Robert Pence

You are not the smartest person in the world. My brother is. He told me so, himself, and he's older than you so he must be wiser.

Yikes! I certainly don't envy heterosexuals' lives! :-o Maybe you and your dad can take your women on double dates. :wink:

Thanks for those links, Ken. The comprehensive Downtown Airport concept includes some of what I had in mind, and takes it farther. I had thought, "Raze 222 South Riverside, build a modern overseas-style open, bright, and airy concourse at street level, and run elevated stub-end tracks to that level so they terminate on either side of the new concourse. Add some through tracks on the existing lower level (at present I think there's only one), and let the long sleeper trains use those. Provide escalator and elevator access to from the concourse to the lower-level platforms. Commuter trains and Amtrak day trains could be allocated between the two levels according to traffic demands and track availability. I hadn't taken into consideration the improved access to CTA trains and local/regional and intercity buses, or the bigger-picture approach to improving passenger train movement through the current freight-dominated infrastructure approaching the station. Connecting Ogilvie and Union Station would add a lot of flexibility. If I remember correctly what I read once, originally there were more tracks approaching the station throat but some were eliminated probably thirty years ago.

Considering the growing public pro-passenger train sentiment and the expression of dissent with ant-train governors in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida even by some Republican legislators and mayors, the chances for real increased passenger train coverage keep growing. Because so much of the growth is promoted for the eastern and midwestern states, it focuses on Chicago's Union Station. I haven't read every post, so perhaps it's already been discussed here, but are there any plans for accomodating the trains and their passengers there? The waiting room capacity, though cramped, possibly would be adequate with more-frequent, smaller trains, but even at the current level if traffic, Union Station often chokes. The last time I arrived on the Lake Shore Limited, we arrived in Chicago 45 minutes late, missed our station time slot, and sat another full hour in the station throat waiting for access to a platform. The latest MHSRA newsletter spoke of plans for sixty daily round trips out of Chicago. The way it's configured now, I don't think Union Station could ever handle that level of traffic.

When someone is tailgating me and I see a pothole coming up, I steer so as to straddle it while just missing it with my wheels. More often than not the tailgater won't see it in time and will slam right into it. :evil:

We won't be able to recover them all but I can retrieve certain posts for users to report on SMF if they want. All I need is a Pm with the thread and a rough time frame and I'll reply with the post. A tip for formers' future reference: if you create your forum posts, especially the photo sets that take a lot of work, offline in a text editor like Word Pad or Notepad and then save them on your hard drive, it's easy to recreate them in the forums if anything unfortunate happens to them. My forum posts are copies of what I put on my site. I maintain a copy of my site on my hard drive where I can test updates before uploading them. I just edit the HTML code and save a copy of the BB code in the corresponding hard drive directory.

... because the weather starts to get nice enough that we northerners can go outside and begin to get our lives back! :-)

There's a Methodist camp on Lake Webster, in North Webster, Indiana, that used to be a Chautauqua site. The camp is still there, so far as I know, but I think most of the original buildings have been replaced. Those cottages at Bethesda are sweet. They have a barber shop! Those are an endangered species. A lot of the remaining barbers in the small towns are near retirement, and when they quit working they usually can't find anyone who wants to take over their business. People now drive to the next bigger town where there's a "salon" staffed by "stylists." In my home town there are three barbers, but all are getting close to retirement. The one I go to has a nice shop in a good downtown building, and he's the only one remaining in a shop that once had three barbers full-time and an additional one on Saturdays when the stores were open until 9 p.m. and all the farmers and their families came to town.

LaGrange is Amish country. Edit: As of several years ago, the courthouse tower still had its bell that rings the hour.

It's hard for me to vote. I was comfortable with SMF, but as I learned my way around vbulletin 4.0 I was liking it. The feature I like most on SSP is the ability to apply a border around images by using "" where "n" specifies the border width. I brought that up in Forum Issues before, regarding SMF, and it seems it doesn't exist. Sometimes I gripe about change, but overall I'm pretty adaptable. I'll support whatever choice is made, and thanks to Rich for the tremendous amount of work he has put into the experiment. :clap:

OhmyGod! OhmyGod! I've survived forum outages before, but it's been more trying to my soul each time. I hope I can survive this one. I need to find somebody to hold me and caress me and assure me that everything will be all right. :cry:

I was up around 5am this morning, somewhat regular behavior for me. The wind was blowing hard and I could hear small tree limbs hitting the house and one hit a window so hard I'm surprised it didn't break. I was reading in my recliner when I heard a loud buzz accompanied by a sustained bright white lite in the wall across from my west-facing window. On my side of the river the power lines and transformers are all in the alley behind my house, so it must have been across the river, probably a couple of primary lines that got pushed together by a gust. Several years ago I watched a transformer blow up during a wind storm. I was having breakfast in a restaurant in a small town nearby where I was installing some software and hardware. Suddely a transformer on a pole across the road went up like a Roman candle, shooting out sparks in all directions with fireballs going up in the air. Pole transformers are full of insulating oil, and it will ignite when it gets hot enough in the presence of air. The fireworks display lasted maybe a minute before it went dead, but the oil that splattered around kept burning for a while.

I had to promise never to tell, and I'd be embarrassed to talk about it now. :oops:

I've had a few questions about how I embed a copyright notice on photos, so I'll describe that and while I'm at it I can't resist the temptation to post a condensed outline of my workflow as it has evolved to now. 1. I save all my DSLR photos in Camera RAW, and all my film scans in uncompressed TIF. 2. I open RAW or TIF files from Adobe Bridge into Photoshop CS5 at their native resolution and make any needed adjustments to levels, contrast, etc. 3. My photography is consistent with my politics, in that I seem to frequently tilt to the left, so I have to correct the horizontal/vertical orientation of a lot of my photos. I do that with Filters > Lens Correction, and then click the "Custom" tab at the top of the Lens Correction menu. The resulting window lets me correct barrel distortion, rotate, and adjust vertical and horizontal perspective. 4. I save the corrected image as a STN file. STN files are produced by Genuine Fractals or Perfect Resize 7.0, from OnOne Software. The application allows greater flexibility and better reproduction that Photoshop's resizing algorithms. It's very easy to reopen STN files across a wide range of sizes, and considerable amounts of enlargement or reduction don't degrade the image or introduce artifacts. I like STN files because I can open a 72dpi small JPG for online presentation, or a 320dpi TIF file for an 11X16 print with equal ease. Because I keep my monitor and printer profiles current, I can easily create a print file without having to make a lot of test prints and adjustments 5. I process all my RAW or TIF photos and convert them to STN files as a batch, and then lock all the files to protect them from myself and my fumbling fingers in case I slip into a robotic state of consciousness. 6. I open MS Word and type a line with the first image number and copyright info. To create the copyright symbol in Word, type ©. I highlight the text with my cursor, press Ctrl+c to save it to my clipboard, and close MS Word. 7. Again in Adobe Bridge I go through the STN files one-by-one, opening each at 72dpi with a the larger dimension at 1024 pixels. In Photoshop some images need just a tad of sharpening. That especially applies to film scans (just the nature of the beast) and photos from my first DSLR. I do that with Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. Once I set the amount of sharpening that I likely will use through an entire batch, I can apply it to an open file by pressing CTRL+f. 8. To embed the copyright info I use the Text tool and a personal typeface that I created using my block printing and Font Creator 3.0. I place the Text cursor in an area with as little clutter as possible and press Ctrl+v to paste the copyright line. I select black or white for best legibility, adjust the image number, and press Ctrl+e to flatten layers. 9. Now, I can save the image as JPG. My personal choice for JPG levels is level 10; although it creates rather large files (250KB or more), I think it's the best compromise between file size and quality presentation. I may be spoiled in regard to file size, because I have Yahoo Small Business sites with unlimited storage. If I had to pay extra for any of my storage, I'd probably shrink my files some. :clap: You've been a great audience! :wink: Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Rain here since mid-afternoon, promising to continue at least until tomorrow morning with winds in the 20 - 25mph range and temps dropping into the 40s.

More personal trivia - Rome City used to be something more of a town. In the 1950s my brother and I used to attend 4-H camp every summer at nearby Limberlost Camp on Oliver Lake. The camp then was owned by Jack Wainwright, who had been band director at North Side High School in Fort Wayne when my mom and her sister attended there. He had been a personal friend of John Philip Sousa. That area isn't even good farm land; all it has are woods and rocks and swamps and the lakes. It goes completely dormant in Winter, but things do liven up some during the Summer. Kendallville isn't so bad, especially when warm weather comes around. Several years ago it got hit with a tornado that tore away the 1960s cladding from some of the downtown buildings and showed younger residents what had been hiding from them. It spurred some interest in preservation/restoration, and there are some decent facades there, an actual surviving small-town cinema, and some galleries, restaurants and shops. One of Kendallville's long-time leading industries was the manufacturing of windmills and pumps, and there's an interesting museum with working windmills of various types not far from town. Recently the Sylvan Lake Dam needed major repairs, and the lake level was lowered drastically for a couple of years while the work was being done. A number of the residents were upset by the inconvenience. It couldn't be helped; the dam had become a hazard.

Akron didn't always look that good. I remember from visits in the '80s that parts of downtown looked pretty bombed out, and it was difficult to find a good place to have dinner. I surmised then that it was because Akron was so close to Cleveland that when people wanted to go out, they just drove to Cleveland. It certainly does look as though there's been some investment.

Kinda cute - probably would look better without all that white stuff piled all around.

Pretty good stuff. Contrary to rumor, Detroit ain't dead yet.

Interesting tour.

Thanks for posting these great tours of areas that aren't midtown Manhattan. They're places I heard of as a kid during summers when Mom's friend from her public health nursing years would visit us on our Indiana farm to escape New York City's sweltering heat.

Albion is an interesting small town, and Noble County, in the heart of the Northeast Indiana lake country, is a popular summertime destination; quite a few Fort Wayne residents have summer homes or cottages there. The first photo is the old Noble County Jail, now the historical museum. I think it's only open on Summer Sundays. The couthouse was designed by E.O. Fallis & Co. and completed in 1889 at a cost of ~$102K, and the exterior remains, so far as I've been able to find out, exactly as it was built. The interior has had updates to ensure its continued functionality, but the work was done tastefully and to high standards. Maintenance throughout is impeccable. I'm not a fan of dropped ceilings and flush flourescent lighting, but I suspect it was done in order to conceal HVAC ductwork.

Wonderful! I don't think I've seen a lot on UO lately that can compare with this. The photos are excellent and intimate, and the location isn't something that's frequently shared here. I look forward to seeing more as you repeat your Korean experience.