The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey September 24, 2013

Liaden Book Time

Agent of Change Carpe Diem Plan B I Dare These I have read (relatively quickly, given how busy I am these days) - books written by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I came across Agents of Change when it appeared in the Baen Free Library. I devoured it, and went to Baen to feed the habit. I ended up buying the Korval's Legacy Collection and the Phase Change Collection direct from Baen. Good pricing, ten books full of awesome. Taken together, the four books named above are a galaxy-spanning space opera that brought me to mind of the best of E. E. 'Doc' Smith and…

Brian Bilbrey September 23, 2013

From the Vaults

Look what I dug up: I think I'll take it to work, and ask the mobile dev team to port one of our iOS apps to this platform. Then I'll run away, laughing.

Brian Bilbrey September 22, 2013

Welcome to Fall

Now I'm waiting for the first 39 degree morning as my next harbinger. The weekend ... it was productive. Mostly moving stuff around on walls, and hanging up assorted wall hangings that Marcia's made for the house over the last few years. That and patching systems made up most of my time. I still have more cleanup to do in my office, but that can wait for later. Very tired, and a long week ahead. * * * Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors: Staff Sgt. Randall R. Lane, 43, of Indianapolis, Indiana, died…

Brian Bilbrey September 15, 2013

X < 50

... where X is the temperature outside when I get up in the morning. Today was the first day for that event, post-summer. But only just, 49 degrees fahrenheit at 0800 this morning. This is my leading indicator of the imminent arrival of the Fall season. There's also the calendar, which tells me the Autumnal Equinox is 6 days and 20 hours or so in my personal future. But the temps are the big deal for Fall as far as I'm concerned, not the calendar. It was a cold summer, all things being equal. I'm waiting to see what Fall…

Brian Bilbrey September 11, 2013

Bad sysadmin, no cookie

In a fit of giggles, I did something on purpose which one normally only does by mistake. I zeroed out a boot drive on a Linux box. The system had previously been wiped with DBAN, and a test CentOS install thrown on for REASONS. Those reasons were done, and it was due for wiping again anyway, so, what the heck... dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M Do NOT cut and paste that into your *NIX box as root unless you're not running Linux (in which case /dev/sda is unlikely to exist), or you want a re-install opportunity because you've got great backups…