Entries this day: invoice_service_approved lry_chuck_e_cheese

invoice service approved

Wednesday 1 April 1998

Today the new version of the New Invoice Service was approved. This version allows the users to view and print not only invoices, but information obtained through an SQL query to an RDB (Standard Query Language query to a Relational DataBase).

This is rad because Mario (my supervisor's manager's manager) said this should be the last version we put online before I get to write something else to replace it. We're lookin' at having me write an interface that can be viewed over the Web.

I washed my car today. I went to the local do-it-yerself place and spent $2.75 to have great fun with the bubbly pink bubbles and the high power splashy spray gun. I love doing that. I got pink bubble juice on my Biff's Wonderful Clamdip T-shirt.

Tonight the LRY is meeting at Chuck E. Cheese Magical Satanical Pizza Place! That's fun 'cause we get to climb all through the tubes and play in the ocean of plastic balls.

lry chuck e cheese

Wednesday 1 April 1998

At Chuck E. Cheese's Magical Satanical Pizza Place, the goal for the night was to acquire enough tickets to trade in for a lava lamp, lofting large purple wax bubbles bathed in soft light behind the counter.

We included "Satanical" in the name because their phone number includes "666" but the recording we hear when we dial the number says something like, "Thank you for calling Chuck E. Cheese's Magical Pizza Place..."
Okay, well, it's funny to us, so laugh!

Anyway, after eating pizza and mixing soft drinks to taste like Nerds, we hit the gameroom. I had like $9 in tokens and spent them all on one machine that lets me use a little gun shaped remote-flipper to toss one coin at a time nearly randomly into a glass box with dinosaur heads and crevices and a spinning Wheel of Fortune looking thing at the bottom. The crevices were labeled with different ticket amounts between 1 and 25 tickets. The dinsaur heads were worth either 100 or 200 tickets, and the Wheel of Fortune had about 20 slots awarding between 1 and 25 tickets.

In just several minutes, I converted my 36 tokens into 273 tickets.

Sounds great until doing the math. Each ticket is worth 1 penny at the counter, while the tokens were worth 36 tokens * 25 cents per token = 900 pennies.

But the story is a lot more interesting than, "I went to Chuck's and bought a 1 dollar flashlight for 9 bucks."

Gambling fever took kT most viciously at what we call the "Feed Me Tokens" game. It's the one where you toss tokens or quarters in there and little shovers shove the enormous stack to within one tenth of one millimeter of falling off the edge, but nothing falls.

About 8 tokens went into the machine and a few tokens fell and about 10 tickets came out. Then four quarters went in and one token fell and 10 more tickets were ours. Dennis set off the TILT alarm probably 10 times trying to help.

Out of tokens, we went and weighed our loot of tickets.

Including the previous 2 nights kT and Dennis had gone, including around 300 tickets I donated, they had 1270 tickets.

$12.70 for maybe 80 or 100 bucks in tokens? Good for Chuck!

So we (me, Laura, kT, Dennis) dove into the ball crawl and stormed through the tunnels and tossed balls at one another at buried ourselves and ambushed the others and generally had a great time.

kT found 4 tokens in the bottom of the ball crawl!

We converted them into like 10 tickets, gazing longingly at the precarious stacks in Feed Me Tokens.