robert.admin – Page 232 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 7, 2011

Cats and Dogs

I knew it was going to rain today. Right there in the weather forecast – couldn’t miss it. Rode anyway. How to explain this? Can’t tell you. Of course, there was a late afternoon meeting that went on until 5:45pm. Rain’s hitting the window, it’s dark as pitch, and everyone is gassing their way through everything they can possibly say. Finally, done. I go out as the woman who sits near me is leaving. She’s shaking her head at my madness – of course, she also told me about her recent white-water rafting expedition and how they flipped (twice). You’d […]

July 3, 2011

Early ReTyrement – the working cover

So here is the final working cover art for Early ReTyrement. Michael Metcalf, who I commission off Elance, did a stellar job through all my little changes. He actually researched Persian dress and foot ware for the time, to get the illustration right. This has been the cover I’ve envisioned since 2002, when I was ready to go to print (the publishing industry, it seemed, wasn’t quite as ready as I). I’d long dreaded that they would muck this cover up, perhaps with something silly or stupid or simplistic. No, I wanted nice-guy Mason, the ranks of soldiers, the crowding […]

June 30, 2011

Early ReTyrement – take 1

I got the first cut from my artist at work today. The email came in, I gulped, I gasped. What if it was a cock-up? What if it was horrible? Then I clicked on the attachment. Magnificent! And here it is… I couldn’t believe how much I liked it. I’ve been thinking of this book for years, how the cover would look, what it would show. I wanted Mason in the middle of ranks of Persians and Greeks, with […]

June 28, 2011

Who’d a thunk it?

Like Oddball and Kelly in Kelly’s Heroes, I don’ like officers. Corporate officers. They tend to frown at me, lie to me, and indirectly fire me. I trust them like I would a hungry lion pacing about. Or, as noted in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Universe, as far as I could spit a dead rat. But my current one, my managing director (i.e. my boss’s boss) is slowly winning my respect. He seems…. decent. How strange that is to me. He’s been straight-up, even when the company hasn’t been. He’s asked for my opinions and forwarded them up. And, most […]

June 26, 2011

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Review)

Before Dollhouse and Firefly, even before Buffy (on TV) there was the movie Buffy, the one my wife and I saw back in 1992 and rather liked. Anyway, she found the disk on the cheap, so it served as our Friday Nite Flick. What a difference nearly 20 years makes. I’d remember this being slick, stylistic, happening and hip. I remember it being so cool – Modern Vampires! In L.A.! I remembered really liking it. It came to me while Buffy was training, and in some of the early fight scenes. Everyone seemed… slow. Everyone looked like they’d just walked […]

June 24, 2011

The quest conitnues…

Been digging about on Elance for the last few weeks, searching for a cover artist for Early ReTyrement. Originally picked out a perfect set of guys in India but they never responded. Another group turned me down flat. So I fired a reworked version of the request into the general pool and now I’ve got ten responses. Most of those I know I won’t go with, but there are two that are pretty good. I’ve queried both artists further, making sure they are quoting for what I want. Many of them have wildly differing styles, so I want to make […]

June 22, 2011

Opslog LM&O – 06/22/2011

With warrants (where a dispatcher reads checkbox orders to a crew, who reads them back) there is a handy little order for “Not in effect until arrival of train ____ “. With this, you can latch orders. If Train 101 is going from A to C, and train 102 is at B, wanting to go to A, you can cut an order to 102 that clears him but it isn’t “in effect until arrival of 101”. If a dispatcher is clever, he can latch orders ahead of time, letting the trains roll as events trigger them. It’s really cool… when […]

June 21, 2011

Black out

So what’s cycling like during an apocalypse? 4:30 at work. Just finishing up an email to a friend. Another couple minutes of boning about, a little small talk, then down to the locker to swap out clothing and away. Nice thought. But suddenly my screen, the overheads, my lava lamp, all the computers around me, all snapped off. In the silence I could hear the fans spin down. Power failure. We hung around for a bit, watching the major intersection on Maitland, the cars careening though it beneath blackened signals. Nobody stopped. Nobody yielded. I was certain I’d see a […]

June 21, 2011

Load Night

The sun is only hinting across the 5am sky. The world is pretty peaceful on a Sunday. I’ve been up since, oh, 2:30am. It’s load night. Three times a year, my corporation shuts everything down and loads a new release. Thirty times over my career here, I’ve been up to work it. Years ago, we’d actually go down to the ops center and watch the data flow in (like water into freshly cut irrigation canals). Now its all done from our desks. And of course, it’s for free. I don’t get a dime. It used to be (back in the […]

June 19, 2011

OpsLog – Florida East Coast – 6/18/2011

On the panel again on the FEC (as mentioned HERE). Always easier the second time around – I know what to expect. And now we’re in the zone. In the early days of programming (back before SOX and process and other such rubbish) I’d go into the zone a lot. Also, writing sometimes puts me there. This is when you are furiously working on multiple levels, with your brain seemingly running at capacity, fully engaged. In the zone, time doesn’t pass, it doesn’t even exist. You are fully focused, dealing with each issue as they come up. I’ve got the sheet […]