robert.admin – Page 77 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 4, 2019

The Cassandra Project (Review)

should have known what I was getting into when a woman at the astronomy club meeting offered this book she’d read to anyone else, with kind of a shrug and a “I’m not saying it’s good or anything.” Shoulda known faint praise when I heard it. So, The Cassandra Project is a fiction where a tabloid points out (in a NASA briefing) that Apollo IX (the vehicle sent to orbit round the moon two trips before the “actual” moon landing) made a radio transmission right before going around the far side of the moon, sounding a lot like the astronauts […]

August 1, 2019

Millennium (DOG EAR)

love the English language. I love its flexibility, the way you can make up words that work in the context of story. And I love that, with all the reading I’ve done, I have access to words and phrases dating back to the Napoleonic Era, even older. It’s a blast, when a character slips out of town without a forwarding address, to say they slipped their cable. But as I work with millennials, I’m beginning to find out just how short their awareness-horizon is. Recently I used the word “powder keg.” Emptiness. And “goldbricking”. “Featherbedding”. Blank looks at “Snipe hunt”. […]

July 28, 2019

OpsLog – WAZU RR – 07/28/2019

First item: Let the record reflect that the author, known herein as Robert Raymond, has operated three times this week. Second Item: Let the record also reflect that having a kiddy birthday party/ops session for hyperactive nine year olds is probably not a good idea. hat business out of the way, let us begin. And yes, we began as part of a birthday party. Nice that I got pizza and coke and a cute engineer’s hat, but I also got a local off the bat, working a busy section of mainline, with other mother/child teams pushing out of Portland and […]

July 28, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 7/27/2019

ou might remember our last jaunt on the FEC which ended prematurely (possibly due to your author bumping a scrap piece of rail down into the electronic guts of the Farnham Calculation Engine). The superintendent decided that this session would be finished with the same cast of characters that smoked his railroad the month before. So, no crew call, more like a summons. We all returned to the scene of the crime where we were all given our jobs from the precise moment we’d gone dark. Everything was as it was. I slid into the dispatchers chair, looked at all those […]

July 28, 2019

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Review)

kay, so this is a weird one – two guys about as tripped out on drugs as it is possible to be in ’71, hired out by a magazine to report on the craziness of the Mint 400 (a desert race outside of Vegas), going from seedy bar to wrecked hotel room in this dizzying series of episodic adventures from the very early seventies. As you can imagine, I was having troubles getting my head around it (clear as it is from drugs) and to see the humor of some of the situations. Sure, Hunter Thompson is a raw guy […]

July 26, 2019

The Brick Joke (DOG EAR)

as watching an Indian movie (not a Bollywood movie – there is a difference, I found out) the other day with the wife. In it, some young guys break a father’s wide-screen TV. They manage to replace it (with circumstances too weird to convey here). Once the TV is in, they take the old TV up several flights of stairs and out onto a lower roof, where (one, two, three and away) they throw it up to a roof another flight up. Evidence is hidden. They are safe. Some time later in this movie, another plotline, a darker and more […]

July 25, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 07/24/2019

am in the waning days of my career, but I’m still needed it seems. Had a kid in my team who has spent two days inert because the people he needs in another team are out of the office. Finally he came in today and I marched him right down to their manager (whom I’m friends with). Tossed some intros, told her about our missing SMEs, asked for help. She smiled. “Oh, yeah, I can get someone on that right away.” Problem solved. Deadlock broken. I’m pretty proud of my problem-solving abilities, and it stuck with me tonight as I […]

July 21, 2019

Don Quixote (Book 2) (Review)

don’t know how this all came to be. Miguel de Cervantes had his first smash hit (the original Don Quixote). Then, fifteen or so years afterwards, he came out with his second one. But this was two years after someone poached in his preserve and wrote their own sequel. Given that he bitches and mocks this trespasser all the way through his effort, I’ve got to figure that this sequel was a direct response to the incursion. But I found it interesting to see how much Cervantes’ powers of a writer had grown in that time. Book 1 was just […]

July 18, 2019

Change of scene (DOG EAR)

ll good things come to an end. And while I’ve (mostly) enjoyed my time in this corporation, it’s time to end it. I mentioned I was thinking about retirement in the review of The Decision Book. And how my boss know it was coming since she was Among our Subscribers. I’ve told the team and it spread like wildfire. So suddenly I’m getting back forty hours each week (fifty if you count the commuting) for my own uses. And that’s troubling. See, over the last twenty years here, I’ve learned to write hard and fast. Did several novels out on […]

July 14, 2019

ShowLog – Deland – 07/13/2019

otta admit, this was the weekend from hell. This train show, starting at 5am to head in for setup. And once it was through, I was looking forward to a run to the airport to pick up a friend’s wife, then three hours of sleep before heading in for my final corporate load (which was a disaster in itself). So, yes, stuff was stacking up. I’m not going to take this out on the show. Yeah, we only had three people for set up (that’s going to come up in our next meeting) and we put the legs on in […]