So, this is what I'm thinking…

A new form of art I re-acquainted myself with is the improved IOGraph. This tracks your mouse movements and pauses on the screen. Get it now from IOGraphica.

Some cool images I happened upon at Flickr

I was never exactly a Pinball Wizard, but I was pretty good in my day. During high school I was more into coinop video games than pinballs, and if I remember correctly my reasoning was that they were more consistent and predictable in their behaviour. You pull left, your spaceship flies left. The boss on level 5 always dives down after exactly 15 seconds so get the hell out from under there, etc.

It wasn’t until I got to Uni that I came to better appreciate pinball games, and if I remember correctly it was because they were less consistent and predictable in their behavior compared to video games. Each particular table had it’s own nuances and secrets, and no two games were the same. They even seemed to change week to week either by design or through wear and tear for added challenge. For example, the left flipper might be a little weaker than the right. After pointing this out to the owner you might find it fixed the next week but at the same time you’d find the table tilted up half a degree or leaning slightly to the right. The technician may have adjusted the out-lane pins a little wider and the in-lane pins a little narrower. The challenge and fun in pinball was not only in getting a high score but in finding the secrets and challenges of the gameplay and overcoming the traps put in there by unscrupulous operators.

One particular day of my pinball career sticks in my mind. I had a day off Uni and thought I’d invest some time at LazaMaze, a Video game and Pinball Parlour on Victoria Street in Midland. They had a well worn and slightly neglected “The Addams Family” game. The flippers were pretty weak, the jets in the mid-left area didn’t register and a few of the lights and sounds didn’t work. It wasn’t my first choice TAF machine, but it was still fun. When I got there some guy was on it and he was pretty frustrated. He’d been flailing away trying to hit a very conservative Replay Score of 20 Million but couldn’t manage more than 5 Million. He lost another ball, cursed and started kicking the legs which ended his current game with a tilt.

I asked, humbly, if I could have the next game and wagered that I could score get a replay. He took the bet, deciding that it was impossible since he;d already spent five bucks on it and hadn’t managed one yet. He was a slave to Pride which, along with deep pockets, had kept him chained there getting more and more frustrated to the point that I could see arteries popping out of his temples.

I didn’t really mean to make him look foolish, but I think I might have. Not only did I get the replay score on my first ball but it took me a total of about 12 seconds. Here’s how:

1. Pull that plunger back and hit the Skill Shot for 2M
2. Hit the Train Wreck, not so much to get points because you need two hits for your first bonus, but to get your eye in and test the upper right flipper strength
3. Let the ball dribble to your left flipper. If it’s on the right flipper, perform a Flip Trap or a Falling Hold Pass to get it onto the left flipper
4. Send the ball up that nice wide ramp up the back called the Bear Kick. If you hit this enough times you can do things like light extra balls, collect Jackpots in Multiball. If you have a strong right flipper, you can sit there all day and hit 99 Bear Kicks which lights 5M per shot, but for now we only want to go up once. This is the first shot in the 4-way Combo and should have taken about 8 seconds so far.
5. Having gone up the Bear Kick, the ball will be delivered to your right flipper. Send it straight through the Graveyard into the Advance X Loop. This is quite a hard shot to pull off since the entrance to the Graveyard is very narrow, and the distance between the jets in the Graveyard means you need to be very precise. This is the second shot in the 4-Way Combo and should have taken about 10 seconds so far.
6. As the ball comes around the top of the table through the Advance X Loop, send it up the Million Plus ramp with your upper right flipper.  This does two things: gives you 1M points (the next shots up this ramp will be 2M, 3M etc) and scores you the 3-way Combo for 5M points. This is also a hard shot, since the ball will be travelling through the loop very quickly. this is the third shot of the 4-way combo. It’s also a 3-way combo itself, and scores you 5M points.
7. Send the ball into the Swamp for the final shot of the 4-way Combo and earn another 10M points.

I let the ball come out and trapped it on the left flipper and showed the other guy the score. 15M points from the 3-way and 4-way combos, plus bonus X advanced plus 1M from the ramp + at least 5M for the 5X graveyard value (small thought it was) plus the initial 2M point skill shot brought me over the 20M point line and earned me a free Replay game.  All in under 12 seconds. I let the ball dribble off the flipper, told the guy “Good luck” and walked out feeling too cool for school.

Image via Wikipedia

After work, I intend to immerse myself in some good old fashioned sports on TV. When I get home I’ll be watching the Fremantle Dockers v Saint Kilda AFL replay. Then I’ll flick between the Le Mans 24 hour race and the Algeria v Slovenia World Cup game.

Around midnight is when the fun starts, with the Canadian Formula 1 Grand Prix live from Montreal. I remember being in Montreal a few years ago for work during GP week, and I could hear the cars at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve from my hotel room across the river. I wish I had the money at the time to go and watch the race. I have a Google Wave set up ready to do some live blogging so I hope some fans join in. I did one a few nights ago for the South Africa v Mexico World Cup opener and it was great.

After the Formula 1 it’s the main event, with the big Germany v Australia World Cup game. That should take me through to about 4am. Luckily I don’t have work tomorrow. But in the afternoon I will be attending my son’s Kindy class as this weeks parent helper. I hope that I can pull it off without them all knowing I had no sleep the previous night!

One thing I’m happy with is that our kids have taken a keen interest in the World Cup games. Jett even does his African dancing at times which is just hilarious to watch.

This post is also serving as a test for a new blog content manager I’m trialling called Zemanta.

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• Lewis Hamilton claims pole position (independent.co.uk)
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Cousteau would have been 100 years old today. Here is a compilation of some of his finest shots

So Lost is finally over. What the hell did I just see last night, anyhow? The whole series has reminded me of a mashup between X-Files and Gilligan’s Island.

What was real? What was imagined? What was dreamed? What was alternate universe? What was purgatory? What was heaven?

What is the island? Who was Charles Widmore and why did he care so much about the island? WTF was the DHARMA Initiative? So what’s going on with the island now that everyone is dead? Where happened to the black guy Michael, and his son Waaaaaalt? Basically, all this ending tells me is that all the backstory was absolutely meaningless; the entire six years of random weirdness was just stretched out to say “LOL, everyone dies and the good people get to go to heaven.”

Maybe I shouldn’t think about it too much. It’s like the Force in Star Wars, something cool which certain people could wield but when Lucas tried to explain it with midichlorians it just sucked.

Benjamin Linus has to be one of my favourite TV characters ever. He was just bad-ass.

Urgh, this is hurting my brain. I have to think about this more. I can’t believe I invested 6 seasons in watching this show. More often than not I’d come away thinking, “What just happened?”

So I’m prepared for next month’s FIFA World cup!

Wow, I haven’t been paying attention and these kinda snuck up on me. Pacman turns 30 today! Pacman was developed by Namco and released in Japan on 22-May-1980. Wow, has it been that long? I don’t want to consider how may 20s I dropped into coin-ops in the early 80s playing it, avoiding Pinky, Inky, Blinky and Clyde. Pacman came at a time when the most popular arcade games were shooters like Space Invaders and Asteroids, so it came as a welcome non-violent alternative and grew in popularity. Everything about the game was cool: the high-contrast colours, the wocka-wocka sounds, the intro music… it really was the perfect game for it’s time. To celebrate, Google even changed their header logo into a playable version of Pacman for the day. You’ve got to be in Classic Google mode, not iGoogle. I remember saving all my pocket money to buy this on the Atari, but was so disappointed to find that it really sucked.

Another 30th anniversary this week was the release of The Empire Strikes Back. After being blown away by Star Wars three years earlier, it came as a surprise to me that there was another movie released. Remember, these are the days before the Internet and discussions forums, preview web sites and such. I didn’t know about it until it actually came out  in Australia, which was a few months after the US release and even then I don’t think I saw it until a few weeks after than. Empire is still the best of the movies. I might see if I can fit it in sometime this weekend, perhaps on VHS for the low-fi experience, the way George Lucas intended.

Meanwhile, here’s a Periodic Table of The Empire Strikes Back.

Click for larger version

So, the poor Dockers didn’t win which drops them from second to third on the Premiership Ladder, equal second with Geelong but behind on percentage. They stayed competitive for about 2 thirds of the game but eventually were handed a reality check to their fairytale start to 2o1o.

On a more positive note, Mark Webber is starting at pole position for the Monaco Grand Prix, which means that he is likely to win since passing in Monaco is very hard. Webber squeaked ahead of Kubica’s 1m 14.120s qualifying time with 1m 14.104s, but then slammed in the only sub-1m 14s lap of the weekend with 1m 13.826s to throw the issue beyond doubt. It was his second consecutive pole and his third of the season, and Red Bull’s sixth. It starts in half an hour, but I dunno if I’ll stay up to the end as it’s probably the most boring single auto race outside America. They really need to take out the chicane after the tunnel