Jul 31, 2020
Dust Mite inspects the new jukebox.
I finally snapped and (thanks to someone buying a fork + a rack from me) bought a mac mini to replace the first gen macbook air I’d been using as a music server after it suffered the pepsi syndrome (an all too regular occurrence with macbooks in this household!) and was no longer usable as a workstation.
This one is a 2012 mini that I got cheaply (for a mac; those things cling to their resale value like you wouldn’t believe) because the video chip had blown up and took the video output with it when it died. So this thing works (see the friendly little light!) but can only be managed by telnet and or vnc (and if I need to try and modify the disk I need to put the thing into firewire target mode and pretend it’s an external disc for another mac.) But it’s a music player, so it doesn’t need a head, and once I got it set up I could just plunk it over by the stereo cabinet and leave it be.
It’s got a 2.5ghz I5 (2 hyperthreading cores), 8 gb of core, and a 500gb SSD and no big graphics display to slow things down, so it flies (itunes playback takes ~3% of a single cpu thread) and doesn’t act like a little space heater while doing it. No pockets, but pockets (CD slots) were discontinued after 2011 and I can plug an external one in if I need to load a cd.
(And now I need to get a replacement keyboard for the macbook air so I can use it as a emergency backup macbook for the next time my main one suffers from the pepsi syndrome.)
—orc Fri Jul 31 23:59:17 2020
Taking the long boi rack out for a test ride to verify that it won’t *immediately* disintegrate when it goes out on the line. tl/dr; it didn’t, though this frame + these tires + this weather make for a hard riding combination.
—orc Fri Jul 31 16:46:52 2020
Jul 30, 2020
A freshly stretched rack, ready for a test ride and then into the paint shop (along with the fork, at which point a thing goes back into the bike mess until the next time I need something to test ride.
The rack is not tilted nearly as jauntily as this picture claims it is.
—orc Thu Jul 30 23:50:34 2020
Jul 28, 2020
A consist of E50, E47 & 2 other boxcabs at Avery Idaho, three years before the criminally incompetent management pulled down the wire and started running the Pacific extension into the ground.
—orc Tue Jul 28 19:59:11 2020
Jul 24, 2020
Dust Mite helps me scan in some old railroad slides
—orc Fri Jul 24 21:40:29 2020
And by ancient, I mean “taken when I was a teenager”; the Milwaukee Road ran their Alcos up unto the mid-70s (the great purge happened around 1975, but rsc2’s 578 & 594 until ‘77 or '78?) so people slightly older than me were able to load up cameras and drive to the corners of Wisconsin where they still operated.
I never made it to Wausau, or Eau Claire, or Winona, or up the Rock River to see any of them running (my family regularly took the state highways from Coon Valley to Viroqua, but we never saw anything operating on the branch except one time when I saw CM&N’s 1205 working the old La Crosse & Southeastern’s stub line in Viroqua during the year where it was operated as a short line) so except for when they were in La Crosse (I saw – once – 577 coming in from Minnesota with a train from either the Rock River line or Winona) either laying over at the (now demised) roundhouse or switching in the North La Crosse yard. I probably saw the 575 once or twice, but I was a kid and didn’t pay as much attention to the details except for the low noses on the rsc2m’s vs the high(ish) noses on the unmodified rsc2s and rsd5s, so I can’t be certain.
But here it is, out on the line near Wausau, bringing in revenue for a railroad with a criminally incompetent management, while the tsunami of abandonments builds to the point where all the remaining pretty locomotives will be washed away years before their time.
—orc Fri Jul 24 21:29:09 2020
Jul 22, 2020
Fortunately catnaps aren’t that long, because my tea was about to run out.
—orc Wed Jul 22 23:51:17 2020
577 on track six at Rondout Junction (on its way to the breakers yard in 1976)
—orc Wed Jul 22 23:32:45 2020
Taking a thing out to test drive my latest fork. The fork didn’t fail, which was nice for my teeth, and once I got the tires pumped up to a reasonable tension the low trail on the fork didn’t drive me to distraction. Didn’t test the nohandedness of the machine to see if the fork is tracking properly – I’ll do that tomorrow – but other than that everything worked as I wanted it to.
I need to get some thinwall tires instead of these belted commuter Pasela-alikes, because the stiff belted lyfe is really uncomfortable when matched with the upright position french fit demands.
—orc Wed Jul 22 18:44:05 2020
Jul 21, 2020
This fork is going to be fitted with Paul mini-Vs, so it doesn’t need much post. I, however, do need a little post so I can test ride it before sending it off to the east coast, so it became an experiment to see how low I can go.
35mm tire and the fork crown is 50mm wide, so there’s plenty of room for the brake shoes to back out of the way when I install and remove the wheel.
—orc Tue Jul 21 23:43:10 2020
Jul 18, 2020
Mavis helps me program
—orc Sat Jul 18 14:47:13 2020
Jul 17, 2020
Dust Mite helps me jig up another fork so I can braze it together tomorrow.
—orc Fri Jul 17 21:52:47 2020
Jul 12, 2020
No volcano here, nothing but a pointy cloud hanging out with all of the other clouds!
—orc Sun Jul 12 19:59:29 2020
Jul 11, 2020
When I’m at home, I drink tea, but when I’m helping my parents out, I drink coffee.
Oh the horror :-)
—orc Sat Jul 11 20:14:33 2020
Jul 10, 2020
Dust Mite helps me load up some custom bike parts & an ebay sale so I can take them over to the Post Office (and away from my bike mess!)
—orc Fri Jul 10 20:42:01 2020
Jul 09, 2020
My (not so) local bagel shop (Henry Higgins on Foster) was sold out by the time I got there, so I had to go to their other storefront (up on NE 19th) to get the bagel ration instead.
Apropos of nothing, the rando bag I’m using today matched the fire hose attachment on the adjacent warehouse.
—orc Thu Jul 9 21:38:36 2020
Jul 08, 2020
579 powering a very short train at what I think is Medary, Wisconsin, just at the junction where the C&NW’s city line split off from the line running north through Onalaska and points north (the track in the background is separated far enough to fit the C&NW’s line, and the bluff in the medium distance matches my memory of the bluffs north of the La Crosse River at that point.)
—orc Wed Jul 8 23:21:08 2020
Jul 07, 2020
A couple of SD600/SD660s come down the hill towards Foster Road station
—orc Tue Jul 7 21:53:59 2020
Jul 06, 2020
My allergies have kicked in (I foolishly opened up the windows at home on Sunday and all of the pollen in the PNW came streaming on in) so I’ve been spending most of my time stoned on cold medicine, but the kitter litter is running low so I needed to scoot out and get another 40 pounds of it. The basket is useful here, because it keeps the bag of litter from working its way off the rack while I’m riding back from the pet supply store.
—orc Mon Jul 6 21:25:30 2020
Jul 04, 2020
A southbound train pops over the short bridge just north of Tacoma Street.
—orc Sat Jul 4 21:32:52 2020
I’d been slowly drifting towards becoming a chonk, so I decided to start recording my food intake again. I need, for moderate exercise, ~2500 kcal/day, but it turns out I was regularly going substantially more than that per day. But, as it did before, actually writing down what I’m eating and summarizing calories eventually had the side effect of trimming my caloric intake.
Mind, when I start riding long distances again my intake is going to need to go substantially up, but that’s not happening yet thanks to the plague.
—orc Sat Jul 4 16:50:34 2020
Jul 03, 2020
Dust Mite is on holiday and doesn’t want to show you where (at my parents' house; I would have ridden down to retrieve Dust Mite if I’d realized this about 6 hours ago.) Imagine Dust Mite kicking back in the lap of luxury in lovely Milwaukie, Oregon.
—orc Fri Jul 3 23:38:12 2020
Jul 02, 2020
Another b&w photo of 577 set out at Rondout Junction (a lot of chicago-area railfans must have marched up to Rondout to get their last photos of it while it sat waiting for a hotbox repair), also from ebay, and added to my continually growing pile of rsc2m photos.
—orc Thu Jul 2 15:18:31 2020
—30—
![[rss feed]](/~orc/feedbutton.png "Atom + RSS feeds available here"){kind=small}