January 14, 2012

Preach It, Sister...


I feel much the same way right now.  Tuesday is the start of Spring Rush, yet we're already stupid-busy at the Duck U Bookstore.  Part of that can be marked down to being a smidge shorthanded, but it really does seem like we've gotten more customers through our doors of late.  But there's a deeper, darker thing going on as well.  My knees are killing me.  Last Wednesday both of them hurt badly enough to make me weep when I got home.  Unfortunately, there's no position that I've found that makes them not hurt, just some that hurt less.  That'll make Rush Week particularly spicy! 

As you can guess from the picture above, I'm still playing Katawa Shoujo.  I've finished two paths, just stumbled into a third, and have the instructions on how to get into a fourth sitting here next to me.  Based on the two routes I've completed, I'll temper my excitement for the game a bit.  It's no longer "brilliant", just merely very very good indeed.  However, considering that it's an independently produced game made by a collection of amateurs working for free and released for the price of nothing, it's really quite astounding.

On a different note, I've now gone well over a month without a cigarette.  I think I'm handling it fairly well... I only occasionally want to massacre entire villages with my bare hands and drink the blood of my victims.

My ALCO PA post seems to have nudged my "I trains" button again.  Here's the image I'm currently using as my computer's wallpaper:

Inside a Chicago & Northwestern roundhouse, circa 1942.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:18 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 271 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Of course, one proof that you're a railfan is that you know what a "roundhouse" is, and why it is round.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 15, 2012 12:12 AM (+rSRq)

2 Glucosamine.  When my old job was killing my knees, I started on that and it really helped.  Assuming it's a pain in the joint and not the tendons/ligaments.

Posted by: Mauser at January 15, 2012 01:30 AM (cZPoz)

3 Steven: ...and why a turntable isn't just something you play records on.

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 15, 2012 01:51 AM (f/6aJ)

4 I think Rin is hilarious.

Posted by: Ed Hering at January 15, 2012 10:21 AM (4deSp)

5

Since we have locomotives on the brain, here is a railroad trivia...

Once upon a time, there was a place called the Baldwin Locomotive Works.  It was biggest locomotive factory in the Union, which meant it was the biggest locomotive factory in the US.  The Baldwin Locomotive Works alone built more than four times the number of locomotives built in the states that would make up the entire Confederacy in 1861.  That number still managed to surprise me when I first read it, even it really should not have.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at January 15, 2012 04:34 PM (Wbp5N)

6 For such a dominant company, Baldwin was strangely short-sighted.  They remained a huge player in the steam loco market until the diesel came around... at which point, they fought against dieselization.  Then WWII came around and the War Production Board told a struggling Baldwin to make ONLY steam engines.

After WWII, demand for steam cratered.  98% of all locos built in the five years after the war were diesel... and Baldwin wasn't building all the remaining 2%.  While their sharknose "F7"-style locos were good, they weren't good enough to break through the EMD domination and Baldwin went away in 1956.

They had built nearly 71000 locos.

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 15, 2012 08:40 PM (f/6aJ)

7 Isn't it General Electric that dominates the market now?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 16, 2012 12:56 AM (+rSRq)

8 Yep, ~70% of the North American diesel market is held by GE Transportation.  The remaining amount is controlled by EMD.

The GE plant in Erie, PA is home to the "world's largest air-hockey table."

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 16, 2012 01:16 AM (f/6aJ)

9 In the realm of locomotives, I was a little surprised by a chance to see one today.

Took a trip to visit the Henry Ford Museum, and they have one the Allegheny locomotives on display. It's a 2-6-6-6 engine weighing in at 778000 pounds, and reputedly the largest steam locomotive ever built.

The museum had a collection of other locomotives present, though the Allegheny was the king of the display.

Posted by: karrde at January 16, 2012 03:00 PM (ogrlY)

10 2-6-6-6...? That's a lot of... sixes. Whoah.

Posted by: GreyDuck at January 19, 2012 09:14 PM (eHm8o)

11
For such a dominant company, Baldwin was strangely short-sighted.

Actually, they weren't short-sighted, I'm sure. Clayton Christensen wrote a classic book about it, "The Innovator's Dilemma", which is commonly misunderstood, especially by people who read reviews of it. In particular I suggest reading the chapter about excavators and how the likes of Bucirus-Eerie failed.

Posted by: Author at January 19, 2012 09:25 PM (G2mwb)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
28kb generated in CPU 0.0137, elapsed 0.3714 seconds.
47 queries taking 0.3622 seconds, 287 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.