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Time Table and Train Order – this is the technique railroads used to keep trains from crashing into in the dark ages before remote signaling, electronics, computers, and radios. How does this apply to the morass that is American Business Management? Think about it for a minute. It’s 1910 and you work on a railroad that covers 3000 miles over which hundreds of trains are running. Climbing into the cab (perhaps in the middle of the night in a driving snow storm in some podunk town), how do you know what trains are late, what bridges are out, and what special trains […]

Sat by the pond at lunch and slogged through the ongoing ReTyrement rewrite. Got to the point where we see the hero at work in a wineshop (that serves food) in 330BC. He’s humping over the fire, turning the spitted goat, checking the bread on the metal plate… Something in my mind went clunk! I checked this online. Don’t know why I didn’t realize this (nor did any of my editing readers realize this) but you absolutely have to bake bread in an oven. Now, there were little ovens, even portable ovens, back then and you could shove bread in […]

Stopped at a light, the rising sun glimmering the frost-blasted foliage around me. I mirror-glanced the driver behind me through wisps of steamy exhaust. Oriental, female, high cheekbones, a slender noble face. Her hair was parted back and collected behind her narrow neck, glimmering earrings clasped to shell-like ears, as beautiful as a geisha. And she was doing something that, as both a motorist and cyclist, really torques me. She was applying mascara. But how beautiful. One tiny hand clasped the steering wheel with a gentle dove-like touch, her fingers poised in a tidy little line. Her other hand, raised, her […]

I knew how the commander at Pearl Harbor felt that fateful morning in December when my auxiliary hard drive crashed. I loved my first laptop and, as memory cost dropped, bought an auxiliary drive to hang off it, my “back up”. But let’s face it, the laptop was like a thimble, the aux drive a bucket. I’d couldn’t have a one-to-one data ratio. Furthermore, there was stuff I didn’t want to carry around day-to-day on the portable. So into this basket went all my eggs: photos, freelance work, model railroad reference information, everything. And then, after years of storing things, […]