robert.admin – Page 107 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 31, 2017

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/31/2017

poiler alert! I occasionally screw up while dispatching. If you weren’t there or don’t like bloodshed, you might not want to read further. I burned twenty-five people alive in a fiery tangled holocaust inside a tunnel. If you don’t like unhappy endings, you might not want to continue. I’m very sad. Yeah, so it was a busy night on the LM&O. We’ve redone large sections of our layouts, some turnouts aren’t powered, others aren’t hooked up. Lots of work over the last month so everything was filthy (even with John L. paradropping in to soften the beach and pre-clean). It […]

May 28, 2017

A Temporary Matter (Review)

hoba and Shukumar are a young Indian couple living somewhere in the west on their quiet street with their quiet lives, she an editor, he still a student. And in the mail comes an announcement that following the last snowstorm the power company wants to firm up their repairs so for the next five nights service will be cut from eight to nine PM. Sounds innocent enough. The couple continues on their lives, with reflections provided by Shukumar as he considers, without enthusiasm, the state of their marriage. It turns out that some time before Shoba had been pregnant with […]

May 27, 2017

Jupiter as never before (5/27/2017)

ate spring and summer skies are sucky night skies for astronomer. No Orion. None of the favorites. It’s pretty much open space with few things to bullseye. But tonight was clear and Jupiter was on a close approach so I set up the tripod at dusk and waited for the gas giant to come into view. Okay, first lesson learned – if you are aiming for something rising, don’t set up in the middle of the yard. Set up to the west so you can catch things coming up from the east sooner. I could see Jupiter inside an oak […]

May 25, 2017

Phased out (DOG EAR)

t’s interesting (in a bittersweet way) to see how things change. For some reason, this morning while getting ready for my bike ride in, I thought of World War One aviation. I think it was in response to the ideal of dawn patrol, of an early morning moment of getting ready for going somewhere few souls would dare traverse, kitting up, checking the crate, sniffing the wind, eyeing the sky. Yeah, it’s only a bike, but I’m a romantic. It got me thinking to a book I’d read over and over as a kid, Goshawk Squadron, by Derrick Robertson. Needless […]

May 21, 2017

Biketopia (Review)

ver since I became some sort of public bike advocate (hey, I just like to gush about riding them to and from work) everyone forwards me articles and stories about bikes. Well, Biketopia was a small collection of short stories combining alarming futures, feminism and bikes a friend sent me. I looked forward to seeing what they could do with the topic. Not much, I’m afraid. Maybe it was just me, but the stories all looked like tales put together by people who saw the call-for-submissions stuck to the bulletin board of the local coffee house. Yes, they talked about […]

May 21, 2017

OpsLog – FEC – 5/21/2017

here is a bit of universal irony here. I’m idling in the heated gravel desert of Cocoa Yard on the Florida East Coast, writing car numbers on lading slips and jotting in pick-up dates on the swaps. This, following a weeklong, daylong, every-damn-second long audit I’ve only just survived at work. Yes, more paperwork! Yahoo! But seriously, it’s a well-thought-out system, it slows the ops down to a more realistic pace, and I rather like it. Owner Ken Farnham has come up with an even-better way of getting cars to sidings where the trains are assembled in a completely different […]

May 18, 2017

Overtime (DOG EAR)

don’t think I’ve ever gapped in posting my DOG EAR column (nor my book reviews, for that matter). Since 2012, I’ve been religiously posting up my observations on media, on writing, on techniques. I’ve talked about shows I’ve enjoyed (for TV and movies are just another form of storytelling). I’ve even talked about the societal changes to our reading habits (such as the impact of cellphones – people who know me are now going nooooooo! Say it isn’t so!) I’ve written while sick, while tired. I’ve written in the middle of the night. I’ve written from work (shh!). I’ve even […]

May 14, 2017

Cloud Atlas (Review)

loud Altas – it’s not one book, it’s six! Actually, it is only one book, a set of six stories told from differing human epochs. All the characters share a distinctive birthmark, a blemish in the shape of a comet on their shoulder. And all their stories link together very distantly, but, like instruments in an orchestra, all of them taken together produce a message to the reader. And the message can be bittersweet, yes, but uplifting too. So, we have… ADAM EWING – A San Francisco attorney who, in 1849, is on his return journey to his home from […]

May 3, 2017

Bikes and… Speaking (DOG EAR)

’m not writing with a quill on parchment – I’m using one word processor (Word) or another (the Joomla editor). I don’t write once, dust sand on it and blow-dry the beads of ink. I write something. I consider the flow and meter and meaning. I might break a longer sentence apart. I might glue two shorter ones together. I might decide I’m belaboring a point (now, perhaps?) or that I haven’t made my meaning clear. But I’ll mess around with the sentences, meander through the paragraphs, figuring out how to make it all work out so my prose gets […]

April 30, 2017

Arabella of Mars (Review)

kay, so the Napoleonic Wars are still taking place. There’s that. And there is colonialism. Again, a constant of the British Empire. But then there is the fact that space isn’t, well, space. It’s full of air. And with sailing ships that can lift on massive hot air balloons to low earth orbit, where they can set their sails and move about on interplanetary jet-streams and then, when they get to a planet, deploy heated chutes to come in for landing, yeah, so it’s rather a different 1813 than you could imagine. So young Arabella is a daughter of a […]