The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 29, 2011

Real Snow (TM)

Had I said I was going to celebrate All Hallow's Eve by decorating the whole DC Metro area for Christmas, they would have laughed at me. The snow is still here, hours later, and the temps are dropping through freezing, so it'll be here for a short while tomorrow, too. Wow, just wow! And our overall precipitation is around an inch and a quarter for the last 18 hours. We're 3/4 of an inch away from 20 inches of rain in our back yard since Irene made landfall here in late August.

Brian Bilbrey October 29, 2011

Snow? SRSLY?

First snow of Winter 2011-2012 - it ain't much, and it ain't sticking to anything, but I'm still impressed with the can-do attitude expressed by this weather system. We started off with rain in the middle of the night, and were just shy of an inch of rain today when it flipped over to the snow delivery system about an hour ago. Right now the occasional flake is still falling, and it's hovering around 35-36°F (~1.5°C)... I guess it's a good thing I winterized the watering systems yesterday. We might get our first frost tonight, eh? * * * I…

Brian Bilbrey October 27, 2011

Healthy Choices

Tim O'Reilly twittled about a talk at a conference, regarding "systemic" change to cities and food choices to enhance health. Really? We can't afford healthy, long-lived people! What this country needs is sick people, real sick people, people with low cost, short time-to-death diseases and infections. That'll solve our employment problems and our long-term social welfare funding issues, all in one go. It won't be as effective as the big rock from the sky with our name on it, but disease has the advantage of not damaging much in the way of physical infrastructure. Fewer people, faster commutes! * *…

Brian Bilbrey October 23, 2011

Long Week

It's been a very long week. A lot of work and planning went into two big multi-system transitions at the office. One took most of the day on Friday with follow-up work Saturday morning and today. The second was a bigger job, and we had most hands on deck from 5PM to nearly midnight last night. So far, everything seems to have come off as well as can be expected. Everything that didn't come off according to plan had contingency planning already completed - our checklists were really good. Yeah ... meetings are good for that. Sigh, I really didn't…

Brian Bilbrey October 17, 2011

Sidewalks, Ringtones, and iOS5

Time for the last walk of the evening for Lexi. Up the street we go ... and a couple of nights a week, we actually go up the street, rather than use the sidewalk, because some neighbors can't help but block the way. I've even spoken to them about it, to no avail. Either they can't remember that I asked, or they're malevolent. Grrr. I really *want* to tip that stuff all over their lawn in response, but I'm too bloody nice to do that. They do the same thing, only more sprawled out, with bags of lawn clippings. Sigh.