Well, the good new is that the truck is very driveable – it pull just slightly to the right now. Before it pulled just slightly to the left. The bumper is definitely toast (it’s the worlds ugliest bumper anyway – however I saw the advantage to that particular bumper after I backed into a pole and dented the pole, but not the bumper!)
The truck has always been a P.O.S. – but, it’s got 467,000+ miles on it, it’s on it’s first engine and transmission (the engine doesn’t surprise me as much as the transmission. But I’ve talked to two of the five owners, and both of them swear the transmission has never needed replaced. Considering it’s still very solid, that’s impressive.) The truck has always been fairly ugly and trashed out – but, ya know, I realized I’ve started to get a bit protective about it. I can be gone for a couple of weeks, come home, and the sucker starts right up on the first try. If something breaks, it’s almost always a dead simple thing to fix it (the most complicated fix I’ve ever had to do on it is repair the throttle cable – it kept breaking. Used aircraft cable, and some bunggie cords to give it the proper amount of tension. Obviously I’ve become more advanced than my grandfather at keeping old trucks running – his solution would have involved electrical tape and bailing wire!) It eats very little oil, gas mileage isn’t good but I’ve driven much worse before.
In other words, it may look like shit – but, I don’t think I’ve owned anything that was quite as dependable as it is. Plus, being able to load a ton of wood on it for trips from Home Depot is a wonderful thing. And here someone goes and tries to break my truck, and doesn’t have the common decency to stop and tell me (that’s the funny part – if they hadn’t have driven off, I would have probably just shruged, and talked to them about it and saw what could be done cheaply for all involved.) Oh well – need to get the Lincoln sold off one of these days, or even just towed off, so that we can have both driveway slots open and I can put the truck there where it’s less at risk.
Getting the old bumper off might be a bit of a bitch – I’ll see about borrowing Larry’s cutting torch (Hmm…. wonder how much one costs, along with the tanks? Would be a useful item to have – then I would actually have some equiptment for gas welding to boot.)
The good news for the day is about Midnight Ryder Technologies. I said in a previous post that I was contacting a couple of publishers. Well, one has picked up both Boulder Panic! 2 DX and Tile Panic!. They aren’t a real slick group or anything – Garage Developer International is a small time outfit that produces demo CD’s, does online demo downloads, online sales, and also publishes compilation CD’s of full version games for retail outlets – but not a LOT of outlets, just a few. It’s not Big News, but, it’s yet another revenue stream that might bring in some more $$$ without me spending tons of time workin’ on it. They already have the online download and esales setup for it, and are sending the contract for the retail distribution. So it’s pretty much a done deal now.