The other rant...

...I have is about O-gauge model trains. Once upon a time, they were simple things. Turn the power on, they'd go forward, and you turn the power off and back on, and next they'd go backward. Forward and backward, that's it. As I have said, I had one of those, and I gave my son one too. But in the process of getting his ready, I realized how much I missed playing with these things. They are nice and big, go round and round, and are loud AC motors. I do have a bunch of HO and N scale trains, but they are small and fragile. They have to be set up on the table, and aren't becoming to setup and tear downs. Well, I wanted a big one too. I dug out my old locomotive, and it still didn't want to go much. So what do I do, I goto ebay, and start looking at some. There are lots of old ones, but they look, well, like old ones. And the nice ones cost way too much, so I start looking at newer ones. And would you know it, I find one I like. I bid, and win. Now what? Only then do I start researching these things. And what do I learn? It's a computer dressed up like a locomotive! (Now at this point, it seems to me that I have told all about this before, so if I have, please forgive me, I'm sure over the course of my blog I'll repeat myself many a time.) Argh! Now I have to buy a special transformer to even get the locomotive to run right. So another ebay purchase. The locomotive came thursday, and the transformer came today. This thing literally has all the bells and whistles, and it smokes, goes chuff-chuff, and makes station announcements! Luckily it does have a volume knob, and a smoke off switch. And I can program it to just go forward. Only one problem, it has an internal rechargeable battery that is needed to keep and even adjust settings, and this thing is close to 10 years old, so it is dead. Now I have this locomotive sitting here next to my computer on my desk charging, just so that I can use it. *sigh* Looking at the bright side, now that I've got one, any more that I'll buy I'll already know what I'm getting into.