The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey November 2, 2014

Space, Patch, Read

A number of folks who lack a sense of wonder, a sense of adventure, a ... spine, perhaps, are whinging in articles here and there online about how awful it is that Michael Tyner Alsbury died testing a near-space tourist plane. How very risk-averse we've become, as a culture. I'd do his job tomorrow, in a heartbeat, if they'd let me. The wonder and joy of experimentation, research at the edges of what's possible make life worth living, either personally or vicariously (for those of us too old to but dream). Again, risk vs. reward. * * * Today I…

Brian Bilbrey October 26, 2014

Patch Sunday, plus Valentine and Banks

A week or two ago, the Oracle quarterly CPU (Critical Patch Updates) notification went out. So I scheduled my Solaris patching for the maintenance day I have: Sundays. The first round went fine today. Next Sunday, I'll do the rest. Solaris patching is just about the least troublesome thing I have to do. It takes a fair bit of time, but the reversion path on Solaris 10 with the Boot Environment (BE) feature is as safe as houses (well, not houses badly built in an earthquake zone, or ramblers built on slabs on a flood plain, but you know what…

Brian Bilbrey October 19, 2014

End::Garden

2014 Garden is done Yesterday, along with a bunch of lawn work front and back, I put the garden to bed for the year. I'll probably break out the tiller in a week or two and turn the soil, for good measure. I did get one last batch of assorted (and unexpected) peppers from the maze of weeds, though: All told, about 7 hours of yard work yesterday, in utterly lovely weather. Today, I worked inside. More basement floor prep, a bit of cleaning here and there, and I made a pot of spicy turkey chili. Yum. Recent Reading I…

Brian Bilbrey October 17, 2014

Progress Elliptical

Elliptical progress That's the highest single-session stride count I've done to date. That plus 96 sit-ups, 48 push-ups, and assorted stretches filled up my late afternoon between arriving home and feeding the dog. Not too shabby.

Brian Bilbrey October 14, 2014

Backup Discussion

On the topic of backups... I like redundancy and backups. Redundancy is this: I have more than one copy of the data on more than one disk in my important systems. So: Mirrored disks == good. This protects me from one of the disks going bad. If the system blows up, or if I simply need a copy of a file I deleted by accident, I need a copy that's either not part of the mirror, hidden from view, or NOT on the system. Here's how I go about that. Having a local copy of something so that when it…