robert.admin

August 7, 2018

CZ-3 and Coathanger (8/7/3028)

ust a quick entry, showing that you don’t need to lug the scope out to enjoy astronomy. I’d gone outside with the binoculars to hunt a couple of things – the night was pretty clear (though a heavy bank briefly obscured the entire sky at one point). Still, I looked around at Polaris and tracked a few stars I liked. At about 9:30, I saw a satellite pass over, west to east, just a little north of due overhead. I used to have a pretty good tool on my old computer setup to follow such things. A little desperate looking […]
August 5, 2018

Tyre (Review)

’ll bet you know why I read this little informative book, no? Actually, this one came from a lady on my bus, a dynamic Vietnamese woman who got me to ride Critical Mass with her and her husband. I couldn’t place his nationality but when we saw each other on the bus again, she told me he was Lebanese. And that they were going to see his family soon. And with that, I started babbling about Tyre (see my books on the beg-link, below). Turns out she was going there. And she picked up this nice small reference book that […]
August 5, 2018

Jupiter and Saturn and maybe Mars (8/4/2018)

’ve been very busy with the train club recently, which means I’ve not been out with the Astronomy Club for two months. And that’s my excuse for why I wasn’t out when they were showing the masses the various opposition planets tonight. I glanced on Facebook a few hours ago and realized that they were having a star party. Just as well I didn’t go – outside of an aborted star party earlier this year, I haven’t had the scope out since November. I figured doing a major event rusty like this would just be a disaster. So I figured […]
August 2, 2018

OpsLog – CP&W – 8/2/2018

kay, blame the fact that it’s the first day I’ve taken off work on a long time, that it was a two-hour drive to Tampa, that our Mr. Roboto navigation system got us lost in the cargo port area, or that the layout is big and there was so much to see. I’ve forgotten our host’s last name (sorry, John). But he’s got a kick-ass huge-ass railroad, the Chicago, Peoria and Western, that it’s mostly steam, that you have long runs and freight shifting and someday (it can’t be too soon) Time Table and Train Order. So, yes, names are […]
August 1, 2018

Scheduled (DOG EAR)

like the site Webtoons.com. There are thousands of strips and generally I can find a handful that I really enjoy. As long as the art is fairly decent and the story not too formulaic (how many zombie apocalypse toons can there be?), I’ll try it. Windbreaker, Space Boy, and My Giant Nerd Boyfriend are just a few of my favorites. One thing that bumps items off my watchlist is consistency. For example, Seed is a brilliantly illustrated story about a young troubled girl who is befriended (in an ominous way) by a rogue AI. I really like it. It’s sharp […]
July 29, 2018

Reamde (Review)

his one comes from Neal Stephenson, they guy who swept me away with Snow Crash all those years ago. It’s a vast and glorious tale that runs a modest 1044 pages. Yeah, you gotta really wanna here. So Reamde is, in a nutshell, a fictional tale about a bit of Chinese malware that locks up your files and leaves you a “reamde” file that tells you how to pay them off to get your files unlocked. Of course the file is typoed because they are Chinese hackers and English is not their mother tongue. But the unique thing here is […]
July 25, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 07/25/2018

ike an ecstatic divorcee leaving all their cares behind, the local I’d been running dropped everything at Zanesville, a string of empty corn syrup and paint tankers and a couple of boxcars, sans auto parts, and was now rattling along the river valley at track speed; two geeps, a T&P boxcar (with mine equipment) and a jolly green Penn Central caboose. We’re making the run up the valley to Carbon Hill in record time. Everything gone sharp with all the spottings and a run on coal has left Champion Mine clear for us to work in. It’s shaping up to […]
July 25, 2018

Failed Authors (DOG EAR)

am a failed author. I was commissioned for one book (Don’t Jettison Medicine) which made me a nice bit of money. Fire and Bronze, my masterpiece, fizzled when the publisher died and the company went bankrupt during its release. Early ReTyrement did okay at bookshows but I never got that traction that publicity-pumping, number-jumping authors who are more concerned at ranking inflation than actual writing have. But that’s fine. I still write a lot; these blogs, my interactive games, my various projects, and even a little commissioned erotic on the side. I write because I write. In a way, it’s […]
July 22, 2018

Green Eggs and Ham (Review)

oke up this morning wondering what I could review. I’m still working through Reamde, all 1042 pages of it (you can use this book to chock the wheel of your car if you need to change a flat). And then this Seuss classic popped into my mind and I figured, “Why not?” So, Green Eggs and Ham is a story about choice and acceptance of new experiences, in this case the titular foods, both shown as nauseating and possibly dangerous to ingest. The protagonist, an unnamed sort of man/canine hybrid, seems to view himself as his own worldview center; he […]
July 18, 2018

Books as lives (DOG EAR)

unny think about work – my team has shifted from being a collection of Indian moms to being a team of millennial boys. And with that comes all sorts of problems. Normally I’d not concern myself with the tribulations of the trophy crowd but I’m a scrummaster – I have to run a team. And I’ve got one little tyke who is particularly troublesome. You’ll remember from an earlier Dog Ear how I mentioned pulling one of my dad’s old sea stories from his shelf while stuck in a family event with nobody to talk to? Well, I was just […]