Thursday, June 15, 2006

The next great adventure

Racing notes:
Okay so I've signed up and recruited two other guys for this race on July 8th. www.scoutar.com
Some preliminary reconaissance from last years race points to this venue being literally in my back yard. Irvine lake and Black Star / Silverado canyon. I hope this will be to our advantage knowing the terrain and altitude gains our mountains have to offer. Anyways, we've started training for this already and the running is just killing my legs. It's going to be friggin hot too. Nino my riding buddy is all amped to do this and he's going to be in really great shape for this race. Andy, who I met at the last race, will also be fast by nature of still being in his 20's.

Arcade notes:
On to the important things... I'm still shopping out this Twilight Zone pinball for a couple weeks now spending lots of money buying parts, upgrades and gadgets that will make this look great and play forever. I'm almost done and I'm looking forward to putting some new high scores on it. On the other hand Alien Poker is starting to bug out on me, but the fixes look easy. I think there are some cracked solder joints causing the displays to behave oddly. There is also an intermittent grounding issue which prevents me from starting a game. I think again another cracked solder joint or loose wire.

I had Ken, my technician over to finish the Jokerz pin and drop off a spare XY vector monitor he'd had for about a year now. Happy to say, ALL my machines are up and running, so that makes about 100% It's taken me 8 years to get to this point and I'm a happy guy. Time to stop fixing and to start playing.

Family notes:
Kaleo is growing up fast, the vocabulary is expanding and the expressions are getting pretty damn hilarious. The last two were: "You're driving me crazy dad!" which was either picked up from school or mom. The other was "Stop fooling around!" which I know came from me. He's been a bad boy lately and unbuckling his seatbelt on the school bus. We've tried to reason with him that if he gets up on the bus, he won't get to go swimming after school. So far the last three days, this has NOT worked, but then he has not been able to go swimming either. I hope he'll add two and two and realize this before he mis-behaves on the bus again. For four, he's a smart kid, but very impulsive.