Blog

December 5, 2010

Beyond Potter

Okay, this is my book blog. What’s the point of this blog? Well, let’s see. What would you say if you had a friend that ate at some nasty place, some sticky-elbow fast food joint. Every day, same burger, fries, and a coke. Conversely, perhaps you have been to France and walked the boulevards and enjoyed intimate dining in a street-side cafe. Or you’ve sat on a pier-top restaurant off the California coast, enjoying a local wine with your pasta as the sun slides into the golden ocean. Or perhaps you’ve been to cooking school and learned every detail of […]
December 5, 2010

A new begining

So, welcome again. I decided to kick off this new website. The decision came one night in San Diego (to run trains – a story for another day). I was reading “Waiter Rant”, a book (a very plain book) written by a waiter who was “discovered” by someone tripping over his blog. Funny, but I remember going to bed that night, wondering why the hell everyone else get’s breaks. At 2am, I woke up in my hotel room and realized that my current (ha! Current? Five years out of date) web site was as cold as day-old oatmeal. I decided, […]
December 6, 2010

Yesterday’s Jam

To continue my point from the earlier post, a bit of script from a great show, the IT crowd. Postman: Moss. Amazon thingy. Moss: Ahh wicked. I know what this is. It’s the new Harry Potter. I got the child edition and the adult edition just to check there are no differences in the text   Think about it.
December 7, 2010

Here come the tomatoes

Tonight I pulled down Jcomments, a Joomla! extension that allows user comments to be entered against articles. I’ve enabled this for all my blogs (currently general and books – I’ve plans for movies, bikes and trains soon). How it works (how I think it works) is that you can either enter something as an unregistered guest (I have to midwife it into being). Or you can register on the site and put up anything you want (within reason, please!). Don’t like what I said about Harry Potter? Give me what-for! Enjoy a review? Post up some support. Go’wan, it’s easy […]
December 9, 2010

War of the Worlds (review)

What can I say. If it wasn’t for H.G. and his nightmarish vision of apocalypse, I might have become some sort of illiterate dummy. As it was, when I was about eleven, I read below par. It didn’t interest me, I didn’t care, it was boring, yada. Then my mom (bless her heart) sat me down every night and made me read for 30 minutes. Didn’t matter what. The TV guide, the back of a cereal box, anything as long as it had words on it. So I read a little of this and a little of that from the […]
December 12, 2010

iZombies

  It was a risk. I had to buy a cell phone. I hate the effing thing, but being a bike-commuter I might need to flare-gun the wife for recovery (like the time I collided head-on with a Mormon missionary). Or that time I was out and she had a medical emergency. So I bought one, but to inoculate myself I gave my wife the number and refused to memorize it myself. You could torture me and I couldn’t give it to you. And the phone is off 99% of the time anyway. Otherwise, I might turn into an iZombie. […]
December 12, 2010

Four reasons

It’s too damn early, my breath is frosting my glasses and the bike is as cold as a popsicle. I’m out in the carport in two sweaters, sweat pants and polyester head-condom. On go the bike gloves, the helmet, and lastly the Road ID bracelet (for the time I might be too mangled to speak for myself). There is the usual fumble to get the 20 lb saddle bags (pre-packed the night before with a full set of office clothing, a towel, a bike pump, repair gear, my breakfast and my tinytop) over the back rack. Whenever I ride without […]
December 14, 2010

Live Free or Die (review)

You know Iran can’t have a nuclear power plant. But did you know Disney could? This pissed me off a decade ago, so I wrote a scathing novel about theme parks growing into “duchies” with their own laws, courts, and (it turned out) armies. And as I wrote it, I found myself really chewing on those enablers of theme parks, the shambling middle class. With their annual passes and their comfortable entertainment expectations, my novel did everything it could to give them a wake-up slap, a cosmic black eye. One agent asked me, “So, if you piss off everyone, who’s […]
December 16, 2010

The Great Panel of China

“You said you wanted to dispatch sometime,” Ken said with his usual friendly demeanor. “How about today?” “Sure,” I smiled. Holy crispy crap, I thought. Ken’s three-room layout represents sixty miles of Florida East Coast mainline – huge! He’s also got a a half-dozen serious operators taking their starting positions, reviewing their train orders, checking out their paperwork, as serious as career engineers. This is not the place to screw up. He walks me through the CTC board, essentially that big black 2001 monolith bristling with lights and toggles. I’ll be the dispatcher today, setting switches and signals in to get the traffic […]
December 17, 2010

Work – where everyone screws up

Had to ride in today. The car is having severe electrical problems – everything except the headlights and recharger is out – no windows, no moonroof, no mirror adjustment. Even the heated seats are out (and damn, did needed them this week). So its in the shop and I’m on Kiki’s broomstick (i.e. my bike). So had that going on, and a late start because I had to curse the dead batteries out of a tail light (with the help of a screwdriver). Found myself playing bus-tag up 1792. You know the game, where you are riding and a city […]