Come on back to the caboose and get a cup of coffee [or sweet ice tea] Part IV

[dwiemer]

Early case, just checking in. I am a bit under the weather, but hope to be up to speed tomorrow. I have a friend at Georgia power who is going to sell me a GA Power Lionel set...this will be the second one I have. I may give it to my Father in law who retired from there.
Hope everyone has a great day.
God Bless,
Dennis

 

[Jonadel]

Sorry to hear about all the Windoze computer problems, glad I don't have to deal with any of that, dealing with DirecTV satellite is enough of a problem for me. Technology is wonderful----when it works.

We might be going up to 32 this weekend :thumb::thumb::thumb::thumb::thumb: You know it's been a long winter when you celebrate any thawing.

Jon

 

[Chief Eagles]

Morning. Had planned on sleeping late. Woke up at 4:30 with headache. Took some Tylenol and went back to sleep. Woke up at 7:10 with headache and right nostril running. Do not need a cold. Several at Town Hall sick. May try a big bowl of GRITS and snooze in recliner. Got to prune grape vines. Jon, we have flowers blooming here. :thumb: Meeting in Raleigh tonight. All day Town retreat tomorrow. :curse::cry: Later

 

[TomPM]

Good morning folks

It was 19 F as I headed out onto the salt covered roads this morning. It was like driving in a dust storm this morning from all the leftover salt and anti-skid. I guess after the ice storm they decided to be extra careful and put it down heavy last night. High toady will be 33 F. Tomorrow civilization as we know it will end according the weather hype-it mis-forecasters. We are in for 1 to 3 inches of snow with sleet and freezing rain starting tonight and going through tomorrow. By noon there should be a full scale bread and milk panic in the Delaware Valley.

No modeling last night. We had Cub Scout Den Meetings.

I hope everybody has a good day.

 

[jeffrey-wimberl]

Good morning.
it's 60 degrees here under heavy cloud cover with thunderstorms approaching. Expecting a high in the mid 70's with more thunderstorms this afternoon. If you need rain, come and get it. We have plenty.

Today's Weather for:
Sundown, LA 71446-6114 2/21/2008

Wind Chill: 59°F
Humidity: 97%
Dew Point: 59°F

So Far Today
High: 61°F
Low: 60°F
Rain: 0.56"
Rain Rate: 0.00"/h
Gust: 17mph E

Today High: 75 Rain and scattered thunderstorms early in the morning...then rain likely and scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. Rain may be heavy at times. Highs in the mid 70s. South winds around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation 80 percent.

Tonight Low: 58 Showers and thunderstorms in the evening...then scattered showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall and small hail in the evening. Lows in the upper 50s. South winds around 10 mph shifting to the west after midnight. Chance of precipitation 80 percent.

 

[cnw1995]

Morning all. Warmer here - 16 - I can feel the difference. Vista belongs to an inner circle of h... you get the idea. Roy, I am sure Norton is conflicting with V's built-in security utilities. I had to carefully load Trend Micro's antivirus and open/close individual 'actions.' Like Jon, I prefer Macs for home-use. And XP at work - fully 1/3 of the university's PCs can't run Vista anyway.

 

[wrmcclellan]

fully 1/3 of the university's PCs can't run Vista anyway.

Doug - how fortunate for you!

Raining lightly here today - 45 today. This means it is really cold up Nawth!

Jeffrey - good photo this morning! I am glad you can find the time to do the photos. I find it overly tedious to get them off the camera, post them to a web hosting site, and then paste URL into forum and I just can't find the time anymore.

Chief sure is sleeping a lot - you better be careful of infiltraters slipping by?

Have a great day all!

 

[cnw1995]

Chief, I hope you are feeling better. Boy, I wish it was 45 here. I wonder if I there are universities in North Texas...

I went and added text messaging to the family cell phones. Not sure whether I will regret it.

 

[wrmcclellan]

Doug - ALERT - ALERT!

Hopefully that TM plan is unlimited! If not you better prepare your kids.

At $0.10 per message after the limit - kids run over real quick. Most of their messages go like:

Hey?
RU there?
Yah!
Whas up?
Seen B lately?
etc.

Kids can send hundreds of these a day with no problem.

Our kids ran way over with several thousand messages a month. We got a $300 bill for our daughter once and negotiated out of it. My good neighbors son and my son's BF ran up $700 in one month. He negotiated 1/2 price with the carrier ($350 ow!).

 

[Brutus]

Roy and Doug - A friend did this! She thought it was all free and was texting her brother all day from work (he was moving and then moved to CA from MO and the first/only sibling to move out of state). They now have a plan. Dave (the hubby) was not too happy about this, to put it mildly!

They closed our building and sent us home since more freezing rain is coming today. I hung around for a while and scraped off windows for some of the ladies until my scraper broke!

Nice pic, Jeff! Love those cargo containers.

 

[sir james]

Afternoon to All, just checking in..
its 22 degrees and starting to cloud over, but the snow and ice is SUPPOSE to miss us. They are saying flurries, we'll see. I let a few trains exercise today and played some golf, wasn't all that excited about going anywhere today...Later all,,,,,,,S.J.

 

[cnw1995]

I was glad to have learned about the dangers of text plans from Roy. I did get them unlimited texting, photo-transfer and IM - but no downloading / emailing. I chopped their call minutes. My bride is excited to use it. I am not joining the texting and IM revolution. Brutus, that sure was nice of you. Hope you made it home safely. For once, it doesn't look like we'll get snow until Fri. night. Wait a minute, that's tomorrow.

 

[jefelectric]

Real disaster last night - upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2008 and now my work laptop with Vista will not go to the internet at all (so I guess it is superior internet protection huh?) and Norton tech help has no idea what is causing the problem. I was on the phone with them until nearly 2 this morning (uninstall + reinstall - twice). I had recurring - yet fixable by yourself - problems with NIS 2007, so I guess Norton took care of that problem by making it completely unresolvable by yourself or them. Talking to my IS support person, looks like we are going to have to regress my PC to XP, but that is a 2 day process requiring a complete wipe of the HD and then rebuild of the system by me from scratch - so today has been a long aggravating day just preparing for this.

Do not - I repeat - do not get MS Vista - it just does not work with anything, will cost you significant personal time dealing with its glitches, and and provides absolutely no advantage over XP for any normal user who just wants to do business e-mail, write and edit documents, presentations, Excel, etc.

OK - I feel better now - - -

Roy, You have confirmed what everyone else has told me. At the office we are absolutely not going there. In fact most IT departments want no part of it. BTW, are you aware that MS is now working on the next version of Windows, at this point called Windows 7. Why that name I have no idea. Maybe the original target date was 2007. sign1

At the moment I am using XP version X64 which is a patched together interim version for 64 bit processors. Vista was supposed to take care of that problem, but I don't have the nerve to try it.

On another subject, I gave up on Norton several years ago when I upgraded a computer from 98 to XP and then had to reformat and reload everything as it acted just like the problem you are having. At the present I am using avast which gets good ratings from the computer press and cost zero for home use. That's enough about computers for the moment.

We had a nice little snow yesterday afternoon. (A nice snow is one without freezing rain and sleet mixed in). Today it was Sunny but cold, but most of that snow melted to make way for what is coming tonight into Saturday, which is snow, changing to sleet and freezing rain, then back to snow then back to sleet and freezing rain. Does that sound like fun or what?

On the train front I picked up a new Railking RSD4 in Central of New Jersey on Tuesday, but haven't run it at home yet. Nice looking and will take 031 even with the 6 wheel trucks. Still working on the train inventory using MITrains software. Slow going as I am trying to put pictures with every entry. I copy a lot from the manufacturers web sites, but some I just have to photograph myself.

Working on a little project for my son as he bought a property on which to build a new office, shop and truck garage. I am doing a preliminary building design to establish building footprints for the sight development engineer to work with.

Have I mentioned that I love using Firefox for the forum as it provides spell checking as you type. This is great for us spelling challenged types.

Guess this post is long winded enough so good evening and have a great Friday.

 

[jefelectric]

but can you even get XP anymore? the wife wants a new computer but cant find new ones with xp, just vista, and we dont want it.

Ozzy,

You can still buy computers with XP, maybe not at the big box stores, but on the net or by phone it is not a problem. One company that I have purchased a lot of stuff from is New Egg. I just looked and they still list some computers with XP pro. Be sure to read carefully to make sure what OS is furnished with the machine you buy. Check out this link.

Newegg.com - Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!

Wow, that's a long link.

 

[Chief Eagles]

Evening all. Meetings over. Popcorn and then off to bed. Got 8 AM Town retreat tomorrow. wall1

 

[Brutus]

I went from an Apple IIe dualdisc system to a 10 ghz (turbo) PC years ago due to the hardware costs back them for harddrives and peripherals. I think that harddrive was like 40 MG !!!! Can that be right?

 

[wrmcclellan]

Brutus - you are right - I have a 40MB HD on the shelf here with my stack of old PCs/parts. I maintain some of this stuff as I have need every now and then to do something simple with a QBASIC program. You do not get QBASIC on PCs anymore (DOS 5.1 was the last I was told) and if you want to do some simple serial port communications you have to run an old PC.

 

[dbaker48]

Evening guys.. All this computer talk, reminds me of when I was in the industry. I sure do NOT miss it, I was responsible for new product introduction, and always was getting new hardware and peripherals. Started off with a dual floppy machine, and when got the 10MG drive, thought this will really be a big hit. Didn't even get initial production receipts before the 20 was available and then the 30. What a tread mill that whole situation was. After 8 years, had enough and left. But sure was exciting.

STILL working on my wiring, got 2 AIU's wired to terminal strips tonight. Represents over 30 wires ran and labeled. Also got initial path and hardware done for individual switch wiring. As a matter of fact I get tomorrow off to work on it. YEAH !!!


Now I have one for you, when you speak of dedication and train addiction. Went to our club layout last night, and there was hardly anyone there. One other person running trains. He has the BB and Legacy, and was having problems. I checked the wiring and noone had moved the ground wire from the TMCC to Legacy, so there were conflicting signals. Anyway, he was running the BB in TMCC and some of the Legacy features weren't working. I asked if he runs it at home, and does it respond. He said he only has a 5' straight section of track that he runs at home. Not the BB is 32" long, and only runs on a 5' section!! This same guy has some really beautiful trains! He spends a LOT of time, weathering the cars, and making unique military trains. It is very obvious he really enjoys HIS aspect of the hobby, but I would certainly try to adjust some priorities, for some operating capability.



The weather certainly looks wet for this week-end. Raining now, and suppose to continue until sometime Sunday. Saturday is going to be the worst, expecting 3 to 5 inches, the Sierras are suppose to get between 3 and 5 FEET of snow!! May certainly cause havoc with NASCAR this weekend. You guys may really be in for a lot of bad weather next week! This storm is covering the entire west coast, and there is another big tropical storm right behind it.


Hope everyone has a great day

 

[John Baker]

My research into Vista indicates that it has all the necessary anti Virus stuff, firewall etc. with it and putting Norton and/or others will just screw things up. Am on XP home edition with Avast AV. no firewall, it seems to get in the way. IE7 for this (have to tell it to spell check, not much of a problem) and Thunderbird for e-mail, spell checks as I type. I intend installing Vista after Easter.
+13C here in a wet Stockport, within 24 hrs we've had a 19C rise (34 Luddite degrees).
Lionel sleeps on.

 

[Chief Eagles]

Off to 3/4 of a day Town Board retreat. [] Listen to bull about planning the future and then not do it as it changes all the time. Could be home working on upgrades to trains. Can't work outside. Cold rain. Had some ice in the trees earlier but gone now. Have a good one.