Blog – Page 3 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 1, 2011

OpsLog – UP – 12/31/2010

Last session of the year, over at Docs. It was supposed to be a casual get together over hot dogs followed by a clean-n-stage, but Doc with his remarkable boyish enthusiasm had gotten everything ready beforehand. And so there we were, literally thrown into a session without a dispatcher, just running in look-ahead rules, casual fun. Took the Sterling Turn out of North Platte (flipping industry waybills as I went). Lots of traffic on the line, people poking ahead to negotiate meets with each other. Strange moment – Doc dragooned my wife to run, so here she comes in control […]

January 2, 2011

How to train your dragon (review)

Okay, so I admit I went rabid when I saw this movie with my nieces. First off, I love flying. When I was a kid, I’d read Goshawk Squadron and Fighting the flying circus and dreamed of flying. I even built a fake cockpit (based on gleanings gained from my many dog-eared World War One books) and took to the skies in my imaginary SE5a (you kids and your Microsoft Flight Simulators!). In my twenties, I built and flew an ultralight around the Central Florida skies. After that, a pilots license. Even my current book, Indigo, draws heavily on my […]

January 3, 2011

Managerial Train Wrecks

Time Table and Train Order – this is the technique railroads used to keep trains from crashing into in the dark ages before remote signaling, electronics, computers, and radios. How does this apply to the morass that is American Business Management? Think about it for a minute. It’s 1910 and you work on a railroad that covers 3000 miles over which hundreds of trains are running. Climbing into the cab (perhaps in the middle of the night in a driving snow storm in some podunk town), how do you know what trains are late, what bridges are out, and what special trains […]

January 9, 2011

Kindle missionaries

D’ja see that new Kindle ad where cool looking people tote kindles about in bike baskets and the back pockets of stone-washed jeans? Young people all looking so active. And the only thing they aren’t shown doing? Reading. Because the thing about kindles is not quietly reading on it, it’s about bragging about how quickly you can get your books, how cheaply, how many books it holds. Ever had a kindle-ninny tell you what they were reading? No, its just about their device. Really, how many times do you have to say, “So, just what the fuck were you reading […]

January 9, 2011

ShowLog – Deland – 1/9/2011

We had a disaster of train show a year back. We have an aging set of interchangeable modules which formed a looped three-track mainline. The scenery ranged from beaten to aged. The wiring looked like something on a telephone pole in post-war Italy. The trackwork was rocky. And it get into the crew area, you had to get on your knees on a cold concrete floor and crawl in. So, that disaster of a show – for setup nothing worked right; non-stop repairs, fixing this, grunting with that. It took us something like 12 hours to build the basic layout. […]

January 13, 2011

Too tight for cool

So my wife and I are a couple of progressives. We live in a somewhat-gay downtown neighborhood in a little 1949 bungalow. We drive small cars and I often cycle to work. We also tend to vote lefty. Our TV screen is only 21″ wide. But I’m a little wired, as Monday night at the local farmer’s market showed. Stardust Cafe sets up all sorts of pavilions, bands, crafts and whatnot in their parking lot. Since we are proud neo-urbanites, we walked over. It had just finished raining and a low fog hung on the ground. We passed the little […]

January 14, 2011

Inspector Bellamy (review)

At one point in this movie, the Inspector (and his wife) visit some gay friends of theirs and get stuck watching a slideshow of their vacation. I sort of know the feeling, since the Inspector, himself, is on vacation and yet gets involved in a criminal investigation. Sort of. See, the guilty party comes to him and confesses (right up front). And then he stumbles across the girlfriend of the victim, who really doesn’t care to press charges and see justice done. And then we get interviews of what happened, which don’t change our understanding of events at all. Basically, there […]

January 16, 2011

Tunisia – another messy birth

I have to admit that I am a Tunisiaophile. I love Tunisia. We toured the country years ago (partially in research for Fire and Bronze (as this was where Carthage was)). It was here I tried goat-milk cheese on marketplace bread for the first time. And dates, at a small stand in the middle of a causeway amid a great salt marsh. First camel ride. It is a beautiful country. The haunting echo of the call to prayer. The spitting of rain out of a near-cloudless sky in the Sahara. The majestic Roman ruins. The rolling hills along the Atlas […]

January 17, 2011

OpsLog – UP – 1/17/2011

Doc Andy’s got a double garage of layout, a sprawling run of Union Pacific and Santa Fe from Council Bluffs to Denver. Half of it is shared trackage, half parallel mainlines. It’s massive and fun and impressive. I’m there for the session but I won’t see a single car move. I’m in the main house, upstairs in the den. I’ve got a timetable in front of me, a repeater clock, the timetable and my computer. On its screen is a schematic of the railroad in Excel with colored cells containing train numbers. I’ve got a radio in my hand and […]

January 20, 2011

Beauty and the Beast

I met my lover on the road this morning, a magificent full moon in the bed of her royal sky, dropping away into the west. She bathed the world of concrete and neon, and that of the lonely cyclist, with her gentle albedo. I could see why the ancients worshiped her and why writers hack descriptions of her beauty. Glorious! While marveling at her glory, I came across an FUV squatting troll-like in my moon-washed bike lane. Massive, dark, sinister. Someone didn’t feel like manhandling their man-machine into their driveway last night and abandoned their siege engine in the road, […]