Projects

Many moons ago we were faced with a common problem, choosing a place to eat. I'm not sure who's idea it was, but someone suggested we needed a way to select a restaurant at random. So I wrote a little program to do just that. It was initially written to run on my cell phone, then later rewritten for the truckputer. Later, I added support for multiple cities and a second program to ease the creation of lists.

The funny thing is that after all of that work, the program was only used a couple of times.

I'm making the program available for download, along with the source code. Also included are the city files I used for testing. It's in Java, so you'll need to install the JRE if you don't already have it.

I've tested it quite a bit, but I'm sure there are still bugs to be found. Keep in mind that this most recent version was created for use on a small touch screen monitor.

Download Random Eats.zip

A couple months ago I started working on a design for my next guitar controller. I knew I wanted to do something different with this one. Something more than just paint. I brainstormed a few themes and kept coming back to the idea of doing something zombie related. Probably because I had just finished reading World War Z, and zombies were fresh on my mind. A guitar made of rotting flesh and bone might be interesting. I sketched out some designs. The zombie idea gradually progressed into a general horror theme.

The basic design I came up with consisted of a guitar covered in human skin, a pick guard and neck made of distressed metal and wrapped in barbed wire, a whammy bar made of bone, a rusty chain for a strap, and some blood spatter.

At this point I just want to reassure you that I am a perfectly sane individual, and these ideas are not manifestations of a demented psyche.

Read on for pics.

Last night I finished painting my second GH controller. It didn't turn out the way I had it pictured in my head, but nothing ever does. I was going for a faux rust finish body with worn wooden neck. Parts of it turned out great and other parts look like crap. At least it's better than plain black and white.

I'm probably going to end up with quite a collection of guitars. Red Octane is producing a wireless version that I'm sure I'll get eventually, and then there's the 360 controller that I plan on modding.

I've been working all week on marquees for the arcade machine. I think I've finally decided which one to have printed. I'm going to hold off on the side art for now. That stuff isn't cheap

After a lot of monitor trouble, I finally have a functional arcade machine again.

Everything I have left to do is pretty much cosmetic. Paint the whole thing black. Replace the scuffed up t-molding. Lay some vinyl over the control panel so no one gets splinters. Have a marquee and some side art printed.

Now when anyone comes to visit they better be sure to bring some quarters.

Right now I'm going to get to work on that Donkey Kong high score.

This is a little something I worked on last week. My spider web SG:

Remember what it looked like before. Now to come up with a theme for my other guitar.

The arcade auction was fun. I got there around 8:30 and they were still unloading stuff. There were tons of games there. I walked around and noted the games that had good sized monitors, wouldn't cost too much, and would be OK to MAME. Then I pulled out the drop cord and started playing games. The auction was late getting started and they went through rows of video poker machines, pool tables, jukeboxes, and a bunch of other stuff before they even got to the stand-up arcade games. I was surprised at some of they stuff the sold. There were a couple hot dog carts, a 7-foot tall gumball machine, and a 2001 F350 that went for something like $27,500. I wasn't keeping track of time, but I probably played for about 3 hours.

The whole family went. I warned them before hand what they would be getting into and that I was going to stay until it was over or I bought something, but they still wanted to go. I had heard that at the end of the day most people would have bought what they came for or given up. That's when you can find the best deals.

They had aisles set up with games on each side. An auctioneer would start on each side and work their way down the row. At times it was pretty confusing with two auctions going on simultaneously right across from each other.

A couple of the auctioneers were young and tended to start out with high bids. One guy was very entertaining and when he realized that some of the bidders were being stingy he lowered the starting bids.

The family started getting restless around 5:00pm when I hadn't even bid on anything yet. My parents reminded me that my birthday was coming up and they could give me a little money if I nothing was going to come up in my price range.

Around 7:00 they got to a Street Fighter EX that I had looked at earlier. The guy started the bidding at $600. I thought, "Great! There's another one I won't be getting." No one bid so he dropped to $500, then $300, and $200. A guy behind me and I both threw in a bid when he dropped to $100. Another guy upped it to $150. I glanced up toward the checkout line. I'd be waiting for at least an hour if I got in line now. I'd rather pay a little more and get out of there soon than wait around for something cheaper and not be able to leave until 11:00. The guy behind me and I both threw in for $200. The guy behind me didn't see me bid, and the auctioneer didn't see him bid. So the guy behind me thought he was winning when I actually was. If not for that, it would have gone higher and I would have dropped out. The whole thing went incredibly fast, I didn't even realize that I had won at first. Needless to say, the guy behind me was mad.

So, I was there for about 12 hours. I only took a couple pictures. Some guy got thrown out early on for taking a bunch of pictures. I don't see why that would be a problem.

Dad drove the game over here Sunday morning. I was about 15 minutes behind him. Instead of waiting on me to help him unload it, he tried to do it himself and broke the control panel and did something to screw up the monitor. I've fixed the control panel yesterday and will see if I can get the monitor working again this week. If not, I guess Dad will be paying to have it fixed. I've been having terrible luck lately.