The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 1, 2015

Oddly Low-key Introduction

If you play in Apple's sandbox, you'll know that today was release day for the latest version of OS X: El Capitan. For a variety of reasons, I decided to upgrade on release day (admittedly after pulling a full, bootable, copy of my system using my favorite tool for the purpose, SuperDuper! Highly Recommended!). An hour or so to pull down the 6 GB download, another 30 minutes or so to apply the new OS, and my Mac Air was rebooting! Happily, I got a login prompt at the far end. That's always a good start. I typed in the…

Brian Bilbrey September 30, 2015

Foxy

Fox at the roadside This gal was standing in the middle of the road on my back-road drive home today. I gave him a couple of blasts on the horn, which sent him scampering off the right side of the tarmac. But as I pulled up even with that spot, there she was, standing 15 or so feet off the roadway, staring up at me. I stopped, and brought my phone up, opening the camera app. I got the picture. Throughout, I expected the fox to bolt ... but it didn't. The area where I was is a blend of…

Brian Bilbrey September 29, 2015

About daynotes.com

Carl Sanders wrote: Was wondering why www.daynotes.com was down. The registration for the site expired on 23 September 2015. It's in limbo for a while, then it'll go on the block. Daynotes.com was a domain purchased by, and leading to a website designed by, and originally maintained by Tom Syroid, back in September 1999. By sometime around the mid-naught'ies, Tom dropped off the Internet, and with few exceptions, has not resurfaced. A few times we tried to get the site registration transferred from his name (and with difficulty, since the email address he registered with exists no more), so that…

Brian Bilbrey September 27, 2015

Lexi at work

My work and week was relatively uneventful: just computers, patching, rebooting, yardwork, and shopping, so I'll share Lexi's work week with you instead. Before I get onto the elliptical, I'll generally do a repeating series of stretches, alternating with exercises like squats, sit ups, and push ups. Above, you can see how helpful and encouraging Lexi is during this phase of my workout. Her prone position, her near-perfect lack of motion is extraordinarily motivational. Frankly, I couldn't do it all without her. * * * When she's not "helping" me exercise, or outright sleeping, Lexi likes to guard the house.

Brian Bilbrey September 20, 2015

Ch-ch-changes

Computational changes, at least... During the past week, I migrated all of the public sites (including this one) from a machine running Scientific Linux (SL) 6 (an RHEL respin out of CERN), and onto a different box running FreeBSD 10.2. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, SL6 was pretty slow to get updates from Red Hat and rebrand them, and release them to the world. I'd initially gone with SL because CentOS was suffering that problem. Then CentOS was picked up directly by Red Hat, and has become much more responsive. But I was ready for something…