I’ve done quite a bit of research on the Internet this week, and there’s a ton of stuff out there on fixing old pinball machines. It’s quite a significant hobby. Unfortunately, it seems that the era of pinball is slowly dying, as everything’s moving to video games and slot machines (and video slot machines), as there seems to be a lot more money to be made in those areas. There’s only one remaining new pinball machine manufacturer. But I’m looking forward to getting our machine this weekend, and hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll be able to make it playable. I’ve already ordered a multimeter which will probably help me in my quest. From my online research, the score display probably just needs a fuse changed (if I’m really lucky), a couple resistors and diodes replaced (if I’m slightly less lucky), or I’ll need to try to replace the whole score display system (if I’m really unlucky, as it’s not like anyone makes these parts anymore).

• My brother moved out to Palmer a couple weeks ago to be closer to his job. With the house came a pinball machine in the basement. It’s a Williams Earthshaker, from 1989. It seems to mostly work, although the score display on it doesn’t seem to work right now. It looks like the current plan is to transport the machine to our house next weekend, and I’m going to take on the hobby of pinball machine restoring. I’m looking forward to it.
• This weekend, I’m going to judging a Magic Grand Prix Trial and Dreamblade $1k at TJ Collectibles.
• Jessi and I are working on filling out an adoption application. Hopefully this will accelerate our plans for growing our family.

DCI Reporter V3 still needs a little work…

So, in general I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the race for Massachusetts Governor. I figure that the governor doesn’t really have much power anyway, since Romney vetoed a bunch of stuff during his administration, which is really the most you could hope a governor would do, and they pretty much all got overridden anyway. So, I think that the governor here is primarily just a ceremonial position that can try to set direction, but doesn’t really have much power. (I could be wrong on this, but it’s just how it looks from where I’m sitting.)

Doris Whitman Green, age 98, formerly of Worcester, passed away Sept. 29, at Overlook Masonic Healthcare in Charlton, MA. She was born in Worcester on July 3, 1908 the daughter of Albert and Lisetta Burgess Whitman. She was the widow of Roger Green. She attended North Pond and Dix Street Elementary in Worcester and graduated from North High in 1926. She had taught Home Economics in the Worcester School System.

Yesterday I judged my first ever Magic Vintage event, the Star City Games Power 9 Series, Boston. (Vintage is the format where almost every card ever printed is legal, but several overly-powerful cards are restricted to 1 per deck. This particular event allowed up to 10 proxies.) We had 116 players (I think), and the prizes were the the top 8 players drafting a set of the “Power 9” cards, which are 9 old cards with a total secondary market value on the order of about $3,000. There’s nothing quite like deckchecking a $1,000+ deck. It was a fun experience, and while I don’t anticipate getting into the Vintage scene much, I’m very glad I went. There were all sorts of fun old cards and interesting interactions and interesting decks.

Last Friday, Jessi and I played in the first sanctioned Dreamblade event in Massachusetts that actually ran, and now I’m ranked number 8 in MA. (Those players with 100 points played at the release event at GenCon, as one got 100 points just for playing in that event.)

I doubt I’ll stay that high, however.

Last time, I mentioned that my bank seemed to have at least one lax security policy (or at least a lax security policy implementation), and I promised I’d share more.

So, last month my bank started requiring “Two-Factor Authentication” (as they call it), so that just a password isn’t enough to authenticate me to my bank’s web site. Now, this makes some sense, as this is my bank’s site, and a user posing as me could send a check to themselves with the online bill-pay service and clean out my account.

“Okay, your password has been reset to ‘password2’.” — The customer service rep. at my bank, after calling them, telling them that my account on their web site was inactive due to me mistyping my password too many times, and telling them my name.

There was no verification beyond me telling them my name.

More about the false sense of security when logging into my bank in the next update…

On Sunday I finally managed to play my first games of Dreamblade, the new collectible miniatures strategy game from WotC. While my wife and I are really rather dismayed at the creative flavor of the game (it’s all horror and nightmareish stuff), it’s fun to play, and has a huge depth of strategy that we’re just barely starting to scratch the surface of. Wizards is really trying to push this game, and is giving thousands of dollars in prizes out for it. I may start trying to play it competitively, although if I do as good as I do at competitive Magic I may just end up judging it primarily.