robert.admin – Page 84 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 25, 2021

The fall of the house of Mozilla (DOG EAR)

’ve long been a fan of the Mozilla products, particularly FireFox (as a browser) and Thunderbird (for my email). They’ve served me well. Until recently. I’ve been having problems with Thunderbird. Occasionally email accounts (I’ve got three) would drop out for a week or so. Like stray dogs, they would eventually wander home. But recently one of my important accounts has failed and stayed failed for several months. This meant I had to browser into the AT&T site to get mail – not too bad except when you have a newsletter due out and people are submitting to two different […]

February 25, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 02/24/2021

“Boomer” is defined as a railroad employee who goes from job to job in a short time, constantly working on different trains and positions. That was pretty much me tonight. Got there early and set up a passenger train, and put some engines in the yard for any locals that might open up. Then someone said our dispatcher wasn’t showing tonight so I’d have to take it. Then Shaun said he’d take the DS desk instead of running Shelfton. Fine – I wanted a local. So I rolled down to Shelfton at clock-hot, working out my first slick move of […]

February 21, 2021

The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar (Review)

’d first heard of Lupin from the classic Japanese anime (and I do mean classic – it’s been running fifty years) – Lupin III. There, the main character, a master thief, claims he was the grandson of Arsene Lupin, whoever that was. Then there was the very recent series on Netflix, Lupin, where a modern French thief raves about “the Lupin books”. Well, you all know how I am with literary threads like this – I gotta unravel them. So into Project Gutenberg I went, poking around. And yes, there was a Lupin, a thief very popular in French magazine […]

February 14, 2021

Drone (Review)

kay, no mistaking this – Drone is one of those male fantasy books. Troy Pearce, our main character, is the CEO of Pearce Systems, a company that makes and flies drones for all circumstances including whale tracking and political assassinations. He apparently spends his time up in a cabin, running his company with occasional online meetings and mostly chopping wood (with his shirt off). His officers are all eclectic individuals who do their own research from various beaches around the world. No TPS reports. No budgets. No investor meetings. Everyone is sexy and provocative and perfect. The villains are pretty […]

February 14, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 2/13/2021

o when you set up an ops session on get three guys willing to show, and then on the day of, two of them bail, you’re pretty screwed, aren’t you? For a moment I figured we’d cancel – it was just me and AJ. But John was there and agreed to run coal. I told AJ that there was no better time to learn the tower – we’d treat it like a practice session. I ended up with both the local and the dispatcher job so I was really going to be busy. And we started the sequential clock. It […]

February 11, 2021

Lost and Found (mostly lost) (DOG EAR)

was good friends with an executive at a former company. My service for him was sterling as he rose through the ranks. But then I made the mistake of loaning him The Great Race (that wonderful movie with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon). And that was the last I saw of it. It’s always a pain to corner someone, to trap them, to offer them a great movie they never knew about which you wish to share, to have them in your power and place it in their hands, only to have them turn the tables and lose it. Part […]

February 7, 2021

The Demonstration (Review)

his shortie comes from The Fortunes of Captain Blood, one of the collections of short stores that 1930’s megastar Rafael Sabatini wrote about his break out character, Captain Blood, a pirate in the golden age of piracy. In this short tale, Monsieur de Saintonges, on a sort of inspection tour of the French possessions in the Caribbean for his masters in Paris, has been successful in that he has married a very rich woman who owns most of Martinique. In completing his circuit and before heading home to enjoy his wife’s fortunes in his homeland, he calls upon Tortuga, a […]

February 4, 2021

The Real World (DOG EAR)

ecades ago, a friend of mine worked at TRW. At the time they had a pretty pompous ad – something like “TRW – what does it stand for?” My friend laughed at this and said “Three Random Words”. But he also noted that, right out of college, it meant “The Real World”. The Real World. No more drinking every night. No more philosophic debates late into the wee hours. No more D&D. No more showing up for class only if you wanted to. The Real World was a small cubicle. Be-in-by times. Crummy coffee. Deadlines you didn’t agree to. Unfair, […]

January 30, 2021

The Ghost Brigades (Review)

had a good feeling this was going to be good. The first book of the series (Old Man’s War by John Scalzi) was really a joy to read. And I had my best friend Jesse (as well as the guy behind the counter at the bookstore) rave about how good the followup was. And I’ve got to say, “I had it on good authority…” Great book. This book centers on the Ghost Brigades, far-future solders who are created from the DNA of the dead, who fight and die to keep the human colonies safe. However, one of them is a […]

January 28, 2021

The Nature of Stories (DOG EAR)

’m a writer. And I’m also a model railroader. Yes, I play with trains. Actually, in my case, model railroading is every bit as story-filled as writing. For example, we are currently finishing up a Dairy Queen restaurant on part of our sectional layout. There was discussion on how to make it stand out, to be more than just a model of a road-side business. So the result was to put a whole bunch of motorcycles out front, parked in a row. And around the corner, before the outside “Men’s” room door, a line of a dozen desperate bikers, all […]