robert.admin – Page 65 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 10, 2022

Steamboats Come True (Review)

ound this in our little corner bookshop, an old textbook which i stained with coffee and Tabasco as I read it over many mornings at Juniors. But it’s a fascinating and very detailed account of the development of the steamboat. And if you think that Robert Fulton did it all alone in some sort of vacuum of engineering, no, he didn’t. When you think about it, the steamboat was one of the most technologically amazing crafts men of the time could envision. Think about it – America had just gotten through its revolution. The wilderness still besieged the coastal seaboards. […]

April 8, 2022

My Reading Room (DOG EAR)

ou might wonder about my reading room. Possibly you imagine a high-ceilinged, oaken place with towering bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes. Well, using the magic of description, let me take you to the place I do much of my reading at. It’s an old shopping center along Corrine Drive in part of Old Orlando – the area of Colonialtown was build in the late 40s and remains (with the exception of sprouting, insufferable McMansions) pretty much as it was then. Anyway, this shopping center has been there for over a half-century. The sidewalks are cracked, the storefronts old-fashioned, painted and […]

April 3, 2022

Drive (Review)

his one comes from the collection of short stories in The Expanse universe, all balled together in Memory’s Legion. It’s a collection of all the short stories and novellas the two writers who make up “James S.A Corey” have published in various platforms. But I’d not wanted to buy them for a device – I wanted paper. And now, thank God, I’ve got it! So Drive is the story behind Solomon Epstein and the creation of his ship drive that allows humans to spread out across the solar system in an easy and economic way (and not the months and […]

April 3, 2022

ShowLog – Deland – 4/2/2022

hunder is booming and rain is spattering me in the face. I’m standing just clear of the coupler, waving my operator back. Lightning flashes. Rain is starting to come down a little harder. I’m going to get wet. “Ten feet,” I call. “Five. One. Inches. Good!” Bill comes back and in the gathering rain and wind, we couple the truck to the club trailer and link all the safety hooks up. Rain is splashing against my back now. Finally we’re coupled. Bill decides he’s going to position. “I’m going in,” I tell him. It’s a long walk back to the […]

April 1, 2022

Amazing good news! (DOG EAR)

o I was at home yesterday and got a call from someone named Joel Landau on the coast. He’s a project manager for Paramount (well, technically he works for a subsidiary of theirs). But he is one of those studio guys. It seems that the someone in Paramount got a hold of a copy of Early ReTyement (God knows how), read it, loved it, and saw potential in it. Studios, he related, are trying to get crowds back with new things, trying to outplay the Netflixs of the streaming world. Early ReTyrement is just what they needed: epic, vast, amazing. […]

March 27, 2022

OpsLog – VSW – 03/26/2022

he third ops session in a week (starting with Night Ops last Saturday and Club Ops Wednesday), a great run of John Wilke’s massive and amazing Virginia SouthWestern. So this was an effort to get Orlando N-Trak to get out of its tiny clubhouse and into the larger world of Central Florida layouts. John was nice enough to open his layout for us; still, all sorts of problems, scheduling conflicts, people dropping out, a truck with three of us nearly breaking down on the side of the highway, everything going wrong. But once we got there, what a session! We […]

March 27, 2022

Soft Edges (Review)

can’t say I’m a fan of author Elizabeth Bear. I reviewed her recently in Undertow. It was an interesting-enough book, but either it the whole thing was too esoteric for me or it was the middle of a series and I didn’t realize it or whatever – it was good enough to finish but not enough for me to totally enjoy (and this isn’t a critique about Ms. Bear – sometimes readers and writers don’t match). So, that’s my prequel. Right now I’m plowing through a history of steamboats (does that whet your interest, dear reader?) and I had nothing […]

March 24, 2022

Hike (DOG EAR)

here is a house about a mile away with two curb libraries in the front yard. Who knows why – maybe they have two many books or it’s a husband/wife thing; I dunno. All I know is that they generally have great books for adults (too many of these library’s become dumping grounds for last year’s school primer or half-done coloring books (yes, I’m looking at you, sister-dear)). Anyway, I generally come across this house without too much trying. I wander past it from time to time and believed it was at the intersection of Finch and Bobolink streets. The […]

March 24, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/23/2022

o, the dispatchers report: not much for on-the-ground action, but you get the birds-eye view of the session, high above the muddy-cinder-level viewpoint of the engineers. I can tell you I kicked out 83 warrants, a good amount (which comes out to about one every two minutes or so – counting readback time (and calling overhead for information – more on that bitch-point later), that’s air-traffic-control-level busy. We ran five freights (I’m going to take 271 out next time I run – he’s been annulled twice now). We ran three of the four passenger trains. Two locals went out (Shelfton […]

March 20, 2022

The Space Between Worlds (Review)

n interesting little scifi tale about a post-corporate Earth where the environment is screwed for good, where rich whites live in their pristine city and beyond the walls, in Ashtown, all the poor people of color live in their dangerous squalor. But this Earth is a bit special – it is one of many Earths, various parallel universes with minor changes, over a hundred of them we can detect. But not only can we detect them – we can travel to them Sorta. You see, if you do exist on that parallel Earth, if you haven’t yet died, you’ll get […]