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I took a work trip to Pittsburgh, PA last week. It was for a computer training seminar, so I spent it indoors without much chance to take photos.
I noticed a rather odd thing driving up. All the way across eastern Ohio, there are signs for the city of "Wheeling", which is a small-ish city on the east end of I-70 within Ohio. Just across the border into Pennsyvania is the Pittsburgh metro area, which is much larger and would make a much more logical choice for "this highway to" signs. I presume some Ohio administrator decided at some point that they didn't want to point people to a city in aother state, no matter how large or prominent.
It was a rather dreary cloudy day, so my phone camera wasn't coping
very well with the low light. That coupled with the fact that take
these photos use-the-force point-and-shoot style meant that I didn't
get very many usable photos at all. Here are a couple from the drive
up:
My purpose for this post is this photo. I'm told this buildin in
central Pittsburgh is called "The Cathedral of Learning"; I think it's
a building in the University of Pittsburgh. It's really quite
something. I hope I get a chance to go inside sometime.
My wife and I took a short weekend vacation over the winter to the
Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg area of Tennessee. While we
were there, we visited the
Hollywood Star Cars Museum in
Gatlinburg. It has some interesting cars from movies or owned by
movie stars. It also has some other interesting artifacts, like the
Batcomputer from the 1960s Batman series:
They have a neat array of props from James Bond movies, including
a Golden Gun prop from "The Man With The Golden Gun":
Among its vehicles, it has one of the motorcycles used in "Terminator
2". It's a 1990 Harley Davidson Fatboy. I took this image of the
overall bike:
And then one quick shot of the instrument panel
Because my wife really isn't into car museums.
I late found myself looking at the second photo a lot on my phone,
looking at the speedometer and light panel:
The bottom of the panel, just below the key switch, are very clearly
warning and function lights. The red light in the lower rightis
probably the oil pressure warning light. The green one in the center
bottom is probably the "neutral" indicator light. The lower left blue
one is probably the high-beam headlight indicator. But are the other
colored things in the next row up lights, or just trim?
It took me a while to figure out why this one photo of this motorcycle was obsessing me so (meaning a couple of hours for an evening googling photos trying to find better depictions). My revelation was--I'm obsessed with instrument panels of vehicles. I'm not sure why this was a revelation. Whenever I got on a trip I take pictures of my own instrument panel, or particularly of the rental car I'm driving. One of the things that facinates me about my vintage Beetle is the extremely austere instruments: one speedometer dial, which an embedded fuel gauge, and two warning lights. When I look at an airplane for sale, I want to look at the instrument panel more than pictures of the outside of the airplane.
I found an few interesting depictions with Google image searches: an article on howstuffworks.com on the Harley Fatboy, and another specifically on the "grey ghost" on harley-fatboys.com.
Then I started doing some searches on YouTube, and ran into some interesting stuff. Here's a couple of videos featuring someone starting and running a Fatboy where you can see the instrument lights when they turn on the ignition: here and here.
After I ran into those examples, I did some more thorough searching for images, sometimes including for-sale sites. Here's a for-sale ad for a 1992 Harley Fatboy in Tennessee. If you click on the "more photos" link, the middle photo has a nice view of the speedometer/instrument cluster in bright light.
I found
a very nice image of the tank and speedo by Carl Johan on flickr:
I found some other photos on flickr,
including
this one by Stacey Warnke, which I think is the very same
motorcycle. The other photos near it in her photostream are of other
cars in that same museum. The image shows the odometer milage of 727
miles, and the page says the photo was taken on July 31, 2008. The
odometer in my photo, taken January 2012, lists has 732 miles:
One of the big pieces of infrastructure built during the Apollo moon program was the Vehicle Assembly Building. It's the really big building at the Kennedy Space Center where they stacked the rockets for the Apollo missions and also assembled the Space Shuttles for launches.
It's a really huge building, and an giant industrial space, and with things moving around inside occasionally, it's a safety issue as well. With all those issues, before recently it was a VIP-type tour that you had to at least know someone to get to see the inside of. Starting in November, NASA opened the building up to the general public. I drove down to Florida this last weekend to take the tour and see it.
It's pretty cool, and really really huge. I'm posting a few photos here. I took a lot more of the inside. While the experience is neat, the pictures don't really show much because there's no reference or scale.
Here's a photo of the outside of the VAB:
The VAB is on the left, and the two buildings on the right are two of the
Orbiter Processin Facilities, where they reforbished the Space
Shuttles after every flight. The two tall vertical grey sections on
the VAB are the doors that open to let stacked vehicles out. They go
most of the height of the building.
Here's a different angle. The next shot is goin to be from fairly
close to the building, showing roughly the area that's circled in
green on this photo.
This shows the bottoms of the two grey doors on one side of the
building. Notice the area between them, circled.
Those tiny openings highlighted in the last shot are three
double-width personnel doors. That gives you an idea of the size of
the VAB.
Now, the VAB is very very cool for a rocket nerd like me. However, I'd like to recommend the Apollo/Saturn Center at Kennedy Space Center for anyone who's even vaguely interested in space travel. It's a really well-put-together museum out on the NASA property. They have a really impressive collection. Apparently the way it works is that you take one of the bus tours to see the launch pads and stuff, which end at the Apollo Saturn Center. You can then take a bus from there back to the main visitor's center, where the big parking lot is.
The centerpiece of the Apollo Saturn Center is an actual Saturn V rocket, which was the rocket that took the Apollo missions to the moon. The first (bottom) stage of the Saturn V was powered by 5 F-1 engines, each of which developed 1.5 million pounds of thrust. This is a photo of the business end of the Saturn V there:
Here are a few goofy road-trip type pictures from the trip down and
back. Here's the interstate sign when I-75 splits off south from I-40
west of Knoxville.
I was pretty cranky on the way down, and I really horrid traffic
problems. That was apparently the spring break that everyone and
their dog was going to Florida. The rest of the pictures were from
the way back. Monday, April 2, on I-75 crossing I-10 northbound.
I saw this billboard a few times and managed to snag a photo of it.
I know the intention is that it means "We're Nuts!", but I can't being
suspicious that this is a front for were-nuts, as in were-wolves,
were-bears. Vegetable Lycanthropes! What insidious monsters would
those be!
The interstates splitting on the south side of Atlanta. I'm taking
the I-285 bypass to the west. That interstate goes very near Atlanta
Hartsfield airport; in fact, the highway goes UNDER one of the
runways.
An airliner on very final approach.
This was a very pretty cloudscape just before I turned off of I-75 in Kentucky.
It's so well-defined, it almost looks like a Terry Gilliam animated
head-of-God should pop out of and start dispensing commandments.
I went to Kerrville, Texas in October for the annual convention of the Mooney Aircraft and PIlot's association. A lot of folks flew into the convention. The Kerrville airport closed one of the runways and used it for parking space.
On Saturday afternoon, a few people took a van out to the airport to drop off logguage and stuff. I tagged along. These pictures are fun; you don't usually get to shoot photos while standing on a runway.
A panorama:
And the panorama larger.
My wife and I went to DragonCon in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend this year. It is, if I'm remembering correctly the fourth time we've gone since we moved to the southeast in 2006.
We got into downtown Atlanta slightly after 4pm, and ended up getting snarled in traffic quite a bit. We probably got delayed for half an hour. Once we were there, it was fine.
The convention was fun; we got to see good stuff. One night there was a musical performance by Paul and Storm, Jonathan Coulton, Molly Lewis, among others, which from a seeing-stuff-on-stage was definitely my highlight.
One super-neat thing: I've been a fan of Wil Wheaton's work forever. I've been following his on-line writing for 10+ years at this point. I've been trying to arrange to go to a convnetion and say hello for a while. He was at DragonCon this year, and I got to do that. Turns out, he recognised my name from on-line interactions and posts I've made to his blog, so that was a neat surprise. You can read the whole story of me meeting Wil Wheaton on its own page.
One of the really fun things to see when going to DragonCon are the "cosplay" costumes that people make and wear to the convention. I took a lot of photos of costumes I saw and I posted some of the better ones on a separate page, so that they don't clutter up my blog page. My DragonCon photos from 2011.
A couple of notes about going to DragonCon. You can book admission (they call them "memberships") long in advance, or right at the door (for more money). However, the hard thing to get is a hotel room in one of the convention hotels. There are 5 now, and they usually all fill up very soon after their rooms are announced, which is usually October or November of the previous year. So if you want to go in 2012, you'll probably want to start keeping an eye on the DragonCon web site for announcements about hotel room availability for next year. (By the by, we will NOT be going next year (2012). We have an important out-of-town anniversary to go to that's also over Labor Day weekend.)
Speaking of Hotels, I would like to put in a plug for the Sheraton Downtown Atlanta (one of the con hotels). If you have the choice, I would highly recommend it as the place to stay. It's much quieter than the other hotels. There were never huge lines for the elevators. Their staff was pleasant; the people running the restaraunts were sort of in costume. It was really a lovely time there.
I mostly visited vendors I was interested in and stuff like that at
Oshkosh, and I didn't walk the flight line looking at pretty airplanes
hardly at all. But one thing I did do is take a look at "Fifi", the
only B-29 currently flying.
On the drive back from Oshkosh to Illinois, I got to see a tow
airplane towing a glider aloft. I got a great view of it, but this is
the only photograph of the event that I got. My phone camera (the only one
I could get to easily) kept focusing on the windshield.
The blog software is working (mostly). I don't have the sub-blogs linked from the main page I just realized; I'll have to take care of that soon.
I've made this goal before, but I'll make it again. Now that I have a basically-functional blog, I'm going to post every day here for a month. I won't always have photos, but at least every couple of days have something pretty to look at.
I went to the Airventure Oshkosh airshow Saturday and part of Sunday. It was cool, what I saw. I ended up not walking around and looking at planes very much because I had specific things to do and people to talk to. So I didn't take very many photos.
One I did was some sky writing that was going on. My mother once said that "skywriting" didn't actually write, they generally just did circles. This was probably in response to something in a children's book that had an airplane producing perfectly ligible writing. This writing isn't as good as if you printed it, but it's pretty good considering it's smoke suspended in the air and is at the mercy of wind.
Here the airplane is just finishing the "G" in "Oregon", which is a pretty long letter to write on a windy day, particularly when the "E" has 4 separate segements. Most of the time when I take pictures of stuff at Oshkosh, it tends to be of specks which are too far away to see clearly. Most of the time I want more zoom on my camera. This is one of the very very first times I've wanted a wider-angle lens at Oshkosh.
