The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey April 17, 2016

17 April 2016

This was a good week. Not a great week - that would have required all seven days to have been above 32° F for the full 24 hours each. That only happened four times. That said, work was good and productive, including the weekend work that ate half of yesterday, as well as patching last night and this morning. The rest of the weekend was given to yard work of assorted types. I mostly did lawn care, but we did get a couple of new rose bushes for the front porch pots, a couple of herbs for the herb box…

Brian Bilbrey April 10, 2016

10 April 2016

A good week, overall. I was on-call for the first half, which is tiring, even when nothing happens. Yep, I sleep a lot more lightly when responsibility requires it. But one week out of every few weeks ain't bad - and our monitoring and remediation are in a state of continuous improvement, so we get far fewer alerts and calls than in years past. All to the good. I also executed terminal retirement on a stack of former virtualization hosts. Spin down, uncable from last network connections and from the SAN, spin up again with a DBAN disk in the…

Brian Bilbrey April 3, 2016

3 April 2016

I survived another April Fool's Day, mostly by staying away from the Internet except for specific purposes. Best tweet of the day, though, something like: "April Fool's Day: The sole, single, solitary, only day when the Internet is full of lies." That's full of WIN, that's what that is. That said, two night's of terrible, broken sleep mean that I'm pretty tired. I'm hoping for better tonight. Downside: I'm still on call, and will be for another three nights. Upside: We shouldn't have gusts up to 50 mph tonight, so that the house makes massive amounts of noise, and keeps…

Brian Bilbrey March 27, 2016

27 March 2016

Boring, I'm sure. First mowing of the year, yesterday. The front lawn is looking lush - that's normal for this time of year. Today, no shopping because the store was closed for Easter Sunday. But since Easter is also a sigil of Spring, I used the day to clean house. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it was before I started. Oh, oh, we saw a WONDERFUL Annapolis Shakespeare Company production of The Importance of Being Earnest. The excellent company cast was superbly directed by Founding Artistic Director Sally Boyett. It's a great play, Oscar Wilde was such…

Brian Bilbrey March 20, 2016

20 March 2016

It must be Spring. We've been in the 30's all weekend, and it's currently dropping what's quaintly called a "wintery mix" on us from low, leaden skies. Bah! * * * We've lost a lot of the roadside trees in our neighborhood in the last couple of years. The HOA's landscaping service took out a bunch this winter, and replaced them with ... some other kind of tree, I'll guess. They didn't get all of the dead trees yet, and from the tracks on the barkless trunk, you can probably see the reason behind the death: Yup, some kind of…