Comments on: Wisconsin to South Dakota

By: Care Bear(:

Care Bear(: — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:36:43 +0000

Hey!
I was wonderingg, you didnt happen to go on the Rapid City to Keystone train did you??
Because i did, around the same time (according to when you posted this) and it was really wierd! these too blonde girls got stuck on the train tracks on their quads!
did you see that?!
hahahaha

By: Rudy

Rudy — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:30:35 +0000

Well, certainly SV is full of tech hype, but it’s not “empty” — e.g. the chips that power the computer you use to post your comment were designed here.

The fact that you think of it as full of empty tech hype is in fact the back end of the transition. In the 80s and 90s there was, I’d say, more of a sense of really discovering brand new things. And in the late 90s it switched to be more about making money, often with empty tech hype.

Contrast, e.g., Deadwood SD when the outlaws were there vs. today’s Deadwood, which is a strip of cheesy slot-machine casinos.

My engineer friend Isaac says you might say that the Wild West pioneer period of Silicon Valley lasted from 1970 to 2000, and that it ended with the dot-com crash.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:47:38 +0000

> One thing that
> struck me about the WW is that it only lasted
> 20 or 30 years. I’m thinking there was something
> similar in Silicon Valley from like 1975-2005, a
> 20 or 30 year transition period, and I happened
> to be here for most of it.

What came to an end or finished transitioning? I only know the place by reputation, so I think of it as being the land of empty tech hype, same as it seemed to have been a decade ago…

By: Roy Kotz

Roy Kotz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:23:02 +0000

Great photos. I am originally from SD and love to read blogs of peoples trips throught the state. Sorry about the Corn Palace!

My grandfather owns the 1880 Town. He is in his 90s. and loves to hear the comments about the town. He has been a bit sick latly, however up till last year he drove the 25 miles from Murdo SD to the town every day during the summer to walk around a talk to those who stopped to enjoy his “museum”.

I to am in awe each time I see Mt. Rushmore. It is truely an amazing work of art. I hope you enjoy the remainder of your trip.

By: Rudy

Rudy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:44:09 +0000

Glad you like the pix, Zack. Rather than filters, I use Photoshop or, sometimes, Camera Raw (another Adobe product, mainly used on RAW files, but also usable on JPG files). In Camera Raw you can set the White Balance “temperature” to warm up a picture. In Photoshop you can do something similar by fooling with the Saturation/Hue menu, or you can in fact flat-out apply a warming filter, though I don’t tend to do that. The two Photoshop tricks that I use the most on my pictures are the simple Ctrl+Alt+L to “set all levels” which usually pops the picture out better, and I almost always use the Image|Adjustments|Shadow/Highlight dialog to dial up the light on the shadowed areas. I like to have the clouds show up, and a good way to do this is to set your camera’s exposure for the clouds, accept that the foregroudn will come out dark, and then fix that with Shadow/Highlight.

Devil’s Tower…soon come!

By: Zack

Zack — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:29:57 +0000

I went to all the same stops in SD when driving cross country when I moved from South Carolina to Alaska last year; I think everyone who can should take a cross-country drive in their life. Montana and Wyoming are also great, did you get to go by Devil’s Tower or the Tetons in Wyoming? I had to see Devils Tower being a sci-fi & movie geek, unfortunately no close encounters of the third kind. Montana is nice too, big sky and plateaus; even saw some bison there. The airport in Great Falls is on a plateau, airplanes look like their falling off the edge when taking off; pretty cool. One question, did you use any filters or anything on the pics of the Badlands, the colors are much more dramatic than my pics of the area. Thanks for the blogging and great books.

By: Rudy

Rudy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:52:57 +0000

I did see a herd of half a dozen bison (another word for buffalo) in Yellowstone, Gamma, but failed to photograph them.

The other photo I missed that I wish I’d gotten was a line of boxcars parked at the base of a grain elevator in the plains.

By: gamma

gamma — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:00:42 +0000

wow what i was reading this & looking at yur images what about Zappanalle in Bad doberan – anyway i got my passport NOW & would like to meet Norman Spinrad cos i have 2 go 2 Paris , France on the new train FROM ST pANCRAS & my son number 2 Dave has Gone to a stone circle & DID YU SEE ANY bUFFALO IN THE mIDWEST