Narrow gauge discussion forum (ngdiscussion.net)

[Loggerhead]

Does anyone know what happened to the narrow gauge discussion forum? It went offline a couple of weeks ago

[Keith Hayes]

I can see itin my phone. The moderators seem to have  removed a few folks in response to a heated discussion. Must have been related to green boilers or something similar.

[Wayne Taylor]

It is still there.  Just accessed it on my PC.

[Loggerhead]

Thanks, my IPad still indicates not avail. Must be an issue on my end

[Dave Eggleston]

No problem for me at all, but it could be Safari on the iPad, depending on the release level. I had the browser start failing on various sites as my laptop aged (almost 7 years) and Apple wouldn't do any updates...grrrr. Using Chrome solved the problem for about 6 months and then...things started failing again. Had to bite the bullet and buy a new macbook and suddenly everything works. Grrr.

[Loggerhead]

Just checked, my iPad is 11 years old, my iOS hasn't been updated in a couple of years. Time to ditch Apple and get back to real computers, software

[Dave Eggleston]

I'm on a 9 month old Macbook and running just fine. It's a real computer. I worked for the other company located in Redmond for 11 years and was a Windows person for a long time. Both platforms will work just fine, both have software that expires over time forcing upgrades. It, planned obsolescence, is an industry, not company, reality. I got pissed I had to buy a new computer this year when some browser and PDF functions started to fail on my laptop...until I realized the laptop was nearly 7 years old. Hence my new Macbook.

But I had the same issue with Windows on and off over 20 years and in fact just lost several extensive documents of my railroad research--transcriptions of newspaper articles and original source documents--that I'd created, because Office no longer supports the version of software they were created with in the 1990s. Thanks MSFT. But really, mea culpa, I (and all of us) need to stay on top of updating not only computers but also documents and spreadsheets to remain usable. Heck, even this forum got caught up in the realities of technology.

Fortunately I have hard copies of those documents that I'll be retyping into Word. Nasty but at least I have something.

[Todd A Ferguson]

Scan and OCR can be a great start to converting documents especially if you type as slow as I do...

[Dave Eggleston]

Good idea, I hadn't even considered that.

But at the same time, as tedious as it seems, retyping all these the details of several obscure narrow gauges, and one very early standard gauge, has been surprisingly refreshing. The notes all date back 20 years ago and with fresh eyes and a lot more knowledge I'm seeing a lot of connections and a few answers I missed back then. So some good is coming out of the effort.