Blog – Page 138 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 4, 2019

Forced (DOG EAR)

o one of our senior executives (who I trust does not bother with this little blog) told everyone at work they had to read three specific books on software principles and practices. And thus Caesar sent forth his decree. Really, how many people (other than the guppy-swallowing career-jumpers) are going to bother? We work in an environment of churn, where we see management say one thing and do another, where our development jobs have shipped overseas (the shortcomings of this lost on those Olympians who never do code reviews on these guys), and where every sprint has some emergency that […]

July 7, 2019

The Gossage—Vardebedian Papers (Review)

oody Allen is poison now. Nobody will touch him. But before all that sordid family stuff, before the films, he was a writer. Even then, a lot of his short stories were silly and strange. But one, which i first read as a kid, involved two gentlemen playing chess by mail (snail mail). What could go wrong? We see this in the form of their correspondence, with the first letter (at mid-game) pointing to an irregularity in play. Evidently a move from several turns ago was lost in the mail (blamed in distractions by “Amalgamated Anti Matter”, which just fell […]

July 12, 2019

Among our subscribers (DOG EAR)

n Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog, a supervillain who maintains a video blog boasts on his podcast how he is going to attack the city. He gloats about his plans, his goals, and his likely success. Then he clicks off. The next image is him (quite disheveled) blogging a few hours later. Shakily, he notes that he should count the LAPD and Captain Hammer among his viewers. “They were waiting for me. Captain Hammer threw a car at my head…” Longtime readers of this blog will remember a couple of weeks back, where I reviewed The Decision Book. My wife had […]

July 14, 2019

A Dream of Armageddon (Review)

he long trek through Don Quixote continues, the end in sight. Given that I had a train show, an airport run and a software load (all before sunup Sunday), I didn’t get it done (expecting it cleared by dinner tonight). So that being the case, I grabbed one of my H.G. Wells collections from the shelf, opened to a random story and read it. A Dream of Armageddon opens in our living dream, that of a man on a train pausing at Rugby, of a haunted man entering, of the conversation quickly turning towards dreams (for the narrator is carrying […]

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 […]

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 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 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 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 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 […]