Rusty Shackleford

I was respecting you as board owner to not crap all over a thread if my screeds were becoming excessive. I have said my piece and I appreciate the forum. No, it's in the Research Park (rimshot).

Frankly, the foreign workers and H1Bs will take more abuse and will work "harder" - more beads of sweat, more obvious "labor", without necessarily getting much, if anything accomplished. Deportation is a powerful incentive to comply. Managements love to see visible sacrifice and discomfort among the worker bees. Last thing they want to see is a happy engineer who isn't being punished for having "one of those fun jobs for kids where you're paid to fool around." This is what I always say: guest worker usage is more about control than it is just the dollars. And Dayton high tech employers LOVE cracking that whip. Even though it drives anyone worth a crap out of the area or out of the career field (my case.) Dayton has had a terrible imbalance of decent mid level technology jobs for > 30 years. Dumping a bunch of cheap, servile labor on the local market is just typical for this area. More serfs, bring it on! :x Note: if ColDayMan has a problem with my venting I will restrain it. But this topic of "goshie gee, Dayton is just peachy for technology" pushes my buttons. I think opinion and analysis from someone who has worked in that scene is worth noting.

Ok, there are a lot of commodity engineering jobs in the Dayton area - entry level stuff. Working in Dilbert offices in teams on regimented projects. There is a segment of research oriented engineering work (PhD level) in the region at places like Lexis, the base, UDRI, Wright State. (I think that explains the terrible treatment I received at one of the aforementioned joints. A bachelor's degree, even with experience, was regarded like a janitorial hire at the place I am referencing.) There is very, very little around here for typical mid career engineers, for "Silicon Valley" types with bachelor's degrees. The favored hiring patterns in the area favor either cheap numbers or very high end research people. It's sort of an inversion of a bell curve. Dayton is the absolute last place that can claim that it is a good place for an engineer to build his career. Those entry level people top out VERY quickly in this area, and unless they can make a quantum jump with an advanced degree, they stagnate professionally. The advanced degree people here are like preening show birds in a cage - they see low cost of living in the area so to them it's great. Sorry to be beating a dead horse. It angers me when local boosters give credit that is not due.

Jeffery, this blog thread is really interesting. I have a car-less family member that lived in Centerville (Revere Village) for several years. He could go about all of his business, which included regular trips downtown, in a fairly straightforward manner. But he had to plan things out very rigorously, and bus transfers would easily make what should be a 45 minute trip into a two hour trip. That in itself is worth noting. He was on only one bus line along Rt 48 (#17?) To get anyplace in a realistic time he had to walk 1 mile north to a bus stop on Franklin Street. I initially thought these apartments would be very easy to access from the bus and the reality was that Revere Village is in an outland as far as bus routes are concerned. Almost every trip anyplace requires a time wasting transfer. In general I didn't see being carless in Centerville or Washington Township to be very practical at all, unless, like you, a person is located right along major roads with bus service. And for walking, distances in Centerville and Wash. Township are simply vast. I assume that you know about the online tool that RTA has for planning bus trips on their web site? It will plan your transfers and give you estimated travel and arrival times. My family member did not have computer access, though. The only bad thing about the online tool is that almost no normal address format works as an endpoint. You have to guess and use their lookup tool to determine a starting and ending location that it understands.

The last two comments interest me. I used both shops when I was a student in Dayton in the 1970s. K&G (their original location on Marshall Road) had always been my go-to place for bikes and repairs. I had just one experience with Steve's, in the late 1970s - a really bad experience with repair. My brother and I were planning a 1 week bike trip. We dropped our bikes off and Steve himself proudly declared that he would have our bikes overhauled and ready to pick up on a certain date. We went there that morning and they hadn't even touched them. So we had to take our bikes back and ride them as-is. Now I live closer to Cincinnati and I suppose I should patronize local bike shops more. I went to Montgomery Cyclery a few years ago to buy cold weather clothes. The salesman said that an outfit like I wanted would be at least $700 "and we have financing". So I bought my stuff at the Wal-Mart of bicycling, Performance, and paid less than $250 for comparable stuff. I would gladly use K&G for repair or gear again, though.

Now here are anecdotal observations from someone who attempted to make a living in IT in this area. A friend and I have joked for years that Dayton is "Silicon Valley Not" (borrowing the terminology of logic circuit design.) It's like everything that SV is known for is the exact opposite here: poor wages; lack of entrepreneurial dynamism; redneck, not hip culture; REALLY bad management; peers who are abused so much that they shut down. Everything about the Dayton area is socially and professionally repulsive to innovative, intelligent engineers and the like. The software groups and companies I have worked in and interviewed with around the Dayton area have been abusive, bush league and unprofessional and pay a good margin lower than any major market. There is an endemic oversupply of techies and engineers around Dayton and this has been the case since the 1970s. My experience as a EE with 15+ years experience at the time interviewing twice at the tech crown jewel of the region, (the joint on Springboro Pike in Miami Township), was that they wanted to use me as a high tech janitor to clean up their mistakes (and not in a good highly paid way.) They, like almost every company I have interviewed with around here, demeaned me in some way. The general pattern of entrepreneurial tech companies I have worked with or observed locally is: start up with bloated self image; perform poorly; go out of business or be acquired. Dayton is the place where I learned to hate and to eventually get out of IT. The professional culture here in IT is crap. Most managements here bully their people or engage in Kafkaesque games of non engagement. It's "Nerdistan" to be sure but not in good ways. It's Nerdistan in terms of intense competition for table scraps of jobs. If you're a degreed engineer it is an extremely unstable place to make a career. Or, to be even more direct: Anyone good gets out of Dayton if they want a good career. You come here to watch your career die. (Abbreviated 2-minutes hate directed at local IT scene redacted) There is exactly *one* way in which the Dayton region is good for IT: company founders can pick up qualified people for relatively cheap here. So externally, to business writers and the like, the area looks much better for IT employment than it really is. The poor hiring dynamics for engineers here make job hopping very difficult so if you can keep someone steadily employed here as an engineer or developer you have them for "life". But there is a down side even to this. Experienced engineers around here tend to be so battle scarred and burned out that you wind up hiring yes-men and people that aren't at their best.

There is at least one Pony Keg in D8ton, nearly 100 years old - the Patterson Pony Keg. http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenworld24/2642879087/#

One of many driving irritants I have experienced repeatedly here in the Buckeye State is what I would call passive-aggressive driving. Amazing balls and nerve (in a bad way) combined with extreme witless slowness. Example: somebody who waits literally until the very last split second to pull out of a side street in front of very fast traffic, and then proceeds to drive at a VERY slow speed. Or who lefts on you after waiting a very long time for you to get very close to them, and then turns VERY slowly. In general, Ohio has a plague of drivers who are really extremely aggressive but in a really stupid and slow way. In most metropolitan areas drivers are very aggressive but they go about their business quickly and expediently. Here if a driver has 12 seconds to decide to make a turn safely, he will spend 11.75 seconds of it picking his ass. It's like in Ohio there is a mentality of driving as if to say: "I despise you simply because I do not know you, I am more important than you, and therefore I am entitled to do anything I like. But I will not break a sweat over it." Dayton's the worst with this stuff.

One other thing. Several people have noted how much tighter and better looking the screen layout of vBulletin is. I completely agree with that. SMF wastes a lot of white space. What about looking for an improved theme, or finding a freelancer to customize an existing theme to tighten it up? There are always tons of freelancers hanging around the Simple Machines forums. It would probably cost a couple hundred bucks to make it prettier and tighter. That's the whole point of board themes, you can change the layout and appearance without dealing with moving board data around. Just a thought...

I voted "keep SMF". I have a unique perspective on this matter. I own a message forum and last year I migrated it away from a commercially hosted service that owns all the data called Yuku. Yuku had transformed from a normal BBS service into an idiotic MySpace clone and a lot of features were unavailable or broken (IE, search was next to useless and never found anything.) So last year I finally stumbled into a bunch of scripts (written in Python) that exported the Yuku message base to a MySql database dump file that could be imported to SMF. It was a freaking NIGHTMARE. Getting everything right resulted in MASSIVE amounts of twiddling and experimentation. Even little things in the existing message base like quoting or emoticons were a major PITA to get right. Plus, only the user names came over and user profiles were essentially wiped out. And, people would not read the "how to recover your own account name" instructions I posted. Every person coming over was a special case. (The forum is for IT people and it impressed me how clueless even IT people are about not following instructions.) So I completely respect the amount of work that goes into a conversion like this. I have done it myself and I don't look forward to work like that. But what I am thinking is that a move like this breaks the formatting of many older messages, and it may be very difficult to get the many formatting combinations completely right. I voted "keep SMF" because I don't really have a clue what vBulletin is supposed to add, so the change seems somewhat pointless. SMF is very rich, and has many add-on modules, some of which I have adopted for my own board. Is vBulletin supposed to address some critical security vulnerabilities of SMF or is it much more efficient to run on a server (can be hosted more cheaply)? I guess those things could play a role in this decision. To me as a user it broke too many things, and doesn't seem to add any value.

I said to myself "Damn!" when I saw this thread. I used to work in "the fort" and a friend came from Rome City. 95% of social life there seemed to revolve around bar hopping. A hop and a skip from Chain O' Lakes state park and Greater Kendalltucky. This looks rather bleak - you can basically dismiss Northern Indiana in the winter. I don't even see dead people. It is much more festive in the summer, and actually worth sticking around then. Well, at least in the cabin resort areas.

Agreed with Inkaelin and ColDayMan - I am always impressed by McConnellsville. It has a big city feeling of solidity to the architecture. Most other towns in this region could be erased by a tornado. The area may be poorer than crap but the downtown looks really nice for the region that this is. There's a decent little downtown tavern we ate at when visiting a couple of years ago - the Chatterbox.

Overall the town looks a bit bleak but relatively healthy economically for a small Ohio town - people actually walking around on a cloudy day and actual businesses in operation. Contrast with the burned out husks of some small towns in southern Ohio.

Update: I scored an auction win of one of these from Ebay (where else?) $7.95 + $2.50 shipping. Not TOO bad. It's highly nostalgic for me because Dayton is the only city I know of that had city maps like these, and these maps formed my childhood impression of the city's geography.

I have a collection of South Charleston specific pictures that I took last summer that are bikeway centered, based on my rides from the south up into the area. I have been meaning to post that as a thread. South Charleston is a tidy, quiet little town. These pictures emphasize the little architectural details that I never paid attention to.

Locals who grow up and live around things never appreciate them. It probably boils down to that. I saw that attitude in Dayton and it's quite apparent with the reaction you got from the mayor.

Has there been discussion in Dayton about embarking on the same path as Detroit? IE, a deliberate program of "de-urbanization" and the creation of green space out of slums? To me this sounds piecemeal.

Interesting Kentuckyesque small town. Dead, dead, dead. Too bad about the zombie plague and the exclusion zone around this town.

Silent Hill! Amazing photo essay and commentary. Really well done.

More detail: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20110127/BIZ01/301270104/Ambitious-plans-for-Cincinnati-Mall What the heck would a "76,000-square-foot agriculture museum" look like there?! :?

Does Tiffin, O. have something to do with the Tiffin filters?

Somehow, I don't think in 100 years they will have festivals commemorating meth labs. :(

Their web site says that moonshine is illegal. So this is basically another small town country festival. I think communities like this one really should capitalize on their history entrepreneurially. There is a moonshine distillery in Gatlinburg that is a tourist trap. They should amend the laws and do something similar here.

Thanks, Jeffery, for at least acknowledging this post. Every single map like this that my parents owned got completely beat up and was falling apart at the folds. It didn't take long, either - maybe a year of light use and it was disintegrating. I think I'd have to stumble into a garage sale of someone who stockpiled some copies that were never used in order to lay my hands on one in decent shape. My goal is to scan a copy at high detail (600 DPI.)

I was curious if there is any book store or collectible store in the Dayton area that specializes in the vintage local publications. The one I am looking for is titled "Map of Dayton, Ohio, Oakwood and Environs" published by Frederick J. Cellarius up through at least the early 70s. It came folded in a blue paper cover that was attached to the map. When I was growing up it was ubiquitous and I never saw a different style of local map until around 1970 at the earliest. I haven't seen an intact one of these for years. These maps are extremely interesting because they have extremely small legends embedded in the map that indicate street numbers and names of certain businesses and institutions. This guy has scans of the exact type of map that I want: http://www.davidlauri.com/galleries/Dayton1945/ Here's the cover from his web site. This is a 1945 map, and the design was the same up through the last ones I saw in the store. The color is faded but close. Of course, there is the usual vulture phenomenon with this collectible - I am finding web stores offering the map for $95. Thanks.