Web-cam

DREADFUL!

The mighty MAC.

About 6:30 p.m. (Wednesday, October 17, 2007).

The vaunted Web-cam at the mighty Curve is getting worse-and-worse.
The housing is so bad it throws the auto-focus off — i.e. it focuses on the housing instead of the tracks.
And then there are the bugs (see picture).
Bugs swarm all over the housing, and march across the picture. So often what we see are bugs obscuring a train.
Well, okay so the poor unattended web-cam is a-swarm with bugs — perhaps box-elder bugs that are swarming our area.
But the out-of-focus is frustrating.
I offered to replace the housing (can’t cost that much), but nothing ever came of it.
I figure that’s only fair. —I have that web-cam on in the background every time I have my rig on — every day.
Sometimes it goes on the blink, but I can accept that. It’s technology. (There’s a “Winbeam” logo on it. That tells me Gates.)
What’s irksome is poor focus thrown off by that awful housing.

Horseshoe Curve (the “mighty Curve”), west of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (It has a web-cam, and I am a railfan.)

“Gates” is Bill Gates of Microsoft. My siblings all use PCs with Microsoft Windows; and loudly claim that anything else (like the OS-X Macintosh I use) is inferior.