Still Plays With Trains

I mentioned a few days ago that I would be changing my focus regarding model railroading. I think I’ll discuss that for the next few posts.

First, take it as a given that me and trains: we be mates. I have had a fascination with trains for as long as I can remember – literally! I have an essay in the works on my history with trains that I am preparing for posting on my planned StillPlaysWithTrains website. So reviewing my experience with toy or model trains, I recall I had a Marx O gauge steam engine freight train when I was very small – not sure if it was mine or someone else in the family, nor do I know what happened to it. Christmas of ’59 when I was eight years old, I got an America Flyer S gauge steam engine freight train that I had for several years and was destroyed in our attic fire when I was in high school. When I was in junior high I saved my money and (with Dad’s help) bought my first HO train set – a Sante Fe diesel streamlined passenger train and an oval of track. I then stayed with HO for years after that. While in junior high, my Dad put together a real nice train board for me – a 4’x 8’ sheet of plywood on a 1x2 frame with a wheel, chain, & pulley arrangement that allowed it to be stored flat against the basement wall, then lowered for playing. It was very cool!

Now, financial reversals and poor choices on my part in the late 1980’s made it necessary for me to generate money so I sold my HO trains. I went to several regional train meets, rented a seller table, and sold off a collection of twenty year’s building that took five good sized boxes to store. Now that is a key point: stored. I had not had a layout since high school. I had always planned to have one but we never had a place that had room for such, so while I slowly added to my collection of engines, cars, and structures, I had to keep them in storage, getting them out every year or so to admire and dream. I should mention that the collection took a big hit in the early 80s when we moved from Tennessee to Arizona. The trailer was too small to hold everything so one group of boxes we left in my wife’s sister’s basement included the trains. A couple years later when we could finally afford to have them shipped to us it was evident that their kids had gotten into the boxes at some point: there was a lot of damage and a lot of items were just missing. I never said anything – they were kind enough to store the stuff for all that time – I just cleaned up what I could and continued growing the collection when I could.

Then came Christmas of 2005. The Tom Hanks movie The Polar Express had just come out, and the Lionel company had issued a top quality entry-level set of the Polar Express in O gauge. My sweet wife got me one for Christmas! It’s beautiful. It was my first Lionel – ever! The engine is a Berkshire (2-8-4), is highly detailed and weighs a ton! The three passenger cars are lighted and have silhouettes in the windows depicting characters from the movie. Very cool!! Makes smoke and the whistle blows. Looks fabulous under the tree. The following year Sears came out with a Dept 56 series of buildings from the movie A Christmas Story whose scale matched the train! I built a little village under the tree with the Express chugging through town. It was great. See it here. I was hooked. I got the latest Lionel catalog, bought some issues of Classic Toy Trains magazine, and began to dream about my big O gauge layout. Whee!

Here’s the kicker: for my next birthday – about a year after getting the Polar Express – my Dad made me a present of an HO gauge train set! He knew I hadn’t been doing trains for a while and thought I’d like to get back into it. He was right! [Oh, the irony! See the following posts!] However, I was committed to O gauge now, so I called him and explained to him that I was thrilled with the gift and the thought behind it, but that I wanted to exchange it and why. He was fine with it – always has been an understanding fellow – so I sent the HO set back to the internet seller and exchanged it for the two add-on cars that had just come out for the Polar Express. Very cool! The train now had five passenger cars – a respectable looking outfit. And I am a proud three-railer!! To be continued…

The Freedom of Blogging

140 characters. What can you say that has any meaning in 140 characters? Not much, I find. I kinda like Twitter for the friendly banter it engenders with the people I have discovered online – mostly at MegaTokyo – and that I seem to be connected with them in some small way. The problem I have is the restrictions of the medium. 140 characters seems to be designed for communication through texting on a phone, so it’s limited and very limiting. If someone has more to say, I find we type to the 140, then post, then type to the next 140, then post, and so on. This morning I opened Twitter and found a friend had made six posts in a row just so he could say three sentences! I mean, I was glad to hear what he had to say, it just seemed so cumbersome.

How do people handle this limitation? For the most part, the posts I see on Twitter are just shorthand streams of consciousness; and, I’m sorry, but the state of your gastric tract or what you ate for lunch are just not that interesting. It’s as if people respond to this limitation by limiting what they dare say and rarely attempt anything too involved or thoughtful. It’s become a waste of time.

I am also on Facebook, but not very often. I usually find it more frustrating than Twitter. I don’t have that many friends or relatives on my account, but some of them post all the time, all kinds of crap – by crap I mean cute pictures or videos they want to share, or level-ups and milestones they’ve reached in all the games they play. I like the pics and videos sometimes, but I don’t really care if they offed some mythical godfather in Mafia wars! Please people, don’t post that kind of stuff. Anyway, I’ll post something on Facebook and 10 minutes later it’s off the page because all these other posts just keep the front page flowing downward – it’s like a text & video simulacrum of the Matrix screens! Perhaps I just don’t use it right. I hear of people who spend all their time on Facebook, but I don’t understand what they’re doing that is so compelling. I also find the constant advertising there most irritating. Still, I guess it fills a need.

So I like the freedom blogging gives you. I can write at length on whatever topic is on my mind. I see blogs used for information sources and repositories too. It’s a valuable tool. On the other hand, I do like the conversational quality that Twitter provides – I post a comment, and one of my followers can respond in real-time. It’s nice. Feels like we’re doing something together, and we are!

Looking at these three community streams, I think we need a compromise. I think the next big app for the web will be a Twitter on steroids. We need a Twitter-type utility that allows you to post full sentences and paragraphs, say 500 or 1000 characters. No pictures or videos displayed – that would just recreate Facebook – the method of loading URLs in Twitter with the shorthand code is a good thing. Then we could have real conversations. I guess the best solution would be to leave the Twitter layout just as it is, but with more characters available for use. Also, maybe they could set it up like AOL used to be where if you were in a conversation with someone and wanted to continue but not in the public forum, you could split off into a separate chat room. That would be a nice enhancement to Twitter.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep blogging.

Daily Blogging for a Month? Good Idea!

So I saw on Kelly's blog about this initiative for blogging every day for the month of November -- see nablopomo National Blog Posting Month. For a sporadic blogger like me this sounded like a good idea and a way to get back into the habit. I’ve never blogged that consistently, even though I find when I do I tend to be more focused with the rest of my life. I went to the website and signed up and here we go!

I think to kick this off it might be a good idea to re-post the poem from Kipling I posted a few years ago that I first saw quoted in Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. It says pretty much what I need to think about right now as far as focusing on things go:

The young recruit is silly – 'e thinks o' suicide.
'E's lost 'is gutter-devil; 'e 'asn't got 'is pride;
But day by day they kicks 'im, which 'elps 'im on a bit,
Till 'e finds 'isself one mornin' with a full an' proper kit.

Gettin' clear o' dirtiness, gettin' done with mess,
Gettin' shut o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.

From The ‘eathen by Rudyard Kipling

Nicely put, don’t you think? Where I’m at right now requires a good deal of focus on my part. I am out of work again, so let’s taken it as written that I spend at least a couple hours each day searching the job boards, applying at likely-looking companies, and following leads from friends and former co-workers. I do that daily so I won’t mention it again; it’s just there, it has to be done, and I’m doing the footwork.

As I mentioned before, MLM is scheduled for her first shoulder replacement surgery on December 2nd. She is getting ready for that with help from a cohort of home care nurses and physical therapists that we are lucky enough to have coming in several times a week. She is getting some good exercise and still losing weight which really helps her pain level. It’s so good to see things finally moving forward for her surgery. I look forward to taking her back to Disney World! Her Mom was coming for Thanksgiving but has extended her stay to be here after the operation and help with getting her settled in afterwards – much appreciated! We have a hospital bed loaned to us by a family in the church so we are almost set. I just have to finish tidying up the living room and office, get rid of our old entertainment center on Craig’s list, and set up the bed in our bedroom. The fun never ends!

In order to move forward in my ‘career’ (such as it is), I need to get additional certifications or an advanced college degree (just another form of certification wouldn’t you say?). To that end, I am studying SQL for two reasons – just having a cert in SQL should improve my chances of employment, and it’s a big step toward an MCSE (super-valuable cert from Microsoft). Alternatively, as I’ve mentioned previously, I.T. hasn’t been berry, berry good to me lately. There are fewer jobs, more techs competing for them, and the pay has dropped considerably because of this – market forces at work; supply and demand; etc. So if I get back into college for a master’s program it seems prudent to focus on a different, but complimentary field. My first inclination was the Medical Informatics program at Northwestern – it seems a good direction to go that builds on my past experience but moves me into the medical admin field which is definitely not going anywhere and pays well, generally. There are also masters programs in HR that build on my undergrad degree in Organization Behavior – MLM even found a MS program in Org Behavior, so that’s another possibility. Third, is teaching. MLM and many others have always said that I would make a good teacher. Now I have taught adult classes in PC skills before, and I enjoyed that. Not sure how I’d do with kids though. On the other hand, I have taught Sunday school as well and enjoyed that a lot and was pretty good at it. Anyway, MLM found an online teaching master of arts program at USC and put me in for that. I am getting e-mails and phone calls from them now so I guess they’re anxious to get some business. It’s intriguing to say the least. Of course, before I can do any of those things I need to get employed, at a living wage, with a short commute, etc. etc. etc.

That’s enough for today. Feels good. Let’s keep it flowing.