Hey there, hi there, ho there!

This past Saturday my wife and I almost bit the big one picking up a Cosmic Avenger in Long Island, NY. I’m not that familiar with the roads there, and we were on 495 heading back home in my rust bucket of a truck. I was a bit nervous driving that far with it (3hrs and 15 mins each way), but couldn’t pass up a good deal ($150). I was in the slow lane, because my truck is not exactly a racing vehicle. The lane was suddenly ending in front of us, and I didn’t see any signs warning about it ahead of time. I looked very quickly to my left and there was a guy jackass behind me in the left lane. I put my blinker on to get over, and he gunned it! The bastard sped up. I must have been a quarter inch from him on the left and the same distance from the guard rail. I swerved and the game rocked all over the place. I don’t know how we didn’t manage to wipe out, but I’m certainly glad we didn’t. I guess it’s true what they say about NY drivers.

Here’s a few pics of it:

Read the rest of this entry…

Hey! What’s shakin’? Not too much I hope.

This is just a quick post to let you in on something that I just discovered. Maybe you already know, maybe you don’t. I had heard Amazon.com was selling MP3s now, but never bothered to check it out. I’ve bought all sorts of crap from them, but never MP3s. The wife was recently looking for this album by a group from the 80s called the Stabilizers:

It was only released on vinyl (look it up kiddies). Being younger than the wife, I’m not up on these “records”. Apparently they are some sort of large compact disc with grooves in them? Very strange.

I was hoping I could find it on CD for her somewhere. I tried eBay, and they had loads of them, all on “record”. I tried a rare music store - Gemm.com. It looks like it was only released on CD in other countries. They had one listed for $100(ish). I’m not Bill Gates, so I didn’t buy it.

I thought about searching for it again today, and just for the hell of it I tried Amazon. They had it! $8.99 for the album with no DRM, recorded at a bit rate of 256kbps. I never would have thought they would have something hard to find like that. I bought it, downloaded it, listened to it for a few seconds, and threw up a little. If you are looking to take a white knuckle ride on the Vomitron, here’s the link to buy your own copy.

Hopefully the wife will like it better.

People at my gay day job are irritating the crap out of me, so I came over here to get my sanity back. Please don’t irritate me here or I’ll have no place to hide.

The other day I received a comment from Jason at Electronic Dojo asking if I could help provide some measurements for my Final Fight cabinet. He’s working on creating a replica Karate Champ upright. Here’s the section of his website dedicated to this quest.

From that page:

The cabinet was used in a few games by Data East/Nihon Bussan/AV Japan: Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja (marquee varient), Commando, Gondomania, Kung Fu Master, Last Mission, ShootOut.

So, for the sake of anyone else that may need this I present to you these measurements, without further adieu or hesitation, straight from my desktop to yours, the dimensions that everyone has been waiting for, without any additional commas except for this next one, in all it’s hand written glory:

The width of the front of the cabinet (not counting the thickness of each side panel) is 23 7/8″. That front panel is set in from the sides by 1 1/2″ inches.

I believe Jason is in the UK, and I apologize for all the silly measurements in inches. Unfortunately our country can’t seem to get on board with the whole metric system thing.

Hey there. Hope you had a good Easter yesterday. If you aren’t into Easter, then I hope you had a good Sunday.

My wife is divorced. She had a bunch of her stuff in the attic at her ex-husband’s house and it sat there for years. We went to pick it up on Saturday,  and she found this in one of the boxes:

She won it at a fair of some sort back in the 80s. It’s obviously not licensed, but I like it. We are going to put it up in the arcade. I *may* get a new frame for it though. This frame is pretty ugly and crooked.  It reminds me of Owen Wilson’s nose. Maybe he won said nose at a fair in the 80s? Now THAT would be a coincidence!

Howdy partners! Today is the official first day of Spring. Pretty soon I will be able to paint my Baby Pac-Man cabinet, put it all back together and try to find a place in my house for it!

Today is also my nephew Mackenzie’s birthday. If he’s reading this, then he’s in big trouble because he’s supposed to be in school right now.

Something I am looking forward to doing this year is visiting Spring Lake Arcade in Burrillville, RI. It’s the oldest penny arcade in the country still in operation.

Here’s their website…which hasn’t been updated in some time. They’ve had since 1929 to get their site updated…not sure what the hold up is.

This info is from marvin3m.com:

This is “The World’s Oldest Penny Arcade” (business) in the country. It has 11 penny games, about 12 nickel games, and 17 dime games. The rest are on quarter play. The arcade is located at Spring Lake Beach in Burrillville, RI. It has continuously been a penny arcade (defined today as the ability to spend pennies) since around 1929. Many of the machines have been here since new.

When I first heard of this place last year, I was surprised that the oldest penny arcade is here in my tiny state of RI. I was also surprised that I never heard of it before! We attempted to go last year, but we went on a rainy day and I didn’t realize that they are not open when the beach is closed.

I’m determined to get there this year, but I have to wait until they open on May 26th. I’ll post an update sometime after that date with loads of pictures of this place.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a weirdo.

I don’t hide in the basement wearing a hat made out of Reynolds Wrap®, or spend my evenings trying to tune in to alien news broadcasts on my shortwave radio. I do however have some interest in most paranormal subjects. I don’t believe in everything I hear or read, but do find UFOs, ghosts, and “the unknown” interesting.

Are you still reading? OK…now that we have that out of the way, I just wanted to post about an episode of UFO Hunters that will be on either tonight at 10pm EST, or the following Wednesday 3/26 on the History Channel.

I first heard about this on the forums at AboveTopSecret.com. The info at that link sounds a lot more interesting then the info listed on the UFO Hunters official site for the episode:

Episode info:

Many UFO investigators believe that extra-terrestrials have gateways scattered all over the world. Theories behind gateways vary from being used to travel between time and space to being the link between dimensions. The UFO Hunters travel to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where more than 7,000 UFO sightings have been reported in the area. There appears to be a good reason for the sightings - locals believe that a powerful beam of light is a beacon for UFOs, and may signal the location of a gateway. The region is also home to mysterious monoliths made of heavy stones. Investigators will reveal accounts that point to these stones being another kind gateway  one where ETs actually appear. Then the UFO Hunters explore the deserts of Arizona where locals lead the team to another gateway just outside of mystical Sedona.

The episode was supposed to be titled “Gateways” and is listed on their site as being on tonight. The end of the forum thread I linked to has info saying it’s been renamed to “Vortexes” and is going to be on the following week, 3/26. I’m not sure which is correct but wanted to post about it before it aired in case anyone wants to catch it.

I haven’t written an arcade related post in a little while (sorrrRRRY!) This is partly because I’m trying to save money for a truck and haven’t bought anything arcade related as a result. It’s also because I’ve been consumed with work to the point that I haven’t had much free time to work on my games lately. I’ve been itching to finish Baby Pac-Man, and will soon. For now, here’s some more fun with advertising….

Notice: If you are older than 60 years old, please stop reading now.

I spotted this ad at the top of MSNBC.com this morning:

This ad is incredibly deceptive. Look at the before picture on the right. That woman looks like she’s been living on the surface of the sun since the Eisenhower administration. She can’t be a day younger than 125.

There are several reasons that prove the woman in the before picture is not a burn victim, but in fact a victim of a horrid photoshop job:

1. The woman in the before picture is smiling. No one with a face that tortured by the elements is going to be smiling. Years of baking cookies for ungrateful grand children would have turned that smile into a scowl years ago.

2. A woman that old would never have that many teeth in her mouth, and the ones she would have would look like little baked beans.

3. Look at her hair. While it is gray as expected, it also looks long and luxurious. A woman of her age and experience would not have long flowing locks. She would have an old lady afro like this one:

In closing, if this product does work I’m going to buy a whole case now and save it. In about 20 years, I’m going to slather it all over my entire body. Heck, I may even have to do the same to my wife after she falls asleep around 5:30 pm after a day of heavy knitting. I will post back here in 20 years and let you know if it really works.

Hey! I haven’t posted in quite a while. This is going to be a short one.

I picked this up at a Flea Market yesterday:

It has 25 pages or so inside, and was used for Air Force training in WWII.

Here’s the back cover:

When searching for info on this, I found a great site that posted scans of the entire pamphlet.

This site has it listed for $850 (item 222): http://www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/printarticle.asp?from=r&id=595

This site lists it between 200 and 300 dollars: http://www.pbagalleries.com/search/item186527.php

I may put it on eBay, or keep it. If you are reading this and want to buy it, let me know.

Update: it’s on eBay. Go bid on it!

Commercials suck. I usually try to avoid watching them, and Tivo helps to get that job done. For some reason, I wasn’t fast forwarding through commercials the other night and noticed something rather strange.

Have you seen the Citibank commercial where this dude takes his woman to a fancy restaurant that took forever to get into, and they start bitching about how the food is tiny, and is in fact “elf food”? I’m talking about these 2 clowns:

The picture sucks, I know. It’s hard to take pictures of the TV but hopefully you’ll get the idea.

So, they get all worked up because they are served elf food, and decide the only logical thing to do is to buy more substantial food at a gas station. Mmmm….every time I hear the word “Texaco” my mouth starts watering.

Take a look at this woman’s fingers (if you can muster enough will power to pull your gaze away from her freakishly large nose):

They look fairly normal, no? Note the ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Now….look at that same finger as she goes to give the store clerk her credit card:

Not only is that ring missing, but her FINGER IS MISSING. What the hell is that gnarly discolored stump where her ring finger used to be? The wife and I thought at first that maybe her finger was bent, but it just doesn’t look that way. A few more frames of the video confirm our suspicions:

That hand, my friends, does not belong to that woman. It must belong to a guy that got it stuck in the sharp angry bits of some sort of dangerous farming equipment.

Now, I have nothing against people with missing (or extra) fingers. But WTF? If they are trying to film a scene with a “CITI” card as the main object of interest, wouldn’t you think they would take the extra time to try to find someone in the room with a full set of fingers? I just don’t get it.

Next time this commercial comes on, watch it closely and let me know if you saw the same thing.

The title above should be said as Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein.

Howdy kids! I have good news to report regarding the programming of my LED sign project.

The folks at EvilMadScientist.com and LadyAda.net teamed up to help me resolve the issue I was having with my USBTinyISP programmer, and it’s now working perfectly. If I understand it right, the 1.5K resistors were not allowing enough voltage to go to the buffer chip. I removed them (R6 and R7) and replaced them with wires:

After I did that, it worked great. I then took some code that “bbum” posted on the EvilMadScientist.com boards (thanks!), and modified it to alternate rows 16 and 17 to get my 2 frame animation as follows:

lightLine24(lineDuration);
lightLine23(lineDuration);

if (RowOnCount++ < 75) {

     // frame 1 animation
     lightLine16(lineDuration);

     //lines below say “EAT ME”….makes them flash on and off with the animation
     lightLine22(lineDuration);
     lightLine21(lineDuration);
     lightLine20(lineDuration);
     lightLine19(lineDuration);
     lightLine18(lineDuration);

} else if (RowOnCount < 150) {
     // frame 2 animation
     lightLine17(lineDuration);
} else {
     RowOnCount = 0;
}

lightLine15(lineDuration);
lightLine14(lineDuration);
lightLine13(lineDuration);
lightLine12(lineDuration);
lightLine11(lineDuration);
lightLine10(lineDuration);
lightLine9(lineDuration);
lightLine8(lineDuration);
lightLine7(lineDuration);
lightLine6(lineDuration);
lightLine5(lineDuration);
lightLine4(lineDuration);
lightLine3(lineDuration);
lightLine2(lineDuration);
lightLine1(lineDuration);
lightLine0(lineDuration);


You can download the full source code for this here.

Here’s a new video of the sign:

As you can see, I decided to flash the “EAT ME” text in sync with the animation. Here’s a pic of the sign as it looks standing in the arcade:

I feel like making another one now.