User talk:Trierites

Welcome

 * Let me know if you need help. The interface can be intimidating. Image upload on Commons is reasonably straightforward, but I suggest that you read the copyright/copyleft stuff first. I ignore the GFDL, which is better suited for text, and use the CC-by-SA attribution required, which gives me some measure of control and a bit of leverage against people who are just lifting images off the web. Take it slow and don't be intimidated by the 10,000 rules.   Acroterion   (talk)   04:06, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

"don't be intimidated by the 10,000 rules."

Riiiight.

How about this?:

Wikipedia:File Upload Wizard From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Your account has not become confirmed yet.

Trierites (talk) 05:14, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

BLEAH!

After fighting with the user-interface, I finally uploaded one file:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_Ship_Savannah_-_Reactor_Control_Room_-_Center_and_Left_Panels.jpg

Trierites (talk) 06:12, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * "Confirmed" status is granted after four days and ten edits. It's there to prevent people from uploading harmful images using a throwaway account, and to allow articles to be "semi-protected" against vandalism from such accounts. It's a way to require enough investment of time to discourage drive-by trouble. I've taken the liberty of consolidating the image categories, since Savannah has its own category, which is in turn a sub-category of most of those parent categories. Don't worry about the complication, it begins to make sense after a while, and it's best to take it slow.  There are no deadlines here.   Acroterion   (talk)   12:09, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Upload
Regarding the photo I uploaded: Is that the sort of thing that would be useful in the Savannah article? Did I upload it correctly? The user-interface is not terribly user-friendly. 8-(~ I figured I'd upload one and make sure it's correct before loading any more. The documentation in the Upload Wizard seemed to indicate that it would automatically take the location from the EXIF Data and Geotag the image; that does not appear to have happened.

Note that the photo was taken with an Olympus OM-2n on Fujicolor 400 film, so the EXIF Data is sort of suspect, but I manually edited the location and Date/Time in iPhoto.

A couple notes about Savannah:


 * You'll see that all the major subsystems on the Control-Panel are indicated in different colors,  then you turn around and look into the Turbine Room and see that the corresponding systems   are painted the same colors, which explains all the bright colors on the machinery.


 * Ashtrays everywhere. Small cigarette ashtrays on the upper decks and wheelhouse for the officers,   and honking big cigar ashtrays down in Engineering.  You can see one of them in the lower-left,   below the handrail, in the photo I uploaded.  There are two more in the corridor directly behind   the Control-Panel.


 * There is nothing aboard the ship that qualifies as a "computer". On the port side of the ship,   behind the control panel, are a couple equipment racks that each have eight-vacuum tubes,   but I coulnd't figure out what they are.  I guess everyone carried slide-rules.

Trierites (talk) 13:25, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I've formatted the above a little: you insert a colon to indent, two colons to indent more, etc, to indicate threading. Just one example of Wikipedia's non-intuitive user interface, which we're promised will change one of these days. I'm not holding my breath, but it's reminiscent of the Wordstar I used in graduate school in the 1980s. You sign your name using four tildes ( ~ ) and it inserts your name and a timestamp.


 * I've never seen anything get automatically geocoded using EXIF data, and since you scanned it from film, it won't show much anyway. I'm going to geocode my images today when I get a chance, and you can follow my example. I just try for an approximation of where I was standing using Google Earth coordinates, but since it's a ship any location coding is ephemeral anyway for the interior pictures. You did fine.


 * I noticed the ashtrays elsewhere in the ship: we tend to forget how universal smoking was in the 1950s and 60s. My parents and in-laws, who came of age in the 1940s, were prime examples of confirmed smokers who would have fit right in there.


 * I hadn't picked up on the color coding, but it makes a lot of sense, and we should get it into the article in some way, particularly if there's a source we can cite. The whole ship is something of a time capsule, frozen in 1961/1975 when no merchant ship would have any need for anything resembling a computer, even if it was a nuke. I was struck by how primitive it looked to modern eyes. Given that I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s when computers needed their own buildings, I shouldn't have been surprised, but still ... My high school teachers carried slide rules and knew how to use them.  Acroterion   (talk)   14:09, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

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 * I hadn't picked up on the color coding, but it makes a lot of sense, and we should get it into the article in some way, particularly if there's a source we can cite.

I gatherer you never made it to the Control Room, or you'd have taken pictures there. After looking around there for a few minutes, the color-coding becomes obvious and you say "D'oh!"

I just sent a message to Erhard Koehler, inquiring about the matter I emailed you about, and tacked on a query asking for a reference on the color-coding.

I suspect it was there more for the benefit of the passengers looking down from the Observation Gallery, than the engineers.

I can't picture the Watch Officer saying "Golly! There's a red-light flashing above the blue thing.  I'll go into the Turbine Room and look for something blue and see what's wrong with it!"

When I was in the Control Room, I felt I was on the set of a 1960s Irwin Allen Movie, then realized I >>WAS<< on a movie set, as everything there was done for show.

Trierites (talk) 17:08, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Somehow we missed that turn, or we would certainly have gone there. I think we went out on the deck when we should have gone down the ladder to C deck. I also should have brought my tripod for some of the interiors (or a camera that performs better in low light levels), so there's always next year. Since few ships were as consciously designed for Hollywood as Savannah, I tend to agree that the color coding was mostly for the visitors, but it's still good human-factors design.  Acroterion   (talk)   17:21, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

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I uploaded a few more pictures of Savannah.

Trierites (talk) 18:57, 27 May 2012 (UTC)