robert.admin – Page 124 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 13, 2018

Fast and Slow (DOG EAR)

have a lot going on this week, one of the things this Corporate 5K. I’m in for setup, the walk (was “the run” in years past but a knee injury fixed that), and takedown. Rode over on the tandem with the missus. And so, my impressions… There. Sitting for all the late corporate people of my group to show. Unfolding chairs. Arrival. Rearranging chairs. Guiding people in on phone. Set up. Set up. More set up. Group photo. Final piss. The milling wait to walk. Niece (with her own bad knee) finds me. Chatting. Go. Walking along Central. Talking about […]

April 8, 2018

Mark Twain for Cat Lovers (Review)

o here is the book that provoked me into traveling around the world with Mark Twain (i.e. Following the Equator) – a little collection of Twain’s essays and observations about a topic dear to me. Bikes? No, cats. Turns out the crusty ex-riverboat pilot was a lover of our feline friends, always having a couple about. He even kept a billiard table and allowed his kittens free-range across it, with a cat lurking in a hole and swatting at massing balls considered part of the game’s hazards. There are wonderful stories here, from his classics about a boy climbing out […]

April 8, 2018

OpsLog – WAZU RR – 4/8/3018

yers. According to our host Doc Andy, it’s a little nowhere place whose only reason for existence is to get Portland-Seattle rail traffic by each other. But I like it. People with kids (tired people, with no money and sleep) will tell you that having kids is a way for you to gain posthumous fame. My one answer to that is “Name your four grandparents.” I guess that matters to some, that you are remembered and made a difference. Well, for me, it’s Ayers. See, on the WAZU RR, it was jammed right next to another town. It wasn’t rare […]

April 7, 2018

OpsLog – 4/7/2018 – L&N

Lightning boomed outside the windows. Hunched in their seats, the two men struggled to keep a mulit-engine explosion from happening. They fought with their controls, the switches on their consoles unresponsive, even haywire, their radios filled with static, the voices on the other end indistinctive against the ether. Sweat plopped onto their crumpled working diagrams. Suddenly came a total power failure, the screens black, the drone of the distant engines winding down. Then the host entered the room. “I shut off power to fix a broken turnout. Lunchtime.” Yeah, it was […]

April 5, 2018

Clerks (DOG EAR)

nteresting use of historical reading today. Found myself on the Sunrail plaform, reading the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Historical Group’s magazine, specifically an article about a couple who clerked in the early fifties. They were involved with working the orders by customers coming in, securing them seats on trains a month (and possibly, in larger groups) a year out. Image that – doing all that work across a railroad with something like a hundred passenger trains each day, getting people into seats and to their destinations. And no Excel, or internet, or anything beyond a typewriter. They were even limited in […]

April 1, 2018

Following the Equator (Review)

othing teaches us more about a person’s true self and soul than travel. I’ve had friendships end on long trips. Perhaps because we see how our acquaintances react to stress, or that we see them out of the context of their typical background, who knows? All that matters is that we’ll see them in a new light. Following the Equator was a travelogue by Mark Twain of his trip around the world in the late eighteen hundreds. The unwritten background is that he was in financial straits through bad investments, forced to go on a world-wide speaking tour (which he […]

March 31, 2018

OpsLog – FEC – 3/31/2018

ilot friend of mine told me about getting vertigo once. He was flying formation with another jet, looked down his wingtip at the other, saw his running lights and the lights of the city rotating beneath him as they orbited the field. And suddenly he lost it. He just rolled out (on instruments) and flew for a minute or two to center himself on his bank-n-turn, just getting everything squared away. Same thing happened to me on Ken Farnham’s Florida East Coast today. I had the panel, dozens of lights and switches telling me a story, of indicators glowing and […]

March 29, 2018

Flatline (DOG EAR)

o I’m a corporate schmoe. I do process. I run scrums. I do planning. I do data-raids. I go to a lot, lot, lot of meetings. And I get a lot of interruptions. The interruptions are the worst. Millennials don’t mind them as much (since their brains have grafted around their phones). To me, I’m thinking long-term. I’m organizing my thoughts and considering a problem from several angles and thinking of the best way to something and there’s the critical email, the phone call, the IM. And I can feel the blue smoke off my mental brake shoes, the howl, […]

March 28, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/28/2018

s the forward trucks of 247 West rattled over the points of Bound Brook throat, I figured this was shaping up to be a strange run. I’d only just scrambled aboard ten minutes before – she was already four hours late (her original crew had been pulled for a coal run earlier). And strangely, 271 (not due out for two more hours) was running ahead. They were already nosing into Calypso Yard some distance ahead of me – heard it over the horn. The problem was, all our pickups were on a shared yard track, meaning they’d have to dig […]

March 25, 2018

The Great Time Machine Hoax (Review)

The Great Time Machine Hoax represents one of the reasons I love going to used book stores. It also represents the danger of going to used book stores. It was an early work of famed SF author Keith Laumer (1963). It came from a shorter work and was expanded into a longer novel (I think I know where the expansion was – pretty much a strange Kung-fu training section in the entire second half of the book). But I’m ahead of myself. So Chester W. Chester IV inherits a rundown mansion, the sole heir and sole responsible party for millions […]