robert.admin – Page 229 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 22, 2011

Compasion and fairness

Hit the ground the other day, going home. My fault, really. Got myself into a tight spot that I can usually avoid – for this one stretch I usually keep to the sidewalk – the road is narrow and there is a barrier down the right. Anyway, decided to stick to the street and when traffic backed at the light, I cut to the right between the cars and barrier. Then I remembered the the lip between the asphalt’s undersurface and final coat, a half-inch step that I slid down. Humming down this tight space, I realized that the lip […]

October 18, 2011

The “Early ReTyrement” Challenge!

What would you do if you fell backwards in time? Yes, all these iron-age boners are still head-scratching over smelting while you can make silicon circuits dance. You’d be a wizard! A king! Wouldn’t you? But all these things around you that grant that superiority: computers, cars, flush toilets; could you produce them? Could you reconstruct the tools, techniques and processes to recreate them, all the way down to their building blocks? Do you know what it takes to make a spark? A sheet of paper? A pencil? A paperclip? Join Mason Trellis, hapless castaway in a temporal drainhole, as […]

October 16, 2011

The joys of writing

So this weekend, I had a long slow cold, one that came up on Friday as a fevered flush with minor diarrhea. Normally it would be nothing to worry about unless you were one of the Carthaginian host crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, where if you sank along the side of the muddy trail, you’d be left to die. Or, if you were at work with only a bike. Got home okay, but it was a long ride, and my head pounded through ever pedalstroke. Yet writers have duties. I had to scroll through the latest Kindle […]

October 16, 2011

OpsLog – FEC – 10/15/2011

There were lots of things I could have done Saturday. First off, I was coming off the tail end of a low-grade cold / long workweek, just bone tired and ready to take it easy over the weekend. And there was that new Steven King novel, Under the Dome, which the library just sent. Things are heating up in this corrupt Maine town trapped under a mysterious force field. And there is that Occupy Orlando march going on downtown. Regardless of what you think of them (I’m certainly not a fan of corporate turdworms), it would be an easy bike ride to get […]

October 10, 2011

OpsLog – Longwood & Sweetwater – 10/10/2011

The trains are streaming out of Orlando Yard at the start of the session, and then the layout goes down. We all look at each other. The owner starts cycling his system. We all help by checking our trains, making sure we’re not on turnouts, we’re not derailed or shorting in any way. The system comes up – briefly – then goes down again. You hate to see it – owners put a lot of time and energy into setup, and they feel a need to provide a good session. But still, with all the electronics a modern digital command […]

October 4, 2011

Statistics

Statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Fatality Facts: Bicycles – 2009 Less than two percent of motor vehicle crash deaths are bicyclists. The most serious injuries among a majority of those killed are to the head, highlighting the importance of wearing a bicycle helmet. Helmet use has been estimated to reduce head injury risk by 85 percent. Ninety-one percent of bicyclists killed in 2009 reportedly weren’t wearing helmets, the same percentage as 2008.

October 2, 2011

The writer’s life

Everyone has this dream of being an author. And with self-publishing, it is easier than ever. Well, that’s the story anyway. Been working on the final cut for the physical book of Early ReTyrement. Hired Mercedes from WriteTheWriteStuff off Elance and she’s been a good sport, dealing with a maniac obsessive perfectionist. But that’s what writers are, right? When Hemingway couldn’t have it his way, he blew his brains out. Been through this before. Back when eBooks published Fire and Bronze, they were supposed to (by contract) give me a final pass at the proofs. Well, they did. Kinda. They […]

September 29, 2011

OpsLog – LM&O – 9/28/2011

Model railroads are like their real-world counterparts; they can suffer downturns in traffic and business. Last night, our club ops were sparsely attended. Where sometimes we’ll have 20+, maybe upwards of thirty people, this time we only had a dozen. Member’s wives where in recovery, people had to work their crummy recession-desperate jobs, it was summer, something was on the tube, whatever. As a friend told me when he drove in and saw the cars in the parking lot, he thought “Uh oh.” But the layout was clean and we were here and trains were coupled up, so we figured […]

September 27, 2011

Broken set

Lighting was ripping the sky apart and I wasn’t going out in it. No, I sat against the back wall of the loading dock next to the bike, waiting until the leading edge passed before I pushed out. I knew I was going to get wet – radar showed a hundred miles of rain. Decided it was time to ride – lightning was far away but the rain was pouring down. Turned on the lights, checked that the saddlebags were sealed. Then I noticed a car stopped on in the street. A woman had exited it without an umbrella, into […]

September 25, 2011

Opslog – SP&K – 9/25/2011

The Stuyvesant Poolsburgh & Kinderhook railroad had its shakedown ops today. It’s a slick space-age layout with optional computer control of trains (in fact, during the session, the RDC line (small interurban transports) ran across their own line and met at the Stuyvesant Central Station). It’s pretty much a passenger effort, lots of station stops, mostly double-tracked main (other than one death-defying tunnel where the line is single track). Train handling is superior to anything I’ve seen in N-scale. Of course, that’s not to say we didn’t have problems (it was a shakedown session, after all). At first, everyone was […]