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March 12, 2014

Corporate 5K – it begins!

I like trains, but not training. Big difference! We’ve got that corporate 5k coming up and that means jogging so I don’t totally humiliate myself. This time, the wife is coming (for the walk). Me, I’m jogging again. Hopefully, with better shoes and stretching exercises, I won’t suffer a repeat of last year (cramps, pulled muscles, a month of pain and a slow jog in the event (but, dammit, I made it)). So now, Tuesday and Thursday noontime, my work friend Manjula and I are training together (Omar, he’s somewhere back there someplace). We’ll jog around the neighborhood behind the building, […]
March 9, 2014

Scaramouche (Review)

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. This is one of the best openers ever in a novel, penned by Rafael Sabatini in one of his greatest works, Scaramouche. Some background – it old plays, it was common for known character types to be cast in fixed positions. This way, an audience would know that character on sight, and know his personality and characteristics (modern movies and books do this pretty much today, with their lack of creativity). The character “Scaramouche” is the trickster, the fellow who stirs the pot, creates […]
March 6, 2014

Do Androids Watch Anime (DOG EAR)

So one of my entertainment passions is Japanese Animation (or “Anime”). Some of it is stunningly good, some of it is insightful, some of it is just reactionary fun, and some is just stupid. Was watching one, a little one-season deal called Psycho-Pass, a story involving a future society where scanners can tell if you are above a certain “potential” crime level. If so, you can be killed just because of your possibility to do crime. So the broad story is unraveling, the somber mastermind is lounging around, interviewing a hacker who he’ll need for his devilry. But then the […]
March 2, 2014

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Review)

I read this years ago, probably because I’d just seen it’s companion movie, Blade Runner. And recalling the sort of person I was in college (half-baked, like most humans under twenty-seven), I remember being slightly disappointed in it. Silly me. Let’s toss the movie and focus on this wonderful book by Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream… is centered on a tomb of a world, our world following a nuclear exchange that left the planet dust covered (and slightly radiative, too) and dead. Pretty much all the animals are gone (and those that are left are hoarded and worshiped (in […]
March 1, 2014

The new car

I‘m out of Orlando, driving over to Palm Bay for a fun model railroad ops session. Nobody else could go – the invite list is tight and my buddy has a cold and backed out. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. I’m finally getting a chance to get my new Mini Cooper out of the city, to let it loose on the wide open road. I’ve got the windows down, the sunroof open, and its a balmy 74 degrees. The sun’s just overhead, so sliding the shade forward screens me. The car’s flying along at 80+mph, sipping gas in […]
March 1, 2014

OpsLog – FEC – 3/1/2014

So at the start of the week, I was dispatching on a middle-sized coal hauler. By midweek, I was dispatching a huge railroad stretching across several states, as well as running their freight forwarding division. And now, on Sunday, I’m sitting in a going-to-rust, unwashed FEC engine in Miami Yard, tugging cars back and forth, a lowly classification hogger. How did this happen? The author side of me wishes it was because of a substance abuse problem, a fight over a woman, or perhaps because I caused a wreck that killed innocents and this was the only railroad job I […]
February 27, 2014

Serendipity (DOG EAR)

A little something happened while I was running a mile-long freight through the Carolina foothills, hogging on the Tennessee Carolina & Coast. I placed a magazine article. See, I was running trains up in the Asheville area (you can see my blog on trains, over on the left, for details of prototypical operations of trains). Guy named Steve was on the dispatcher’s panel, in the other room, directing the traffic by line phones. He’s got a magnetic board in front of him and he’s moving his markers to keep track of the trains (and telling the crews how far they […]
February 26, 2014

OpsLog – LM&O – 02/26/2014

It’s been a paperwork sort of week. On Tuesday at work, we held the wall in an ISO audit, with me with two big three-ring binders full of paperwork details. But more importantly, this month I also wrote a switch list generator for our club. The problem we faced was with our waybills and people walking off with pocketfuls of them. And every time they did, we had to make new waybills and generate entire runs of switchlists. A pain, it twas. So now I generated full lists for every train. The trick here was the order things happened. Cars […]
February 23, 2014

A fight with a cannon (review)

This short story dropped on me like a bombshell. I’m waiting for a mailed book to make it here, so to pass the time and flip some pages, I pulled up my old favorite site, Project Gutenberg (if you read and you STILL haven’t visited this place, what do I have to do, give you a boot in the ass?) and pulled down International Short Stories: French. While I’m unable to tell just when they were written, I’m thinking that they mostly come from the 1880s or so – there are trains and country scenes and horse drawn carriages, the […]
February 22, 2014

OpsLog – P&WV – 2/22/2014

I hate the idea of bucket lists. The thing is, if you are going to have an experience, it shouldn’t be an afternoon thing, something you do once without any expertise or knowledge or appreciation. It should be something you know and have studied and put an effort into. That said, I’ve dispatched dozens of railroads. I’ve run them with everything from mother-may-I to warrants to CTC. But I’ve never dispatched a railroad under timetable and train order (one of the most intensive and tricky ways to do it). And this is funny because I actually wrote code to dispatch […]