Sad news everyone. Michael MacDonald, who we all knew as "Wanswheel," passed away July 7th. I've missed his contributions to this Forum and I'll miss the e-mails he and I exchanged over the years. Here's his obituary.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/newsday/name/michael-macdonald-obituary?id=35649638
Rest in peace Mike. Ride easy on the "Night Train" to a greater dawn.
Rest easy. You were missed and will be more so now.
Same me, different spelling!
Vince the Miningman and myself thank you so much for your sentiment Becky!
Where the hell everyone else is mystifies us. Has Mike been forgotten already?
I spend most of my time on the Model Railroader forum since I model in HO scale. But, I am a regular viewer of the Classic Trains forum, and I spent a lot of time there when I was researching Dearborn Station in Chicago some years ago.
Wanswheel was extremely helpful to me with photos and texts at that time. Quite frankly, he was a wealth of knowledge to everyone during his time on the forum. Mike was an extremely knowledgeable resource and a credit to these forums.
Godspeed, Wanswheel.
Rich
Alton Junction
Thanks Rich!
Thank YOU for the first posting. I believe his spirit will share in the joys of his family and possibly even with those of us who cherish his memory here.
I was pleased to be able to discuss different manufacturers and designs of railroad coach seats. There aren't many people who could have done that.
I missed the postings, and now I miss the author...
Peter
I commented on the 'official' funeral site, just after Vince. I recommend that all of us do that, too.
The problem Mike had with Kalmbach was an administrative matter. He liked to make long posts including nominally-copyrighted material, which appalled certain Persons Who Must Not Be Named... who told him to stop. He wouldn't. First he was moderated and then a few days later, apparently banned (no one had the courtesy to let him, or us, know). He refused on principle to do what many of us did in such circumstances -- set up a new account with a different e-mail. "wanswheel" had a special meaning to him, and if he could not post with that handle, he would not grace their site at all.
OvermodI commented on the 'official' funeral site, just after Vince. I recommend that all of us do that, too.
You know, I tried, but for some reason it didn't "take."
I'll try again. Third time's the charm?
It said to allow 24 hours for your message to appear.
Penny, I got a notification this morning, and yours is there. But Firelock's wasn't.
Perhaps you or I could post something for him with a different e-mail address?
I tried again about an hour ago and didn't see any evidence of it being rejected so tomorrow I'll have a look.
It's there now:
Overmod The problem Mike had with Kalmbach was an administrative matter. He liked to make long posts including nominally-copyrighted material, which appalled certain Persons Who Must Not Be Named... who told him to stop.
The problem Mike had with Kalmbach was an administrative matter. He liked to make long posts including nominally-copyrighted material, which appalled certain Persons Who Must Not Be Named... who told him to stop.
It wasn't so much a problem with long posts as his posts typically contained numerous images that required a lot of downloading. I suspect that a fraction of the forum members were/are on a rate limited or data capped internet service that would be rightfully upset on the amount of data used for dispplaying a thread with his posts. IMBO, he would have been better off with displaying perhaps one image and provide clickable links for the rest. With my previous 10Mbps download speed, his posts often added many seconds to page downloads.
What I did like about his posting was quickly coming up with references to some of the more obscure aspects of railroad history.
pennytrainsIt's there now
Thanks Becky! Third time was indeed the charm!
Erik_Mag Overmod The problem Mike had with Kalmbach was an administrative matter. He liked to make long posts including nominally-copyrighted material, which appalled certain Persons Who Must Not Be Named... who told him to stop. It wasn't so much a problem with long posts as his posts typically contained numerous images that required a lot of downloading. I suspect that a fraction of the forum members were/are on a rate limited or data capped internet service that would be rightfully upset on the amount of data used for dispplaying a thread with his posts. IMBO, he would have been better off with displaying perhaps one image and provide clickable links for the rest. With my previous 10Mbps download speed, his posts often added many seconds to page downloads. What I did like about his posting was quickly coming up with references to some of the more obscure aspects of railroad history.
I would think it was about the quantity of data the Kalmbach server would have had to house rather than the download speed of the users.
Unfortunately it's all academic now.
pennytrains... I would think it was about the quantity of data the Kalmbach server would have had to house rather than the download speed of the users. Unfortunately it's all academic now.
Lets face the facts. None of us appreciated the storage requirement of computers when we got our 'first' computers 20 - 30 - 40 years ago.
The first computer I ever got involved with was at work. It had 32K bytes of core memory and had a 10 megabyte disk drive that occupied the space of a two drawer file cabinet, had a 11 inch diameter platter and would crash periodically and destroy the platter, the data on the platter and some of its mechanical features in the cabinet. That computer was being used to 'operate' the B&O's Baltimore Terminal.
The first computer to enter my 'living space' was the one my ex got for her Word Processing business - its storage material was floppy disks with 75KB capacity.
My first computer, secured after the turn of the century came with a 100GB drive; a few years later it was running out of storage space and I purchased a 200GB external disk drive. Short story long, I subsequently bought a Laptop computer so I could download data from the data logger my then new race car came with. Subsequently Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP and I purchased a new desktop computer with Windows 8.1; shortly thereafter Windows 10 became available and I downloaded that since I found 8.1 as being 'flakey'. Then I made a 'Black Friday' purchase and got a Windows 10 laptop, as my frustration quotient was being maxed with my then existing laptop that was running Windows Vista. So now a days, I have 4 computers that are hooked together in a local network and act as back-ups for each other. External 4 Terrabyte drives have been added to both machines that are running Windows 10.
Have a couple of Garmin 'action cameras' that are used with the race car. Each of these have 64GB mini-SD cards as their storage. Mini-SD cards now have capacites of 1 Terrabyte and larger for relative peanuts.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Kalmbach has set the options on the Forum software so that all images are linked, not stored locally. That makes the storage requirements for all the forums together trivial by even decades-old hosting standards.
And yes, the forum package can be configured easily to host photos and files. That should indicate where some of Kalmbach Media's concerns with posts might be.
The further concern with hotlinking is that whatever site Mike hot-linked all his displayed pages has to send all the page images again whenever the page loads for any user... all of which would have to be shoveled from the providing site across Kalmbach's and the user's bandwidth. Most sites that find this a problem simply set their sites to disallow hotlinking... or complain to repeat 'culprits' -- in this case the forum, because the hotlinks mapped to it -- to have their users make it stop. A more attentive organization than Kalmbach would have put terms in the TOS indicating that hotlinking (including use of the Kalmbach hotlinking 'tool') is only allowed in posts if permission from the original source is obtained, instead of relying on the source to 'break' the link from their end.
Amusingly, Kalmbach itself has long forbidden users to hotlink to posts on its own forums, including those originally made by them.
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