ohwaitnvm

So pair programming?

Love it! Super creative :)

How about a skier with little jumps or obstacles at each header

I couldn’t find the right combination of search terms to provide a citation, but I’ve heard stories of plane crashes where locals took the flight data recorder or other critical pieces of evidence from the scene before officials arrived. Rewards had to be announced and paid out to get people to bring back parts so that investigations could proceed.

Aww I'm glad it helped! I wanted to illustrate the amount of upkeep it takes to even keep a machine that was already about 99% working from disrepair.

I think you could give the offer a shot, but it looks like the market is a good bit higher - the bigger the discount the more you're probably going to have to work to get it operational. It looks like you've already got a headstart on that, so if none of this is scaring you off, I say do it! My two machines are Whitestar and Spike2 systems, and are from Stern, which is still operating. My concern going for Party Monsters would be that System 11(B?!) boards and replacement parts may be in short supply, and I can't comment on the quality of documentation for it all.

Looking at pinside though, between the owner thread and system 11 thread, there are probably more than enough helpful folks who will have good advice for you if you take on the project. https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/elvira-and-the-party... https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/system-11-club

Watch out though - I see posts about mods in the game thread. My newer machine came with 6-7 already installed by the first owner, which got me hooked. At this point I've added another 25 or so... I think I spend as much time working on these machines as I do playing them (but my goal is to make my own machine, so every piece of work comes with learnings and better understanding of what's in store for me.)

Post back here later and let me know what you end up doing!

I picked up my first two last year - they require a decent amount of maintenance -- more the older they are.

Home use only machines will be in better shape - my 2018 Stern pin (3rd owner, home use only) has only really needed replacements of the coil stops and sleeves for the the upper flippers.

On the other hand, my 2002 Stern machine (3rd owner, but first was on location in a Century theater where it saw thousands of plays) required in just two months of ownership:

- diagnosis and replacement of a bad bridge rectifier for the controlled lights,

- new plumb bob (machine info showed it had never reported a tilt before - looks like it had been removed before ever been played),

- clear mylar patch on the playfield near the plunger lane exit,

- replacement of the main power cable -- someone had ripped out the third/ground prong (which is apparently very common),

- redoing the connections inside the power box -- someone had decided all the connectors should just live in giant solder balls.....,

- replacement of the coin door lock mechanism,

- replacement of a flipper return spring

and it has a few cracked pieces of protective plastic that just aren't worth trying to find replacements for.

In total all together that's still less than $50 in parts, but figuring out the lights issue took weeks, and some of these required soldering. (And desoldering! I strongly recommend the Hakko FR301 desoldering tool instead of mucking about with copper braid.)

For the prices you listed, I would guess you're looking at older machines, which will probably have more issues sooner than new (but not brand-new!) pins. I suggest pinside.com for the classifieds and also the "_X_ Machine Owner" forum threads which might have game-specific info for you. Stern has very detailed manuals, and pinballlife/marcospecialties have just about every part you might need when you do have a problem.

Good luck, and have fun!

Nice! Direct access seems like the way to go if you're not worrying about the single player modes and shot structures, and if all the sound is from the physical interactions. I appreciate the API info offer, but I've already got the FAST Neuron controller, so I think it's a different path for me

I think y’all are both right and I appreciate the additional contexts. It’s just awkward to headline the article with a term that has a pinball-specific usage and not define it or dig into it a bit more.

I’m super impressed though Andy, did you use MPF or something else to program it? I’m only just dipping my toes into building my own pin, it’s quite intimidating realizing the breadth of skills required.

EDIT: another post clarified that it is on MPF - nice!

It actually doesn’t seem to qualify as an electromechanical pinball machine at all. Given the 17 computers in control and modern playfield mechanisms and sensors, it is almost certainly considered a solid state pinball machine.

EM machines use much older tech - look at Gottlieb machines from the 40s-70s. Even they switched to SS by the end of the 70s

You don't add the salt to the ice cream, you add it to the ice that surrounds the ice cream-making container.

Maybe it's the first away-team win for an EBUG

I was going to say the same thing, but with deteriorating vision they may be already past the point of seeing meaningfully-clear view of the world.

You might like Emerald ps. Snail https://www.geologyin.com/2016/06/fossilized-gastropod-repla...

Yeah I find that I can remote pair for maybe 5-6 hours a day. Catching up on non pairing work things (email and slack and whatever) takes another hour or two, and I’m beat by 4 or 5.

Thanks for the response! I guess the big difference is being on camera. My team has been 100% remote of course since Mar’20, and split across SF and Toronto for the most part.

We use Zoom for cross discipline meetings (and nearly everyone has camera on most of the time, though there’s no explicit rule) but discord+drovio for remote pairing. Discord has been nice for the ability to drop into another pair to ask for help, or for non devs to know who is pairing and drop in as well.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that some team members play music in their headphones while pairing/mobbing. While the others can’t hear it, it’s certainly not helping our communication or focus… and it certainly feels disrespectful to me.

I’ve been pairing at all but one of my jobs in the last ten years, and love it, but I found mobbing to almost always be a driver, a half engaged navigator, and a third basically napping or distracted by a smartphone.

The devs in question were experienced in pairing and happy to do it, but I pretty much always found adding more than a second head was effectively net neutral if not negative.

So I’d love to learn how to make mobbing better for the rare times it comes up. What do you have to change or be more disciplined about to make mobbing a net gain?

And if you’re into roller hockey we play pickups at Dolores Park rink on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. (18th and Church closest intersection)

Look up “Doop” skates. I have a pair of three-wheeled (100mm monsters) doops that I can step into somewhat like snowboard bindings. I much prefer my roller hockey skates most of the time, as the ankle support on Doops is almost nonexistent, but after the first couple minutes each time you adjust and can go for a while. I don’t know if this is true for all of their models, but mine disassembles each skate into a boot and a wheels+rail section, meaning it’s very easy to pack them in luggage for a trip.

I haven’t played GTAO in a couple years, but I vaguely remember using the suspend process option of windows task manager to jump into online much faster.

Googling gave me this result, which sounds about right for what I remember. https://www.gfinityesports.com/grand-theft-auto/gta-online-h...

I’m not certain it’s still a valid workaround, and it’s not nearly as sophisticated as the OP method, but at least everyone can do it :)

It's sad, because I was writing up a big thread on how to get your own pictures or at least see the ISS for yourself, but the submission got buried as I was posting it. I'll probably just repost it wholesale next time a submission like this comes up again, since nobody is going to see it here :(

But I get it, the linked content itself and much of the rest of the discussion here is on the level of "hey look at this cool thing" without much of technical interest.

Great pictures, but even better editing! I've taken photos of both kinds of transit with pretty decent results, but I have no patience for editing - McCarthy's shots really pop in a way I don't know how to do.

It's actually not too hard to see the ISS or find a transit occurring in your area, there are great tools online to assist you.

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings lets you select your location and gives you sighting possibilities that can be up to a couple minutes long with the naked eye. These are fairly common and seem to occur in batches as the orbit of the ISS subtly changes day by day. The ISS orbital period is around 93 minutes, so sometimes you can catch multiple passes in a night - the issue is much more one of the evening being dark enough while the ISS is still receiving its own light from the sun.

To assist orientation I use the iOS app SkyView Lite, where you can search for the ISS and see its projected orbital path. The app was also useful for viewing the recent Saturn/Jupiter conjunction. I find with both spotthestation and SkyView, I have to look further above the horizon than either makes me expect.

https://transit-finder.com/ lets you find transits and near-transits in your area up to 30 days into the future. I've found their projections to be reliable and made about 10 attempts. After you calculate, you can click into "Show on Map" and then click the map to change your location to somewhere within the path, and you can choose exactly the chord that your transit will take. Andrew's "hours" searching for a perfect location is more likely just clicking around till you find a quiet street maybe on a hill - that's what I do. Clouds and fog day-of are a big factor in location selection, but actually knowing viable locations and being in the right ballpark is very easy.

As for equipment, I'm hauling around an expensive setup, but significantly cheaper options are doable and honestly should produce nearly as good of results. I use a Canon 5D III or 6D II - the important thing to note is these are full-frame cameras, so in "close-up" astrophotography they're a good bit worse than crop-factor cameras like the much cheaper APS-C 1.6x crop Canon Rebel series. https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4154657 has a lot more discussion of pixel density/relative magnification/crop factors but what matters for you is honestly just having the most megapixels. For a lens I use the Canon 100-400mm IS with a 1.4x extender, giving me an effective 560mm zoom. For the cheap setup you could use a 70-300mm lens and save 90%+ on glass. A recent Rebel+70-300 lens kit can be found in the $400-500 range and would give you an effective 480mm zoom. I use a tripod and a wired trigger (such as, but not specifically this: https://shop.usa.canon.com/shop/en/catalog/remote-switch-rs-... ). This allows me to shoot without touching the camera, which will be extra important with a non-image stabilized lens.

The key is that a transit is a sub-second length event, and if you select one from transit-finder where the ISS in darkness is crossing a lit moon, you cannot see it coming. Most (or all, lmk if you know otherwise) automated trigger devices (hardware or software via apps) can't do sub-second intervals and the camera drive modes either are semi-automatic or shoot-until-full-buffer. Unless you can time your burst to the transit moment (which perhaps you can in a lit-ISS over non-full-Moon situation) you want to sustain your captures-per-second at a rate shorter than the transit duration (to guarantee you'll have at least one hit) and cover a much longer window than the event itself. Usually I will start shooting 60 seconds before the expected moment and overshoot by a minute or two, aiming for just over two shots per second. Test what your camera and memory card can actually sustain (card write speed can be a bottleneck here more than camera fps or buffer size) and use a card that has space for 500+ photos. Once you figure out your photo settings, you'll want to shoot at least one shot with the lens cap on so that later you may compare shots of the night sky with the sensor noise captured in the capped shot that might otherwise look like a false star or random blue pixel. Selecting the right camera settings is an art and a much longer discussion, but for now you just need to use Manual mode, manual focus (modern DSLR live view screen+magnified look is a godsend), aperture somewhere in f/8-16, and a shutter speed faster than 1/300.

This is a composite shot of the ISS passing the moon in March 2018 from lower right to upper left. I aligned several photos in photoshop by overlaying their moon positions, then made 10 vertical slices and selected the sharpest moon from the sequence and merged it all. There's very minor color saturation work (to separate the blue and orange a bit) and probably a minor sharpness tweak. EXIF data is included on this one if you want to compare settings. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ohwaitnvm/40282783635

This is my first hit ever, during the blood moon of January 2018. The EXIF is missing from the upload but the settings were ƒ/10 1/2000 400ISO. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ohwaitnvm/39289900094/in/album... The moon itself is about 850 pixels wide in the original image and the ISS is about 27 pixels, from which you can see a surprising amount of detail, though not quite as nice as the submission's pro work.

I have much less experience with solar transits (I've shot two, but editing is boooring and I haven't put them anywhere) but pointing your camera at the sun is not wise unless you have a solar filter such as https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1299066-REG/marumi_am... or I suppose the hydrogen-alpha solar telescope mentioned in the submission.

My takeaway is that maybe I need to pick up a 1.6x crop camera on the cheap soon.... And look into telescopes.

I think there is a term in California - fired “with cause” - but I’m not sure if that has bearing on unemployment eligibility.

If you want to see such a fleet of grounded planes in person, it's worth going to Tucson to visit Pima and take a tour of the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Pima is a normal museum admittance but the on-base bus tour requires preregistration and a background check.

For now since we can't travel, I definitely recommend taking a look in google maps satellite view:

https://goo.gl/maps/5jo5jkpXPc9AtrW68

In the SE corner of the base you can see long range nuclear bombers with their tails and wings clipped, for all the world to see.

Speaking from experience in California - if you are fired but not for misconduct, you may still collect unemployment.

There’s certainly a fine line between being bad at your job and actual misconduct, so if someone were so inclined they could probably just be a bad worker long enough to get fired without any specific alleged misconduct. Personally, I’d just quit if that pathway were on my mind, but I understand how people could decided to do this.

I’m single with no roommates and my productivity is wayy down due to the mental stresses of both the times we’re in and the huge drop of social fulfillment (used to play hockey 5x a week, other group things 2x, and individual friend hangouts too) - zoom chats just aren’t the same.

I also very much need that “work” space to switch my brain into focus mode. My place has never been setup for work-focus as I work at a place that encourages not taking your work home with you - though I am thankful that now we are fully enabled to WFH rather than lose that paycheck.

My personal data point is that I received feedback that was negative on specifically my base level of concept understanding on one out of ~7 short sections I did for a company, and it made me skeptical that it was the actually the real reason.

It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.

I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"

Yeah I'm not sure where verbal-only came from! We definitely do less upfront specification of say a whole project or months of work - we'd probably call that waterfall style and suggest that likely so many things contained therein will change or be outright wrong that it's better to have just a rough outline, and build definition as work gets closer to being actionable or executed.

I think the interruption thing is interesting - at jobs where I was solo, I probably minded it significantly more. With constant pairing, different interruptions can be handled in different ways. Two-second questions can be answered by the non-driver while the driver continues to focus. Five minute answers should probably stop both members, but having two brains allows you to bounce back into context through re-merging your mental model of where you left off.

Thinking about this though, I realized that in pairing you have internal interruptions as well - if one person needs to use the bathroom or take a phone call, the other can choose to keep working and maintain context. When the breaker returns they can reload their mental models much more easily. Or you can both take breaks and you've already got a built-in ping-pong opponent ready to play :)

I'm an engineer at Pivotal, having returned after a few years at startups, both practicing XP and not. The part about verbal-only requirements couldn't be more incorrect. Stories might start as a title and a sentence or two description, but more often than not here they get written up with gherkin-like Given/When/Then sets of acceptance criteria with additional details/considerations noted down.

Regardless of that issue, XP isn't for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with that. I like it though, that's why I'm back. :)

EDIT: Also, I don't know him, but our writer here seems to think a lot about how he interacts with his dev team, which I appreciate, but think maybe he got into his own head about it a little bit too much here. But I also don't really mind interruptions.

That’s too bad. Their situation was that they were working in Pivotal’s office, surrounded by extremely high quality Rails devs who were happy to give free help and advice.

Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.

I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)

I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run.

However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)

I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!

Exercise. Bike, blade, or run. I go and rollerblade the Embarcedero.

You get some sun, you tire yourself out in a different way, your eyes get to focus more than two feet in front of you. There are people around but you don’t have to be social if you don’t want - moving at a different speed means you can still think on your mental problem.

Finally, you work up an appetite that sitting at a computer just doesn’t give you, and you can reward yourself with some nice noms that you feel you’ve earned and will give you the energy to return to code work.

Edit: I forgot to mention podcasts or audiobooks. If you want some external input for your mental stimulation you can do that at the same time!