About

19 December 2025

Updated this page to reflect Marcia's passing in October. Starting to work on re-posting the pictures on the site that went AWOL when I migrated from WP to Publii. That's going to be a serious effort, more's the pity.

18 September 2025

Today is the day I stepped off the WordPress bus and moved back to a static html website, for security and robustness. This new iteration of the site started with an import of the WordPress XML export file, then a wee bit of tuning. Expect more small changes in the near future.

Welcome!

I'm your host here, Brian Bilbrey. I am living in Maine, just me and the dog. After 27 wonderful years, Marcia passed away in October 2025.

I work for Dynaxys LLC, a Maryland-based firm that I've been with since May 2007. We have a big lawn, a small pair of garden beds, a small boat on a nearby lake, and a rescue dog named Georgia Aileen.

This site started hosting at "home" in our apartment on Sunnyvale, running Apache HTTPD on Linux some-distro-or-another, on a Gateway PC connected with static IP via DSL. Then for a number of years Greg Lincoln and I ran a dedicated server at some hosting company in Texas. There we ran our sites, as well as Jerry Pournelle's, Bob Thompson's, and a few others. In 2011, I moved the sites Marcia and I were running over to a DreamHost VPS to start using Wordpress. Some time after that, I started self-hosting again, with hardware in a rack in Maryland, a FreeBSD system where I hosted the assorted websites.

You can find a guide to the first 12 years of static/PHP-assisted posts over at https://legacy.orbdesigns.com/bpages/metajour - there you can find out what I was doing 25 or more years ago, not really that much different than today.

How this page used to read

Yes, you've landed on one of these new-fangled blog thingies. And no, already I don't look quite like that picture; The beard is off. But it shall return one day.

Migrating away from Zidane after a nearly 10 year run of co-administrating the system with the extraordinary Greg Lincoln and helping out a handful of friends hosting on the system with us was ... bittersweet. I'm not going to miss the responsibility of hosting in the least, but the sense of controlling one's own eDestiny is much more present when working with a dedicated box.

This site is hosted now at DreamHost. It came very well recommended, not only by current customers (including Greg) but also by a friend who knows the founders. If you, too, want to sign up for Dreamhost services, you're welcome to use this link (or the Dreamhost link above), which helps pay for the annual service fee. Yes, it's a Ponzi scheme, but in a good way.

The guide for the whole previous 12-plus years of static HTML can be found on the Site Map. The search boxes on all those pages don't work anymore, since I didn't migrate that service over. My friend Google works pretty well, if you start your search string with "site:orbdesigns.com".

So, why the change?

Convenience, mostly. Posting into WordPress is pretty darned easy, and it manages all the stuff that I had to deal with by hand for the last few years. I automated lots of it with PHP and ssh and rsync, but it was creaky and old and getting harder to modify. I'm pretty busy between work and school (due to finish that in December 2012), and anything that helps me get more content online works for me. Friends and family can keep up with my hijinks, and occasionally I seem to put up something that finds a broader audience. But mostly this is for me, and I'm glad to share it with y'all.