Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey November 25, 2018

25 November 2018

Turkey coma, that is. We roasted a full bird for the first time in a few years, and it was certainly one of our best. We started with a fresh Butterball, and Marcia dressed it and put it in the roasting pan with a cup of water to keep the humidity up. That trick worked a treat, and the bird was flavorful and moist. The other winner of the evening was also of Marcia's concocting: a wonderful apple pie. Since then, leftovers, including a turkey tetrazzini that I made this evening, using ... the pasta that Marcia made yesterday. So…

Brian Bilbrey November 18, 2018

18 November 2018

Last week, Veteran's Day. This week: Thanksgiving. So, food coma pending. Just sayin' ... not that I can really do that, I'm on call this upcoming week. Still, we bought an actual full turkey for this week. In recent years past, we've only roasted a turkey breast. All in, it was a good week just past. I spent most of it puttering around in a BMW X2 M Sport. My car was in for servicing the headlights. They ended up replacing at least one of the assemblies, possibly both. Downside of computers and motors (in the headlights!!!). Had the car…

Brian Bilbrey November 1, 2018

1 November 2018

Nope, this time I didn't forget. I just planned on waiting until I got back from Nashville. This was a 4 day trip to attend LISA 18, the USENIX Large Infrastructure Systems Administration conference. I think, though, that they dropped the long form a couple of years back. I hadn't attended since it was last local, in 2015. This trip was great. The event itself is shorter, just three days of blended talks and short trainings, as opposed to the prior 6 day run. Looking back, I actually miss the dedicated training days, and the much more extensive training available…

Brian Bilbrey October 8, 2018

8 Octogre 2018

A day late and a dollar short. Well, one of those, anyway. Yesterday was a half-day at work, updating firmware versions and upgrading hypervisor versions on the fleet at $FIRM HQ. When I say half-day, I mean in the CEO-sense: 12+ hours... long day. But it all got done, and everything was still working when the ball dropped. That's not always guaranteed when working with systems that get rebooted and/or power cycled with no regularity at all. And BIOS updates are a feature in one of the special circles of Hell. Since I was planning on a long Sunday, I…

Brian Bilbrey September 23, 2018

23 September 2018

More rain. Seriously. And we live close enough to DC that the rain-hole that exists there shadows us a bit - we got just a bit over half of the 22 inches that BWI got in the same time span, and that's less than 30 minutes drive. We're at 15 inches in the last two months. That's four month's worth of annualized rainfall. And I'm tired of it. Oh, yeah... the app on the phone says each one of the next 24 hours has rain due, better than 50% chance. I count Fall as officially started on the first night…