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Franklin Institute – Very Early Member Letters

Just when you think finding 70 year old stuff is cool, finding 111 year old stuff is even cooler! These two letters were both addressed to the same person in Philadelphia, as they were likely a “member” back then. The postmarks on the cards match the dates seen.

Just to put things into perspective, if you’re familiar with the Franklin Institute, the older of these letters pre-date the current 1936 building by more than two decades! At the time, they had a building on 7th Street, which is actually still there and had housed the Philadelphia History Museum after the Franklin Institute moved to the current building.

In this first letter, they mention the outing at Woodside Park, which was an amusement park located just outside Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.

Letter from Franklin Institute – Dated August 1911
Franklin Institute Letter dated October 1928; the mention of “car” likely refers to a Trolley

And with a quick search or two, I believe this may have been the grain elevator the second letter refers to! I’m assuming there was a park or place nearby?
(Image from the Philadelphia Free Library)

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Postcards – Early Wanamaker Organ & Store, Philadelphia

I was going through some postcards I recently acquired and thought I should post these up. These are the only postcards of the Wanamaker store and Organ that I’ve ever found. The Wanamaker organ is the world’s largest fully-functional musical instrument, and is still at the former Wanamaker’s Store (now Macy’s) in Philadelphia. The organ has been fully restored, and the facade was restored in 2020.

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Summer Radio Silence

So yeah I tend to forget to keep the site updated with the latest goings on, so I figured I’d post up a quick update with real-life things. Many of my projects have been put on hold for summer fun, although it’s been so hot out that I haven’t really done much anyway. Here in Eastern PA it’s been in the 80-90 degree range for nearly 3+ weeks now, and we’ve barely seen any rain in the last 5+ weeks. I don’t think we’re alone; I watch some social media even from places like London who seem to be in the same boat. Yet some states down south seem to be dealing with a lot of flooding; go figure. I haven’t cut the grass in over the month, although recently we got enough rain to make it grow a little (in patches) so I guess I have to bust out the mower at some point.

I was going to say I haven’t done much, but I can’t really say that; since my last post, I’ve camped 3 times, attended Field Day with the Phil-Mont Radio Club (where I also brought a Teletype Model 32 back to life and got it on the air), had some out of town friends come for a visit, did up my front yard for the Shapiro Superhero Run, entertained a friend’s kid for a week, picked up some more nerdy bits and #Teletype junk, and got to go to the Telephone Collectors show as well as a couple hamfests.

Lately though things have calmed down to a crawl, which I’m not too fond of sometimes lol. Again it’s been too hot to get anything done outside to the cars or even ride the motorcycle, so I’ve mainly been messing around or driving around in the AC instead. Part of me is looking forward to the fall, but part of me doesn’t wanna give the summer up either.

Anyhow…I’ll try to backfill some of the events and highlight a few things, so look for some more posts in the near future.

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Aruba CX, IP Phones, and PC Ports, oh my!

I’m still getting used to the Aruba CX switches, as they’re definitely humbling me despite me not being a network “expert” per se. One interesting battle I had recently was trying to get the “PC Ports” on some Mitel IP phones to work. In my case I’m messing with Mitel 5xxx and 6xxx series phones, and while the phones themselves work fine, and the PC ports are enabled, they just…don’t do anything!

The PC ports on these phones are basically a daisy-chain port; they allow an IP phone and a computer to share a single network drop by basically daisy-chaining the computer through the phone.

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Microsoft Bookings – No Staff Available

Sometimes trying to be on the bleeding edge (or just ahead) often means trying to get things done quickly, which can result in breaking things in new and creative ways. Some people never admit their mistakes, I’m humble enough to not only admit them, but to share them so other people pulling their hair out as to why their booking site isn’t working can learn from my mistakes. Especially when they’re kinda funny.

I was trying to set up Microsoft Bookings for a group of individuals, and no matter what I did, I just could not actually get it to work. The backend was all there – staff is there, availability is there, and I can even manually book a slot from the admin portal, but the customer portal just stays on “loading” for all staff and offered no availability.

It was me…I goofed it up, and an easy goof at that 😉

Under the service settings, there is a setting called “Buffer Time”. That allows you to specify how long of a gap to set between each booked slot, so the staff can complete paperwork, get coffee, etc. I wanted to default it to 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after.

In my infinite wisdom, I actually put the “15” in the hours box in the after area, as such, there would never be availability as 15 hours is longer than the user’s daily availability. Once I changed it to be 15 minutes after, the bookings site worked as expected.

Corrected Setting

Anyway, onto bigger and better screw ups!