The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 4, 2011

Is Not and Is ... Insanely Great

Some of the folks I know are really disappointed that today's announcement was only for an iPhone 4S + some new iPods and release dates for those and for iOS 5. I pointed out that if all the features and guts of the new phone were in a angular new skin (like some of the "leaked" photos showed) with a bit more screen resolution and it were called an iPhone 5, they'd be drooling. There was general acknowledgement of this, yet and still, "it's just an iPhone 4S, argh!" There's no pleasing some people. Of course, it doesn't please me…

Brian Bilbrey October 2, 2011

Day and Duty

The day was successful, in that everything that needed doing got done. Shopping, coffee roasting, further research for school project, school work, lots of dog walking. Additionally, more of Marcia's wall-mounted shelving started auto-detaching. So I pulled the balance off and patched the holes. I purchased two more 4' wide x 6' tall wire rack units (6 shelves each) to put into that space, and assembled them. Marcia's already started reorganizing all that fabric onto the new storage. * * * I was looking at the flow chart that SF Signal created for the NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy…

Brian Bilbrey October 1, 2011

Putting the garden to bed...

Summer session (school) wiped out my garden. That is, I didn't have enough time to tend it, and it went a bit wild. Today, I mostly put the garden to bed. There's some basil still in, and the peppers need final harvest, but all of the cruft is cleared out, and I'll have to turn the soil soon. That and a quick threshing of the hay (the back "lawn" was well over 12" tall) just about finished up my day. I spent a while playing Witcher 2, a fun RPG. A new release this week brought a very useful new…

Brian Bilbrey September 28, 2011

NAS, BlackArmor 220, Lion, and Time Machine

At work, there happened to be a Seagate BlackArmor 220 NAS device floating around uncommitted. I suggested that I might bring it home and test it a bit. That happened. The primary driver for looking into this kind of appliance is that I'm currently running a mid-tower Linux box all the time ... and only personally using it rarely. It does, however, also function as the house DNS server, the home SMB server, and the backup central host. It fires off scripts to connect to remote systems (like the virtual host for this place) and pull down backups, too. That…

Brian Bilbrey September 27, 2011

No guilt at all

Last night was fun - in between the chores we got to visit with Marcia's friend and former manager Judy, who was in town for a Peace Corps event. Out to supper at Mi Hacienda, then the girls had a nice chat while I finished up the trash and did some school work. We were up at 0530, and Marcia ran Judy down to the train while I confused the dog by walking her early on a working day. What I'm not feeling guilty about is schooling some of my fellow students in the Social Gerontology course. At least one…