On the Railroad Track at Paulden, AZ

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paulden AZ, railroad

I went with Gary when he got called into work. Here are some photos of what happens on the railroad tracks. Taken in Paulden, AZ

The first image was taken by laying my Nikon D80 on the track. Note the Memorial Day weekend storm clouds.

A raven in flight, likely looking for food. These are scavangers, so it may be looking for railroad kill.

Hyrail truck as seen from the track. These vehicles can run on the track and the road. The railroad wheels lift up under the truck for highway travel.

Burn rope being used to expand the track. A pull apart was being repaired, to do so the rail had to be expanded to fill the pull apart gap. Heat from the burn rope expands the steel rail and thereby closes the gap. When the gap closes, railroad workers use a bracket (you can see one in the image above BTW) to connect the 2 sections of track. A 1500 foot length of rail can be expaned as much as 1 foot with this technique. For today’s repair about 2 inches of expansion was needed.

Click on any of these to see a larger image.

Mint and iBank Financial Software for OSX

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financial software, ibank, mint

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my search for personal financial software for my Macintosh.

Mint, a financial web site, works with any OS. I’m using this site once a week or so to get an overview of where I’m spending. My family income is easy, I have a job and so does Gary. I do like this site and I recommend you check it out. It’s free. Now they are adding investment accounts. I’m in the beta program, I’ve used it all of one time so far. There is a great view which lets you see performance of your investments vs. the Dow or S&P or Nasdaq as a multicolored line chart. Extremely cool.

iBank, an OSX financial program. This is my electronic checkbook and credit card account tracker. It can import Quiken .qif files, which my bank and cc card web sites can produce and download. This program works well, worth the $60. It can save your data in an encrypted form (do this!, especially if you use a laptop) requiring a password to open the datastore. The UI is pretty and very Mac-like. iBank has an investment account piece which I have not been able to figure out, but that’s not what I’m using it for. If you use OSX and have had problems with Quicken for Mac, try iBank. I think there’s a limited free trial.