robert.admin – Page 216 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 16, 2010

The Great Panel of China

“You said you wanted to dispatch sometime,” Ken said with his usual friendly demeanor. “How about today?” “Sure,” I smiled. Holy crispy crap, I thought. Ken’s three-room layout represents sixty miles of Florida East Coast mainline – huge! He’s also got a a half-dozen serious operators taking their starting positions, reviewing their train orders, checking out their paperwork, as serious as career engineers. This is not the place to screw up. He walks me through the CTC board, essentially that big black 2001 monolith bristling with lights and toggles. I’ll be the dispatcher today, setting switches and signals in to get the traffic […]

December 14, 2010

Live Free or Die (review)

You know Iran can’t have a nuclear power plant. But did you know Disney could? This pissed me off a decade ago, so I wrote a scathing novel about theme parks growing into “duchies” with their own laws, courts, and (it turned out) armies. And as I wrote it, I found myself really chewing on those enablers of theme parks, the shambling middle class. With their annual passes and their comfortable entertainment expectations, my novel did everything it could to give them a wake-up slap, a cosmic black eye. One agent asked me, “So, if you piss off everyone, who’s […]

December 12, 2010

Four reasons

It’s too damn early, my breath is frosting my glasses and the bike is as cold as a popsicle. I’m out in the carport in two sweaters, sweat pants and polyester head-condom. On go the bike gloves, the helmet, and lastly the Road ID bracelet (for the time I might be too mangled to speak for myself). There is the usual fumble to get the 20 lb saddle bags (pre-packed the night before with a full set of office clothing, a towel, a bike pump, repair gear, my breakfast and my tinytop) over the back rack. Whenever I ride without […]

December 12, 2010

Matrix places (links)

The following sites are places that mean a lot to me on the World Wide Webbie. Click through and have a look – it’s the undiscovered country! StoreyMinus This is a text-adventure I spent a year putting together. Dropped into the world under London’s streets, a place of tube lines, buried rivers and lost passageways, can you survive and return to the surface? And every time you play, it’s random! GridSims This site carries the games Jesse Markowitz and I put together, using Excel as our platform. Best of the lot – Solar Trader! Can you pilot a ship across […]

December 12, 2010

iZombies

It was a risk. I had to buy a cell phone. I hate the effing thing, but being a bike-commuter I might need to flare-gun the wife for recovery (like the time I collided head-on with a Mormon missionary). Or that time I was out and she had a medical emergency. So I bought one, but to inoculate myself I gave my wife the number and refused to memorize it myself. You could torture me and I couldn’t give it to you. And the phone is off 99% of the time anyway. Otherwise, I might turn into an iZombie. […]

December 9, 2010

Fire and Bronze (released)

The thing on the pyre withered. Bitias rocked back and forth in the bitter-sweet smoke, held erect by his bronze corslet and the spear butts he’d jammed into the dry Libyan soil. Around him, the other armored figures stood motionless, dazed by what they’d just witnessed. “Oath-breakers!” Opposite the armored men of Carthage, Hiarbas stood tall upon his four-horsed chariot at the head of his army, javelin horizontal over his head. “Dogs! Defilers of wells!” The curses echoed off the armored men around Bitias. Crackles from the nearby flames punctuated the silence that followed. Dido was dead. Without her, they […]

December 9, 2010

War of the Worlds (review)

What can I say. If it wasn’t for H.G. and his nightmarish vision of apocalypse, I might have become some sort of illiterate dummy. As it was, when I was about eleven, I read below par. It didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, it was boring, yada. Then my mom (bless her heart) sat me down every night and made me read for 30 minutes. Didn’t matter what. The TV guide, the back of a cereal box, anything as long as it had words on it. So I read a little of this and a little of that from the […]

December 8, 2010

Free Games

This section provides links to some cool games. For writer purists out there who are wondering what games are doing on a literary site, I’ll have you know these games play out in 15 minutes or so and are great when you are stumped for that perfect word. GridSims My friend Jesse Markowitz and I love gaming, and for the past few years, I’ve been writing games in Excel. All these games are free to a good home. Rules included inside each zip – just dump them into a directory and you’re good to go!) Get them HERE. Spelunky I don’t […]

December 7, 2010

Here come the tomatoes

Tonight I pulled down Jcomments, a Joomla! extension that allows user comments to be entered against articles. I’ve enabled this for all my blogs (currently general and books – I’ve plans for movies, bikes and trains soon). How it works (how I think it works) is that you can either enter something as an unregistered guest (I have to midwife it into being). Or you can register on the site and put up anything you want (within reason, please!). Don’t like what I said about Harry Potter? Give me what-for! Enjoy a review? Post up some support. Go’wan, it’s easy […]

December 6, 2010

Yesterday’s Jam

To continue my point from the earlier post, a bit of script from a great show, the IT crowd. Postman: Moss. Amazon thingy. Moss: Ahh wicked. I know what this is. It’s the new Harry Potter. I got the child edition and the adult edition just to check there are no differences in the text Think about it.