Blog – Page 108 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 20, 2017

Faceless Finale (DOG EAR)

o really, what was being anti-social in regards to social media (as a Lent objective) like? Freeing in some ways. Restrictive in others. First off – I’m a writer. Technically I create my own social media. I maintain a set of blogs and create content for them. I post broadly about the craft of writing and specifically about the craft of reading (i.e. book reviews). So I do have my creative outlet there. Without Facebook and an incessant need to click into it to see who liked me and who I needed to defend my views against (you trolls, you), […]

April 23, 2017

London Under (Review)

nyone who’s played a game within the last 40 years probably knows about D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). In its most basic form, players take the role of magic users and warriors and travel into the dungeon of a castle long swept away, to fight all the monsters who horde treasure therein. Economically, it makes no sense. Biologically, it makes no sense. Rationally, it’s a joke. But it’s still fun. But while a dungeon chock full of monsters who understand economic principles (and, seemingly, doorknobs) seems unlikely, equally unlikely are the places that exist beneath London. The remnants of old streets […]

April 24, 2017

The Great Train Bloggery (DOG EAR)

t’s eleven at night. I’m driving home after eight hours of work, an hour’s commuting, two hours of dinner with the buddies and then three hours of model train operations. And now I need to blog about the latter. To define – model train operation is where a group of train enthusiasts use their layout to simulate how a real railroad operates. There is a dispatcher controlling things by phones from a remote office. There is a yardmaster sorting inbound cuts to locals, and outbound strings for export. And there are the train crews, dozens of guys running freight, passenger […]

April 26, 2017

OpslLog – LM&O – 4/26/2017

didn’t think they could do it. To get ready for this ops session, we had several Herculean efforts. First, we had Frank and Jonathan rebuilding the entire West Martin throat in one month. I mean, damn, this is overhand track laying. I know that these guys did a lot of make this happen (I could see the alarm toggle open and close remotely for their work sessions). So, in four weeks, they stripped the yard bare, put in more than a dozen turnouts, improved the flow into the critical west end (by double-tracking the leads), wired and tested it in. […]

April 27, 2017

New scope for the kids (4/27/2017)

o my adopted daughter’s kids loved looking through my scope in a backyard observing session a year back. Turns out my sister found an old, reliable (sorta) Meade, just a lightweight scope with simple knobs and a dodgy spotter scope. She got it for $20 at Goodwill (and if there is something the poor need, it’s access to clear night skies). Anyway, it was in pretty bad shape. Tonight I spent the evening cleaning it up, tightening the tracks (it’s still a bit loose for my tastes) and trying to get the spotter to line up (never did). But with […]

April 30, 2017

Arabella of Mars (Review)

kay, so the Napoleonic Wars are still taking place. There’s that. And there is colonialism. Again, a constant of the British Empire. But then there is the fact that space isn’t, well, space. It’s full of air. And with sailing ships that can lift on massive hot air balloons to low earth orbit, where they can set their sails and move about on interplanetary jet-streams and then, when they get to a planet, deploy heated chutes to come in for landing, yeah, so it’s rather a different 1813 than you could imagine. So young Arabella is a daughter of a […]

May 3, 2017

Bikes and… Speaking (DOG EAR)

’m not writing with a quill on parchment – I’m using one word processor (Word) or another (the Joomla editor). I don’t write once, dust sand on it and blow-dry the beads of ink. I write something. I consider the flow and meter and meaning. I might break a longer sentence apart. I might glue two shorter ones together. I might decide I’m belaboring a point (now, perhaps?) or that I haven’t made my meaning clear. But I’ll mess around with the sentences, meander through the paragraphs, figuring out how to make it all work out so my prose gets […]

May 14, 2017

Cloud Atlas (Review)

loud Altas – it’s not one book, it’s six! Actually, it is only one book, a set of six stories told from differing human epochs. All the characters share a distinctive birthmark, a blemish in the shape of a comet on their shoulder. And all their stories link together very distantly, but, like instruments in an orchestra, all of them taken together produce a message to the reader. And the message can be bittersweet, yes, but uplifting too. So, we have… ADAM EWING – A San Francisco attorney who, in 1849, is on his return journey to his home from […]

May 18, 2017

Overtime (DOG EAR)

don’t think I’ve ever gapped in posting my DOG EAR column (nor my book reviews, for that matter). Since 2012, I’ve been religiously posting up my observations on media, on writing, on techniques. I’ve talked about shows I’ve enjoyed (for TV and movies are just another form of storytelling). I’ve even talked about the societal changes to our reading habits (such as the impact of cellphones – people who know me are now going nooooooo! Say it isn’t so!) I’ve written while sick, while tired. I’ve written in the middle of the night. I’ve written from work (shh!). I’ve even […]

May 21, 2017

OpsLog – FEC – 5/21/2017

here is a bit of universal irony here. I’m idling in the heated gravel desert of Cocoa Yard on the Florida East Coast, writing car numbers on lading slips and jotting in pick-up dates on the swaps. This, following a weeklong, daylong, every-damn-second long audit I’ve only just survived at work. Yes, more paperwork! Yahoo! But seriously, it’s a well-thought-out system, it slows the ops down to a more realistic pace, and I rather like it. Owner Ken Farnham has come up with an even-better way of getting cars to sidings where the trains are assembled in a completely different […]