Monday 5-8-23 Dancing, Playing Games & Having Fun

 

Just having fun

We had a wonderful day.

I started the day out by attending Di Green's Weekly C1 dance at 9:00 for an hour and fifteen minutes. Robin, one of our virtual square dancing friends has been visiting Di and Terry for the last three weeks. She is flying home to California today so Di and Terry had to take her to the airport. It was at the same time as Di's dance so she asked Ett McAtee to cover for her. Ett did an outstanding job of covering. She called five tips to 20 participants. I attended it by myself and had a fun time.

Larry started his day by using his long reach cobweb brush and removing all of the cobwebs from around the exterior of the house. He then sprayed the weeds in the gravel.

After his outside work Larry spent most of the day installing a new pinball game and tweaking it to work the way he wanted. A gentleman took an old Playboy game playfield and modified it, he then used his modified playfield and made quite a number of different pinball games from it. They are really excellent. Some of the games are based on music, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Pink Floyd and others, some are based on movies, Home Alone, X-Files, Polar Express, and there are others. Larry downloaded Rock 'n' Roll Diner. It has the early rock 'n' roll music from various artists (Elvis, Chuck Barry, Fats Domino and many others). As you play the music changes and there are photos that also change, very cool!!

The gentleman who wrote these tables is not one of the normal developers, while most developers are not very good at documentation this person wrote absolutely no documentation. Larry was able to get it running fairly easily but there were problems with where to put the music, it also shares a file with the older Playboy game that we have and with all the other tables this gentleman created, whatever high score one table got they all got.

Larry wrote the developer a question asking if there was an easy way to change the code to better organize the music. The developer was quick to write back and say that if he had it to do over again he would have done that but he didn't offer any ideas on how to do it. So, Larry went digging around in the program and compared it to other games and after a few hours he was able to change the code to get the music organized correctly.

Next up was the scoring. There is a way to get machines who share code to score individually. Once again there is very little documented. Larry worked on it for hours and while he got very close he simply could not get it to work. He ended up posting a question about it in one of the online pinball forums, he showed what he had done and asked if anyone had any ideas, one person wrote back and showed him exactly what he could do. Larry made the suggested changes and now the scoring works correctly. 

One great thing about virtual pinball is there is lots of community support. If you have a problem or question many times you can find the answer in one of the online forums, if not you can ask for help, there is normally someone who will help. Larry is always appreciative of the help and makes sure to thank folks who help. He also will offer advice to others who have questions that he may be able to help with.

Rock 'n' Roll Diner

I also played a few more games. I played Guardians of the Galaxy, Scared Stiff, Great Houdini and Tales of the Arabian Nights. I also did Cactus Canyon and got a new high score, of 23,802,280. I had a great time.

Great Houdini

 

Guardians of the Galaxy

 

Scared Stiff

 

Tales of the Arabian Nights

New high score

While Larry worked on Rock 'n' Roll Diner I played my games. I did the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event today was Event: Tri Peaks Adventure of 20 games. It took me 1 hour, 19 minutes and 35 seconds, which put me in 7th place in my group.

I continued reading Sarah's Quilt for about an hour.

In the evening we watched the last episode of the 12th season of Call the Midwife. Afterwards we started watching Carnival Row on Amazon. The second season is now available on Amazon but it has been a few years since we watched the first season. So we decided to watch it again. After Larry went to bed I watched the 7th episode of the 9th season of The Brokenwood Mysteries. Then I watched a couple episodes of Sister Boniface Mysteries. I ended up doing 26,000 steps for the day. Because I hadn't done the 175,000 steps for awhile they put me back to the 20,000 step Challenge. So I was in first place in my group.  

Back during Covid we belonged to Walmarts home delivery program. We started going back into the store and found we weren't using it enough to justify the cost so we cancelled it. A couple of weeks ago Walmart offered to let us resubscribe for half price so Larry signed us up. This evening while we were watching television we got our groceries delivered to our front door. Even though we normally find ourselves at Walmart at least once a week it is still nice to do our grocery shopping this way.