Brian Bilbrey ⁽⁷⁵⁹⁾

Brian Bilbrey April 13, 2012

Spring: Sprung

For the second morning in a row, early temperatures in the mid-30's Fahrenheit put a bit of a damper on morning yard work. I've taken a couple of days off to get the front yard in order. I'm peeling out all the old mulch, weeding everything, edging around the trees, and re-seating border bricks around the beds. What I didn't count on yesterday was finding that a couple of the beds needed a deep turning. When I uncovered the bed you see above, the soil seemed a bit lifeless and compacted, in keeping with the tepid growth of the few…

Brian Bilbrey April 8, 2012

School and Lexi

First, Lexi ... She's a dog who epitomizes dogness, especially in the napping department. But when it comes to bed neatness, well, it's not her long suit. This bed had been made, before Lexi decided to climb back in for a late afternoon nap: You say, no, that's not Lexi ... You're the slob, Brian. Not so. See: But she's not very good at looking guilty, is she? * * * When all was said and done with the PeopleSoft upgrade of MyUMUC, many things were broken. THANKS, UMUC! For one thing, my instructor from the Software Engineering course has…

Brian Bilbrey April 1, 2012

Spring Semester Fini!

Yay! I wrote and submitted my last 11 pages of work for the Principles of Software Engineering class yesterday, so I'm done and waiting on the 'A'. Today, to celebrate a few weeks of freedom from school, I shopped, cleaned the coffee roaster, did yard work, roasted coffee, cooked, and cooked some more. Sore and tired now, but still happy. And of course, we won something on Friday. Nothing close to a half billion dollars, though. * * * Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors: Capt. Aaron D. Istre, 37, of Vinton, Louisiana, died…

Brian Bilbrey March 30, 2012

Training Week

A week of intense training, VMware vSphere 5 Fast Track presented by Global Knowledge, is now done. I had the benefit of a great instructor: Scott South. But my brain is bursting with information about this latest update to the VMware product line. Also, Spring session at UMUC is almost done for me. I've got one paper-ish thing to write this weekend, and then wait for the 'A'. Yeah, but I'm not just being smug: I've got 86 points going into this last week, and 12.5 points still to be graded, so it's a reasonably certain 'A'. Much more statistically…

Brian Bilbrey March 25, 2012

Good news, bad news

The good news is twofold. First, my penultimate deliverable for the Software Engineering class is in the hopper - two sections (about 11 pages) of an SDMP document. One more week of reading and writing puts that class to bed. Second, it looks like my effort to finally purchase materials and get the cold frame built (see yesterday's post) is going to pay off: we're likely to see frosts Monday and Tuesday nights. With luck what I built protects what I'm growing. Third (yes, third, this is a bonus good thing, for some definition of good), I've got a week-long…