Time for arcade machine maintenance Wednesday, Dec 2 2009 

It’s been exactly 4 years since the completion of the arcade cabinet. Wow, it is only a few months younger than Olivia! My new phaze I’m going through is Joust. Man, Williams made the best games: Robotron, Joust, Defender, Ladybug. Sure they reused some sounds and graphics but the playout of these games are awesome and unique.

Anyway, I wanted to play centipede the other day and realized that my trackball is kaput. So, it’s finally time for a tuneup. Some of the buttons need tightening as well. I’m impressed how well the machine has held up. Barring replacement of the CPU and probably the monitor, the joystick console itself looks like it’ll withstand many many years…..or until Christien spills a beer that fries it’s motherboard. But that won’t be until he’s 19, right?

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The Curious Case of ‘Where the Hell has Roach Been’? Thursday, Jan 15 2009 

1st off, I’ve got to laugh. I’m sure the new Brad Pitt extravaganza is an excellent movie and perhaps Academy Award worthy (which means blah to me). But correct me if I’m wrong: Didn’t Mork & Mindy introduce this whole ‘born old, die young’ notion with the character Mearth? And please, Brad Pitt can’t possibly hold a candle to the incomparable Jonathan Winters! This Benjamin Button flick had better be one hell of a comedy….

Anyway, I haven’t been blogging much these past months. At least on this site anyway (OG’s and Christien’s sites are somewhat more active). There are 2 reasons for this:
1. No time! With OG at 3yrs and Christien at 3mths, it’s hard for me to find the time. When there is time – I’d rather be sleeping.
2. Zombie-like lifestyle. In a sleep deprived state, it’s hard to keep up on what is happening in the real world. You know, the world beyond the doors of the house. My tracking of the news is disjointed at best and the ability to retain the facts and observations I wish to keep has diminished.

It is frustrating to have set aside my pencil and forgone my blogging over the last 4 or 5 months. When I look back at my site years from now there will be this void in the annals. Along with passing along observations, anecdotes, etc to outside readers, a personal goal for blogging is to be able to document what I was thinking and doing over my life and what influential and noteworthy things were going on over my history.

Which brings me to the problem. At the time something occurs in my life, I am quick to think ‘Hey, I should blog about this’. In fact, this happens a minimum of 4 times a day. What I end up doing at the end of the day is writing down thoughts and concepts on scraps of paper that are now accumulating on my desktop or jammed inside of my wallet. What often happens is that by the time I scribble down the ideas, I’ve undoubtedly missed many of them and the ones I do write down, enough time may have passed that I miss a little intricate detail that I wanted to convey.

I recall my friend Chris used to have a voice recorder that he used to log information. I wonder, does he still use this approach to retain his many thoughts throughout the day. If so, what is the best recording device to use? If he doesn’t use voice recording, how does he retain his ideas before putting pen to paper?

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Dr. Mario on the Mame! Thursday, Nov 13 2008 

I found Dr. Mario on my Mame machine last night. I should start looking for other games some day. I may be surprised what I find. But with the little amount of spare time I have, it’s always Robotron 2084 for me! I’ve got to figure out how the pros complete all 255 screens. I think I’m a pretty decent player but can only get to about the 60th screen….which takes about an hr to get to by the way.

Olivia loves Dr. Mario. It’s funny what game attract her attention: Pengo, Ms. Pacman, LadyBug…but not Robotron–I think she’s a little scared of that game because of the sounds it makes between screens. One things for sure though, she loves watching me play, just like a certain cousin of hers used to enjoy doing when he was about her age (and younger).

It’s time to avoid the inevitable and perform some maintenance on the machine. It needs a new light for the marquee, and more urgently, I need to open up the control panel and clean things up a bit. The trackball is acting funny and I think there’s dust build up on the contacts….much like a mouse for the computer gets gunked up once in a while. The problem is that due to the design, I’m going to have to get inside and dismantle the control panel from the base. Not an easy task. It will probably take many hrs for this task and some extra hands.

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