Morning all. Sparky wiring is not my thing. I avoid it.

We occasionally order old aerial images from the US Government. They have an extensive archive of the entire country going back to the 1930s. Most of it is 1950s to modern times. For years I worked with one employee via email and phone calls. Somewhere back in this thread my trip to Salt Lake City, UT parade is in there. On that trip I stopped at the government archive and put faces to names.

All those people have retired, and now it it all new folks. It appears they had some major overhaul of the system. So I am back to just another nameless customer for the new folks, and getting the government employees to do their job is something they do at their pace. Like trying to talk to the Social Security folks with a simple question or get them to do something for you. Not gonna happen quickly.

Yesterday I contacted the city planner for the next little burg over. I travel up one of their streets to get home but the rest of the world uses it for a by-pass route. ITs a narrow little street with no stripe down the middle. I have had to navigate it with a full size tour bus going the opposite way. Yesterday there was a semi without a trailer but still. When we moved in 20 years ago there were signs for weight limit and residential traffic only. Hoping to hear back from this guy.

What, you think roads should be convenient? You most likely made the planner spill or snort their coffee if not do a spit take.

Richard its a 1.5 lane road at best. Its not designed to handle heavy loads or for that matter be used as a by-pass for a left turn light on a major road.

I'm betting their maps somehow don't show that.

Possibly not but the locals all know its a tiny road.

My BIL worked for the USGS making and checking maps. He does not like driving on limited access highways. So always takes back roads and smaller highways.

Mom went with them on a trip from Rolla, MO to Disney World in FL. They took two cars so he would not have to ride with the kids making all their noise. He lead the caravan of two vehicles. He had brought his own maps from the USGS because they were the most accurate at the time. No GPS. At one point, in the middle of nowhere, he pulled over, got out of the car, and threw the map.

Kind of hard to throw the map out of the RDX. It would take a while to get the screen out. Not that I have not thought about it.

240v

Afternoon all.

45 more min till afternoon. but who is counting?

Wow, cool. I just got a call on my land line. I did not answer as always so they left a message. Evidently Microsoft is going to give me and refund for something or the other. I only have to call them back real soon. It is a shame I deleted the message before I wrote down that number.

I finally found the right place to order the USDA imagery. They have moved they office and changed the system. I finally heard beck from them, and it is one of the guys I used to deal with. He said many of the people were moved to other offices and jobs.

The good news is I now have the current email, and phone numbers to contact them next time.

As long as they don't do like the library of congress and move all the images to getty images with much steeper prices.

You can contact the national archives and they will only give you a list of what they have. If you want a scan of the image, you have to hire a certified Archivist. They can go into the archives and they have to bring their scanners with them, and scan the negatives. Any scanner that you can carry in, is a consumer level piece of junk. Our old photogrammetric scanner was something that took two people to physically move, and many hours to set up and calibrate, and it cost over 70 grand.

I had a client actually pay me to get a negative scanned from the archives, and it was obvious it was scanned on a low level scanner, and it was not sharp at all. And they scanned it at 300 PPI, and just "rezed it up" with Photoshop which only makes the file bigger and not one iota better.

Getty may well have scanned a lot of stuff in, but they don't control the National Archives. The archives got out of the business of providing anything except a list of what they have. They require an archivist to access the originals. Totally screwed up system. Likely all the politicians getting rich.

Glad I only used it when they had a LOT of stuff scanned in plenty of res and was available via web/ftp, you could download and use free.

Progress...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1562882428.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1562882542.jpg

I could really use that reproduction dash pad right about now. :rolleyes:

looks great.

Not bad at all