Coffee Shop XXXIX-9/21/2013

[IronBeltKen]

Say Ken,
What exactly is this 'Keyspan' your talking about? Is it something connected with NCE?

David - Keyspan is a line of serial adapters made by Tripp-Lite LLC. Their model USA-19HS USB-to-Serial adapter has been proven to work successfully for interfacing NCE command stations with home computers [e.g. PCs and Mac's] that use DecoderPro, plus this is the only adapter I've seen [so far] where the vendor explicitly includes Windows 8 as one of the operating systems they make device drivers for.

 

[Bill Tidler Jr.]

Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Sunday, September 29, 2013

Temperature in TIPTON IN

High in the high 60s.

 

[blownoutcylinder]

Good Morning

Mostly sunny this morning..turning dull this afternoon with 30% chance of showers...

Heading off to church a little later and then some yard work later on...maybe...

Have a good day!!

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 75° with 88% humidity. The high will be 85° and will feel like 93°.

with a

Looked at the weather radar a little while ago and saw a line of thunderstorms stretching from Arkansas to the Gulf Coast making it's way across the lakes region of Texas and moving to the east. Looks like everything from Shreveport to Lake Charles stands a good chance of getting wet today.

I've already taken my morning meds that insure I'll be a healthier(?) and nicer person today. I'm not too bad without them. I just have a really short and highly explosive temper and people generally wish to be elsewhere when it makes itself known. Guess that's the American Indian half of me mixing with the bits of the British, Irish, French, Scot, German and Welsh parts of me among some others all mixed together in one sack. Oh well, you work with what you get. Maybe someday everything we do and say each day will come in a little pill.

Well Swepco (local power company) has already ticked me off this morning. They missed the timing for the switchover to one of their other generators and it resulted in a two second outage. I don't know what made me madder, the fact that it happened or that it was only two seconds. I didn't throw the computer out the window so the meds must be working.

No plans for today. Maybe the itch to work on one of the F3's will strike, maybe not. I'm hoping that my niece will go over to my place sometime today and come back with a couple of Wal-Mart bags full of DVD's.

Looks like there was a bit of excitement at the northwest turnout.

 

[railfan]

Greetings Model Train Dignitaries and normal people as well. It is now 76* degrees and partly rainy in the hinterlands of upper Waldoonia.

Last night I stumbled upon an auction for a bundle of used atlas turnouts in fine condition, close to ending. The short story is I won them, and broke my own record, paying less than $3.50 each shipped! It's perhaps a bit odd.....but I like collecting these code 80 turnouts with the built-in actuators......as there are ten different versions made since the 1960's. All work well.....except some of type nine which are said to have point rails made too thick......causing wheels to BUMP when passing through. Thankfully, I have not run into any of these problem units.

 

[kbkchooch]

Greetings Model Train Dignitaries

Wut? Where ?

 

[railfan]

Wut? Where ?

I was using this reference loosely. Lol!

 

[railfan]

If those Atlas turnouts are more than 20 years old they are most likely code 100. I also bought all of mine on the bay (all C 100), and paid much less than $10 each shipped.

True for HO........but mine are N scale.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

A little while ago my sister and her daughter were working upstairs when they noticed there's a leak in one of the skylights. At this point it's just a seep but like all leaks it'll progressively get worse. So that's another item on the repair list. With all this rain we're getting here I'm gonna get a real workout getting out to the car tomorrow for my trip to Oakdale. I have a doc appointment there tomorrow afternoon to get an evaluation on how my knee is doing. It's looking like it's going to rain all night and all day tomorrow, probably into Wednesday. Tonight we're expecting around half an inch hour, possibly more. The Lake Charles area is already getting twice that. Glad we don't live down there.

 

[tootnkumin]

I was using this reference loosely. Lol!

I was a bit loose this morning

 

[kbkchooch]

I was a bit loose this morning

Izzat where the screen name came from?

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Calling it a night early as it's been a busy day. Tomorrow morning my father has a doc appointment in town and I have one in Oakdale early in the afternoon. He'll have to be finished with his by noon at the latest in order to make it to mine on time.

Didn't do any work on the F3's today. In fact nothing MR related got done. My sister and niece did bring me some of the DVD's from my place. Four Wal-Mart bags full. That's two racks worth. There are sixty-six in all. Among those are 'Thunderball', 'Tomorrow Never Dies', 'Jurassic Park', Jurassic Park: The Lost World', 'Jurassic Park III', 'Unstoppable', 'The Train', 'Golden Eye', 'The World is not Enough', Eight of the Harry Potter movies, all six of the 'Star Wars' movies, 'The Terminator', 'The Running Man', 'True Lies', 'Total Recall' (Arnold S.), 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom', 'Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade', 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls', 'AVP', 'Star Trek' (Chris P.), 'Star Trek Nemesis', Gone in 60 Seconds' (1974), 'Extreme Trains' (all episodes), xXx, xXx State of The Union', 'U571', 'Robocop Trilogy', 'The Longest day', 'The Lost Room'. That should be good for a while. If it isn't there's still six more racks over there.

 

[bnsf971]

Calling it a night early as it's been a busy day. Tomorrow morning my father has a doc appointment in town and I have one in Oakdale early in the afternoon. He'll have to be finished with his by noon at the latest in order to make it to mine on time.

Didn't do any work on the F3's today. In fact nothing MR related got done. My sister and niece did bring me some of the DVD's from my place. Four Wal-Mart bags full. That's two racks worth. There are sixty-six in all. That should be good for a while. If it isn't there's still six more racks]

Back when we were living in or trailer, Ibought three of the 300+ CD carrier/holders. I removed the DVDs from their clamshell containers, and placed them in the CD caddies. The DVDs, along with labels, now take up not much more room than three large phone books, are very portable, and protect the DVDs.
The toughest part of the operation was sorting them. Initially, I opted for alphabetical order, but later switched to genre.

 

[Trussrod]

Defining, 'Keyspan'.

David - Keyspan is a line of serial adapters made by Tripp-Lite LLC. Their model USA-19HS USB-to-Serial adapter has been proven to work successfully for interfacing NCE command stations with home computers [e.g. PCs and Mac's] that use DecoderPro, plus this is the only adapter I've seen [so far] where the vendor explicitly includes Windows 8 as one of the operating systems they make device drivers for.

Hi Ken,
Ok, now I understand what your referring to. Tripe-Lite, as I was familiar with them in the past made a fairly decent Surge Protector although APC was far better in an actual Lightning strick experence.

I'm unfamiliar with the serial adapters they make but as Karl says it could be faulty or maybe justs needs to be pluged in a few times to ensure good contact?

That sounds like somewhat of a specialty item from what you say.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

 

[Trussrod]

Ah, so. I see.

Mine are actually now O scale, ~36" inch gauge. The area my railroad was located in had small trees, so they used more, smaller, ties.

Oh, Ah-So, very interesting!

 

[GarryCBQ]

Howdy ...

Ken in Maryland .... Good, Bad, Ugly.... I'll stop with the Good. Glad the turnout problem was fixed and tracks are functioning okay at the steel mill.

Barry .... Sounds like a bad night of operations with the pile-ups.

Jeff .... Speaking of pile-ups, that photo is a messy one.

Stoker.... The Ah So sauce is funny.

Here is my GE 44T at work at the scrap yard. The engine was a night mare to convert to DCC, and I would never do it again with that kind of locomotive. It's the old Bachmann 2-motor. It actually runs okay now which is a miracle.

 

[Bill Tidler Jr.]

Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Monday, September 30, 2013

Temperature in TIPTON IN

High in the low 70s.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Back when we were living in or trailer, Ibought three of the 300+ CD carrier/holders. I removed the DVDs from their clamshell containers, and placed them in the CD caddies. The DVDs, along with labels, now take up not much more room than three large phone books, are very portable, and protect the DVDs.
The toughest part of the operation was sorting them. Initially, I opted for alphabetical order, but later switched to genre.

I have around forty I did that with when I switched from VHS to DVD about ten years ago. I soon discovered however that I like being able to see the titles at a glance instead of having to shuffle through them looking for the one I want. So I've just been leaving them in the cases ever since. Even though my trailer is small (8x25) there's plenty of room for the 4x4x1 bock case and the wall mounted racks I use. Even though I almost never watch them anymore I still have a lot of my old VHS tapes taking up space in the book case. There's three rows of them on two shelves. Tossing all but the pre-recorded ones would free up a lot of space for more DVD's but I'm not to that point yet.

*

Jeff .... Speaking of pile-ups, that photo is a messy one.

That one wasn't staged for the camera either. I took the photo right after the derailment occurred. You might have noticed there was no truck under the end of the boxcar? That's because it was laying next to the track between the wall and the turnout. The screw that held the truck on had fallen out!

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 70° with 100% humidity. The high will be 85° and will feel like 93°.

with a

Looks like a long day ahead. My father has an appointment with his doctor this morning in Leesville and I have one with one of my doctors early afternoon in Oakdale. He'll have to be done with his no later than noon to get to mine on time traffic permitting. It might be an interesting day after all.

Yesterday my sister and my niece brought me a bunch of DVD's from my place. So last night I was able to watch something other than news reports, congressional meetings, weather, lackluster sit-coms about pointless people with pointless lives, etc. It seems my father picked every one of the worst channels when he got his cable service. The only ones I can find that have any merit are TNT, USA, Discovery and The History Channel and it seems every time I check TNT and USA they have a long commercial break going that totally kills any interest I had in the program, and forget about watching in the morning unless you want to see how you too can cook perfectly, get you laundry perfectly clean, clean your kitchen in a flash with a tiny sponge or clean your carpet with a vacuum that doesn't need a filter or a bag. My mother bought one of those. Looks great, moves easily, costs a ton of money, leaves the dirt in the carpet. Guess you don't need a filter or a bag if it isn't gonna pick up the dirt. But anyway, last night I finally had my choice of what to watch. I wanted to get to sleep at a reasonable time so I put on episode one of Extreme Trains, Coal Train. At the end I was still wide awake because something phenomenal had happened. I had found it to be interesting. SO I set the TV's sleep timer for thirty minutes and changed the channel to one of the 24/7 news channels where they were saying something or other about our wonderful president (catch the sarcasm there?). I was asleep in five minutes.

 

[blownoutcylinder]

Wut? Where ?

WHO/!?!?!

-----------------------------------------------
Good Wet Morning from DullFogVille.

Whereupon it is dull, foggy, misty and showery, sometimes all at once or in bits and pieces...high supposed to get to 68 low tonight 53....

Some bits of bafflework from work needs done then off for a few weeks..need to see a bunch of doctors...again....