Robert Pence

Reconstruction of US 24 between Toledo and Fort Wayne has been ongoing for a few years. The project is known as the Fort-to-Port Highway. The intent is to replace the two-lane highway with a four-lane divided highway. It's commerce-driven because of the number of heavy trucks that use the route.

So far as I know, the dome is an authentic as-built restoration of what was built in 1902. It was the largest free-spanning dome in the world 1902 - 1913. There was a small antique trolley, the real kind that ran on tracks and drew power from an overhead wire, that ran back and forth between West Baden Springs and French Lick Springs Hotel, but I don't know if it still runs. I saw it on my most recent visit to the area in 2002. The excursion trains run from the station near the French Lick Springs Hotel to Cuzco and back, about a twenty-mile round trip. They once used a steam locomotive, but they're diesel-powered now.

Excellent photos, Kyle, and welcome to Urbanohio.com. The restoration of that building is astonishing considering its size and the condition before work started. It had been abandoned for many years and the interior had been heavily vandalized. It was pretty much a ruin; a large part of the back wall had collapsed, and the four cupolas on the towers had been removed long ago when the building was used as a convent. Local fundraising efforts to preserve the building never got up enough momentum to do anything. A massive injection of cash from the Cook Group, medical device supplier, was what it took to get the job done, and it was done better than I could ever have dreamed. For those who don't know about the place, in the early 20th century French Lick was well known for its hot mineral springs that essentially were strong sulfur water. The famous and infamous came from great distances to rejuvenate themselves there, and the owners bottled the water and shipped it far and wide. To make sure that it was effective in restoring regularity, the bottled product was generously laced with epsom salts. The brand name, Pluto Water, evoked images of the lord of the underworld. The French Lick Springs Hotel still maintains its pools of naturally-heated mineral spring water. The area surrounding them smells of sulfur (rotten eggs). The hotel still is maintained with elegance and is a popular conference venue. I'm told it offers very good golfing.

That reminded me of this:

Good tour. I look forward to going back there when the weather warms up; my most recent visit was on a bright and sunny but cold and windy November day.

Zipping right along, for me.

Those really make it evident that Chicago is a city of brick and stone residences. In the areas where I've been, free-standing wood-frame houses stand out for their rarity.

Been there; nice place.

Very nice; looks like the downtown caters to an upscale clientele. I've passed through there many times over the years on US 24 and often thought to take time to look around, but never have.

There's a guy, probably forties, tall and slim, who bikes past my place between his home and his job in a machine shop. He rides every day, all year, regardless of weather, and he's quite a machine-shop wizard at taking old Schwinn steel-framed bikes and improvising specially-adapted driveline parts and cargo carriers for them. We've never actually introduced ourselves, but he stops to chat every now and then if I'm outdoors. He first spotted my old Raleigh DL-1 a couple of years ago, knew exactly what it was, and pulled up in my driveway to look at it. He's a bike nerd's bike nerd, full of energy and enthusiasm, and seems to be able to learn anything he finds useful. The other day he showed me the dual-layer wool bike mittens he knitted, and the sleeve liners and elastic inner cuffs he added to an old Pendleton wool jacket. I live beside a well-used part of the Rivergreenway, and most of the serious riders I see are all togged out in colorful lycra and zipping along on sleek titanium or carbon-fiber frames. This guy presents quite a contrast; he's a true utility cyclist with an eye for the practical and functional, and little concern for high-dollar aesthetics

Beautiful colors and light. The second one looks contemplative.

Nice-looking residential, and it was good to see the zoo; it's been a long time since I've visited it. The Toledo Art Museum is first-rate. I've been there a few times, and it's an easy place to lose track of time because there's so much remarkable material there.

That test is so f***ed! They tried to tell me I'm paranoid, and I'm not, dammit! I don't know how they found out who I am, but they're just trying to make me look bad in front of everyone on the forums! :x

It was pretty near the first. The first one had only 64K RAM on the motherboard, and mine was one of the first ones to have 256K. Also, the first one had 8-sector, 320KB floppies. Mine had 9-sector, 360KB floppies. Everything was DOS, text but no graphics, on a monochrome screen. I booted from a DOS floppy disc. If I powered up without a DOS disc in the A: drive, it would default to the BASIC that was built into the system ROM. To run Word Perfect, I'd boot with the DOS disc, and then load the first Word Perfect disc into the floppy drive to load the program. Next, I'd put the second Word Perfect disc into the drive where it would stay as long as I was using the program; there wasn't enough memory to load the entire program and have any workspace left, so from time to time the program would access the floppy drive to read overlays. When I got enough money to by a memory upgrade card to take RAM to 640K, I created a batch file that would load the Word Perfect program, initiate a virtual drive in RAM, and then copy the overlay disc into that virtual drive. That made it run a lot faster. There was a cassette-tape drive that could be used to store large files, but I never got that. Oh. And I was lucky. My residential phone line would support a 1200-baud modem. Not all of them would, and that's why the Hayes Smartmodem was designed to automatically step down to 300 or even 110 (teletype speed) if necessary.

Geez! It would pay me to haul my electronic junk there. Here, the electronic recycling drop-off charges $5 to get rid of a box full of stuff. LOL, to quote MTS...you 'whippersnapper'. I bought my first desktop (for just me...not a 'family computer') going into my first year of grad school (1993)...it was a 486, 'top of the line'. I paid around $1,500 for it. I think it had a 14400 bps modem! You're all whippersnappers. I've posted this litany before, but it bears repeating. My first (1983) was an IBM PC with an 8088 CPU that ran at 4.77Mhz. It was a 16-bit processor, but ran on an 8-bit bus. The PC had 256K of RAM, two floppy drives (5 1/4 inch disks @ 360K each), and no hard drive. Later, as technology moved forward, I shelled out several hundred dollars for a 10mb hard drive and a memory expansion card to take it up to 640K. Before the upgrades, the PC plus an Okidata dot-matrix printer (screech-screech) that used pin-feed paper, a 1200-baud Hayes Smartmodem, and Word Perfect that ran from floppy disks, cost about $5,000.

... and the Billy Goat entrance is on the lower level! Actually that's kind of a neat place to walk around with a camera; here and there it opens up into some interesting vistas. If my memory is correct, when the Greyhound Station was on Randolph next to the James R. Thompson Center, the buses used the lower level.

The rollback prices of mansions in Detroit are legendary. Just buy a big place in Detroit. Chicago isn't too far of a drive :) ... and there are plans to upgrade the tracks for higher speeds and eventually more service on the Amtrak route between Chicago and Detroit.

Great shot, Jeff!

I don't know whether you're running a Mac or a Windows machine; I have no useful knowledge of Mac. I'm running IE8 on a Windows platform, and when I'm browsing a photo thread I can press <Ctrl+> to enlarge the display, or <Ctrl-> to shrink it, to make the photos fit without lateral scrolling. If the gap between preset increments is too great, I can left-click the down arrow in the lower right corner of the browser screen and then select Custom and define my own display size.

This apparent failed "restoration" isn't in Chicago, but you probably could pick it up for a lot less than $12 million. :wink:

All the more reason to not attract attention! :wink: I'm often amused by the number of drivers arrested with a carload of marijuana, a portable meth lab, or for offenses such as minor in possession of alcohol, driving while suspended, possession of firearms by a convicted violent felon, outstanding warrants, etc., as a result of a traffic stop because of some idiot blatantly speeding, running a stop sign, or otherwise driving aggressively and attracting attention to himself.

If one is obeying the traffic laws, why should they be watching out for cops?

In most cases I was able to train my coworkers and bosses so that all I had to do to change the direction of a discussion was raise an eyebrow. I had one boss that was untrainable, though, so I quit and at my exit interview I tasked HR with reeducating him about not driving away skilled, capable employees. They did.

Posting the link to UO galleries as a sticky in the Photography section, as you did this morning, is a really good idea. I think that addresses a big part of the site integration issue.

It's not so much that agriculture has diminished in importance, but that technology has accelerated the movement away from the small family farmers who bought and sold in the local community, and toward corporate, vertically-integrated industrial-scale farming. The eighty-acre farm, or even the two- or three-hundred acre operation is no longer viable, and aggregations of thousands of acres have displaced the small operators. They purchase supplies in wholesale quantities and haul their grain to ports or rail terminals sixty or a hundred miles away with their own tractor-trailer rigs. Animal-raising operations for market or dairy production number in the hundreds or thousands of animals, again with their own processing, marketing, and feed-production facilities. Even if one wanted to operate a farm the size of most family farms in the 1950s and before, it would be difficult to find a source of new machinery appropriately scaled for that type of work, and except in Amish areas the farm stores and feed mills one would need no longer exist.