robert.admin – Page 191 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 24, 2014

Interruption (DOG EAR)

It’s a quiet Monday night. I’m home from a casual work session at the train club, working out a blog for the coming week. Unlike most nights, I’m carrying a production pager (the kid who is supposed to have it is visiting his fiancée in Toronto and everyone else has kids this weekend, so against my better judgment, I took it). I’m in that writer’s space now: all the thoughts, words and elements neatly switching around in my head, aligning. I can see where I’m going, the points I’ll make, the specific words that will punch meaning across. The words […]

April 23, 2014

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/23/2014

It’s something when you are a part of a skilled production. And tonights’ operations on the LM&O was pretty much that. We had our newest operators, Paul and John, getting drag freights over the road (and working their switchlists) without a problem. Usually I have to progressive-taxi new guys across the division but they had it down. Then we have Yardmaster Frank, who is really getting the hang of our new switchlists. He’s only run this yard twice before and tonight he got just about every car in the right slot. And that’s a hundred cars (and nine trains) picking […]

April 20, 2014

Infected (Review)

I mentioned this book (or rather implied it) HERE. Perhaps this just came at a point I wanted a good horror novel. Maybe it was one of those moments where the book and reader come together (so lucky Scott Sigler). But I really enjoyed his book Infected. It’s the usual yarn where of modern scifi where writers, with full understanding of the unlikeliness of interstellar travel, come up with other ways to do it besides big honking spaceships. In this case, it’s spores (nanobot spores, it turns out) that are seeded across the universe and fall to the ground, to […]

April 18, 2014

Special K

It was my second 5k. Haven’t mentioned it, but these things really get in the way of writing (and lunches, and comfort). We’ve been training at work (a couple of coworkers and myself) for weeks now, jogging pretty much ever lunch time, three miles through a tree-less neighborhood under a hot tropical sun (except for that time it poured on us). I got to the point where I wouldn’t stop, and could do three miles in something like 35 minutes. That’s about as good as it gets with this old body. So we went over to Eola Park at 3pm […]

April 17, 2014

Stinks to Heaven (DOG EAR)

Long-time readers of this series know that I despise publicity-tricks. The closest I’ll come is putting my book link at the bottom of my blog posts. I suck at clever things that people do like begging their friends to inflate their amazon ratings, to giving bookshow clinics to flog their books, to floating their wares in blog postings here. It really pisses me off (and probably explains why I’ll never succeed at this) because I find the entire publishing racket an dirty mudhole of false representation. It explains why so many people read so many lousy books, I suppose. But […]

April 13, 2014

ShowLog – Deland – 4/12/2014

The sectional layout (for our latest Deland show) went up with very few problems (a malfunctioning signal light that I cleared up with a little effort). But sometimes, if you build it, they don’t come. The show was pretty lightly attended – very sparse. We hardly saw any children come by at all. Most shows we’re jammed. But it was pretty dead, which we saw directly in our tip jars. Worse, a friend who runs a small railroad manufacturing businesses stopped by to chat – this is his last show. He’s having a hard time breaking even at the deal. […]

April 13, 2014

The Shame of Motley (Review)

Poor Lazzaro Biancomonte, recently dispossessed of his home in Biancomonte by stronger, sharkier nobles. And so, ever the hothead, the young fellow literally storms a count’s castle, demanding satisfaction. Of course, he is dragged before the count for a sobering talk, and suddenly Lazzaro realizes that (a) he’s about to get his ass killed and (b) this will kill his poor mother, reduced to peasantry by their downfall. But our count is a good fellow. He agrees to spare the young noble’s life… if…. he’ll dress in motley and literally play the fool for his count. The young man, now […]

April 10, 2014

Save early, save often (DOG EAR)

I‘m a coder from way, way back. Back in the days when home computer programs were saved on tape and memory was slotted into the machine and could crash if you hit the table hard enough, you saved early. And often. Even while working Fortran on a mainframe you habitually saved. I even always had a book with me back in my Navy Underwater Research days, given the usual outages we faced. Now, everything seems bulletproof. But I am reminded of the old adage: Never have an unsaved session larger than you’d be able to afford to lose (well, something […]

April 6, 2014

The Gun (Review)

Another short story from Planet Stories pulp magazine in 1952, pulled down off my favorite supplier of eBooks, Project Gutenberg. The Gun is a shorty by Philip K. Dick, one of the famous (and struggling, I’m led to believe) writers from the golden era. So astronomers on a planet pick up a fusion flash from a world not too far off, a big flash, an end-of-civilization full-stop flash. They send a space ship out that way to check on it. Of course, all they find is a dead world, fused and cold without a living thing in its ruins. But […]

April 3, 2014

Everything new is old again (DOG EAR)

I‘m a cranky cuss in a big box bookstore. And even though I hate them, there are fewer of them – they’re going out of business, so I hate that too. But when I’m in them, I walk around frowning. There in the new arrivals (in the front section, which the publishers of Fire and Bronze were too bankrupt to put me in), there are a bunch of self help book and glittery vamperilic trash. Walking along, I see “staff picks” that are bullshit, the usual NYT bestseller “finds” (no climbing out on limbs here). And over here, a leatherbound […]