Robert Pence

Beautiful photos! Number 17 tripped my Happy switch. Snow makes splashes of color pop out, and that's evident in the night shots, too.

Oh, yeah! Nice job. We'll be looking forward to more posts from you.

Middletown has an amazing downtown in terms of commercial structures. Some of them are very old. I can only imagine the energy and activity there when the steel and paper industries flourished. There's a core group of people who are very dedicated to preserving and reviving the city. They have their work cut out for them, but they're energetic, creative, and optimistic. In December, 2006 there was a Holiday Season tour of Middletown's historic mansions and some of the churches. A group of UO forumers got together to tour downtown earlier in the afternoon, and then tour the mansions in the evening. I posted the photos in a thread back then, but the links probably are broken since I restructured my site. They're on my site here, if anyone wants to see them.

So far, no problem with heart pounding. I have felt a reduction in my craving for caffeine, though. I think I've cut back about a third. Today I shoveled snow for about five hours, digging out sidewalks and a driveway. My heart got going pretty good but I didn't experience any problems. I can get it up above 120 and hold it there for fairly long periods, and it was stable at 140 on a stress EKG a couple of years ago. I know what happened to my thyroid; it got wiped out by radiation. I went through two bouts with head & neck cancer in 1994 and 1996, and had a total of 85 radiation treatments. CT scans ever since 1997 showed my thyroid gone, but my TSH always came back in the normal range on my labs. I've puzzled my doctors more than once. In December, though, my TSH was high. About time; I've been complaining of lethargy and being cold for about 3 years. They started me on a minimum dose, 25mcg daily, but I think I'm due for a step up; sometimes I suddenly run out of gas in the evenings and get shivers. The doctors at U of Chicago Center for Advanced Medicine say they don't know anyone else who has had as much radiation as I have, and is still able to live independently and do a full day's physical work.

Yum. That park is such a beautiful green island in downtown, and I can smell the BBQ, enough to make me start to salivate. Edit: I had to go out and get some BBQ. So what if it was grocery-deli variety and I had to nuke it when I got it home? It's making me feel all warm and happy inside, on a cold-cold night.

Beautiful photos! I've been to Marietta in summer, and it's pure bliss. Gorgeous setting on the river, and lots of history. Jeff, it doesn't look like anything runs on those rails now. The slots have been filled in where the wheel flanges would run.

Even with the coffee consumption, I was barely getting through the day. A couple of months ago, I got confirmation that my thyroid had just about completely shut down, and since I started taking synthroid I'm getting some improvement in my energy levels. I'm due to test again next week, and my doctor and I both expect that I'll need my dosage increased. Yeah, I know about dementia. I've been dealing with it in my mom for eight years. She still knows who I am, but her short-term memory is just about zero and her long-term memory, which was once very good, is slipping. She's a retired Registered Nurse who once ran the OR in a local hospital, and was a very sharp woman. She's been in a nursing home almost 4 years, and fortunately, I guess, she's no longer ambulatory so we don't need to worry about her wandering. She'll be 98 next month. Her sister, a retired M.D., is 95 and still mentally as sharp as she ever was.

I think they have the relationship backward. People with dementia simply forget to drink coffee. Actually, I think it is effective. I drink 8-10 cups a day, and look how sharp my mind is. Oh, and did I mention that I drink 8-10 cups every day, and my memory is just about perfect. I remember stuff well, too. Probably because of drinking lots of coffee. ...

One simple way to produce electric power from oscillating or reciprocating motion is to move a magnet (armature) back and forth through a field coil, inducing a voltage. That would produce low-frequency AC, which fairly simply could be rectified to DC and then inverted to whatever AC frequency you want. The DC coming out of the rectifier would be pulsating; the voltage would rise and fall. That could be stabilized with capacitors before inverting, or the whole job of stabilizing and inverting could be done with a rotary mechanical device like a motor-generator set.

Sounds like a pretty good time, and maybe a little more progress against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." :clap: What will gays do, though, when straight folks learn now much fun we can be? I'm worried that if we get mainstreamed, we'll no longer be special! Well, the ones with super powers still will be able to resist, but what about the rest of us when we get outed as being just like everybody else? Straight people's fear is the only power we hold!

:roll: :-D :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Anyone else having problems this evening? Around 10 p.m. EST, sometimes I click on a forum section and sit for more than a minute without it opening. Other times, or maybe other sections, sometimes it opens OK. I don't think the problem is on my system. Task manager says my CPU is running between 0 and 2 percent, and my memory usage is < 500mb out of 3gb total on my machine. I powered down everything including my router, checked all my connections, and rebooted, and still UO forums sometimes seem to freeze. I can open other URLs and navigate in them just fine. Of course, everything's working fine right now.

Yeah. I knew my kitchen floor needed scrubbing, but I didn't think it was so bad my house would rise up in protest. I just now remembered my basement darkroom, location of the water heater and directly beneath the kitchen sink. I vacuumed up about three gallons of water from the carpet there. I have ceiling fans and floor fans, and I've turned the thermostat to about 75. The outside temp is 10 and falling, so the air is very dry, things are drying out pretty quickly. It's nice when an old house sags the right direction, and the water runs out the kitchen door instead of into the dining room and living room with their hardwood floors and rugs.

... and then went on with other life distractions. Later came and went and came and went, until it became ....................TOO LATE! This evening I was working in my rental property next door, trying to fix an icemaker installed by a former tenant who suffered from the delusion that he knew his @ss from a hole-in-the-ground when it came to home repair. I decided to just remove it, and came back to my house to get my tools, and as I came up the back steps I heard water running. Not just the normal flow from a kitchen or bathroom faucet, but the full-on roar that you get when you open a garden-house faucet wide. When I opened the back door, I was met by water running out the kitchen door and across the floor of the enclosed back porch. Following the sound to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, I found that a flex connector for the hot-water faucet had burst. Enough water had come through it to exhaust the 40-gallon water heater, because the water was no longer hot. I shut it off and got my shop vac and sucked up about 25 gallons of water. The floor is one-piece sheet-vinyl, so I don't think much got through into the chipboard underlayment. I won't know that for a few days, when I see if any spots bubble up. I installed those flex connectors as a temporary measure almost 20 years ago, intending to replace them after I got some other pressing matters (like finding a job) taken care of. I never gave them another thought. I'm just glad it failed when I was only gone for an hour, and not when I was away for two or three days or weeks. Just the water bill and the gas bill for a constantly-running high-capacity water heater trying to keep up would have been devastating, not to mention additional damage to the house. Next item on the agenda is to replace all those flex connectors with tubes.

Are you sure that's not a typo, maybe a missing decimal point? 6.5 lbs would be a dangerously rapid weight loss, but 65 lbs in a week and a half would put anyone in a casket.

I live in Fort Wayne (Fort Mundane), Indiana, which used to be headquarters for Lincoln Financial. Through the 90s I worked there in IT. I got to travel around to some of Lincoln's regional marketing offices with a team setting up hardware and software and training users. I had been to Pittsburgh before, and when they posted it on the list I was quick to call dibs. I didn't take any photos on that trip, but I posted some from earlier and later trips on the forums some time back. If you'd like to see them, they're here.

Neat thread. I don't know of anything that would ever take me to Bayonne, and I'm glad I got to see it. The photos are excellent. I wonder if the Berghoffs whose name the building bears are related to the Berghoff family whose name is on one of Chicago's best-known restaurants, and who ran a major local brewery in Fort Wayne.

Great Pittsburgh photos! Thanks for shooting those interiors; those are often overlooked. The Frick Building is gorgeous, despite the fact that Henry Clay Frick was a ruthless, unforgiving SOB. There's a very good book that tells the story of Carnegie and Frick and their business partnership that ended in bitter dispute and lifelong enmity. The title of the book is "Meet You in Hell" but I can't remember who wrote it. It's a must-read for anyone interested in labor history, especially as it related to the early iron, steel, coal, and coke industries in the southwestern Pennsylvania. This shot is the interior of the Koppers Building, designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White, successor firm to D.H. Burnham & Co., and constructed 1927-1929. It's sort of obscured by the density of big buildings around it and the narrow streets, but it has a great entrance and I think it's one of Pittsburgh's best 1920s buildings. When I did some work in that building in the mid 1990s, it had a barber shop and a pretty decent lunchroom in the basement.

I like those a lot. The last time I visited Columbus, it rained a lot and the Capitol rotunda was closed for restoration. It's beautiful.

Regal-Beloit acquired General Electric's Motor Business, headquartered in Fort Wayne, a few years ago. No manufacturing operations remain in Fort Wayne; I think the 180 employees remaining here are R&D and maybe some management. The plants referred to in the article probably are the former GE plants in Springfield, MO and Juarez, Mexico. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Green motor unveiled Regal Beloit creates efficient device for home air systems Sherry Slater - The Journal Gazette. Regal Beloit Corp. on Friday unveiled an energy-efficient motor that can be used in existing home heating, ventilation and air-conditioning units. Evergreen IM was developed at the Beloit, Wis.-based company’s Fort Wayne operation, based on 20 years of making similar products, said Paul Selking, who leads the company’s residential HVAC efforts. The motors, which are made in Missouri and Mexico, use less energy, create less noise and improve indoor air quality, Selking said. [ ... ] Link to full article: http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090124/BIZ/301249933

Excellent tour. Some of those buildings, both old and new, are stunning, and seeing the amount of pedestrian traffic and variety of commercial activity created by a campus makes me acutely aware of what's missing from Fort Mundane, with its isolated commuter campus.

I had it, but it was a long time ago, when I was a whippersnapper about your age. The doctor told me to not go anywhere or exert myself unnecesscarily, stay home, eat, rest, for two weeks and then come back. I had a second-floor apartment, and just climbing a flight of stairs slowly left me winded. I had just started a new, very good office job, and told her I couldn't possibly miss that much work starting off as a probationary hire. She said, OK, go to work, but drive, don't walk. Aside from time to eat, don't do anything else except rest and sleep. It was a couple of months before I started to feel half decent again. I don't think the treatment has changed since then, and there's no effective medication that I know of except that sometimes a doctor will prescribe antibiotics to try to head off any secondary infections that could be very dangerous when your body's defenses are knocked down. I think it's also very important to avoid strenuous activity or pushing yourself because one very dangerous complication from that can be a ruptured spleen. Mono is not to be taken lightly. Chloraseptic spray helps with the awful raw sore throat pain.

Except for a few of us, it's not terribly far off the mark. My home town with popluation < 10,000 used to be a quiet, pleasant place mostly populated by hard-working, genteel folks, if a bit gossippy. Over the past 20 years, trailer parks have proliferated. Along with that, fights and domestic disturbances involving alcohol have escalated sharply, both in and around a couple of bars, and later on after the drunks get home. In the summary of police reports in the local paper, at least half the incidents occur in a trailer park or involve someone who lives in one. The arrival of a Super Wal*Mart seems to be both a consequence of the low-class invasion, and a contributor to the bad conduct; a lot of fights and hit-and-runs occur in the parking lot there.

High-quality coverage, great stuff!

Trim around the windows and doors would tie in better with the architectural styles they're trying to emulate. Paneled front doors, possibly with a little bit of glass in them would look less institutional, too. Still, the goal is to provide as much decent housing as possible for the money spent, so I can understand why they built them the way they did. Once you start adding non-functional niceties, where do you draw the line? I agree with xumelanie that the porches and sidewalks are good. They may get people outdoors and in touch with their neighbors. That builds a cohesive neighborhood where people take care of their properties and look after each other. In the next few years as the trees and landscaping grow in, the neighborhood will look more established.