robert.admin – Page 74 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 5, 2021

Hell’s Gate (Review)

ill Schutt, an author and Zoologist, has created a very Indiana Jonesy hero with his Captain R. J. MacCready, a special operative in World War Two who is sent in when special forces have failed. If you like your action mysterious, hot and kinda on the weird side, you’ll love his writing. His Hell’s Gate was one I picked up on disk to listen on a long vacation drive. I enjoyed it but my wife drifted off to look at passing scenery. That’s kinda how it always plays with Crichton-esh books. Anyway, this one has an interesting concept. Two German […]

September 2, 2021

Generational Eagles (Dog Ear)

o years back, I used to watch Space 1999, a cool-back-then not-so-cool-on-streaming-now show. The premise (now laughable, since I am much older and wiser) is that the moon has a nuclear stockpile which blows up, driving the moon away from Earth. Far away. As in, it passes a new planet with new dangers every week. Okay, well, space is big. First, it would take hundreds, thousands, millions of years for the moon to get to any other star that way. And who’s to say that, with the vastness of space, it would even pass anywhere close to any star? But […]

August 29, 2021

I, Robot (Review)

here are three Laws of Robotics that all robots must follow: First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. This makes sense – you don’t want robots to kill, yet you don’t want robots to damage themselves (unless to prevent their […]

August 29, 2021

OpsLog – FEC – 08/28/2021

o it was a training day on the Florida East Coast. Given the confusions that the new Pinetta Industrial Area has faced, Ken invited a smaller group, broke us into two teams and had us run through the AM and PM shift. This meant that I got a glare when my wife (who is perfectly happy doing the yardmaster job) got posted to the AM engineer. Me, I’d come in at that shift and dumped the inbound cars, the the mainline background job. She wasn’t very happy when she settled in her seat and started running her RS-3 up and […]

August 26, 2021

Where the hell have I been? (DOG EAR)

ou might have noticed a noticeable gap in my latest postings. Like, I haven’t been here for a month. It was a long string of unfortunate events. Like all true adventures, I was supposed to go to a train operation session that didn’t go so well. Got home and wiggled my mouse (what? Oh, THAT) to perk up my computer. Found that Firefox showed the old “trouble with that site” thing. Tried to restart the wifi. Nothing. Checked the router. Running. Checked the wife’s computer. Connected. So that meant that I had something wrong inside my box. Went through the […]

August 26, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 08/25/2021

here are those days where ops doesn’t seem worth it. I knew there was going to be problems when most of the club officers didn’t show up. That means I’m the sole host. I had to get everything ready and was pretty busy, setting up the computer and getting the clocks running (and bringing the phones back online, since we are evidently a club that laughs at death). Since most of the trains were signed up for, I grabbed helpers out of Calypso. Got Dusty Klauck on the front end of 223 and up the hill we went. While Bob […]

August 23, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 8/21/2021

I’m slowly adding scenery to the Tuscarora – been busy with so many things. Anyway, had another session out at the club, a three-man job that was a lot of fun. We had John DV on the Coal and Greg running the local. Me, I took the tower/dispatcher post. It was fun but I realized how LONG it’s been since I ran it last. Man, I got the panel so tangled I had to just throw levers forward and reset. What a mess. Still, we got trains moving pretty good (though some situations arouse that had me running coal three […]

August 23, 2021

OpsLog – L&M – 8/14/2021

hat’s the worst thing you can hear when you are a dispatcher on John Wilkes’ L&M? Headlights? Ha. No. No, it’s when you are hanging around at 10am waiting for your ride-guy to show up and you get a call from another person attending today’s session. “Hey, Robert, where are you? We’re ready to start?” Ready to start? Start time was 10am? I thought it was noon! And it’s in Polk City, something like forty miles away. We’re in Orlando and haven’t even hit the road yet! What a way to not run a railroad. So I called my ride-share […]

August 12, 2021

A real find (DOG EAR)

was on vacation recently, visiting family up north while knocking out a whole lot of novels (I’ve got materials for weeks of reviews now). While rooming at my sister’s, I mentioned I’d like to stop in at any good used book stores. She had one, a little strip mall outlet that had room to grow and lots of books. I dove into it like a shark into a chum-filled ocean. While nosing through the scifi area, I found a collection of novels by one Christopher Nuttall, the Ark Royal series. It had a very interesting concept – it was a […]

August 8, 2021

The Arrest (Review)

his is one of these books where I wish I was in some college class reading it, so I could understand the meaning better. There is a hint of what I think this is really about. But I’m not sure. So, in The Arrest, main character Sandy Duplessis (see, what’s with that name? It’s almost “duplicitous”, right?) has limped home to his sister’s organic farm in Maine after the world fell apart. The Arrest, from the title, is not an act of civil custody as it is the complete break down of every machine in the world. Now, with the […]