Robert Pence

Isn't that weird? I experienced a couple instances like that. Driving in a blizzard, ended up in a ditch. A guy in a truck with a hitch comes out of nowhere and pulls me out. My friends and I got lost hiking in Red River Gorge. We're all about to pass out from having no water and we approach some dirt rd. and flag down this guy had a 5 gallon tank of water in his car for no reason! I know what you mean, its great ro know there's people out there who are willing to help strangers. Too many people are afraid and assume bad intentions. It took me almost fifty years to unlearn my upbringing (always assume the worst about other people until they prove otherwise, and set the bar high). I had tense relationships with co-workers and neighbors and in everyday life because my default attitude was defensive and I had "guilty until proven innocent" expectations of strangers. After a couple of years of contentious interactions in tech support for a large, diverse client workforce I learned that I was getting back what I was giving out. My technical competence was highly regarded by peers and managers, and it took me a while to understand that my boss had an ulterior motive when he assigned me to mentor a young black woman who joined our group. Charlene needed to get up to speed on the client's specific system configurations, but in a larger sense she mentored me. Charlene always approached clients, even the hard-bitten, no-nonsense tough older admin assistants who worked for the senior executives, with a relaxed, friendly demeanor, and in most cases even if she wasn't able to immediately resolve their technical problem, she left them disarmed and, if not smiling, at least not scowling. On return visits they greeted her like a friend, and took to asking for her by name when they called the help desk. It would have taken a pretty tough case to provoke her to any kind of negtive reaction. She demonstrated to me that the Golden Rule applies to more than business ethics, and what you expect of people is pretty much what you'll get.

Great-looking abandoned industrial complex. I think there's more to Cleveland. It has a prominent place in Pentecostal Christianity as headquarter of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and I think that's the context in which I first heard of it. What's shown in the photos looks clean and well-kept.

Superb thread, Marc. Your photos really show off the town, and the collection of intact historic facades is remarkable.

I used to go through almost two weeks of misery every time I got near poison ivy. Finally someone told me that doctors usually can take care of it, so I went. He gave me a cortisone shot and a prescription for some sort of lotion that they compounded at the pharmacy. In less than 24 hours the itching stopped, and the lesions were gone in a few days. I'm guessing the lotion probably had cortisone in it, too, but I don't know. For off-the-shelf remedies that help reduce the discomfort, you can take a high-potency B complex and apply a hydrocortisone ointment like Lanacort 10. That's effective especially in the early stages of an outbreak.

Very lush and green.

Nice! They have to fire those Shays hard because of the unrelenting tough grades on that railroad, and the volume of smoke on the ascent is spectacular. All except Big 6, the big Western Maryland engine, are hand-fired coal burners, and the fireman has to stuff coal into the firebox at more than two tons per hour for two hours. Those guys have to be tough as nails. I've wanted to go to railfan weekend, but never made it. The engines pull cars up the mountain for photo purposes, but for regular tourist excursions they push, and I've seen videos converted from film in the logging days where they're shown pushing the log cars. It's to prevent a runaway in case a coupler breaks.

Perhaps Dayton could captilize more on its bicycle-related history. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics by profession, and did the development and design work on their aircraft in the bike shop. Dayton used to have a very good serious bike shop, Steve's, on Salem Avenue. The neighborhood suddenly got much rougher, and by the late seventies he had the windows mostly boarded up although the business still went on. By then he had mostly switched to silk-screened sports apparel. I doubt if the store is still there. For a long time his store was one of the few in the area that carried quality frames and components, and some of us from Fort Wayne used to make the long drive there to buy good gear from someone who knew his stuff and wasn't a snob-jock. In 1977 I bought an Eisentraut frame from Steve's and built a bike using most of the salvageable components from my wrecked Peugeot PX-10. That's the black road bike I still have.

Pennsylvania thunderstorms can be awe-inspiring. The mention of them resurrects a memory from nearly fifty years ago, when I was stationed at Dover AFB in Delaware. My parents had attended a convention in NY City and we arranged to meet up at Strasburg as they drove home. We had dinner at one of the Amish barn restaurants (Plain and Fancy Farm, I think), and while we were there a spectacular storm arose, with towering dark clouds, a lot of brilliant lighting, window-rattling thunder, and big raindrops splattering down by the bucketsful. It was only then that I realized that I had never witnessed a thunderstorm at Dover. We got torrential rains that quickly disappeared into the surrounding marshland and sandy soil, but I don't recall any of them being accompanied by thunder and lighting. I think Horseshoe Curve, on the old PRR route near Altoona, would be a great place to witness a thunderstorm. The panoramic view from there is impressive.

Adobe DNG (Digital Negative) Converter yields files that are smaller than my original Camera RAW files and that retain all the original data and can be opened in Photoshop's Camera RAW and manipulated just like the NEF files written by my camera. DNG converter can convert all the files in a folder without requiring file-by-file user intervention. You might try that on a few sample files to see how much it reduces the file size. It's a download from Adobe. The time required to upload large files over the internet depends on the speed of the receiving server as well as the speed of your connection, and uploads are almost always slower, often a lot slower, than downloads. If you're working with a lot of large files, I don't know of any way around that. That's why I suggested burning them to DVDs and shipping the physical discs. Disc mailers are inexpensive at Staples or Office Depot, and if you put those in a box or bubble pack there's very little chance of damage to the files.

A couple of options come to mind: 1. Yousendit.com - You can send files or folders up to 2GB and they arrive in a recipient's email inbox. They have a 14-day free trial, annual membership is $49.99. I've used this to send large print files, and it worked well. 2. Burn them to DVDs and FedEx or UPS them. I don't recommend US Postal Service for that; for some reason when I've mailed discs (even first class) they've almost always been delayed, sometimes for weeks, or lost. I don't know if priority mail would eliminate that problem.

Fast for a populated area!

Excellent. The haze is only evident in the distance shots; for the nearer ones it diffuses the light enough to fill in the shadows and eliminate harsh contrasts. Compare: 1985:

Well said. If it wasn't for the state of Indiana being the custodian of NW Indiana counties' taxes to support the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (http://www.nictd.com/), which supports the South Shore Line, Indiana would be the same color on this map as Ohio.... ... and NICTD does a first-rate job. The last few years they've pressed hard to replace obsolete bridges, modernize signaling systems, and upgrade the catenary (some of it sixty years old) with an up-to-date constant-tension system to improve performance and reliability. They've pushed hard to get everything they can, while they can get it, because they're aware of growing pressure to reduce state and federal funds that will be available for infrastructure work.

I sort of envy you that experience, but I doubt I ever would have had the physical strength and stamina for it. I've watched barge tows locking through on the Ohio River, where they had to break a tow and make two passes. Those guys worked hard and moved fast, and it looked like there was a high potential for getting killed by one false move. There's tremendous tonnage on motion, and it doesn't change speed or direction very easily.

Good eye-pleasing variety in building styles and ages.

Fascinating photos! That's a lot of water, added to a place that's already wet. The most striking image, IMO, is the pipeline bridge across the river. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on, there.

... and - heres a biggie - how many children to have ... I immediately thought of my neice and her husband and their friends in upscale suburbia, all staunch adherents of the Quiverfull movement, who drive large SUVs and vans to transport their burgeoning broods of home-schooled future Christian activists and missionaries to events and activities. Inexpensive fuel made their lifestyles more attractive, perhaps even attainable. Most of their breadwinners win the bread in banking, finance, and real estate development, all fields that sooner or later will feel the pinch as motor fuel prices inevitably climb.

I think of Indiana and Ohio as the Bermuda Triangle of progressive ideas.

Quite nice, and those beautiful summertime rural Pennsylvania skies!

Before I retired in 2000 I did tech support for PC users at a financial services/insurance company, and I loathed laptops. The problems weren't so much inherent in the machines, as they were caused by the users, mostly agents. There was physical damage from rough handling - open the car door and fling it across to the passenger seat, knock it off the desk, drop it down a flight of stairs, etc., and corruption because they'd take them home and let their kids mess with them. We'd go and check it out and find out that the kids had installed games, screen savers carrying viruses, etc., or even hacked around on them. One agent's kid had tried to install linux. Desktops weren't immune from employees' kids, though. One morning we had a rash of calls from one department where many PCs were booting up slowly, failing to load applications, spontaneously rebooting while in use, etc. Our first thought was that someone had brought in a cute screen saver with a virus and shared it with their co-workers - that happened more than once. What we found was that the PCs were missing memory modules. It turned out that one employee's teenager had been hanging around after hours waiting for his mom to get off work. He had a buddy with him, and they obviously had planned ahead because they had tools with them. They had stolen memory modules from as many PCs as they had time for. The kids were students at an expensive private Christian school.

Yes. I tried several times to get in last night around that time and a little later, and it wouldn't come up. This morning, it zips right along. :-)

In the 1970s, I believe, Barnesville was threatened with obliteration by open-pit coal mining that was advancing toward it - or was that Woodsfield, not far away? What ever became of all that? I remember seeing film on TV of the movement of one of those giant strip-mining draglines across a major highway to open a new mine in the vicinity.

Barnesville is a gem, pretty much unspoiled by commercial sprawl. Maybe it's because the topography doesn't have much room for big-box stores and their parking lots, and/or there's not enough population density in the area to attract them. I used to drive through there a few times every year en route to a friend's backwoods place on the Ohio side of the river across from Sistersville. It's nice to see that Barnesville has retained its charm. Edit: I remember making a mental note once to return during the Fall Pumpkin Festival, but I forgot or was busy when the dates rolled around. Still sounds like a good idea for a lively traditional country fair.

Interesting theater. It has suffered deterioration from neglect, but it's largely intact in that it hasn't been vandalized or stripped; the elaborate wall sconces and chandelier are still there and haven't been smashed and the windows are at least partly there. That could be a real gem with a lot of work, including restoring the decorative painting that it likely had in its day.

But I'd feel lost without my almost seven-foot desk full of technical-looking machines all hooked up with wires! :-D