The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 1, 2017

1 October 2017

"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?" * * * I'll just leave that there, okay? In other news, I just called my oldest best friend (I've known him since I was four) to wish him a happy birthday, which was pleasant and fun. I also left a voice mail for pater and mater, they're probably out painting the town red. Some of our weekend was normal routine - shopping, roasting coffee, washing the car, going to the office to get some hardware maintenance done during off-hours, doing other chores, but... Speaking of painting the town red, we had…

Brian Bilbrey September 25, 2017

25 September 2017

That was a chore-filled weekend. The lawns are all lovely and flat, and nearly the whole house is much, much cleaner. But I was bloody exhausted by the time last night rolled around. So sorry. * * * Only big news is upgrading my MacBook Pro to the latest MacOS release: High Sierra. I'd popped for one of the Beta releases earlier in the Summer, and put in a few issue reports before reverting to Sierra. All of the issues I reported actually garnered responses from Apple, and they've all been remediated in the GA release of the OS. Frankly,…

Brian Bilbrey September 17, 2017

17 September 2017

A busy week and weekend. We made it down to Melford Pond for a couple of hours of fishing on Saturday morning. Well, Marcia was fishing (and caught a decent-sized catfish that she put back, might I add!), while I walked the dog around the pond. It was a nice start to the weekend. Chores: Mowing the lawns, changing old, worn-out locksets out for new ones that work properly, etc, etc. * * * Tech-side, I've been playing around with Flask (a Python web framework). Yeah, should I find something more bleeding edge? Probably. Maybe I'll revisit Node shortly. Or…

Brian Bilbrey September 10, 2017

10 September 2017

Sad. There's a Jerry Pournelle-shaped hole in my personal Universe. Jerry passed away on September 8, 2017. I was a fan of Jerry's fiction from early on, and additionally a huge fan of his Chaos Manor user technology columns in Byte Magazine. We met in person for the first time at a West Coast Computer Faire (1982, I think, at the San Francisco Civic Center). I'd previously corresponded with him via BIX (the Byte Information Exchange service) on a variety of technical and fictional topics. He was gracious enough to take the time to have lunch with me at that…

Brian Bilbrey September 4, 2017

4 September 2017

Hullo. Happity Labor Day, for US visitors. Happy first post in the final one third (not "two thirds"... sigh) of the year, for everyone else. Hurray for a three day weekend. I've celebrated by not checking email at all (for work), which means several hundred emails, mostly system generated, tomorrow. Oh, well. Not much else to report - we went out fishing for a bit, but catching wasn't on the menu. Otherwise a lovely weekend. * * * Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Emil Rivera-Lopez, who was declared deceased on Aug. 31 as a result…