Fallen Warriors ⁽³³⁹⁾

Brian Bilbrey October 18, 2015

Suicide by BMW

At 0635 EDT (pre-dawn at this time of year), a deer tried to commit BMW-assisted suicide while I was driving to work. I'd have to say, that deer is a failure. It got up and ran off, and my car is in the body shop for the next few days. Bummer, I know. It jumped out of the bushes ten feet in front of my car or less. I barely got to the brakes before the deer was in my grill. Torso to the grill, neck took out the headlight, and the head dented the driver-side front quarter panel. And…

Brian Bilbrey October 4, 2015

Back to the grind

Tomorrow, I'll be back to the grind. Today wrapped up a four day weekend for me. I just took Friday and Thursday off for fun ... then spent those two days worrying about a hurricane headed our way that ended up turning right instead of left. So it goes. It was also a low-energy weekend - I felt pretty washed out the last couple of days. Maybe my body was missing work? Still, you might have noticed a bit more activity around here than usual over the past week, from foxes to Apple upgrades. Most of the activity was indoors,…

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…

Brian Bilbrey September 6, 2015

Magic Blue

Or some silly color name like that. Anyway, that's the exterior color of Marcia's new car. She decided that hauling around her quilting friends and her quilting stuff in a low-slung, two door convertible was getting less and less convenient. So after driving a few different vehicles, she ended up with a Volvo V60T5 - one of their little sport wagons. Nice lines, I think, and she's happy, which is a good thing. I've spend a number of hours this weekend working on a project for $OFFICE, and got the front yard brown stuff mowed a bit flatter, too. Mostly…