Random Sights Around the Soo

These are just shots that I couldn't otherwise classify.

 A flock of guess heading across the river.

 A cormorant zipping by.

 A memorial to Fort Brady.  This was the fort that was established by the United States in order to protect the Soo Locks.

 An osprey looking at me.

 A Coast Gaurd boat wandering by Mission Point.

 The boatnerd cruise in the MacArthur Lock.

 The Administration Building.  The water was almost perfectly smooth and I liked the reflection.

 A pontoon plane.

 The Coast Guard boat going a little faster.

 I have no idea what this is.

 A seagull.

 I think I really like this shot of the cormorant.  As I've said before, these are my happy place birds.  Even more so than seagulls.  I like seagulls well enough but there seem to be fewer cormorants, so they are special.

 Another tour boat.

 It turns out that many planes heading to O'Hare from Europe fly right over the Soo.  It gave me a pretty decent chance for planewatching.   This is a 747.

 A shot of the moon.

 A pilot boat.

 Back to the osprey.  I don't think she was happy to see me.

 I really like this shot.

 I believe this was a Royal Jordanian 787 heading to O'Hare.

And a CN engine passing by.

Angel in the Office

I will admit that I've been pretty lax in my picture a day lately.  But with a trip to LaGrange and then a trip to Washington, I think I've gotten plenty of pictures to make up for that.

Anyone, one of my co-workers had one of those sand things.  If you spin it around, it creates different patterns.  I thought this one looked kind of like an angel.

Pressure!

All grown up, with no place to go.
Psyche one psyche one...what do you know?
All your life is Time Magazine....

what does mean?

My picture for today is a picture of a pressure gage.  No particular reason.

And thanks to Billy Joel for the cool song.

Thinks That Make You Realize You're Old

I'm the ISO-14001 guy at work which means I get to deal with environmental related things.  Part of that is dealing with our recycling and we try to recycled alot of things.  Part of our business is software related which means we have alot of computer related stuff.  In many cases, old computer related stuff.  As I was looking at our electronics scrap table, I saw a stack of these and of course it made me think back to older days.

In 1967, IBM needed a way to load microcode into their computers.  At that time code was stored in the more volatile system memory, so if the system was shut down the memory was lost which meant you had to reload it.  IBM also wanted a way that they could send software updates out to their customers.  The first attempt was tape and then they developed an 8" disk called a memory disk.  It could hold 80 kilobytes of data.  This disk was released commercially in 1971.

The person who developed this disk would leave IBM and help Memorex release the first read/write floppy drive in 1972.  IBM would release theirs a year later.  The first microcomputer tried to use floppy drives but in many cases they were more expensive than the computer itself, so cassette tapes were used.  Since my dad worked for Burroughs/Unisys and would take me into work on occasion, I vaguely remember these disks.

The more familiar to me 5 1/4" floppy disk was developed in 1976 and started to get used with the microcomputers at the time.  Eventually this format would take over the 8" format.  In 1978, Apple introduced a 5 1/4" drive for it's Apple II computer, it could could store 113 kilobytes of data.  To put this in perspective, it would take 50 of those disks to store the full sized image above. These early drives were single sided and a double sided version came out in 1978.

The 3.5" disk shown above didn't come out until the early 80's.  And it underwent a simliar evolution until the standard was the 1.44MB disk.  Eventually, that would be replaced by the read-write CD ROMS and now we have various memory sticks and "the cloud".  And now, it's hard to imagine when the floppy was king.

The Things I Carry

After being inspired by another blog (which I highly recommend btw), I decided to do a posting of the contents of my camera bag.  This is mostly what I travel with, since my camera bag pretty much goes everywhere I go.

It doesn't seem like that much when it's in the bag but when its laid out like this, it looks like a lot.  So I'll start in the upper left hand corner and work my way around.  Do try to keep up.

1.  The manuals for my camera.  I don't normally need to look them up but when there is something different that I want to try, they are always nice to have.  Given that I just got a new camera (I'll get to that in a bit), there are some new features that I need to learn about anyway.
2.  A dog-eared copy of the 2012 Know Your Ships.  This is a nice little reference when asked about ships and there are other people around.  I have newer copies at home but the dog eared copy looks more traveled.
3.  A bottle of pain killers.  A few years ago, I flew to California and I had a cold.  I couldn't get any aspirin on the plane, so I figured it would always be good to have a bottle with me.
4.  A pair of wild flower identification books.  They will occasionally come in handy when I feel like identifying the wild flowers I take pictures of.  The lower one breaks them down into the various shapes.
5.  Some cleaning materials for the camera.  There is micro fiber clothe for the lens.  There are also tissue papers.
6.  The maps are Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania.  I know that maps may seem outdated in the age of the GPS but I still like to have them with me.  It is sometimes easier to get the idea of a location when I see it on paper.  However, if you look in the lower left corner, you will see my trusty GPS (or as I call it, the Yuppie Plastic Jesus).  Besides, the official state maps have information that a GPS will not give you.
7.  My 175 to 500mm lens.  This is pretty useful for taking football pictures and pictures of distant ships.  However when taking pictures of ships, sometimes they are hazy.
8.  Just below that lens is my Bomba.  It is very useful for blowing dust off my camera.
9.  Speaking of which, here is my first picture of my new camera.  It is a Canon 70D.  It is close enough to my old 50D that I don't have much of a learning curve but there are a couple things it can do that my 50D can't.  One of the new features that I like is the fact that I can connect through WiFi with my camera so that I can post quick pictures to facebook.
10.  Above the camera is a shutter release.  If you are going to do night pictures, a shutter release and tripod are very important because typically these use long exposures and both will reduce the amount of motion from the camera.
11.  To the left of the camera is a radio scanner.  I've avoided buying one for years because it is fairly easy to get information on the travel of ships.  However, since I've started to follow trains, it is much easier to track trains.
12.  Next we have M-Hat VI.  It pretty much goes everwhere I go.
13.  Below the hat, we have my other two lenses...the 75 to 300mm and 55 to 250mm.  Of those two, I am starting to like the 55 to 250mm more.  I think it is a little more versatile.
14.  I don't carry the Amtrak blanket with me everywhere, but I do prefer Amtrak to other modes of travel.

So there you have it.

The New Buffalo Welcome Center

Normally, I wouldn't take pictures of rest areas but this one has some degree of significance.

 Not too far away, the nation's first highway information center opened in nearby New Buffalo on US-12.  Soon, other states followed Michigan's lead and opened their own information centers.  This one replaced the one on US-12 in 1972 when I-94 was opened.  Michigan now has a few of these.  There is one near Monroe, Clare, Mackinac City, Sault Ste. Marie.  I'm not sure if there is one on I-69 but chances are pretty good there is one.  If you are looking for places to go within Michigan, this is a pretty good resource.

There is also a mock lighthouse here.

Crazyness on the River

I'm going to break up my ship posts with just some of the randomness seen while waiting for ships.

 A fishing boat on the way somewhere.  I think there is pretty decent fishing on the St. Clair River.  I'd imagine there's perch and walleye at least.

 These guys don't seem to mind the fish.

 It's always cool when you see a speedboat.

 And then of course, there are always seagulls.

 A boat of another sort.

 I kind of liked the name of this boat.

 This flag either means a Van Halen album or there's actually a diver here.

 Looking between the twin spans of the Blue Water Bridge.

 And here's our diver...only he's not down at this point.

And one more shot of the Blue Water Bridge.

Flotsam and Jetsam

When I took these pictures, I already had a title in mind but I didn't remember the difference between the two words.  I knew that they applied to things washed up ashore but I didn't realize that they were specific terms.  Flotsam is the floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo, although over the years I think it's come to mean anything that gets washed ashore.  Jetsam is stuff that is thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress.  The stuff you learn.  Anway...

 I wasn't going to take pictures of stuff lying on the beach but then I saw this bottle sort of washing up on shore.  Of course my imagination took over and I imagined that there was a message in it.  Sadly there wasn't.

 Just a seagull feather.  There were quite a few birds flying around yesterday.

 Just a fishbone missing a head.

 A piece of driftwood.  I kind of liked this one because it reminded me of a horn or something.

 I'm not even going to begin to imagine this story.  Somebody lost a shoe though.

 Another piece of driftwood.  I liked the way the sand was draped over it.

One more piece of driftwood.

Pinball Pete's

I came of age in the 1980's.  As a product of white suburban America at the time, it means that I spent quite a bit of time in the video arcade.  Every mall in America had an arcade.  In some towns, there were even purpose built arcades.  As home computers and consoles got better, the arcade became a dying breed.  By the mid 90's, the arcade had all but disappeared.

 I am not sure when Pinball Pete's started but I know its existence predates my time in the Ann Arbor area.  My first roommate in college was from Ann Arbor, so one night he took me to the Pinball Pete's that used to be on South William Street.  The one in this picture used to be across the street but that location burnt down.

 It has been a while since I've visited here but I decided to feature it in today's post.  So in I ventured.

 I do like the neon lights though.

 It is almost like stepping inside of a time capsule.  If you didn't pay attention to the names on the pinball machines you would think you were back in the 80's.

 A row of video machines that wouldn't look too much out of place in the 80's.  What is really amazing is how this is a representation of how technology has changed.  If you wanted to play good games, you to go to an arcade.  The console games of that era weren't that great.  But as home computers and consoles improved, this quickly changed.

 The Star Wars trilogy game there is one of my favorite games that came out of the mid-90's.  It was an improvement on another Star Wars game from the mid-80's.  Sadly, they don't have that game anymore.   This game is pretty fun though, you get to go through different scenes from the Star Wars trilogy.

 This is probably an example of one of the earlier first person shooters.  You were representing some sort of Green Beret going through a non-descript third world country.  It was kind of fun in the day but it doesn't compare to Call of Duty though.

 Another bank of video games that wouldn't look out of place in the 80's.

 I decided to play Miss Pac Man.  It was fun.  I used to know the pattern on Pac Man where I could get to about the 20th level or so.  That was one aspect of the old games, if you could figure out the pattern, you could play forever.

I remember as a kid, it was a big thing to get the high score.  It's not quite as impressive these days as there aren't quite as many people that play games like this.  If you ever needed a reason for a screen saver, this is it.  You can see the maze burned into the screen.

So there is a little bit of reminiscing.