January, to we haunter-types who haven’t yet insulated our garage doors, can be a jittery time; the dog equivalent of looking into an empty supper dish at one in the afternoon and, hopes dashed, sighing heavily and curling up by the front door. The big difference is that a dog suffers his misery without the knowledge that six o’clock is coming. Or he takes the initiative to raid the pantry. Or the cat’s litter box.
Your old pal Spook subscribes to the sport of initiative-taking, and although it can be a mixed bag, it keeps one from brooding in a heap by the front door. Especially during these cold, dark, endless dreary days between the faded glow of Christmas and the first Spring thunderstorm.
For example, the Snug Harbor off-season project list has expanded to zeppelin proportions with the inclusion of a new arcade game restoration. That hulk on the left of the above photo is a remarkably intact Battle Zone rescued from a barn this past Fall. The cabinet is solid and it powers up, but it’s dead dead dead. If I shrunk Jeff Bridges down to nano scale and sent him inside, he’d de-rez the instant he materialized. At this early stage I still don’t know if I have a power supply problem or if every chip is blown. And it’s flippin’ cold in the garage right now, so it’ll have to wait.
Battlezone can rest in cold storage for now because I’ve embarked on an even bigger challenge, and its name is Flex and Actionscript; an object oriented programming language used to build applications that run under Flash. Our plan is to build the next big online game, the details of which I’m not at liberty to discuss, mainly because we change them daily, and by the time it’s finished it could end up remotely paying parking meters from an Android phone.
One of the casualties of this project is Spookyblue.com, and the neglect has become glaring since there are Halloween prop projects on the list that are now heading into their second year of “coming soon”. I suppose I’ll have to add “geologically speaking” as a disclaimer. For the hard-core folks who keep reminding me about this, ask Mrs. Spookyblue (aka Galagirl, who got her very own Galaga arcade machine for Christmas – another vintage restoration project that was kept secret and in hiding for two months), what the phrase “programmer’s widow” means.
Whether this new time-consuming tempest will reward us with tasty pantry treats or a less desirable tootsie roll from the cat box hasn’t yet been determined. But I have high hopes. And whatever happens, six o’clock will still get here.
Jeff Bridges shrunk to nano scale?
Category: Stuff
Tags: actionscript, arcade game restoration, battlezone, flex, galaga, Jeff Bridges
A twisty two-lane road meanders past dusty old farms, a dustier church with its bell frozen sideways by rust, and a forbidding quarry lake, as still as an August funeral, and the color of pea soup. 
