Syd Explores the New Place in the Night

In the interest of exploring the new place, my cat has been ending up in weird places (like caught inside the inner workings of the back of the dishwasher) and as seen here when I opened the cupboard at breakfast time.  The soldering gear is for working on the arcade cabinet's control panel, not for making western omellettes.

Control Panel Makeover

This needed doing, as can be seen in the Before and After pics.

MAME

Because the chips that make my arcade machine work were kinda hanging on wires when I first installed them, I completely unwired the control panel to move to my new place, so the chips wouldn't be banging around in there when the machine was taking the hour-long truck ride. Today I wired them up properly, with the chips mounted in the cabinet, and I was relieved that I finally got my original Pole Position steering wheel working. Coolio. Much neater wiring job this time. I may leave wiring up the "Player 2" side of the control panel until tomorrow.

Ghost Town

So, my first Saturday alone in my new place and everybody near and far is too busy doing other things to be bothered with a sad sack like me. I made the best of it, though. Moved some boxes around, drove into Kingston (Ontario) and bought a few things, paid my first rent, played some guitar, rented "Jersey Girl" and watched the extras first, hooked up my arcade cabinet (apart from the actual control panel, which I'm rewiring) and it worked... All in all, a pretty limp and uninspired Saturday, but what can you do?

Moved to Elgin

With a huge amount of help from Dave in moving my "museum of me" archived crap, I have moved about an hour from where I lived from 2000 on. I've moved to be close (1 km) from the school where I work. This is great, but it is farther from Ottawa, which I use as my "city shopping" city. I had an awful large amount of things to move and the U-Haul truck I rented broke down twice with a dead battery, but we got it all here and now the Huge Unboxing awaits. Today I don't want to do that, so need to find something else to do.

West for a Wedding

From school last Friday I headed west for about 4 hours through the changing leaves of fall in a truly Canadian landscape of rolling, rocky hills and a 50-50 mix of coniferous to deciduous forest. Very rugged and beautiful (not that I felt like driving at all). Got to Haliburton for the wedding I was an usher at and spent the weekend surrounded by rustic beauty, not-quite strangers and tables groaning with sweets and free booze. Got up to some silliness in our tuxes, danced and ate and drank and then drove home today. I'm glad to be home. Ever been overwhelmed by wonderful events and need to go off and think a bit?

Bezels and Barbarians

A bezel is, among other things, a thing that goes around the screen in an arcade cabinet so you can't see past it or behind it. I got a piece of black poster board (called Bristol Board in Canada and England, but not in America) spattered it with white paint for "stars", and double sided taped it to the TV with a square part in the middle cut out so the screen would be visible, and a tiny square so the remote control for the TV would still work. It makes a huge difference. I also got a Pole Position steering wheel from eBay this week. It's about 3/4 the size of your average car steering wheel, and has the Atari logo on it. Now I have to figure how to hook it up. This week I started teaching short fiction, and used videotaped TV shows to illustrate story structure. One class got "That 70's Show" and the other got "The Dukes of Hazzard" to do this with. The kids are grateful to have this stuff of the real world enter the sterile fastness of their high school. I'm also photocopying short stories I feel like teaching, to mix in with the milksop, moralistic pap that much of the textbook stuff seems to be. As the textbook has that sort of stuff, I'm going to throw in some pulp fiction short stories, for instance, the first "Conan the Barbarian" story. My only concern is that the ornate, faux-ancient language will be too hard for some students. "Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars -- Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."