Robert Pence

I've thought about Flickr as an adjunct to what I'm doing now; the plugins give some nice functionality that, if I were to try to do them from scratch, would require more knowlege of HTML and other web programming tools than I have. Right now I'm paying $11.95/month each for two Yahoo Small Business sites with unlimited storage and unlimited transfer. I like being able to do whatever suits me so far with relatively simple HTML. I grew up writing code, mostly Fortran 77, Cobol, PL/I, even some RPGII (talk about irrelevant now) back in the days of keypunches, and a little maintenance work on pre-existing un-commented, undocumented, unstructured Basic junk that consisted mostly of tracing it to see what it did, and then throwing it out and rewriting the whole thing correctly in something better-supported (I know I'm dating myself, but no one else will, so ... :wink:), so I'm pretty comfortable with a limited amount of HTML and when I want to try something different, I just dig into one of the manuals. I've been selling a fair amount of my stuff, mostly 11x14 prints, at local outdoor art fests, and eventually want to add Pay Pal and a shopping cart to my sites. I could probably be making some money now if I weren't staying up nights cluttering the UO forums with old-fart reminiscences. :sleep:

^It's now part of the Hyatt Hotel. Built 1880, on the National Register of Historic Places. To find out more, click this link

I deal with it by forcing myself to stay and suffer, and resisting the temptation to go someplace nice. If I ever went south during winter, I'd probably want to do it every year. I just concentrate on how nice winter is here, compared with Minnesota.

Whut th' heck are them? :?

All the TV lights guarantee that he'll see his shadow. Once again, the liberal media are screwing up Amurika! :whip:

I tried to vote for all of them, but could only pick one. I'd rather be alive in any season, than dead, but if I have to choose just one, I'll take spring. The snow is gone and I don't have to shovel it, the grass doesn't yet need regular mowing, and the leaves don't need raking. The finches battling over the thistle seed in the feeder hanging from my garage are transitioning from their hues of brown to flashy bright yellow. In early spring we get floods in my neighborhood, but there's nothing I can do about those so I just stay out of the way and take pictures. Spring is a rebirth; life is flowing into everything all around, the leaves on the trees are a fresh, vibrant green, and even the thunderstorms are beautiful in a sometimes-scary way, provided they don't get too carried away. Summer nights are next thing to paradise, warm and balmy and marvelous for strolling the neighborhood. A late-summer day when it's not too hot, is bliss. Fall is sunny days and crisp nights and the aroma of apples fresh from the orchard, and cookouts and bonfires with live local-talent music. Winter - well, let me think about that a minute. OK. I got it. An icy-cold Sunday morning in January, after an overnight snow, with no wind and a crystal-clear, bright-blue sky. Before the going-to-church traffic starts, with almost no ambient sound except the snow squeaking under my boots. A flutter of brilliant red as a cardinal descends to my snow-covered patio to raid the feast I scattered there minutes before. Trying to forget February and March and focus on April and May. April and May. April and May ...

Pretty pic - it sort of reminds me of the time before highly-mechanized farming and ultra-high plant densities. Some of the older farmers around where I grew up still grew pumpkins in their cornfields; they'd mix the pumpkin seeds in with the seed corn in the planter boxes, and the growing corn apparently provided just the right mix of sun and shade for the pumpkins. Some pumpkins got smooshed during the corn harvest, but the machinery was smaller and simpler and a lot survived. After the corn was picked, you could look across a field and see lots of those big, orange gourds. That's what a pumpkin is, you know.

Many years ago, possibly in the 1970s, I sort of accidentally happened across Oakland's Chinatown while just aimlessly wandering around. It seemed very authentic in function, if not so character-rich in form as San Francisco's. I think I was one of the few non-Asians around there, and many the shops were set up with open-air market stalls in front. It was pretty interesting. It seemed to me that Calgary has a lot of ethnic diversity; I saw quite a few Sikhs and Russians there, as well as Asians.

^Cleanest car on UO. Why am I not surprised at that reply? :|

Absolutely. Western-styled shirts should always be worn tucked in.

How many guys will read that and wonder, "Why didn't I think of that before?"

The lesbians I know wear polyester sweatshirts. MayDay has way more class than that!

Nice shot, with a view not often photographed.

Maybe we could foment an internal rebellion that would overthrow the Castro-brothers regime and install a more-friendly Cuban government. Oh. Wait.

Neat weathervane. Looks just like a real helicopter! :wink:

There are miles of metroparks, historic sites and a state park along the Maumee River in Ohio. From time to time there's been talk of filling in the gaps to create a 100-mile trail all the way between Toledo and Fort Wayne, but I haven't heard anything, lately. It would have been nice if they could have tied that in with the Fort-to-Port Highway for funding. Once the Fort-to-Port is finished, though, it should take a lot of the most dangerous traffic off the existing US 24 route, and that might open up some possibilities.

Every fall there's a similar reenactment near Hartford City, Indiana. The newspaper account this year mentioned that the surgeon was the most riveting performance for the school kids who went. It's probably largely the same group of reenactors. My brother has gone several times, and he says it's wonderfully authentic. He's read a lot of Civil War books.

Neat tour. It's ridiculous that with all the trips I make to Chicago, I've never yet gone to Chinatown. I need to remedy that. Does Canada in general attract more Asian people? I remember from a trip fifteen years ago noticing quite a few Asian people and some Asian businesses even in small towns in rural Alberta, some parts of which are about as close to the middle of nowhere as anyplace in North America.

Neat park. I'm guessing the Temple of Love is a popular venue for weddings. Dang! Cincinnati has got to stop stealing Chicago's landmarks, though, or there won't be anything left.

The Five Rivers Metroparks System is more than just urban parks. Carriage Hill Farm, on the outskirts of Dayton, is one of the better historic farm properties in the midwest in terms of size, general state of maintenance, and authenticity. I recognize that my age, farm background, and continuing interest in ag history set me apart from most people on these boards, but I still recommend a visit to carriage hill, especially in summer, for anyone who wants a break from hot pavement and traffic noise and can appreciate walking in tall grass and on dirt paths and escaping the urban scene with only a short drive. It really is a beautiful, peaceful place.

See? It just takes a level of sophistication that is beyond most midwesterners' comprehension! :wink:

Good photos and a beautiful park. I like Milwaukee's signature street lights.

Not bad - looks like a reasonably functional downtown with some nifty buildings here and there.

For those of us who came of age when America was still an industrial powerhouse, who can remember looking out from a workplace on an upper floor of a five-story factory building in a complex that employed 5,000 people and is now dark and half-razed, across a city where smokestacks still smoked and people built heavy trucks and forged iron and steel and made automobile pistons and axles and copper wire and motors and transformers and gas pumps, where downtown streets on Saturdays were busy with shoppers, where transit buses ran from 5 a.m. until midnight and many of them were full - some packed to standing, and where now-dangerous neighborhoods were pleasant working-class neighborhoods with schools the kids could walk to safely, for us it's beyond interesting. It's like looking at the aftermath of a war.

I immediately thought of Bartolomeo Vanzetti.