robert.admin – Page 231 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 7, 2011

Killing my old friend

Well, this has been a long and hard struggle. I’ve picked up a nasty virus, once that hammers performance, respawns, and redirects all web searches. God knows what else its doing. The other day, I contacted the highest-rated Orlando tech firm. How that rating (on thumbtacks.com) was determined, I don’t know. The guy said they were experts at virus removal, that they could make it all better, that they would tune everything and my computer would be “like new”. Elated, I gave them my old laptop and left with a glow of hope. False hope, it would seem. When I […]

July 31, 2011

OpsLog – Nebraska Division – 7/31/2011

I knew there was trouble when I came into North Platte yard limits with my second local of the day. The first cut was still sitting there, the yard was filling up and the yardmaster was ripping out tufts of hair. Operations, like any other social organizations, can suffer breakdowns. In this case, the owner (a veterinarian) had lost a lot of setup time to clearing his train room of remodeling debris and also got called into two emergency surgeries that morning. Hence, the normal administration sorting had not taken place. The yards began confused and couldn’t catch up. Add […]

July 28, 2011

Wired

One thing about last night’s ops – there comes a point in any game/situation/reality where the human mind simply cannot clock any faster, when you’ve hit that wall and know that every synapse is firing. That session was one of those events. I was working the radio with one hand, mousing and order-writing with the other. I’d knock out warrants and more calls would come in. I always had a train or two on the line, waiting for clearance. The problem (engineered to be just that) is Harris Glen, the summit of our line. It’s a long run up […]

July 27, 2011

Opslog LM&O – 07/27/2011

It’s a lot of work to set up for a model railroad session at the club. We’ve got 15 scale miles of mainline, which doesn’t include all the industrial and yard trackage. We’ve also got to put member’s engines on six freights, four passengers, three locals, two coal moves and perhaps a few unscheduled extras. We’ve got to clean all the rails, get the power up and checked, hook up the dispatcher computer, sync the clocks, activate the phones. And we’ve got to agree to an equitable distribution of crews, so everyone gets to run what they feel like running. […]

July 26, 2011

Easy, Trigger…

Was riding home today, coming up on the busiest intersection (Lee and 17-92) when I heard this repeating noise, not quite a hiss, not quite a click, sorta like a something stuck to the tire or flapping against the supports. Put my head down as I took the sidewalk at the corner to wait for the light (call me a coward, but drivers come around that curve like Ben Hur in a chariot). Looked it over but couldn’t see anything wrong. Kicked off when I had the cross light, heard the noise again. Strange. Pulled over on the other side, […]

July 23, 2011

Socialism

To the horror of my parents, I’ve always been a socialist of sorts, a wandering spirit looking for the government supporting its members as members, where people don’t die under bridges or in shabby nursing homes. Before everyone trots out their tea party rhetoric and Fox and Friends viewpoints, let me say that this is pretty much a one-man debate, a personal deliberation. I’ll occasionally discuss the matter with my libertarian friend Jesse Markowitz, if only because he is one of the few people left who openly discusses things on merit rather than what passes for Yankee debates these days […]

July 22, 2011

Hacked

“The Semantic Web works beautifully, by the way. It’s not like your foul litter Internet – so full of spam and crime.” -Black Swan Bruce Sterling Tuesday night I was working on cleaning up Early ReTyrement. My pal Mike Krzos had come up with all sorts of observations everyone had missed and I wanted to get them in. However, in the time travel section where Mason vanishes from Daytona Beach and ends up in Tyre, I stated that he fell thirty feet into the water (the idea being that he’d move to a different location on the globe and a […]

July 18, 2011

The Potter legacy

The end of the world came and I didn’t notice it, what with the bike rides, the model train constructions, dinner with friends, work and wife. The last Harry Potter movie hit the screens. Facebook had rung like a gong when Casey Anthony got off. Now it was ringing against from all the Potter fans bellowing about what a wondrous thing this series was, how it taught their kids to read, about morals, ethics, the importance of good vs. evil, of fellowship, of commitment. Yadda yad. That the adult fans point to their children as the justification for their canonization […]

July 16, 2011

Rivers of grass (Review)

Imagine reading a dramatization of a cancer or degenerative disease that has been slowly spreading through your body, one you were not fully aware of. You read of the wonderful nature of each organ, their function and interplay, and cringe as you follow their demise. The whole is breaking down. And you realize it is probably too late to reverse the process. This is pretty much what reading this beautiful, painful book is all about. Rivers of Grass follows the history of the Florida Everglades, from its geological makeup, its biological processes, its discovery and settling by nomadic Indian tribes, […]

July 10, 2011

Fuzzy History

My dad once gave me a picture that said, “Cats do not tell all they know.” That’s very true. Had cats while growing up, but as an adult I’ve had three special cats. The first, Scud East, a little English shorthair, I picked up from the VPI swine barn. He was my pal through college and those years following, always at my side and never straying (even when we went for walks). Having grown up amidst dorm room D&D games where he charmed the players, he always considered himself a small human, seeing no difference in what we did and […]