Robert Pence

At Dover, it often carried the smell of salt marshes, and sometimes it was so thick you could taste it. We had the biggest mosquitoes I've ever seen, too.

I was referring to posting photos on Urbanohio.com forums and making them appear with borders. For example, on SSP I can use to get a 3-pixel border around my photos. On my web site I use HTML tags; <img src="{image}" border="3"></img> On UO I went through the Forum "Help" section and didn't I find anything that will create a similar effect. No big deal if it's not possible. I just think it sets photos off better against the background.

Is it possible to apply a border to an image? I looked in "Help" and didn't find anything, and tried stuff that worked in other places and it didn't work here.

Updated the exterior views of the tower and added some 1986 photos from the top, for comparison.

Neat shots, sort of ethereal. They remind me of my time at Dover, although the terrain there is low and very flat. The base is near the bay and marshy lowland, and the fog would come creeping along the ground and increase in depth until it was maybe ten feet deep. Sometimes it would get so thick you couldn't see anything at street level, but from a second-storey window you could look out across it and see a clear sky above. I remember riding my bike at night as the fog came in, and watching my front wheel cut a wake through it just like a boat going through water.

Nice! The countryside is beautiful once you escape suburbia, but I remember the air quality as being horrendous in Phoenix when I was there. From South Mountain on a weekday morning, all I could see was the tips of the tallest couple of buildings peeking above a valley full of brown goo.

Absolutely right. The insurance I carry on my rental only takes care of my loss if the joint burns down (it came close last December). It doesn't cover any of the tenants' possessions.

About thirty years ago I was acquainted with a process engineer at GE who worked out of corporate headquarters as a consultant. His passion/hobby was statistics, and when he was away from home on a job, he'd while away his down time at the local public library gathering information on some subject that caught his attention. His latest project had been efficiency in American agriculture. He said that most figures extolling the efficiency of US farming were really talking about productivity; the number of man-hours of farm labor required to feed some number of people. His analysis compared energy inputs with energy outputs, and he included both direct (fuels, chemicals, fertilizers, etc.) and indirect (machines, tools, structures, and vehicles) energy inputs. He concluded that in the earlly 20th century, when most farm work was done by animal or human muscle power and many farm tools were either handmade by the farmer or local artisans or were simple horse-drawn machines that were used for many years or decades, and when crops were fertilized mostly with animal manure, weeds were controlled with simple cultivation or hoeing, and pest control depended largely upon crop rotation, every calorie of energy input to farming, on average, yielded about three calories of energy in food. At the time that he did his analysis, the increased reliance on complex machines that have a comparatively short life cycle and use great amounts of highly-refined fossil fuels, plus very great amounts of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers derived from petroleum and natural gas, meant that each calorie of food-energy output required about thirty calories of energy input, mostly either directly or indirectly from fossil fuels. His conclusion was that in terms of energy yield versus energy consumption, American agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century was about ninety times more efficient than it was at the time of his study. The intervening thirty years since I talked with him have seen even more consolidation and industrialization in farming.

I hadn't picked up on that, and I googled it to find out; it's fascinating. From what I read it's mostly being used for industrial refrigeration to store frozen foods and other materials at temperatures below what can be achieved with conventional compressor-driven HCFC systems, with substantially less energy use. I read about portable units that run off 12V DC, used for transporting materials that have to be maintained at very cold temperatures. It's not much of a stretch to see that this will become mainstream in residential and commercial refrigerators and air conditioners. It's expensive now, but as market builds and draws in more competition, volume production methods will bring the price down to consumer levels.

If you can find out how to make an imaginary boyfriend, let me know. Assuming that's better than a fantasy boyfriend, that is.

Great photo tour! I've never seen Kent, and overall it looks very good; there's some handsome housing stock, the campus looks good, and Fred Fuller Park looks like something I'd really like to check out.

Agreed. Reliable, frequent 110mph service would be pretty damn spectacular compared with what most Americans are used to at home. Even 79mph with predictable on-time running, toilets and heat that work in cold weather, and four trains a day instead of none or just one in the middle of the night, would pack people onto trains as fast as rolling stock could be built to accomodate them. The money would be better spent adding second and third tracks to existing heavily-used single and double-track freight routes, than building costly exclusive-use tracks for true European- and Asian-style HSR. But we've said all that over and over on UO. And provide heated/air-conditioned waiting rooms with restrooms and updated train-arrival info, either from an agent or from a digital reader board, Instead of a plexiglas bus hut with no doors, facing on a wind-swept asphalt platform lit by freeway lighting on thirty-foot poles, where the eastbound train stops on the track farthest from the platform and if the engineer misses the narrow paved walkway across the tracks, passengers alight into snow-covered ballast rock and try to get to the platform without serious injury. Sorry. </rant>

That town sounds like a real bummer. I think I like this trailer park better.

I've seen a Crosley Icyball in a local museum, although they have just the cooling unit and not the refrigerator cabinet it goes with. You could buy the kerosene heater shown in the illustration, or you could heat it on a regular kitchen stove. It was a gas-absorption unit with something in the ball that retained heat to keep it going for a while. Once a day on the stove kept it cold for 24 hours. Crosley made conventional refrigerators, too, and radios and small 2-cylinder cars that might be considered the forerunners of today's tiny urban autos. As late as the 1940s many midwestern farmers lived off the grid either because commercial utilities hadn't reached their area, or because they couldn't afford to connect. Some of the gadgets available to those who could afford them were precursors of what a lot of people now think of as new technology. Winpower Incorporated, now a manufacturer of gas-, diesel-, and gasoline-powered generators, started with 12-volt windmill generators that could be mounted atop a windmill tower or on a short tower atop a roof. It charged batteries that could provide nighttime lighting in a farmhouse or outbuildings. I'm getting far afield from the topic; I'll stop now.

Unless there's considerable investment in new nuclear generating facilities, the cost of electricity will rise along with the cost of fossil fuels. Nuclear plants are ghastly expensive to build, and they won't get any cheaper as the prices of materials and energy climb. There is an option for air conditioning that doesn't require electricity to operate, other than the motors to circulate cooled air; the ammonia absorption cycle, driven by a heat source. It's what's used in propane-fueled gas refrigerators in recreational vehicles and in some Amish households where kerosene may provide the energy. It's the principle behind the earliest air conditioning in railroad cars in the steam era, when steam from the locomotive's boiler provided the heat. In its simplest form it has no moving parts and uses environmentally-benign ammonia, hydrogen, and water. It gets its energy from heat, and operates in a closed cycle so the ammonia and hydrogen recirculate continuously and don't need to be replenished. In today's market ammonia absorption refrigeration is more expensive to build and install than a conventional compressor-driven system using HCFC refrigerant, and when electricity or petroleum fuel provides the heat it's less energy-efficient. Using solar heat, though, the operating cost is nearly zero and the hotter the day, the higher the system's output.

I propose the creation of a Maumee Valley Autonomous Region, including the watersheds of the Maumee, St. Marys, St. Joseph, and Auglaize Rivers and their tributaries. The region will take in a considerable portion of Northwest Ohio and Northeast Indiana, and after we restore the canal system for energy-efficient transport of bulk commodities, we'll become an industrial powerhouse with control of a major shipping gateway. What's the point in all that if you're not going to spank? I was thinking I should buy a ticket to a Tin Caps game just so I could play in our new ballpark's splash pad.

< :speech: > 1. The no-load speed of an AC induction motor depends upon the current frequency, i.e. 60Hz. You could reduce the voltage to 50 volts and keep it at 60Hz, and the motor would continue to run at full speed so long as no load is applied. A too-small or damaged extension cord or a corroded plug won't carry enough amperage to let the motor deliver much power though, and it will bog down and/or stall under load. 2. When sharpening a blade, you have to be sure to remove the same amount of metal from each end of the blade. Otherwise the blade will be out of balance and will cause the mower to vibrate. Eventually it will damage the motor bearings, and the blade could even break and become a dangerous projectile. A blade would have to be reallyreally dull to slow down a mower very much, provided the mower is getting enough power. Note: Electric mowers are not designed to cut very tall grass; it the yard gets out of control, you may have to cut narrower strips the first time around. </ :speech: >

I've used an electric for years, and really like it; no gasoline to store, no fuss to get it started in the Spring. Just plug it in and go. Heavier cord would be my first thought, and check to see if the plug is bent or corroded. Sometimes the prongs can build up corrosion that interferes with good connection; polish them with steel wool or fine sandpaper, and make sure they're making solid, tight contact. If they're bent, they could be loose and not contacting fully.

The kids may complain about excessive force, but they got off easy. Firefighting equipment was standing by, and there are few devices that can clear a street like fire hoses. They're mostly non-lethal, but not entirely; depending on the pressure used, they can deliver a cold drenching or knock the wind out of you and send you flying. Aimed low, they can mow down a mob by knocking people's feet out from under them, sending them sprawling in a torrent of cold water.

I'm not epileptic, and some of those damn near caused me to have a seizure!

Gosh! I'm surprised that Randall Terry and his Operation Rescue haven't found some excuse to join that alliance!

Black-on-white or white-on-black, either one is more contrast than my eyes like. On my web site I picked a "lightslategray" background with black text. For me, the background works well with both black-and-white and color photos, too, especially when I use black borders. I'm running a ViewSonic G225fb (21 inch) CRT graphics monitor that I calibrate every month or so, and I've noticed that my background renders warmer (less blue) on the CRT than it does on my Dell laptop's LCD screen. I never click hackers' links; I regard every one of them as a potential Trojan Horse vehicle. I run SuperAntiSpyware and AVG's paid version of anti-virus and firewall, but I'm not a real tech wizard and even with normal levels of protection I'm still leery of what kind of stuff a hacker might have embedded that will mess with my computer or give him access for whatever purpose.

Excellent. The mural is one of my favorite pieces. In the early sixties, parts of Center City were a zoo at night. The area around City Hall seemed to be mostly a meat market. The courtyard in the the center of City Hall was open at night, and one time as I walked through there some guy came up and started showing me photos, pimping young guys. I was pretty sure I recognized a photo of one guy from the base where I was stationed. In the mid-sixties when the riots broke out, they were using the City Hall courtyard as a holding and processing center. All the entrances except one were blocked off, and at the one entrance they built a ramp where they'd back up closed trucks and herd the "passengers" into the courtyard like livestock. Center City was full of activity all day long and into the night then. It was crazy, but didn't seem all that dangerous to me. When I returned in the late seventies, I was shocked to see many vacant stores and very little activity on the street. At night it didn't seem safe except in the vicinity of a few nightclubs where there were people around. It's remarkable to see that vitality is returning to the area.

I love me some sweet, narrow alleys!

My love affair with Philadelphia began in 1963, and although we've been estranged for several years, my feelings have never diminished. By the way, one of the first sights that greeted me on my first arrival in Philadelphia was this: I believe the first operational demonstration of a PCC was in Cleveland in 1937.