made better with the selection of hot sauces they had available. Yay!

One of the big pinball auctions showed up at the MD state fairgrounds in the last week of October, and since it happened to be on my birthday I got a free pass to see what was up. The last auction I went to -- in the same building that the York show is in -- was not so much a game auction as it was a crap auction... they had 4 Gorgars in various states of repair and about a hundred beaten down cabinets from late 80's and early 90's D-List video games. This show was much better. A bunch of pins, mostly Stern and 90's games, but a smattering of EMs and early 80's games. There were also a lot of reasonable quality vids from the past 30 years. I took advantage of the games set to free play and left a little before noon. There was nothing I really wanted to buy, but I had a pretty good time.

So, we're up to date. Hopefully I will make progress on a workspace and be able to start fixin' pins and workin' on some of my secret projects before the end of the year.

November Will Be Magic Again!

Why settle for Change when you can have Transfiguration?

Not as poignant as Republicans for Voldemort, I admit. I made this sign a few weeks ago as more of a Dada Art Project than any kind of real political statement. I had it next to our first actual political yard sign, but my wife forced me to move it because she felt people would think we were making fun of the real candidate. Re-elect Fudge was out for a week or so, then we got two inches of rain and it turns out I didn't properly seal the sign, which turned it into abstract art. ^_^;

* Hero of the Beach *

Forgot to mention two instances where I saved the day for pinball.

When I first went to find info on the Hershey Gameroom Show, the street address on Mr. Pinball was missing a letter, making it unfindable on all of the mapping programs I tried. So I emailed Mr. Pinball and he corrected it.

And way back in August of last year I blogged about the IPDb not having the correct lamp pages for Quicksilver. Well, last month I finally got a response:

Changes you submitted to the Pinball Database for the game
titled 'Quicksilver' have been accepted in whole or in part
by an editor!  Thank you for your submission!

The following changes were made because of your submission,
and may include additional corrections and listing changes
made by an Editor:

add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Lamp_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Lamp Driver Schematic []  [#3643]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_Solenoid_Driver_Schematic.jpg
 - Solenoid Driver Schematic []  [#3644]
add new file Stern_1980_Quicksilver_MPU_Schematic.jpg
 - MPU Schematic []  [#3645]

You can see these changes at http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?1895

I am remiss in my blogging duties

Yes, it has been two months since my last confession, but honestly there hasn't been a lot going on. There's been some progress on the work area, but not so much that I can really brog about it (brog == my neologism of the day: blog+brag). Ditto on the games... most of them are buried under the detritus of the cleaning effort.

I did go to the Hershey Gameroom Show two weeks ago. Whereas previous shows had multiple vendors and were more gameroom-oriented and not pinball specific, this show turned out to be nothing more than the Pennsylvania Gameroom Warehouse parking lot sale, albeit in a dumpy old agricultural fairground building. Lots of pins, mostly 90's but a few before and after, and one or two vendors that might have not been PGW front organizations, but that was about it. The flea market consisted of two vendors, both of whom were most likely guys who shovelled out the PGW dumpster. It was like going to the Republican National Convention.

Here's my problem with the pins that were there: Most of them has been lovingly restored cosmetically and were achingly beautiful, but most of them couldn't play for crap. Bad flippers, non-working switches, bad displays, games that rebooted, and so on... and all priced a few hundred dollars below PGW's showroom prices. Would I pay $2300 (marked down from $2700) for a Black Knight 2000 that spit out all of its balls? How about the T2 with one of the plastics on the playfield? Or Hurricane with a bump where the lower ramp connects to the upper that slowed down the ball and caused it to drop off the ramp SDTM? They obviously spend all of their time getting the games to look good at the expense of basic functionality. IMO, you can't have one without t'other.

However, it was worth the trip for one thing: They had a working Lotta Fun. I played that a bunch of times so I could experience what my game will be like when it's fixed up. I also got plenty of cell phone pics of the backglass so I can try to reproduce it -- at least so I know what numbers correspond with what lights (I wish I'd taken a real camera, though). I was also surpised to find a modern Gottlieb game that I actually enjoyed playing, Title Fight. I has some fun in the old school section playing Centaur, Xenon, and Silverball Mania, all canted at bizarre angles on the uneven exhibit hall floor... Xenon was so far off kilter that the ball would stop in the tube.

I didn't buy much... my biggest purchase was a copy of Mad Dog and his Art, Gene Cunningham's somewhat amateurishly made love letter to pinball uber-artist Dave Christensen. I'd been meaning to buy a copy the next time I made a Illinois Pinball run, but it was there and I wasn't buying anything else so I went for it. It's a little disappointing... I'd like it to be about twice as long with more pictures, especially of the playfields. Maybe not worth the ~$35 price, but it's not a travesty, either.

Moan moan moan. I don't have a lot of good things to say about anything, do I?

Next weekend is the York show, which should either wash the bad taste out of my mouth or poison my perception of pinball shows forever.

Another example of how my life juxtaposes rather nicely: I was listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the ride, and that same week I had Netflixed the first season of Pushing Daisies, both of which are narrated by Jim Dale. As my mind wandered during the drive, I kept thinking Jim would say, "The facts were these: At this point Harry Potter was 16 years, 51 weeks, 3 days, 5 hours and 23 minutes old."

Here's the thing that I noticed about Pushing Daisies after watching all 9 episodes in a two week period: The costume designer loves the cleavage. 'nuff said.

I also don't think I've mentioned my latest acquisition (aside from the usual small pin parts that I've picked up here and there when eBay exudes them): After looking for ages online, I finally got a pachinko machine from a local garage sale in July. My wife alerted me to it, so I stopped in and took a look. They were asking $25, and it had no balls and was missing parts. While I was looking they offered $15. I thought I'd make them sweat, so I left and ran some errands, and when I came back they asked $10 and I took it. I bought a load of balls on eBay, but I want to clean it up before I set it up. Another wonderful project that will fill my copious free time!

Short, yet action packed

This is going to be a short post because I'm tired and my hands are sore. My group at work is being beaten down by an impending release date so I'm working a lot. My wife got a job last month as an activity coordinator for an assisted living facility, which is good for us financially but she now spends a colossal amount of time on the computer researching activities for the old folks.

I did block out a bunch of time to work on the Doctor Who Dalek Wobble Head kit. It arrived about a week after I paid for it, then it sat around for a few days. Since I don't have a lot of free time, I started doing micro bursts of work on it -- removing stuff one day, fitting it the next, drilling holes the day after, etc. This put me in a pretty good position when my wife's dad and brother showed up for a 2 day visit, which kept her occupied so I could devote some large chunks of time to the process.

Installation was generally pretty easy. I liked the shunts they had to attach new wires to the boards... you plug in their plug to the appropriate location, then plug the real plug into that. Very slick. Of course, since my wiring is different from a standard game I had to do a little fiddling about, but nothing more complicated than before.

Of course, it wouldn't be my Doctor Who if something didn't go wrong, but I did get it to the point where the head would run in test mode. Here is (I think) my first ever blog video:

I'll go into the mighty saga of what went wrong, what went wrong with the going wrong, and what happened when things just fell off a cliff in a later post. It stopped short of the game being left a smoking ruin, but just barely.

But I'll go out on a high note. The state is building a new highway near my house which they've been planning on doing it for almost 50 years now (literally -- it was first proposed in the 1960's). One of the houses we looked at before buying this one was demolished as part of the construction. So a few months ago the dog and I decide to take a walk down the cleared path of destruction where it will be built, and it was kind of fun. So a few weeks ago we wanted to take another walk and see how things are progressing... but this time, we did so when there were a couple of workers doing things on the site. We stayed well out of their way and looked around some more, but it was hot so we turned back after a short trip. So, about three days later, signs such as the one pictured showed up around the entrances to the job sites. I am 100% confident that the signs appeared because the workers saw me walking around and figured I was there to deliberately hurt myself and sue the state or to steal a couple of the 50 foot concrete and steel beams they're using to make the bridges. There are also a group of security guys driving between the job sites on weekends. Regardless, I am partly bummed that we can't walk there any more and partly elated that my actions appeared to have caused such a kerfuffle.

Joe Entropy: Making a difference in the community.

Many are called, few have chosen to pay $300 for a moving Dalek head

As the title indicates, yesterday I got the email offering the purchase of a Doctor Who Wobble Head kit. Of course, I had already talked myself into buying it, so without much ado (other than finding a browser that the site worked with, newly downloaded Firefox 3.0 not being among them) I plunked down $290.75 and eagerly await my booty.

That not being chump change, I feel like I should actually install it promptly. This has lit the fire of righteous fury under me to create a work area in which I could actually do the work necessary without injury. That means the timetable for the swapping of my wife's and my work areas suddenly has a deadline, and I work great with deadlines.

So let's throw shame to the wind and turn the camera towards the parts of the basement that I usually aim it away from. On the right is my wife's work area. In all fairness, this was briefly organized, and over time has become a desperate cry to be featured on one of those HGTV house cleaning shows. And after it became slightly messy, anything even vaguely craft-related was just tossed in, sort of like compound interest for disorderly spaces. Note the exposed sewer pipe in the background... if that isn't a blog post that's just waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Not shown: The partially collapsed drop ceiling!

On the left is my personal superfund site. And this is after some organization earlier in the year... it used to be worse. And while my wife's area is a collaborative effort, this room is pretty much all me because I'm the only one who can squeeze into it without knocking down precarious piles of stuff, thereby blocking the escape route. So you can see this is a mighty labor that even Hercules would pale at. Say, speaking of the labors of Hercules, maybe I can clean my wife's stuff by breaking the sewer pipe and the resulting river of filth would carry away the mess.

And of course it wouldn't be a blog post without a few new purchases. Here's a mostly populated Pin*bot playfield that I got a few weeks ago. It's pretty thrashed cosmetically, but I figure if that's a problem I can move everything over to the unpopulated playfield. Getting this was kind of a pain... the guy who sold it to me was in California and had never sold a playfield before, so he lacked the basic shipping skills, namely accurate pricing and the acquisition of cheap boxes. The original shipping estimate was $140, but I asked if he could do UPS which should be ~$70. He said fine, so I bid and won. Then he sat on it for a few weeks, during which he said he was trying to get a box. Finally he bought a $15 box, which I called bullshit on and suggested he go to a bike store where they'll give you bike boxes for free (like I said, he was new to this). After much haggling, harsh words, and a few angry tears he finally got it to UPS and they wanted to charge him an oversize box fee... hello? Measure the frickin' box BEFORE shipping! So he cut the box down to size at UPS and shipped it for $75. When I got it, it was basically floating free in the box with a handful of styrofoam appliance packing pieces inadequately protecting it. I could reach into the box and touch the unwrapped playfield. I wanted to kill the guy. By dumb luck it did arrive in reasonable condition, but I think I'll be buying my playfields locally from now on.

This just arrived this week, bought from the guy who sold me the non-working "100% working" WPC display board a few years ago. It's the base and functional parts of Rudy's head on Funhouse. The picture was terrible and the description was practically non-existent (the title was "Funhouse pinball Rudy part" and the description was "You are bidding on a Funhouse Pinball rudy parts". Seriously.). But I won, and it actually turned out to be better than I expected. It's got the jaw piece, the kicker, and three of the four coils. If I could get the jaw motor and gear box, that's really all I would need to play the game, since the face and eyes are all just eye candy anyway.

I don't expect to be buying much for a few months, since eBay season has come to an end and the wobble head has put me either really close to or slightly over my debt ceiling of $1000. So it's as good a time as any to get organized so I can prepare for the new fall season, when I'll have to sell a bunch of boodle to return to solvency.

5 minute post... Go!

Last minute addendum! I forgot that for the first time, I won a door prize at the pinball show! Obviously, it's not a pinball machine or flat screen TV, since I probably would have remembered that on the first go round. It's a Pinball Wizards tiny travel alarm clock/calculator/
world time zone thing. I don't know what I'll do with it, but how can I not use it? It's a Major Award!

Actually, one place I could use it is in my new work area! My wife complained that she doesn't have a place for her crafts today... actually, she does, but it's a disaster area (to be fair, not entirely of her own making). We were going to set one up for her in the laundry room, but it's not an ideal space (near water and generally filled with dirty clothes), and it's currently piled to the ceiling with eBay packing supplies and boxes. So she said today that she wishes she could have a room for her crafts. After some negotiating, it was decided that I would move my pinball stuff out of the fake bedroom in the basement (fake -> no closet) and move her craft stuff into the bedroom. She would be away from water and have a whopping two windows for light; I would have a large work area near my games that is convenient to our primary drain pipe, so when it bursts it can spray warm effluent all over my $1000+ collection of playfields!

More on this story as it develops...