Thursday, July 21, 2011 Lethbridge

6:20 am

The temperature is +11 C, with a high predicted of +23 C.

From the Environment Canada website: Today Increasing cloudiness this morning. Wind becoming southwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 near noon. High 23. UV index 6 or high. Tonight Clearing late this evening. Wind southwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming light this evening. Low 11. Normals Max: 26°C Min: 11°C.

2:00 PM Model Trains

I have been playing with the parameters of the Ship It! program. The overall rating for my setup is fairly good but I am having difficulty with the setup for my passenger and unit coal trains. I am unable to get the trains organized so that they are running with their 5 and 6 car consists.

In one sense this is not a serious problem as neither train needs to be included in the Ship It! program. The two trains do not involve any switching and simply travel between Jasper and Coaldale and return. But it would be nice to have this working.

I am still receiving a number of "warning" messages indicating areas where the parameters (eg. number of requests for a load of a particular product) can be adjusted to improve the overall scheduling of the cars. The difficulty comes in when an adjustment in one area causes a problem in another (eg. not enough cars of a certain type).

5:00 PM Puzzles

I have now finished the remaining gaps in the NYT Tuesday puzzles, primarily by looking up the answers. Most of the puzzles had about half a dozen squares filled in this way, and most involved answers that I never would have gotten.

The Wednesday puzzles are more difficult. I am able to complete about 3/4 of most of them, but some have large sections that are completely blank where I an unable to get a toe-hold on the group.