Hi Pinside!

I'm happy to announce that the Pinside is coming to Pinball Expo (for the first time!)

My brother Martijn and I will be flying into Chicago on the 11th of October for some downtown sightseeing (and pinballing of course!) and then attend the 30th Pinball Expo at the Westin Chicago North Shore from 15-20 October.

Come see our seminar on Friday!
The Pinside will be doing a seminar titled "Pinside: Past, Present and Future" on Friday at 5pm.

Are you coming to Expo too?
If you are coming to Expo, please visit the event page and push the big "I'm Going" button!

The Pinside "Away from Keyboard" meet n' greet
The first ever official Pinside meetup will be at Pinball Expo Chicago on Thursday, 1pm in the Birch Room. Thanks Mike P for allowing us to host our get-together

So what is this Pinside Meet n' Greet? Finally a chance to meet all those people you have been chatting with for all those years!

The Meet n' Greet is proudly sponsored by Game Exchange. Co-hosts: Skypilot and Robin.

Pinsiders only!
You can download and print your Pinside badge here. JJ will provide the lanyards and badge holders. No badge? No pizza

...Do you have any tips for visiting Chicago? Pinball-related or not, feel free to post to this thread!

Yes, my first Expo and second time in the United States (after my 2012 trip to New York city).

Ah, the first names are visible in the Expo event page "I'm Going" box. Don't forget to add yours if you are going!

Yes, especially then! I'm planning to bring some cones of shame!

cone_of_shame.jpg

Cool tips! All I had on my itinerary until now was the view from Sears tower (apparently it has another name now), the Navy Pier, and basically just gawking at all the skyscrapers.

In NYC my dad and I were treated to fabulous pizza by Pinsider islandpinball at his hometown pizzeria in New Jersey. I will say this, it's gonna be hard to top those pizza's!

Thanks for the tips!

Looks like a pretty good piece of Americana, worth checking out!

Haha, sweet! But on that subject, where can I find good pins to play in Chicago? Either private or public. New York had the awesome Reciprocal and the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park. So what are Chicago's best spots to play?

I'm in contact with Rob B about this.

No way! How can I have missed that? I will be at the Westin from Wednesday until Monday so we should be able to come over and possibly organise something

Cool, it's only 42 minute travel from my hotel (Rafaellos)!

I love wormwood! Ugh!

Now we're talking, thanks! This should help my plan of getting as many Pinsiders to Expo as possible!

...I also heard there's gonna be a party at Gweems place!

Unfortunately they didn't, would be cool. Where was that thread again with that cool mockup?

Remember to put your name on the event page, using the "I'm going" button. That way we know who are coming! Currently at 43 Pinsiders!

Expo is kind of special to me. When I first got into pinball, around 1998-1999 scouring the internet for any info I could find about pinball machine, I remember first reading about the Pinball Expo event. Chicago, city of pinball. The Factory tour, meeting all the designers, playing rare games, that big hall full of machines. I never thought I would make it there at some point. Now, I finally had the opportunity to visit a show and, even better, attending its 30th anniversary! See, it just had to be Pinball Expo!

My thoughts exactly!

My thoughts exactly. Although there are some rare games that I would love to have a game on. But it's mostly about meeting people.

That's so cool! Looking forward to meeting you. Winfred I already spoke to at the last DPO!

Lots of parties! To be honest, I don't know any of the DP members very well. I spoke to Jean Paul briefly at a book presentation in Amsterdam. Oh, and I spoke to Jules when I sold him my Bally Atlantis earlier this year. Cool people.

Bring it on!
Come over for Dinner, bring other NFV'ers . We can play some pinball too.

You can add the event, simply go to the events page and click the "add event" link. The advantage of being the creator is the ability to change details later without the need to ask me.

Great that so many are coming. Counter is already over 80!

I just got this in the mail from Rob Berk, pretty cool so I figured I'd post it here. There will be a seminar about the visible pinball, a totally clear EM pinball machine that let's you see the logic (and magic) that happens inside an EM game. I'm looking forward to see this cool piece of pinball art

Here's the press release:
Photo credit: Kevin Tiell

Visible Pinball & Video Kiosk with Animation of Reset Sequence:
1. The centerpiece of the Science of Pinball Exhibition. This is a totally clear pinball machine rebuilt from a 1976 Gottlieb Surf Champ. The exhibit examines the electrical, mechanical and physical engineering of a sophisticated Pinball machine of the era. . The accompanying video explains a step at a time, what happens when you press the replay button to begin playing a new game. This is an introduction to electromechanical logic and mechanisms.

3. The Visible Pinball was built by Michael Schiess and Wade Krause for the Pacific Pinball Museum as the premier exhibit for their Science of Pinball series. Discover how this beautiful piece has been inspiring an interest in engineering, art and physics. Learn about how it was made, the people involved and the techniques for machining the parts and their assembly in a photographic history documenting it's creation.

If you use the special Expo link, the room prices will be much more reasonable at around $125 per night for either a king or 2 queen beds.
http://www.starwoodmeeting.com/StarGroupsWeb/booking/reservation?id=1311184194&key=2C5B8

Cool! We are now at 99 Pinsiders who indicated they will be attending!

If you haven't added your name to the "I'm Going" list, don't forget to do so!

Please log out and back in, then try again. It sounds like your token is invalidated somehow.

Great idea! I have not planned anything for my first few days in the city except that I'm definitely planning to visit Logan Arcade. Maybe Barron could set something up? Pre-Expo party!!

I'm really happy to see so many of you coming to Expo. It's gonna be great to meet you all!

As far as Pinside goes, we will have a couple of things happening at Expo! I will be doing a talk on Friday about the history and future of Pinside.com - Things that you probably wanted to know but were afraid to ask, like: who's cleaning up the mess that all those Pinsiders leave every day

The moderators will join me to tell their story about the awful task of moderating an online forum.

And I just got of the phone with Skypilot and we are going to be organizing one or two quick get-togethers at Expo. Nothing too fancy but a place and time to meet up and put faces to Pinside handles.

Details and times will follow, just wanted to give you a heads up.

I have been looking into building a lanyard card generator, based on the above design. It currently looks something like this:

lanyard-concept-70.jpg

I based the dimensions on this badge holder: http://www.idsupply.com/HS100-V-Vertical-Badge-Holder-P2015.aspx Is that one a good format? I want it sized for the most common, widely available badge holder.

Okay, work on the badge generator is progressing nicely, should be finished soon!

Great idea, but it should be optional I think. Maybe I'll also add option for location (country, city, state).

To avoid confusion, I have asked Rob Berk to change our Friday 5:00pm seminar title to “Pinside.com - Past, present and future” - it's not as much a get-together but will be a talk about the history of Pinside.com, the current state and where we're going with the site (world domination!). My brother is gonna be there as well and there will be 5 moderators joining us, fun times!

We are also going to be organizing a Pinside meet n' greet, called the "Pinside - Away from keyboard get-together” on Thursday at 1:00pm in the Birch Room (not on the schedule yet) - This will be an event for Pinsiders to meet up and shake hands (or have beers with old foes). Note: this event will not be moderated

Ah yeah, I forgot to mention, you can now generate your own Pinside event badge.

I'm still looking into generating the correct size. does anyone know what the most common badge holder sizes are?

Hmm, okay, that's only completely different

How should I tackle this? I based my design on the most common badge holder size. Should I add a preset dropdown box with some predefined sizes? Which?

Cool! Then it's official!

The Pinside "Away from Keyboard" meet n' greet will be at Pinball Expo Chicago on Thursday, 1pm in the Birch Room. Thanks Mike P for allowing us to host our get-together

So what is the Pinside Meet n' Greet? Finally a chance to meet all those people you have been chatting with for all those years!

The Meet n' Greet is proudly sponsored by Game Exchange. Co-hosts: Skypilot and Robin.

Free badge holder/lanyard (and pizza, ssshht - Pinsiders only)
Please RSVP before October 12th by sending a PM to JJ at Game Exchange. He will prepare your badge and make sure there's pizza for you. Yes, you read that right: RSVP for free pizza!

Over 170 Pinsiders are coming to Expo. I hope a large percentage will come and say hi!

Pinsiders only!
You can download and print your Pinside badge here. JJ will provide the lanyards and badge holders. No badge? No pizza

Design is aimed at printing 2.75" wide and 3.87" height. That should fit well in a 3x4 badge holder. I will see if I can make the badge generator output a PDF instead of a JPG file an also see if I can add information about the badges and maybe some links to order.

Thursday!

The Pinside "Away from Keyboard" meet n' greet, the first ever official Pinside meetup, will be on Thursday, 1pm in the Birch Room. Finally a chance to meet all those people you have been chatting with for all those years!

The Meet n' Greet is proudly sponsored by Game Exchange. Co-hosts: Skypilot and Robin.

Free badge holder/lanyard (and pizza, ssshht - Pinsiders only)
Please RSVP before October 12th by sending a PM to JJ at Game Exchange. He will prepare your badge and make sure there's pizza for you. Over 170 Pinsiders are coming to Expo. I hope a large percentage of them will come and say hi!

Oh, and friday afternoon is our official Pinside seminar: "past, present and future of Pinside.com", at 5pm.

Cool! We could hold a drawing at the Pinside get-together on thursday 1pm? Will you be there, Mark?

Hopefully in time for the Pinside meet 'n' greet

58 Pinsiders, that gonna be a lot of people to meet

Everyone who RSVPd for the meet 'n' greet, as you may know you will get a free Pinside/Gexchange lanyard with Pinside badge (printed for you), so if you're gonna be there, and haven't PM'd Gexchange yet, no is the time!

The deadline for this is monday at 1159 pm Denver time. After that we won't be able to print any more badges.

Sorry, no. You'll need to get into Expo first. The meet 'n' greet itself is free though

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam: Ready for takeoff!

image.jpg

What? I thought we were going to be discussing Pinside world domination plans

Absolutely, JJ worked pretty hard on setting this up. I got to see all iterations of the badges printed at several sizes to fit different badge holders. But I think we finally got it right. And the Gexchange/Pinside lanyards look awesome!

The meet 'n' greet was fun! Hope you enjoyed the pizza! I think we finished al 16 of 'em.

So big thanks to all who showed up. So did anyone take any pictures?

Especially shirts!