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Good evening all.
I just finished putting my Atlas S2 back together.
I just bought it and thought I might as well take it apart and clean it.
Since I rather new to railroad modeling I don't have a vast amount of experience with locos.
Most of my experience is with old Athearns.
This one was a very surprising change.
The frame is something heavy but does not conduct electricity.
The gearboxes for the trucks are metal.
The motor is an open frame 5 pole.
After I finished cleaning and lightly lubing I hooked it up to an old power pack.
You could not hear this thing run. Quiet.
Sounds better than my 2 Kato Alcos.
Well I got the cottage programmed in then just for the heck of it added a porch and front, back and side yards for a total of thirteen program blocks amounting to ninety-seven lines of combined code or the equivalent of one hundred forty three individual lines of code. Either way it was a busy day and now I have a little bit of a headache. I put one of the Indian artifacts in the cottage as well as a very nasty little troll. For my next trick I'll put in the lake house next door. then the neighborhood will almost be complete. I also have to figure out where the hole in the fence around Mr Addams's garden will be and then decide if the character will go in or something will come out.
Getting back to the secret room in the metal house, I think Gomez's layout will be in there.
I also programmed in the lake house complete with porches, front, back and side yards. A total of nineteen blocks on that one but the descriptions are pretty lean. I'll go back later and flesh them out.
Welcome back Bob! Good to see you have the mobility to go where the decent-paying jobs are.
. . .
The full-system scan I ran on my 'puter last night took 18 hours to finish - "no threats found." I guess they don't consider pop-up ads a threat - my Firefox browser was so badly hosed I couldn't even find the Tools/Options submenu. I wound up uninstalling both non-MS browsers and re-installing Chrome. Apparently since I have a GMail account, all my bookmarks had been automatically saved online and retrieved when I re-installed Chrome. That browser is back to normal now, finally!
Busy day for me today. This morning and earl afternoon I worked on Native Fury. I got the cottage and it's grounds programmed in then this afternoon I keyed in the program blocks for the lake house just down the road from here. It makes a fine addition to the game. Naturally it's location and directional orientation is changed as are the order of some of the rooms and no personal information of any owner, past or present is listed, not even an address. I have one more location to add for part two. It's a home that burned down many, many years ago. When it's added in that'll wrap up part two.
My father called this evening and said that he and my step mother will be home sometime tomorrow.
Time for me to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.
High temperatures will range from 42 to 46 degrees with clear skies. Winds will range between 10 and 14 miles per hour from the west. No precipitation is expected.
Good morning. It's 61° with 72% humidity. The high will be 75° and feel like 78°.
I spent the last few hours programming in the information for the last house in part two of Native Fury and the gateway to part three. I had intended for part two to be smaller than part one but it didn't work out that way. As you can see in the photo below the size of part two is nearly at the limit of a 64k machine and likely would be too large for a 48k machine without a RAM expander.
My father and step mother are due back sometime today. It's a five or six hour drive from where they were last night. My father will likely be pretty wiped by the time they get here.
Because some of you are in Alabama, I'll post this photo I found while surfing the internet. It's in Birmingham.
The picture must have been taken in the mid-1950s from the condition of the buildings at Terminal Station.
I still get upset that they tore down the station and made a parking lot out of it.
Greetings from Rainy Howell, NJ: It actually sis rain here this morning, Now the weather gurus are debating as to whether or not we will have frost overnight. It really doesn't matter as our growing season ended last Friday, when I pulled out the remaining tomato and pepper plants from the back yard garden.
Nice to hear from Bob. Good luck with the job.
Timmonium is this coming weekend. Still debating if I want to drive down, or not. I really don't need anything, but we could use a day out.
*@$!# Devils blew a lead and fell apart again last night!!!! Time for a new coach and some younger Defencemen who can handle the puck!
Today's a good day to work on the layout, maybe chase those derailment causing gremlins away.
I am running 16 GB of RAM these days. According to my calculations 16,329 MB x 1024 = 16,720,896 KB or about 348,000 times that 48k. I paid less for this 16 GB than I did for a 16k add on module for my VIC 20 back in the same era as your IIe is from.
Yep. Memory cost a lot more back then. On the other hand computers didn't require a lot of as they didn't have a huge OS stored in RAM as they do today. Back in the day (1988) I bought an expansion kit for a Panasonic computer (XT compatible) to upgrade it from 256k to 640k. The 'kit' was a set of RAM chips and an instruction sheet 3"x5" that had three short lines of text. It cost nearly $170. The last time I bought a memory stick for one of my newer computers was about four years ago. It was a 2GB DDR3 stick and I paid $38 for it new and that wasn't on sale. A little rough math puts my HP at home at having around sixty-seven million times the RAM of my 128k //e. It would take a whole lot of the little RAM chips in use back in the 80's to hold that! I estimate a bit over 8.3 million unless my math is wrong and it probably is. Like Einstein math has never been my strong suit.
I still have my first computer.
A RS color computer 6809 CPU 800Hz.
4k ram upgraded to 32k.
Never bought the 5 1/4 disk drive(s)that when with it just used a cassette player.
600 baud.
My first computer was an Osborne System One. It had 64k RAM, a Z80 CPU driving a CP/m OS (CP/m 2.2), two 5.25 disk drives and a five inch screen. I bought it in 1981 but sold it a year later when I picked up two brand new special ordered Apple IIe's. That's right. Two new IIe's nearly a year before they hit the public marketplace. Problem was they had buggy main boards (revision 'A' boards). Both boards were replaced with revision 'B' boards within the year. Both were 64k new but I had one expanded to 128k and a Zilog board was installed for on-board CP/m. That started my attachment to IIe's. I've always had one since that time. Now I have three model A2S2064's, all 128k and I'm looking at picking up a A2S2128 Platinum.
Anyway, about the, Rivarossi 0-4-0, is it HO, does it have the Walcherts valve gear, have you had a chance to test run it and if so how does it run? Also what are you asking for it? As if I need another one.
It runs well, I got the glitch in the valve gear straightened out. Cleaned and re-lubed everything and ran it on my DC test track. Actually ran through some stock #6 Atlas switches without stalling. As you can see, pizza cutter flanges, and 3 of the 4 steps have been broken off. Cal Scale does make them, if I was gonna keep it I'd grab a set
I couldnt find the smokebox front, but I did have a similar one that I massaged to fit
Shoot me an offer via PM if you are interested, otherwise it goes to ebay or the Great Scale train show in Timonium this weekend with me!
Well my father and step mother got in about three hours ago. Except being tired from the long trip they're doing fine.
No further work on Native Fury apart from that this morning. I have to come up with a grid and flowchart for part three, the final chapter. I haven't yet figured out where that's going to take place. At the end of part two the character opened a trap door in a closet and dropped into a shimmering swirling vortex. When and where he ends up is anybody's guess.
Time for me to call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.
Good evening. It's windy and 45 right now, heading for the mid to lower 30's overnight.
I got a weird email from my ISP, accusing me of having the conficker virus on my computer. I replied and asked them how a Mac could get this, and am waiting to hear back from them. Seems if one of my Macs has this virus, I am in violation of their terms of service, and they will cut off my internet access until I take them to a reputable computer shop to verify they don't have it. I don't know how they can verify anything of the sort, since all their detection software and methods are for Windows machines (Macs can't get this virus, even if they tried).
