Brian Bilbrey ⁽⁷⁵⁹⁾

Brian Bilbrey December 10, 2011

Orchid in bloom

A few years back ... three, I think, I got Marcia an orchid as part of my anniversary gift to her. It was in bloom at the time, and stayed that way for quite a while. Wonder of wonders, although the flowers eventually faded and the stalks withered away, the plant itself has been pretty hardy. I keep up with the watering, and it sits by a window in the library, so it gets some afternoon light. But it hasn't bloomed since there. Late this summer, I read someplace that orchids need some cooler overnights in order to stimulate flower…

Brian Bilbrey December 6, 2011

On the value of shorter class sessions

With this Fall Semester, UMUC fully transitioned all of their classes to an 8-week format. Most classes previously had been 12 or 13 weeks in length. The price is the same, and the number of units granted for completing the class are the same, but the material, and time, there is less. Here's the pertinent commentary from one of the course evaluations I've written this Fall: This course suffers from the shorter (8 week) session length. The ONE value of the shorter courses is that they're shorter. It's like 1.5 quart ice cream for the same price as the old…

Brian Bilbrey December 5, 2011

Hah!

Remind me not to attempt brain surgery this week. I ended up remounting the Windows drive into the chassis, and booting there for the financial management software. Hard mounted to metal, so it's noisy as hell. But it got the job done, and I was able to boot back into hellboy shortly thereafter. It was opening the chassis to pop in the drive that revealed the missing screwdriver. Hmmm.

Brian Bilbrey December 4, 2011

Transitions

Another busy week, another year nearly wound all the way down. Work was assisting in proposal writing, preparing for a big weekend systems test, and ten hours yesterday working remote on said test. In between, a bunch of reading and some coding and conference participation for my Java programming class, a bit of left-over turkey for noshing, and sleep when it was able to fit into the schedule. Oh, yeah. "Transitions", eh? So I stripped out all the installed games off of the Windows box, and got that all winnowed down just the small-ish C-drive. Then I pulled the drive…

Brian Bilbrey November 27, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

For those that celebrated the holiday, or for those that just like to give thanks, and belatedly, Happy Thanksgiving! We had a quiet week at home. We were both off work for the whole week. I gave a fair bit of time to school work, and a few hours to Skyrim. Marcia quilted and ripped and quilted. We did a big bird for the day itself: 23 pounds. We've now got a pot full of yummy turkey soup, a week's worth of turkey tetrazzini, and more meat left. So, a good week overall. We hope that everyone else enjoyed theirs, as…