robert.admin – Page 149 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 25, 2016

OpsLog – FEC – 6/25/2016

nother big day over at the FEC. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and in retrospect, I got some pretty sweet jobs – just easy run throughs with a minimum of switching. And that’s fine – sometimes I like the air-traffic-control nature of dispatching, sometimes I like the stress-puzzle of industrial switching, but sometimes I just want to run trains, blow the whistle correctly at crossings, ring the bell while passing stations and yards, just doing everything by the book. Funny, but my buddy Bob got all the jobs I had last time, the tough limestone trick, the […]

June 23, 2016

Graying over Grey (DOG EAR)

kay, Sherlock, figure this one out. A friend loans me the book Shades of Grey. From that alone, is the writer English or American? My head is filled with a lot of useless rubbish. I can remember scenes from movies so trivial it would make your nose bleed (in the afore-mentioned Shades, there is a reference to the line “And don’t you yell at me, Mr. Warwick!” – I instantly got it). And so, that question – Yankee or Limey, which is it? I read somewhere that that color between black and white, the one with fifty shades? If you […]

June 22, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/22/2016

ummertime, and the ops are uneasy… Yeah, summers – we always have a dip in attendees. Our roster drops off. Worse, some of our good operators are off to college soon, so we’re screwed in the near future. It was pretty light tonight – had all the opening train warrant moves figured. Then I got one of the weirder calls from the Mingo Turn, just out of Martin Yard, crossing over to track two to work the quarry. “Snakes on your train?” I had to ask, not sure what I heard from him. “No, snakes in my house. Wife called. […]

June 19, 2016

Shades of Grey (Review)

erhaps it was because I came off a hard read with The Republic. Or maybe it was one of those “right book – right time” things. Don’t know why. But when I entered Jasper Fforde’s newest world, I was confused, befuddled, and then delighted. Yes, the first chaper or two are tricky to navigate around. You’ll wonder about this supposed future world of little villages and gryro-monotrains (with their two wheeled cousins rusting by law on disused sidings). You’ll ponder about the abject fear of the populance towards swans, ball lightning and mildue. And you know that by the end […]

June 16, 2016

Upshift (DOG EAR)

t was about the hardest thing I’ve ever read (the review is already up), The Republic. Not that the contents were difficult. I just had a hard time focusing on it. Listening to Plato’s version of oh-so-clever Socrates lay out logical lines of reasoning really became tedious. And with his listener supplying gushing large amounts of “Such is true” and “It is how you say” and “Dat’s a fact, Jack!”. Really, it’s like those times I sit in a diner or bar and overhear blowhards a table or two down talking about a political candidate I simply cannot fathom or […]

June 12, 2016

The Republic (Review)

kay, first things first, Mr. Plato – if you are going to assign a guardian class to your dream city, one which scouts and trains its next generation, one that continues without any input from the people rules, it isn’t a republic – it’s an aristocracy. And screw you for what you said about astronomers. Yes, I know that The Republic is supposed to be one of the major philosophic works, one that turns men on their mental ears and all that. But it didn’t work for me. Two much of it was Socrates leading his pet fanboy Glaucoma through […]

June 11, 2016

OpsLog – WBRR – 6/11/2016

ooks and movies never work well if nothing goes wrong. The excitement comes from complications and deviations from the plan. Like in the movie Alien. Would you really want to watch it if, after the facehugger thing got that guy, they locked him down in proper medical observation, saw the seed, removed it, squashed it? Then you’d have ninety minutes of them getting themselves ready for cold sleep, just SOP, nothing more. Well, in model railroad operations, running the timetable is the goal. Immediately after our last session in March, Al, Phil and myself took Al’s original written instructions for […]

June 9, 2016

Opener (DOG EAR)

e’ve talked about the importance of hooks, and how critical it is to draw a short-attention-span audience into buying/reading your masterwork. So how about character development? Shouldn’t we be able to form our character descriptions quickly? Hundreds of years ago, traveling troupes set up archetypes so that ignorant peasants in every village wouldn’t have to suffer the drag of character development. Scaramouch was always the trickster and weaver of plots. Harlequin was the mute jester. And so on. The characters dressed and acted according to their established types and were known immediately to their audiences. So here’s a good example […]

June 5, 2016

The Day of the Star Cities (Review)

needed a break from my long slog through The Republic (“Do you think that a book that goes so long, and is so pedant, can hold your attention?” “Of course I do, oh Great Socrates!”). Picked this one up in a Maya’s raid, a thin scifi (154 pages), and it would make for a nice intermission. So, things on this future Earth (as seen in the 60s, when this was written) ain’t so hot. Aliens have arrived, ones we’ve never set eyes on except for their five great ships. When they show up, all of our nuclear stockpiles and weapons […]

June 2, 2016

Gamebooks (DOG EAR)

kay, this one seems like a natural for me. You might have heard of Gamebooks. These are the branching type of adventures we used to see in all the wargame shops in the 80s. In them, you’d buy a book and read the opening chapter. Perhaps you were crossing a picturesque stone bridge and realized there was a troll under it. The story would break, and you’d see something like If you want to fight the troll, goto page 14. If you want to cross the bridge and continue up the path, goto page 24. Each of those pages would […]