Blog – Page 14 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 27, 2011

Opslog LM&O – 07/27/2011

It’s a lot of work to set up for a model railroad session at the club. We’ve got 15 scale miles of mainline, which doesn’t include all the industrial and yard trackage. We’ve also got to put member’s engines on six freights, four passengers, three locals, two coal moves and perhaps a few unscheduled extras. We’ve got to clean all the rails, get the power up and checked, hook up the dispatcher computer, sync the clocks, activate the phones. And we’ve got to agree to an equitable distribution of crews, so everyone gets to run what they feel like running. […]

July 28, 2011

Wired

One thing about last night’s ops – there comes a point in any game/situation/reality where the human mind simply cannot clock any faster, when you’ve hit that wall and know that every synapse is firing. That session was one of those events. I was working the radio with one hand, mousing and order-writing with the other. I’d knock out warrants and more calls would come in. I always had a train or two on the line, waiting for clearance. The problem (engineered to be just that) is Harris Glen, the summit of our line. It’s a long run up […]

July 31, 2011

OpsLog – Nebraska Division – 7/31/2011

I knew there was trouble when I came into North Platte yard limits with my second local of the day. The first cut was still sitting there, the yard was filling up and the yardmaster was ripping out tufts of hair. Operations, like any other social organizations, can suffer breakdowns. In this case, the owner (a veterinarian) had lost a lot of setup time to clearing his train room of remodeling debris and also got called into two emergency surgeries that morning. Hence, the normal administration sorting had not taken place. The yards began confused and couldn’t catch up. Add […]

August 7, 2011

Killing my old friend

Well, this has been a long and hard struggle. I’ve picked up a nasty virus, once that hammers performance, respawns, and redirects all web searches. God knows what else its doing. The other day, I contacted the highest-rated Orlando tech firm. How that rating (on thumbtacks.com) was determined, I don’t know. The guy said they were experts at virus removal, that they could make it all better, that they would tune everything and my computer would be “like new”. Elated, I gave them my old laptop and left with a glow of hope. False hope, it would seem. When I […]

August 7, 2011

Haste makes waste

Had to go to Winter Park’s Miller Hardware today (Sunday) to pick up some glue – they have a heavy adhesive that is good for real lock-down applications, and it doesn’t harm plastics or styrene. I’d just used up the last of mine Saturday at the club, gluing buildings down. Kicked out of the driveway at 10:30 and it was hot and getting hotter. Still, Winter Park Road is nicely shaded. Unfortunately, it’s also nicely bricked. I don’t understand the city on this – they just rebricked it recently. However, they have it marked as a bike route. Why? There […]

August 13, 2011

Back in Byte

In my last posting, I mentioned my computer had been violated and that even with all my efforts, it was running too slow and had been irreparably damaged. Took it over to Refresh Computers to have a look. They ran the full registry check and found evidence of hosts of bad programmers (all sorts of snarls and snags down there from years of installs and uninstalls). Still, even with all that cleanup, it wasn’t enough. I gave the order, turned and walked out (like someone dropping their pet off to be euthanized). However, got it back and she’s running as […]

August 14, 2011

Tyre map

Michael Metcalf (who did the wonderful cover art for my soon-to-be-out novel Early ReTyrement, also finished up the map two weeks ago. It was like a Hollywood movie – I managed to close the deal and get the print safe on my aux drive before my entire computer went down. Anyway, have a look. The guy was nice enough that when best-buddy Jesse came up with beyond-last-minute-changes (i.e. after I’d paid and the the arrangement was closed) he added these changes in gratis. As always, he was a pleasure to work with and really came up with some very nice […]

August 15, 2011

Twenty-five years after the dice fell…

I was a pretty good ref a quarter century ago. I’d run D&D, Top Secret, Paranoia, and Superhero 44. But my favorite was StarWars, run off the old Star Patrol rules. Really liked that set – it was open-ended so I could fling out whatever throws and saves I felt like, without players tossing tables back in my face. I reffed it pretty much on a weekly basis through college and beyond, adventures which started on my custom world of Naolo and spread across the universe. My players and I went into some unlikely places in these games. I remembered […]

August 17, 2011

Long wait for the StarWars sequel

After a quarter decade of not reffing, I was asked by a niece to ref an adventure for her college-bound friends, as detailed HERE. It was weird, it was confusing, and it was a lot of fun. The location: A recently-opened Imperial settlement called Communication Post Alpha (or “Compost”) – located on an otherwise inhospitable planet, at the bottom of a sheer 25km canyon, there lay an old republic colony transport crashed 2000 years ago. Its colonists, because of the local fungus forest and damaged reactors, have “regressed” somewhat apishly. The Imperials, finding a ready-made city in the grounded transport, […]

August 19, 2011

The ninth life

My brother just got some sad, sad news. His cat PD has cancer and will probably go to the great sun-warmed spot in the sky soon. I thought about that a lot on my ride home the other night. Came into the driveway and Mookie was looking out the window. I suppose it’s the realization of my brother’s pending loss that made me like Rutger Hauer watching Harrison Ford dangle from the end of a rain-wet girder in “Blade Runner” – I suddenly realized how precious life was. So after dinner, I paid special attention to my little girl, petting […]