Robert Pence

Especially if it's a company car. If you're splitting automobile use between personal and business, and you want to deduct business-related automobile expense, you should keep a log book with the name of driver, purpose/destination of trip, and odometer readings in and out, every time the car is used for business purposes. If the IRS challenges you on your business-related automobile expense and you don't have a log book, you'll be S.O.L.

Check out the Hiawatha Cyclery site. They have studded tires, and a lot of other types too.

Six? The lower level of the DS bridge only carried 4 tracks. I am under the impression it was constructed with four but could be expanded to six. http://www.clevelandmemory.com/SpecColl/bccc/bccc07.html I'm sorry. :cry: I thought it was clear that I was referring to the amount of space provided in the structure, and not to the number of tracks installed, because tracks were never installed on the Lorain-Carnegie, so far as I know. :oops: :cry: :cry: :behind:

When exactly did you become "sweet and innocent"? :laugh: January 17, 1997

I forgot to mention - in addition to getting into fights, I could run really fast. That's an important skill to have when things start to not go as planned. I never participated in track, but the one thing I could do well in phys ed was outrun some of the guys who were on the track team. Long legs for my height and 125 lbs, and sometimes it was exhilarating to just cut loose and go.

Just browsing the online gallery of a photographer whose brick-and-mortar gallery I've visited in Winona Lake, near Warsaw, Indiana. He creates some striking monochrome images using large-format (8x10 and larger) cameras and printing with great skill on fiber-based archival papers. They're all silver prints, with gorgeous tonality and detail. I've seen his work up close, and he's one of the guys who makes me want to put all my gear on eBay and just go back to wrenching on tractors. Or sell all my tractors and spend the money buying his prints. His name is John Eric Hawkins, and his site is here.

Did ya' know that it was built with a lower deck that would accomodate streetcars, like the Detroit-Superior (Veterans Memorial), except that it only provided room for four tracks compared with the D-S bridge's six, in preparation for streetcar system expansion that never happened? You can see the lower deck from beneath it. Like the lower deck on the Detroit-Superior, it's mostly used for utility lines now, I think.

Good photo!

Beautiful shot against the blue sky. He's missing the little finger on each hand. I never noticed that before!

That's probably hard to determine now even from any old financial records that might still exist, because of creative bookkeeping. I've read a couple of articles stating that when the railroads were trying to shed passenger service, they often allocated costs entirely to passenger operations that were incurred by facilities and activites that supported both passenger and freight operations.

Nice shot! It brings out the color and detail that the eye perceives on the scene, but that the camera can't capture in a single exposure. You're right about using it with discretion; HDR gets discredited sometimes because some photographers overuse it for exaggerated effects. Once in a while that's an interesting artistic use, but when it's done over and over, it gets to be trite. When using HDR, it's important to note that moving objects will create odd effects in the image. You can see a small example in the walking figure in the lower left. In this case it works fine, because it doesn't distract from the overall beauty of the image.

I wouldn't think that air conditioning would be a major factor, given San Francisco's mild climate. I can see how heat might be nice to chase away the damp chill in winter, though. I was there twice around Christmas and had awful respiratory problems that went away as soon as I got away from the coast and into cold, dry areas.

Still single, but this thread is so much fun ... I've been in some committed relationships, but I was the only one feeling any commitment. :roll: Some say it's because I was looking for love in all the wrong places. Maybe not all the wrong places, but all the ones I knew about. I'm still hoping, but while I'm waiting for Mr. Right, I might consider a temp. Mr. Right Now? Anyone? :-D

The photo that I posted previously died when I restructured my site. Here's a redo, with more pics and info. How it looked when I bought it in 1977: What looks like my house before additions and alterations appears in an 1880 illustrated aerial view of the city. The abstract shows the lot selling as an individual parcel for the first time in 1858 for $12 and again in 1860 for $200. I speculate that's when the original part may have been built. Construction materials and methods in the oldest part could tie in with that era. I've owned it since 1977 and used it as a rental for ten years until it started to get crappy(er), and then I gutted it, changed the floor plan, replaced all the mechanicals, and made it my residence. Since rehabbing, all that remain of the original are foundation, framing, sheathing, most of the windows and most of the rafters.

I hadn't thought about the corrosiveness, either, but it stands to reason. Hydrogen is chemically very active, explaining why very little free hydrogen exists in Earth's atmosphere. It's almost always bound with other elements. That means that storage and handling would have to be via corrosion-resistant materials with enough tensile strength to work at high pressures. Regarding vehicle accidents, no combustible gas or liquid is truly safe, but hydrogen probably is safer than propane or gasoline because it is lighter than air and diffuses upward very quickly when released outdoors. Propane and gasoline vapor are heavier than air and spread along the ground, accumulating in low spots like sewers and basements until they find an ignition source. When the vapor cloud ignites, it blows up spaces it has filled and burns everything/everyone it touches. Diesel fuel is probably the safest motor-vehicle fuel in case of accidents because at normal temperatures it doesn't release enough vapor to easily be ignited.

Gorgeous photos, colorful spectacle!

Excellent photos. Even good nursing homes can be depressing when they're still in use. Abandoned ones are beyond words, especially when littered with the left-behind possessions of people who may have been long-dead when the place was abandoned.

:| Historically, how has AFG carried that stock on its books? If Amtrak were to file for bankruptcy, and if AFG were to show a $900 million write-down on their annual report as a result and try to take the loss when they file their taxes, I wonder how far that would fly with the SEC and the IRS.

Gorgeous view! I still have a mental image from a trip to Chicago with my aunt around 1950. We spent three or four days there, and one night she hired a man with a beautiful mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft with lots of shiny varnished wood, no plastic or fiberglas, to take us out on the lake for the view. I was only 11 or 12 then and my recollection isn't terribly detailed, but it seems to me that the Wrigley Building was the dominant structure on the skyline. The last I read, I thought the Spire was stalled with just a big hole in the ground. Maybe that info is oudated already? I have a lot of photos of Chicago with a few going back to the seventies that I need to scan and upload. Some are decent. I can vouch that New York is entirely different, and I've only been there a few times, none recent. I wasn't able to adjust well enough to the visual differences on short visits to feel like I knew what I was doing when taking photos.

Wow. Last summer after my eye exam I had a pair of those to wear home. Had I known they were to be the next big thing in fashion, I'd have kept them. Not that I'm all that fashionable, but I could've sold them for big bucks.

Cincinnati's combination of hilly routes and strong ridership might justify adopting electric trolley buses. It takes a big initial investment in catenary and buses, but their superior acceleration under heavy loads and on hills would help to address the running-speed issue. ETBs have lower maintenance costs and longer service lives than their diesel counterparts. They're quieter and don't stink, and a system can be configured with regenerative braking so that buses descending hills or decelerating feed power back into the system.

That thought occurred to me, too. With 1500-volt catenary just a few feet away, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to devise a scheme to disincentivize antisocial behavor by implementing Darwinian concepts.

On ten separate occasions during September, trains operated by Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District between South Bend and Chicago were delayed by signal failures caused by theft of signal system cables. Other South Shore news from the September 26, 2008 NICTD board meeting minutes may be found here. All the new bi-level cars should be in the US by now, with the first two slated for delivery to Michigan City from the assembly plant in Milwaukee in late November, to begin testing in December.

Looks like a festive good time! :clap: Hop into my time machine and come along back to Public Square twenty years ago:

Holy SH!T. Thank God it's priced high enough that I don't even need to worry about lusting for one! Anyway, as soon as enough people sink their bankrolls into those, someone will come up with a camera that rivals large format, for $1,000 - $2,000 less. :| Sometimes it's nice to be able to just give up. [Edit December 8, 2008] If Nikon follows their established pattern, give them about three or four months and they'll announce a prosumer version for about $5,500, and within days the local camera shops will be backordered and B&H will be shipping them as fast as they can unload the trucks at their dock. Serious amateurs will be gobbling them up for a little more money than they refused to pay for the D3. Not long after they introduced the D3, they introduced the prosumer version as the D700, and there was a rush to get them. I thought about it for a month, placed my order at my favorite local camera shop, waited ten days for it to come in, and as soon as I got it, they dropped the price $300. :| I like it a bunch, though.