Robert Pence

Neat shots. That's an interesting area to roam around.

Click the "Profile" button on the menu bar at the top of the page, or click your avatar/user name on one of your posts. That will take you to your user profile. Scroll down to the very end, under Additional Information, and you'll see a link that says Show last posts of this person. Click on that and then go to the last page of that list. You'll see the link to your earliest post there. :-) To post a picture:

OK. I've posted this one before in one of my photo threads, but it's been a few years and this topic just begs for a repeat:

Why are the other two guys' faces blanked out? Did they not want to be seen associating with you? :-D

On July 20, 2004 in the "Where you went to school, what do you do" topic in Urbanbar.

David, it comes to mind that there's an herbal substance ( :wink: ) that might mellow her out if mixed with her pipe tobacco.

I'm wired enough as it is, even after cutting down from ten cups of coffee/day to two, and mixing those 50/50 regular and decaf. Even if I'm up until midnight I can't sleep past 4:30 or 5:00am, and then I wake up feeling like I've been plugged into a wall socket. At 5'10" I usually weigh in around 135, but if I get careless about my calorie intake I can quickly drop 5-7 pounds off that. On top of that, even though glucose tolerance tests show me clinically within normal ranges, sometimes I swing between the maximum and minimum "normal" levels in the space of a few hours and I feel all the symptoms typically associated with hypoglycemia. Except for my first cup of coffee in the morning, sugar is something I've come to fear; I wouldn't touch those energy drinks on a bet. For replenishing fluids and electrolytes without all the sugar, flavorings, and dyes the store-brand equivalent of Pedialyte from the Kroger pharmacy is good. A friend who's a nurse clued me in on that. For coffee I think Starbucks has good stuff, although I rarely buy a cup in the store. I buy their whole-bean decaf Verona. My regular coffee is whole-bean Nicaraguan roasted and sold at a fair-trade shop in my neighborhood for $5/half-pound. I grind them in a Black & Decker buhr mill from Target $24.95 and brew them in a Bodum French Press. Mmmmm! :-) Yep. My great-uncle rolled his own cigarettes (with Prince Albert pipe tobacco) from the time he was a teenager. It finally caught up with him, and he got lung cancer when he was 94. :|

^Appropriate allegory, Scrabble - not only single-handedly (-clawedly?) destroying rail, but in the process demonstrating at least indifference to his effect upon established infrastructure and urban centers. Neville, Although the Annual Meeting is past, I can offer this bit of possible insight into meeting fees in general. Often there's a cost for the meeting venue, plus transportation or stipends for guest speakers who come from a distance. I don't know of any passenger rail advocacy groups that have a revenue stream to cover those expenses. There's another aspect, too, and I've seen its effectiveness at Midwest High Speed Rail meetings as well, and can contrast those with the free (= free-for-all) meetings that I've attended in Indiana. The fees aren't so high as to deter people with a serious interest and possibly some professional expertise in rail operations and the expansion and enhancement of passenger service, but they effectively discourage attendance by the notoriously cheap guys in the hickory-stripe overalls and engineers caps emblazoned with souvenir patches, who will try to flaunt their self-presumed superior wisdom and present their long-winded narratives of experiences ten-times-more-fabulous-than-yours (aka foamers). Fees are a disincentive, too, for the folks who want to put everthing into the context of "when my granddaddy was a conductor on the C-and-O."

Quite a lot of modern passenger equipment is bi-directional, with a power unit on each end. It doesn't have to be turned. I suppose that the emissions issue might be addressed by using the "trailing" power unit upon arrival to push the train into the station, stopping with the power unit outside. Amtrak and commuter operations, especially in the Chicago area, already operate a lot of trains as push-pull. There's a locomotive only on one end, usually the end away from the Union Station headhouse, and a rear car with a control cab where the crew operates the inbound train. The some of the popular Hiawatha Service trainsets between Chicago and Milwaukee have a locomotive on one end and a "neutered" obsolete-generation locomotive, retaining its cab controls but without an engine and converted to a baggage car, on the other. They call those "cabbage cars," for cab-and-baggage car. The photo below shows one of those.

Really nice-looking town in a beautiful area. Although parts of rural North Carolina are on hard times, the state has focused on long-term priorities to maintain quality of life with major capital investment in infrastructure items like passenger rail, and doing it successfully.

We're getting some snow now. Just random flakes that don't amount to anything, sort of like some of my family members.

I haven't shopped these in a while, so I'm not fully up to date on what's available. I've been primarily a Nikon user for more than thirty years, but in compact digital cameras I've been more impressed with Canon's offerings. The Powershot series cameras seem to offer a lot of features and high image quality for their class. If you may want to print from your images, Camera RAW storage mode is a good feature to have; it captures a broad range of exposure data that provides a great deal of flexibility when working in Photoshop or similar software. It helps to recover shadow and highlight detail, correct color balance, and generally produce a better print. The advantages aren't wasted when making JPG images for on-screen display, either. I'm fortunate to live near a good locally-owned independent camera shop where the employees know their gear and always are willing to take time to explain features and help customers figure out what best suits their needs. If you have access to a place like that I recommend going there, even if you spend a few dollars more than you would at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or an on-line vendor. You might take along your SD card on the chance that they'd let you snap a few photos with their cameras and then take the card home to peruse and compare the images at your leisure.

Agreed. Impeachment is the bringing of charges, not the nullification of an election or removal from office. Clinton was impeached, and he remained in office because no justification for removal could be substantiated. Kasich isn't even in office yet. There has to be substantial reason to argue that he has engaged in some sort of prohibited conduct in office in order to be impeached. If there's anything in his past that would have disqualified him as a candidate, it probably would have been found and used during the campaign.

This thread is therapy for the maladjusted. This thread is more like a place for the maladjusted to reinforce each others' scary behavior. :weird:

I'm sure you meant no offense to me, a (capital "H") Hoosier, born and bred, by the context in which you used that term. :-( :wink:

Please take the political controversies over to Current Events; that section already is infested with controversy and diatribes, and we don't need them in Urbanbar, where they detract from the spirit and intent of the section! :police:

Wonderful tour! It's fascinatingly different and dense, and your photography is excellent.

I don't think bit depth affects print clarity or resolution; it only affects the number of colors that can be displayed - that is, the gradations between the primary colors, or between steps on a gray scale. I believe the difference might be evident in the detail visible in deep shadow or bright highlight areas, and much less evident in the mid-range exposure areas. Without the real scene or a 16-bit rendition for comparison, I don't think most people would be able to see any deficiencies in a well-executed 8-bit print. Jake Mecklenborg and possibly some others understand this sort of stuff better than I do. I'd be glad if they'd weigh in on the topic and explain it better. If you're going for high-dollar fine-art work, then 16-bit might be critical. Otherwise ... Keep in mind that a 16-bit file is twice as big as an 8-bit file. Where the Perfect Resize/Genuine Fractals application comes in is in stretching the limits of your camera's resolution capability. It uses a different algorithm than Photoshop, and can scale an image up more with less loss of sharpness. I can't remember now if the latest versions support 16-bit, or if they only work with 8-bit To see if you'll get a good enough 24x36 print using CS4, work up the best on-screen image can and then use the Crop tool to select a critical area for an 8X10 or 11X14 print at the same magification. Print that and examine it closely to see how the colors and fine detail look. You can even make separate test prints in 8-bit and 16-bit and compare them, if you want. Then you can make an informed cost-versus-benefit decision which way to go. There may be a trial-version of Perfect Resize that you can download for comparison purposes.

I'm fortunate to live about a quarter mile, line-of-sight across open parkland, from one of the sirens atop a tall industrial powerhouse building. It's like the WWII air-raid sirens, and may even be one; that factory was built in 1942 by the DOD for GE to manufacture aircraft turbo-superchargers. The sound is loud enough to wake me if I'm sleeping. Those things spook me badly; I'm OK with the test at noon on the first Wednesday of each month, but the sustained blast of an alert makes my anxiety and heart rate go up and I want to break and run for cover. Maybe it comes from the newsreels and drills and blackouts during WWII when I was a little kid, and the war movies that came out afterward. In the safest part of my basement I keep a radio with fresh batteries, a Coleman lantern ready to light, and a gallon of drinking water. When the sirens go off, I stop whatever I'm doing and go there.

I knew I'd posted this tidbit before, but I searched for it and found that it was when this thread was new, about five years ago. I guess it won't hurt to bring it up again. If you want to resize a photo for a very large print there's third-party software that does a better job than Photoshop. I've been using Genuine Fractals, from onOne Software, for several years. Currently I'm using V6.0. I just looked it up, and with the latest version the publisher has changed the name to Perfect Resize 7. It's very easy and straightforward to use and does an excellent job making big size changes without sacrificing image quality. List price is $159.95, and probably you can find it for less. It's well worth the price. I received an email request from a gentleman who had visited my web site and had seen a photo that really struck him, from the campus where he and his wife attended college. They had an anniversary coming up, and he was looking for a present for her. He works in a graphic arts shop with access to printing equipment, and wanted a print file for a 24X30 image taken from a crop of a frame shot with the Nikon D700 and Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 lens. I told him I'd give it a try, and it worked. I created the file, and then took as big a crop out of it as my Epson R2880 would print, just to see how it would look. It was sharp throughout without any visible artifacts and with color and contrast true to the source image. He was happy with it.

This project is just to stop erosion from the river undermining the bank at high water; sections were collapsing, and the street was endangered. The flood protection project will start in the block just beyond the barricades and run for about three blocks through the lowest portion. The design has been accepted for the flood protection, but the city can't fund the $1M it will cost. The flood wall project will constrict traffic flow, hopefully making the street less attractive as a shortcut for the suburbanites headed home from downtown after work.

It is. I took the photo from in front of my house. Since mid-August I've had a front-row seat to excavating equipment, a pile driver (the only part that made me leave my house on some days), and dump trucks arriving full of rock and leaving full of dirt. I expect that they'll finish the construction phase by Thanksgiving, and restoration of landscaping probably will wait until Spring. I've taken hundreds of photos with encouragement from the city's flood-control department, permission from the contractor, and grudging acquiescence from Army Corps of Engineers, and put many of them on my web site. After the job is done I'll re-edit to clean out some of the redundancy. Pretty awesome Rob. The houses in your neighborhood are really nice. I hope this helps with flooding and speeding this fall. This isn't really for flood protection. This spot is on the downstream side of a bend in the river, and at high water periods the river had been scouring soil from the bank and undermining the section along the street. Finally it got to where the street was in danger of collapsing. This work is to build erosion control along the bank. The flood protection area starts in the block just beyond the barricades, and the design awaits $1 million in funding to execute it. That project will restrict traffic flow and make the street unattractive as a shortcut. I've lived in this block since 1972, and the highest water I've seen was in 1982, when it came up to the base of the light pole with the speed limit sign on it. That was one of the 3 hundred-year floods we've experienced since 1978.

Nice job, Jeff, especially with the color balance. White balance usually is tricky in smaller-city night scenes, because the color temperature can vary widely among street lights, storefronts, signage, etc. I like the color scheme of the storefront, too. It looks inviting. It is. I took the photo from in front of my house. Since mid-August I've had a front-row seat to excavating equipment, a pile driver (the only part that made me leave my house on some days), and dump trucks arriving full of rock and leaving full of dirt. I expect that they'll finish the construction phase by Thanksgiving, and restoration of landscaping probably will wait until Spring. I've taken hundreds of photos with encouragement from the city's flood-control department, permission from the contractor, and grudging acquiescence from Army Corps of Engineers, and put many of them on my web site. After the job is done I'll re-edit to clean out some of the redundancy.

AEM-7 in 1996 at Baltimore: Lancaster, PA, 2008, with entomology option: AEM-7 locomotives were built by EMD 1978-1988 based on Swedish designs after a Swedish locomotive was tested successfully in Amtrak's search for a replacement for its aging fleet of GG-1 electric locomotives. EMD built the AEM-7 units using carbodies from Budd and electrical and mechanical components from Sweden's ASEA Brown-Boveri (ABB). Amtrak's first effort to replace the GG-1s, a fleet of E60 locomotives from GE, went poorly. The E60 units were a little lighter than the GG-1s but twice as heavy as the AEM-7s, and even during testing they tracked badly and derailed twice, resulting in their being limited to 90mph instead of their design-rated 120mph. A few were retained by Amtrak to pull heavy long-distance trains on the Northeast Corridor, but the rest were sold to New Jersey Transit and to a mine in the Southwest where they were regeared for freight service and used to haul coal on a dedicated line between the mine and a power plant. The last ones were scrapped by 2003, I think.