robert.admin – Page 120 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 6, 2019

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Review)

eil DeGrasse Tyson is a science popularist, rather like Bill Nye and Carl Sagan. He brings science down to the level where normal nabobs (such as your humble reviewer, with his small backyard scope) can understand. And he does a good job at it. His book on general astrophysics was very good. Starting with the complete history of the universe (at least for its critical first day or so) was quite fascinating. Moving out to the scale of the universe, how scientists calculate things, how we basically know what we know, was quite revealing. It got me to realize just […]

January 3, 2019

A reflection on time (DOG EAR)

ime is always a sour subject with me. I’ve never had enough of it. Even without kids, even with a quiet, low-maintenance wife, there isn’t. I haven’t written seriously (my old Tuesday/Thursday lockdown) for years now. And there are the dusty model trains, the abandoned telescope, the unwatched movies. But still, in all this, I’m active, frantically so. My recent efforts have been writing StoreyMinus, an interactive game that is nearing something like completion. And then there are two nights each week at the train club. Oh, and my buddy who is in a distant hospital, necessitating a long 2-3 […]

December 30, 2018

The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Review)

kay, backstory – while visiting Japan, I saw a movie poster with a shot of a cat that looked exactly like my late Mookie. Stunned me. Looking further into it, I discovered the book the movie was based on, The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Part of me will continue my search for the flick. But part of me will finish the review of the wonderful book it uncovered. The novel follows a strange and interesting journey of Nana the cat and his companion (not owner – it’s not that sort of relationship) Satoru the human. Satoru, it seems, had found Nana […]

December 27, 2018

Best of 2018 (DOG EAR)

s traditionally on this site (well, as of last year), here are my outstanding books from 2018. I am not ranking these in any order. Simply put, they are the best five from the 50 or so reviews I did this year. If you are looking for something to spend your Barnes & Noble gift card on, these are you best choices. Leviathan Wakes – This has become a powerful series on the Sci-Fi network, a great saga of books that follows four characters on a small stolen ship in a universe defined by our solar system (in a hundred […]

December 22, 2018

Leviathan Wakes (Review)

f you’ve seen The Expanse on the Sci-Fi network then you’ve seen this book (the first in a series of seven or eight). It’s set in the solar system a century or so forward from ours. Earth is a UN dominated world, Mars bold and fascist. And the belt, it’s free-wheeling yet controlled by the inner worlds (and falling more and more under the sway of the OPA (Outer Planet Alliance)). So, yes, this is a universe set for conflict and action. Into this backdrop we find four people, late crewmembers of the ice rigger Canterbury (destroyed as part of […]

December 20, 2018

Alas, Blogtorium II (DOG EAR)

o, last week I mentioned the week I was down for a crash. That was in November. So where was my site since then? Well, I’d mentioned my vow, how I would run official backups through GoDaddy (and not these self-launched efforts I’d been laboring with). I called them and signed up for the program. No problems. The tech checked my site and said it would be fine (refer to the blog before this on how fine “fine” can be). The next day I logged into GoDaddy and checked my backups. They’d crashed. Back on tech support, it turns out […]

December 19, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/19/2018

ake a good look at this picture. This is Red Rock, a siding in the middle of nowhere on the western flank of the Appalachians. It’s full of trains. If you follow the rails east to the opposite flank, you’ll find Lehigh siding. It was really fulla trains. I think at one point we had six pushing down that furnace-side main-siding combo. We had a full, full house – guests and new members and visitors from England and, who knows, maybe a Martian out there. In the course of the evening, we ran every scheduled train and a load of […]

December 16, 2018

The Gum Thief (Review)

like Douglas Coupland’s work. I really enjoyed Generation X and his gritty observations of modern Americana. And The Gum Thief, which I’d intended to last a week of easy reading got brushfired-off in one weekend (I was at a train operating session and there was a lot of down time between runs). So the novel is an interesting store about intertwined relationships, all that begins, laughingly (or depressingly enough) in a Staples store. Two of the drones here, Bethany the goth chick and Roger, the washed-out forty-year-old life failure, suffer through their days in this bleak consumer hell. But the […]

December 15, 2018

ShowLog – Tampa – 12/15/2018

his was a new one for us, a long ride over to the west coast for a show. Of course, there were two club-related hospitalizations and heavy rains to cope with, but other than that, everything went well. We managed to hold to our schedule and everyone showed up. Unlike Makers Farce, we had more than enough people to do this and everyone pitched in. Better, we all proceeded slooooow, so outside of the sign stand breaking (again) we set up in our usual hour and had things running when the crowds came in. Overall, the show was a real […]

December 12, 2018

Alas, Blogtorium (DOG EAR)

’m not dead. Nor is the Blogtorium. But it’s late, I know, but there were reasons. Some time ago I noticed that the Blogatorium (where you are now reading this) was down. Really down. Nothing but the pen, the word “Manuscript”, the tan screen and nothing else. Now I’ve gone down once before – for GoDaddy issues (it came up two days later). But this time they weren’t suffering any national malware attacks. And I’d just agreed to some service plan where they would nightly scan my site for malware and whatever. Yes, my site has been knocked on before. […]