Free Equipment Removal and Russian Santa

On my website, I advertise "Free Equipment Removal" whereby I remove obsolete equipment. Usually it is old heavy obsolete metalworking machinery and infrastructure. Like lathes and pumps and piping and such.

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This time, it was something else. A nice younger gentleman called me and asked if I could remove some food equipment that he had to get rid of today.

I said sure.

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Two hours later I was done.

What that stuff in the above picture, is a new Scotsman ice bag cabinet, as well as a used "Ole Hickory" natural gas meat smoker. I kept asking the Russian Santa, called Ded Moroz, for something like that smoker, for years. Ded Moroz brings presents for the New Year, so, I think, he finally heard me and got me this on Dec 30.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus24626
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DAMN, Ig. I've been meaning to ask you this for years now:

_When_ are you going to learn how to process graphics for the web? Your images are all huge (5k x 3k pixels) and multi-megabyte. I pare a graphic like that down to 1024 largest dim and dice it to maybe

100kb. Each is done in under ten seconds, and each loads in seconds. Yours take nearly a minute on my 4mbs DSL to load. I realize that some pictures will need to be large to show details for a sale, but several smaller snippets from one would work better for you, I'm sure. Consider Photoshop or another image processing prog.

That's a great Christmas bonus you got for yourself.

Way cool. Did you spend money on wages to help pick it up, or was it solely your job? I'd consider that money well spent, either way. What's the new Scotsman going to net you on eBay (or wherever)? JES Restaurant Supply has 'em for $8,653.84 Bwahahahaha! Merry Christmas!

Reply to
Larry Jaques

I don't see much of a market for Hickory-Smoked Ice Cubes during winter, but that was a great deal for you!

MikeB

Reply to
BQ340

I did consider this very deeply.

I very strongly believe in high resolution and quality of video and images. 320 pixel videos make me cringe.

I feel that on most websites with pictures, the pictures are way too small to be useful. They are economizing on bytes that cost next to nothing, at the expense of clarity and ability to zoom in.

I think that Scotsman sells for $3,200 brand new. I will probably get

1.5k for it. i
Reply to
Ignoramus24626

Score! We love our smoker. I use it all year around. Smoke a roast for 6 hours and it falls apart. I smoke corn on the cob and whatever. Just figure the time at the temp and put it in near the end.

Nice bucket on the side for grease trap.

Now for a nice Pecan tree to fall down in the ice to fetch the smoking wood! Or a plum. Or go to a big box - and they have bags of cherry.....

Mart> On my website, I advertise "Free Equipment Removal" whereby I remove

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

Nice. What wood do you use?

Yes, that makes washing the smoker very easy. I already cleaned it up some today.

Anything but apple...

i

Reply to
Ignoramus24626

Forget photoshop. There is a free program that would work perfectly for Igor (and the rest of you) called IrfanView. Tiny little chunk of code that works wonders as a viewer.compressor, and even limited editing (like color balance, redeye rmoval, etc)

Reply to
clare

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Nice page - there is "No BS" flavor to it.

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt

I'll second that. Great job, Ig.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Thank you! I did try to impart that flavor.

One of my sources of inspiration on how to write websites for working people, is Vannatta Brothers forestry equipment website.

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i
Reply to
Ignoramus24626

And thank you, too.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus24626

"Ignoramus24626" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

Can you fool Baba Yaga into stealing the stuff you don't want?

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

I use hickory, cherry, pear, sugar maple, apple, and grape. Depending on the meat.

Reply to
Steve W.

I'm sorry we disagree so strongly on this. In my other life as a web designer, speed of a site was of utmost importance, and still is to me and many others. You may be on 50mbs cable now, but not everyone is.

I agree. And have you seen the "videographers" out there with their phones? Most are less stable than Parkinsons afflictees. I get sick trying to watch the majority of YouTubers.

So process larger pics for your site. Simple. 500kb is much better than 4mb per pic, and you lose no relevant detail.

I no longer view all your pics (limiting to one or two) for a project because those cheap bytes take so damned long to download on my mediocre DSL connection. Crom help those on dialup, like Jim.

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Isn't this your machine? Or is this a larger cousin?

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Those pictures are way too small to impart detail, Ig.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Prolly not. There's scrap metal money to be made there.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

I either skip the pix or switch to my 100kb/s cellular modem. Usually they weren't worth the bother unless I have a good answer to a problem they clarify.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

On 12/30/2015 7:17 PM, Ignoramus24626 wrote: ...

...

But certainly it's a cost to those of us who otherwise might look at 'em, if that's your intent. If they're there only for your entertainment, so be it, but I quit at about 1/8-th of the way thru as even w/ my wireless connection it was going to be several minutes to see even one full image. There can't be that much useful info in a snapshot of a smoker, sorry.

Reply to
dpb

FWIW, my 60 Mb Internet connection downloads the largest of those photos in a little less than two seconds.

The image size issue is something we wrestle with all the time in online magazines. At Fab Shop, we use an underlying PDF file, so our photos are JPEG-compressed like hell.

There are two schools of thought: One is to juggle things to try to accomodate people with slow connections. The other is, if they have a slow connection, it's not worth it to lower quality for everyone else just to accomodate the others. If your intended readers are serious businesspeople, they almost certainly have the fastest connection that they can get. Surveys in the publishing business have indicated this.

Iggy's photos look like they're straight out of the camera (16 MP) and highest-quality JPEG, at around 5 MB, which is typical for the very slight JPEG compression that most cameras apply internally. Ig, you can squash the file size down a lot by using a medium-quality JPEG compression in Photoshop, GIMP, or whatever you use,, while leaving the image size alone. As it is, I can count the veins in the maple leaves on the ground. That's a little more than you need. You really have to stomp on photos like that with lower-quality JPEG settings before you notice it.

FWIW, for full-width magazine spreads, I typically run the JPEGS at around 3,000 - 4,000 pixel width, with compression that results in around 1.5 MB file size. They don't look much different than the results that then come out of the PDF squeeze machine, which are much smaller, and they have plenty of sharpness and detail.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Whoop! That download time of less than two seconds was for Ig's rigging photos. For the smoker, it took 7 seconds.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

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