robert.admin – Page 166 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 29, 2015

The Sweep (3/29/2015)

t’s been a busy period here, one full of frustration. Right now I’m wrapping up an evening sweeping everything I can identify – clear night, finally. The last thing I want to look at is the moon, currently hiding behind grandfather pine. Anyway, my barlow lens arrived a week and some back, which doubles my existing lens (giving me 120X, but I’m begriming to realize that isn’t all that it sounds). Still, the day it came, cloudy. The next day, cloudy. And cloudy cloudy cloudy. Finally, while coming home from the club Wednesday night, I saw that the moon was […]

March 28, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 3/28/2015

een listening to a lot of old radio serials while drilling though audits at work. Some of them are pretty stupid but there are a couple I really like, amongst them Gunsmoke and Frontier Gentleman. However, I really like this new one, Night Beat, where an intrepid night-shift newsguy digs up stories in 1930’s Chicago. Usually it involves gangsters leaning on him, generally beating the shit out of him while sneering things like, “So, going to write about that, Newsie?” Yeah, well, I know what it’s like. So we ran Ken Farnham’s Florida East Coast, and I was once again […]

March 26, 2015

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/25/2015

‘m late on this piece – yeah, I know. Running home after a great session, I saw the moon through (appropriately) the moonroof, and so regardless of the time, one hobby lent itself to another and I was outside with the scope until 12:30am. But that’s hobbies for you. Even when I came in and was putting the peeper away, I really didn’t know what to write about. We had a good showing, a number of the old timers had much of the layout already cleaned. The clocks booted up in master/slave configuration perfectly. My paperwork was already out and […]

March 26, 2015

Death’s Doorway (DOG EAR)

veryone who’s a geek can remember that dramatic moment in Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, where Spock dies. I can remember a trekkie next to me quietly sobbing in the dark. Truthfully, it was as good a death scene as could be written, full of sacrifice and victory and sadness. Of course, they ruined it in the third movie – his body wasn’t even cold yet and suddenly he popped back in, none the worse for wear. Character death is a primary tool (like a chainsaw, a valuable yet dangerous tool) of the writer. Killing an important character […]

March 22, 2015

What Money Can’t Buy (Review)

o I’m a socialist and my best friend is a libertarian. It makes for interesting weekly phone calls. However, What Money Can’t Buy, the new book by Michael Sandel, expresses everything I find wrong with the world (and can’t often articulate). Centrally – that market culture is replacing civil culture. Sandel tracks this across the last thirty years (and before), how often we allow money to determine what’s right and how goods will be distributed (strike that – right has nothing to do with it). Where theme parks used to have lines so everyone would join up in egalitarian fashion, […]

March 19, 2015

Wednesday Night Lights (DOG EAR)

f you go HERE, you’ll see my new interest in Astronomy. I’m fascinated by the skies – always have been, ever since I looked at the moon through my dad’s clunky Naval binoculars. And now that I’ve got a x35 scope and a big telescope on order, now I’m reading all about this and getting to know how you look for stars, how you find stars, about light pollution, all that. As part of this, my wife and I went to the local observatory (as luck would have it, it’s a mile from the house). There were several members of […]

March 15, 2015

War of the Worlds, plus Blood, Guts and Zombies (Review)

his is a tough one to review. I’m feeling like the food reviewer who is assigned to check out the local greasy spoon, a favorite of the lowly locals. Is it proper to equate what you eat there to the finest of French restaurants? Or if it’s a favorite for its clientele, should you pursue it with that angle? Okay, for those who don’t know about this sort of thing, there is a sub-culture of literature (in this case, “Blood Enriched Classics”), which takes a classic and puts zombies or whatever into their story. I first heard about this with […]

March 13, 2015

Saturn (3/13/2015)

t takes some effort to find these things. Last night, I checked where Saturn would be this morning at 6:30 (preceding the moon). Got up at 6:10. Walked outside – clear with broken clouds and there was the moon. Transported the scope outside, set it up, lined it up, swung it to bear. Over the sight I could see the moon and a bright star off to its right. Lined it up. Lower mag lens (x25 or so) I cast around in that area and suddenly there it was. I could see it, tiny rings and dunish body and all. […]

March 12, 2015

You haven’t read…? (DOG EAR)

kay, not this has happened twice. A person in conversation says, “Oh, you haven’t read…?” and then foists a book on me. And that’s fine. As you can see from my reading list HERE, I’m not focused on one thing. But in both cases, I’m halfway through and hence, of course, the follow-up conversation arises, where “I’m at the point where…” and that’s when I find out that, no, they haven’t read it. What? What??? I recommend books all the time – refer to that list above – but at least I’ve read them. And one of my sins is […]

March 11, 2015

Jupiter and M42 (3/8/2014)

‘posed to go out to Geneva Saturday night to get a clear star view. That didn’t go so well (heavy clouds). Next night, the computer told me that Io would be shadowing across Jupiter. Took the scope out at 10pm or so but couldn’t quite make it out (at 60x). Where is that backordered extender? While JB and I were running our usual drill around Orion, we did look in on M42 and that area, and caught a neat cluster of stars with a visible nebula around that. At first I thought it was some sort of smudge on my […]