robert.admin – Page 128 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 15, 2018

Pitching (DOG EAR)

’m not why I’m writing this – I should be telling you how to do things, rather than expressing my own shortcomings. But making a pitch is an art totally beyond me. You might have remembered my review for Dark Matter. It was a cool book about possibility, life and its spawning timelines. I really enjoyed it and ranted about it in my review. Three of you reported to have pursued it and are all currently reading it. In that, I made a successful pitch. But then there was Railsea, a book I read a while ago and am rereading. […]

March 11, 2018

In the Orbit of Saturn (Review)

he problem with reading books off Project Gutenberg, and I’m talking really old books here, is that a lot of what you read was fresh and new and imaginative back then but now they’re old and stale. Okay, so our hero is aboard a liner off Saturn that gets jumped by pirates. He finds himself herded into a large cargo hold, trapped with the rest of the snivelers for ransom. But a sniveler he is not because he’s actually an undercover agent for some sort of galactic authority (forgive me – it’s been a while). And so he’s got to […]

March 7, 2018

Million Yen Women (DOG EAR)

o the setup in his Netflix Series from Japan is that a young, rather unsuccessful writer finds out that some unknown person has “invited” five women to live with him. They are told that they must pay the writer a million yen a month (roughly $10,000) and cannot tell anything about the invitation or answer any personal questions. And, seemingly, all of the women can afford this. Outside of his strange houseguests, there are other esoteric touches to this stage. A fax machine that spews out scrawling death threats. A flat-eared kitten that prefers to be called “cat”. The writer’s […]

March 4, 2018

Homeward Bound (Review)

uthor Harry Turtledove started his Game of Thrones-ish mega-series years back, the sprawling Worldwar/ Colonization series. In it, a hapless lizard race which takes everything in stride (including technological advancement) probes our world in the middle ages and decides that it will take humans thousands and thousands of years to get any sort of comparable technology. Taking their time (roughly twelve hundred years), they gradually assemble an invasion fleet (followed by a colonization fleet). And imagine their surprise when they arrive but instead of knights with white satin they find themselves in the screaming confusions of World War Two. The […]

February 28, 2018

Perv (DOG EAR)

ot to go into details, but someone loosely tied to my team is getting rotated out. In the area I manage, it’s getting more and more obvious that this person can’t produce. So they are going into some sort of remedial track and rotating off to a slower-paced team. And that got me to thinking. On the train ride in, I began to empathize with that person. I know that in our remote location (half a world away) our culture and their culture sometimes clash. Things that are understood here aren’t there. Expectations, as foreign as they are, must be […]

February 28, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/28/2018

razy night at the club. Not only were we a bit short-handed but we had VIPs, namely the superintendents for the FEC of who I’ve blogged about on this very train blog, Ken and Bev Farnham. Figured it would be a good session – Cody on the panel (a firm hand) and Frank in the yard (rock solid). I rolled the Zanesville Turn out (or tried to – the DS pushed a long-range warrant against me so I idled in the yard for a bit). But once I hit the rails, everything was fine. The switching was orderly but I […]

February 25, 2018

Dark Matter (Review)

t’s been a while. I’ve read pointless SciFi, stale SciFi, and dated SciFi. After a while I was only reading SciFi to relax on the train. Nothing was challenging me. And then I read Dark Matter. The story starts out brilliantly. A middle-aged college professor is enjoying a “family night” with his wife and son. Going out to fetch ice cream from the shop a few blocks away, he sees an old acquaintance in a bar. In talking to this man, we get a glimpse of the purpose and gift our protagonist possessed, that is, before the day-to-day world sucked […]

February 24, 2018

OpsLog – FEC – 2/24/2018

t was a bit of a struggle getting over to Ken’s Florida East Coast– we fought through a pointless battle on the Beachline (five miles of bumper2bumper and no cause for it) (there, Bruce, I mentioned that). And Ken’s was understaffed – five people dropped the night before leaving him a little short. I posted the club list – last moment stuff – didn’t get any takers. So, with Bev on the yard (one person doing the job for three), Ken on the panel, the shed held only Me, Bruce, Andy, Monty and John. But we were the gold crew. […]

February 22, 2018

Fatalism (DOG EAR)

thought I’d pissed off the Russian mob and had suffered a contract hit. You’ll remember how I mentioned I shut off my blog comments because of all the entries being placed on it (sites get a lot more traffic the more places they are featured, which is a faulty algorithm that drives disreputable behaviors). I’d decided that the last time my site got hacked it was through this mechanism and, if anything, my feedback mechanism was getting stone-aged. Once I started getting volumes of Russian traffic, I decided to mitigate the risk and shut it down. And three days later, […]

February 18, 2018

Doom of London (Review)

eah, I gotta love Project Gutenberg. Now that I have a Brompton bike, I can commute by train and bus pretty much every day of the week. And this means I get a lot more reading done. So, sure, sometimes I slip a paperback into my bag. But sometimes I’m between books without a clear desire for anything. Happened this time. So I downloaded The Doom of London, which was part of three-short-story set. So this short story (set in Victorian London) follows a man and his weather. The man, our narrator, is a clerk for a gentleman of business. […]