Ha ha! I won it! I won the auction for a 1979 Gottlieb Buck Rogers pinball playfield! He gives it a 9.5 out of a 10 in regards to shape, just a few things missing but other then that it’s almost brand new - just needs a couple parts, some polish, and then it’s coffee table time! I’m hoping to do it a bit cleaner then the person who wrote the HOW-TO; my woodworking skills aren’t great at all, but I think I can pull off a few things to make this table more refined and include things like miter joints. I’ll also need to work on a proper circuit to supply power to it - I’m thinking of using one of the rechargeable 18 volt batteries used in my Ryobi system + an additional charger. I figure I can use a DC-DC step down to convert from 18V to the ~6.3V the lights need, plus what ever additional power is needed to compensate for resistance. I can gut the charger, connecting inline to the battery and that way it can just charge the battery, or charge the battery while powering the lights, or just power the lights. Not bad for a $40 investment, $20 for the charger, $20 for the battery. Plus, this battery is a standard Ryobi uses so I can count on them being available for quite some time. Anyway, I’m stoked! I’m also hoping (Though not real sure I will) that I also win this auction, which is for another pinball playfield - this time for a 1978 Bally Playboy machine. It’s not in perfect shape, but it’ll clean up real well. If I get good enough at this, maybe I’ll try to sell them. I figure at most $250 for the parts, and it should easily sell for $500+, call it art and I can go as high as $800 no sweat. And $250 would be the max, a lot of the playfields go for only $50 or so, it’s just a tight market suddenly.

Anyway, pics of the new Buck Rogers playfield after the jump.

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We, in the upper midwest (Being Minnesota & Wisconsin), like to think of ourselves as the conscience of America - we have a tradition of clean government and social reform. We tend to elect people who are champions of progress. Combined, we gave the rest of the world Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone, Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, Robert M. La Follette, and Russ Feingold.

But not only do our politicians think differently, so do our thieves. A trio of men dressed up as construction workers, invading homes and stealing the stained glass windows of many homes in the Twin Cities area.   All said and done, they stole over 150 windows over the last 3 months.

How to you bring something like that up to your cell mates?

Additional stuff - I was sadly outbid on my pinball playfield, I listed my max bid of $80, it sold for $81. I was initially bummed, but yesterday 2 superior quality playfields were placed up for auction, and I’ll be damned if I lose this time. On both, I’ve opted for the eBay SMS thing were it sends me a text message if I’m outbid, and on both I’ve placed my max bid slightly higher then any normal person should be willing to pay. But at least I’ll get one, if not both, when it’s all said and done.

Coffee table hooooooooooooooo!

Here are some pictures of the new loft, it’s in the Rossmor, 500 North Robert Street. In the heart of downtown St. Paul! We’ve painted a lot of it, added some hardware to the walls to make organization better, but otherwise this is how it looks. After we’ve moved in, I’ll take some more pictures.

Click below to read on, or see the pictures over at Flickr

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So, sorry but there are no loft pictures today. I left my backpack with my camera at the new place last night, I’ll try to remember to grab it when I leave there tonight.
I’m so utterly sore it’s not even funny. I was looking forward to coming to work, nothing better then a nice relaxing 8 hour stint sitting down. Ah to do nothing! Well, no physical labor at least.

From Saturday at 10am until 9pm yesterday, if I wasn’t sleeping I was on my feet. Mishka painted the kitchen this delicious shade of orange - but I did the primer work, so I did help a tad bit. I attempted to install on vanity light in the bathroom, then returned it and picked up a better one that actually fit. I tried to hang a coat rack next to the door, where I learned a valuable lesson about modern construction techniques. Apparently the new place was built by using metal 2×4’s, then sheet metal, then drywall. Thusly, the holly wall anchors I tried to use, and promptly snapped in half when they hit the metal, don’t work. We need some special self-tapping sheetmetal screws, which we should have tonight. Using those screws, things went in great - without them, well, there’s a lot of spackle now being used. It’s all good, lesson learned, and all those things will be properly hung tonight.

I came home last night to an email telling me I was outbid on my playfield. Yes, the one I wanted really badly to create into a coffee table. No, I wasn’t around to counter-bid on it, as I was laboriously working on my dream. I emailed him, he had a bunch of playfields he placed on auction all at the same time, and I doubt all of them sold, so perhaps I can still get lucky.

Oh, and on Friday, the same day I said I was going to stop gaming and actually work on some projects, karma came up and bitch slapped me in the form of an email letting me know that I won a spot in the beta for Warhammer Online. I was pretty pleased at that, being it’s probably one of the most sought-after MMORPGs coming out soon, and everyone wants  to get a slot in the beta. But who did? Me, that’s who!

Till next time, which is later this hour, or later this week.

After we’re all settled in to the new place in a couple of weeks, I have 2 projects I plan to do right away.

One is a productivity booster/brainstorming center piece. I have a thing for dry erase boards. I just do - since I’m consulting now I carry 3 smaller sized ones with me, and they go to whatever job I’m working at. Nothing beats jotting down ideas in full color. At the loft, we have tall ceilings, 14 feet or so, and so a large white board on one of the walls would be perfect for me - but have you priced them? I have. A 4′ x 8′ large plain-Jane white board will cost you over $300! And it’s on sale, normally it’s over $400! I was somewhat bummed out about that - that’s just to much for me to justify spending on something I’ll basically doodle on.
Then I saw this article over at Chris Metcalf’s site. He created a 4′ x 8′ white board for… ready? $28. He used shower board, which is a thin plywood coated with a white waterproof to be used to build a cheap shower surround, only it works perfect with dry erase markers. He took a 4′ x 8′ sheet, glued it to a thicker piece of plywood and boom - there you have it. I’m going to do this, but I plan on improving - I’ll be adding some thin ferrous material in between the shower board and the backer, thus giving me a combo white board/ magnet board.

The second item I’ll be constructing is this. It’s a coffee table, with the table part being made from a pinball playfield. I’ve got my bid in over at eBay and in 2 days and 2 hours from now I’ll be the proud owner of a playfield from 1979. I won’t link it, because I don’t want people driving up the price :P. It’s a helluva lot cheaper then an actual pinball machine (Trust me, I’ve been looking), and a lot more ‘WoW’ factor. Invite some friends over, flip the switch, and there ya go!

The next update I’ll probably have, sometime tomorrow of Sunday, will be full of pics of the new place and some more details on the plans we have for it - so look for that!

It’s a typical Friday at work. Slow, painfully slow. Not much gets started on a Friday, and not much gets completed.
I’m standing, oddly enough, between 2 positions - one being Sr. Infrastructure Engineer, the other the MS Operations Manager guy. Beginning Monday, my time will be split 50/50 between the two. The MOM gig pays more, and I think I can even get more then what they offer - purely based on the fact I’m the only person even remotely qualified for this position that isn’t attached. I’ve been asked by 3 additional firms if I’d like to try for this position. My current firm is already jockeying for someone to backfill my current roll of reading email and clicking buttons.

Don’t get my wrong, I love to make a metric ton of cash doing nothing but surfing the web and blogging as much as the next guy, but I really wish I had days filled with work and tension - I thrive on pressure. The MOM gig is right up my alley.
It’s a solo thing, there’s almost always only 1 monitoring guy in an organization, no matter how large it is or how many servers it houses. This monitoring guy is in charge of a minimum of 2, maximum of 18, monitoring systems spread throughout the company. It could be something as large and robust as HP OpenView or MS Operations Manager, or it could be Bob’s Script that checks on custom application x34, which runs on a Windows NT 3.5 server, connecting to DB2, and using Bill’s (He left the company 10 years ago) custom connector.
Monitoring, reporting, and alerting is an intrinsically important part of any company, especially if your business is online. What doesn’t make sense is, no one wants to do it. Everyone loathes the thought of writing rule logic to intelligently alert when a cluster goes into a failed state, they run away from trending reports which attempt to figure out when the SAN will need to be expanded, they scurry from the idea of creating color-branded graphs that attempt to lay out the company’s entire IT infrastructure in as few primary colored lines as possible.

I, however, thrive upon it.

I love constructing complex rule logic, ensuring that the proper alerts are sent to the proper parties at the proper time. I feast upon the algorithms that I use to create trend reports. I’m enamored with the prospect of creating custom graphs, showing the progress that a company is making as a whole - I love the fact that something I created, something I made, is being shown to the most powerful people up the ladder. I like it.

It’s not for the feint of heart, that’s for sure. There’s a small sect of us in the midwest that do this type of thing, and we are as fanatical about it as the next Harry Potter fan. We hav e one hand deep in the corporate driven high-dollar professional suites such as MOM and OpenView as well as the archaic deep knowledge of open source free solutions such as Cacti, MRTG, RRD, Nagios and it’s derivatives to numerous to name. It’s not something you become, it’s something you are - an almost asberger-like devotion to the craft. You are timeless, steeped in protocols such as SNMP and Syslog, while also honing your knowledge on XMLRPC and MSMQ. It’s one of the few things that I get visibly excited talking about, my face lighting up as I explain how it can all come together.

I have several projects lined up I want to work on, one involving system and application monitoring. Several other involve industrial art pieces. Another involves electronics. I need to work on those. I hope the new loft will be an inspiration to me. I also hope that canceling my World of Warcraft subscription and getting rid of all the other games on my PC will excel that as well. I need to get my ass in gear an act on some things that could have a high payout in the long term.

How’s that for an ADHD riddled rant? I wonder if anyone can follow my blog except me. I’ll probably have another post later, but figure I should seperate this train of thought with the one that is occurring simultaneously right now, lest they truly clash together into a thought train wreck the likes of which William G. Crush could have never envisioned (I’ll take obscure 19th century train publicity stunts gone bad for $1000, Alex).

Till next time.

Oi, less then 24 hours and we’ll get the keys to the new place! I can’t wait damn it, now now now! Bringing my camera and a bottle of champagne to celebrate I think.

And a few hundred dollars in paint and supplies Mishka picked up yesterday.

 Those people are my kind of activists. Apparently, according to this article, the people in Gareth Groves’ neighborhood didn’t appreciate his purchase of a 2005 Hummer, and proceeded to violently let him know. All 4 38 inch tires slashed, a ‘machete’ taken to the body work, lights and windows smashed - we need these type of people around here!

Also, Moo is opening its doors today. If you haven’t heard about it, Moo is a new service that will print up a sticker book for you with high quality vinyl stickers. Yes, I know that isn’t big news by itself, Mpix, Vista Print, etc etc all do that. BUT, here’s the difference - Moo allows you to make a sticker book with 90 stickers, and each sticker can be a completely different photograph! That’s big news! So, since I’m a TechCrunch subscriber, I’m going to pass the special offer on to you as well. Click here for 90 stickers for only $10.

“She’s bi-sexual, bipolar, over-educated, under-medicated, and she’s dating you“

How’s that for a tag line? Draws you in, doesn’t it? I certainly hope so
According to WalkScore (Site might not work, it was digg’d so there’s a ton of people hitting it) , our new address is listed as ‘Best’ - meaning we have restaurants, art, movies, theater, museums, grocery stores, and more - all within a mile or so of where we live. Within walking distance as it was :).

Today my department is out having a little picnic. Since I’m a dirty contractor, I’m not invited to most of the team outings, this one included. So I’m basically running the show here, which is fun - except I keep having this problem that’s driving me crazy and there’s no one around to ask about it. Oh, also about work - they’re trying to find someone who knows MS Operations Manager - it’s a system and application monitoring tool. I happen to know this tool very well having worked with it exclusively for the past several years. There’s about 5-6 people in Minnesota that know it well enough, maybe 3-4 dozen in the entire midwest. So I might be making a move to their MOM side in a few weeks - with a $10/hr raise too :).
Anyway, since IT went to a picnic, the consultants decided to have a consultants potluck here. I went over there, I looked over the food. I went to Jimmy Johns instead. Nothing quite as interesting as a potluck dinner in Minnesota. You never know what you’ll get; sloppy joes, loppy joes with rice, hot dish, hot dish, 37 more different varieties of hot dish, chips. Yeah, I passed.

August 23rd Mishka and I will be going to Studio Vincent, a jewelery designer, for their ‘How to design your own ring‘ class. It goes from 5-9pm, and runs through all the aspects of creating a one-of-a-kind custom ring. Why would I want to do that? Ohhhhh I dunno

Small update for now, horribly written - many things going on, will try to update later.

JDP

Just got a call a little bit ago, and it seems that the person living in what will be the new apartment has already moved out, since he’ll be out of the country for the next 3 weeks. They wanted to know if I wanted to pickup the keys and such this weekend, and it wouldn’t cost anything extra. Well hell yeah! This Saturday we’ll officially be moved in! I plan on bringing the camera, and I’ll take plenty of pictures of the lovely new place! Rawr!