Entertainment ⁽⁸⁷⁾

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 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 17, 2016

17 March 2016

There once was a service called FandangoNOW, ah, Fucking Bastards, the company formerly known as M-GO. I logged into it once, because it was a featured service on our Roku box. As of this morning, I had neither purchased nor rented any content from M-GO. This is a good thing, because it appears that with the acquisition of M-GO by Fandango, you can either accept their new Terms and Privacy Policy (including the privacy policies of their corporate parents, NBC Universal and Warner Brothers), OR YOU, THE CUSTOMER, CAN GO TO HELL. Well, not HELL, as such. But if you'd…

Brian Bilbrey February 14, 2016

14 Feb 2016

Happity Saint Valentine's Day. Did y'all have a nice massacre? To pre-celebrate the day, we went out to supper and the theatre last night. The show was Annapolis Shakespeare Company's production of Anton Chekov's Three Sisters. It was a crowded main stage (20' x 25'), between set dressing and at times all eleven cast members at once! Three sisters is a melancholy and ever-so-slightly depressing drama about the titular sisters and their brother, trapped far from the desired Moscow in a semi-rural backwater of Russia. As the play opens, with their father the General dead a year past, the family's…

Brian Bilbrey December 13, 2015

13 Dec 2015 - Wonderful

It's a Wonderful Life - staged as a 40's radio play - was presented in properly wonderful fashion by the Annapolis Shakespeare Company for our amusement this afternoon. We decided to hit the matinee instead of an evening performance because, frankly, I'm still recovering a bit from last weekend's fun. But I'm at 90%, and took great joy in ASC's 110% performance this afternoon. George Bailey's story is one that many people know from the marvelous 1946 movie with Jimmy Stewart. I loved this live production directed by Jay Brock, which featured Kevin Alan, Sally Boyett, Nick DePinto, Rob McQuay,…