While watching Jim the Realtor's videos, I came across this.
I was curious. I have never seen such an empty toll road, so I looked around. This is San Diego's South Bay Expressway. You folks riding the Sam or the Westpark every day might be interested to see the freebies the owners of the South Bay are handing out. Imagine the HCTRA giving you two weeks of free rides if you sign up for an EZ Tag. And can you imagine people buying Sam Houston Toll Road t-shirts and coffee mugs?
Betcha there will be some financial problems in the very near future.
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8 comments:
Paul writes,
Nothing happens, or doesn't happen, without somebody being rewarded. Governments love problems, that is how they grow. But, in truth, we have few problems, so it's critical that government grow, make, sponsor problems. Now with private partners as in that freeway, private capital has politically tied its self to government power. That is called 'rent seeking'. For an example....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123992516941227309.html
Never heard of that toll road Lou, it must be way south of me. I still manage to take bike and train combination to work on days my schedule allows.
I did some quick math on the housing front. My house is still conservatively valued at 25% above purchase price (9 yrs ago). The mortgage is half retired at 4.6 % fixed). Still not a bad investment. My wife and I are thinking buying some buildable property in the mountains.
A while back, you were into digitizing old photos from what I presume were prints and negatives. If I emailed you would you give me advice for doing the same, specifically whether it's worth buying equipment? I'm clueless about the matter.
The topic diverges...
Lou, don't just send private e-mail if you have info on digitizing. Post your experiences! Please? I've got a decade of slides that I really ought to digitize. I've considered sending them to scancafe, but since I haven't even started the process, I'm interested in any alternative.
And back to toll roads. I had the pleasure of taking the Pennsylvania Turnpike recently. Wow, prices have gone up in the last few years. But I have to admit, it's been widened nicely and is no longer the speed-racing deathtrap that it used to be on a dark, rainy night. I also took the Dulles Greenway a week ago, and that price went up a lot, too, from what I remember.
'tis the way of toll roads these days. Am I becoming an old geezer because I'm old enough to remember when tolls were meant to just pay for the road to be built, and once those bonds were paid off (admittedly many years later), they removed the tolls? Never seems to happen that way anymore.
Someone else asked me about that. You need a scanner that accepts slides, with a special backlight. Mine wasn't incredibly expensive, but I haven't seen them at BB or Fry's in a while. I have the Epson Perfection 3170 that I paid something like $200 for. Once you have the scanner you need to have a lot of free time on your hands because it is SLOW. But the end results are worth it.
Once you've saved each file you need to edit it. I use Photoshop, but Paint.net works almost as well and it's free and very simple to use. Some people like GIMP, but it has a pretty steep learning curve.
I have an HP Scanjet 4370. Several years old. Best advice is to set the dpi pretty darn high, and remember to clean the slide or negative first.
As far as the toll roads, you should see Denver's. They close the toll booths at night there is so little traffic, and just take a picture of your license plate and mail you a bill later. It's driving the tourists crazy. But they need the capacity for the concentration camps under the airport.
Lou,
Does that kind machine allow you to turn negatives into "positive" jpegs? Or is it just for slides?
CL, sure does, or you can use the photo editing software to do that. In fact I scanned some negs last week. Works pretty well.
Lou,
Cool! I'm going to Best Buy tomorrow to see what's available.
Thanks!
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