Fallen Warriors ⁽³³⁹⁾

Brian Bilbrey July 8, 2018

8 July 2018

Well, that was a busy week. And although we had a lovely weekend, weather-wise, it was mostly downtime for me. I wasn't feeling very chipper yesterday. Today, I got the bare minimum done - shopping and coffee roasting. I did spend some time playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though. I play these shooters in story mode, and they're fun for me that way. I'm not fond of the die-every-minute mode they've put in for the fun kids with extreme fast twitch reflexes. * * * Our condolences to the family and friends of Cpl. Joseph Maciel of South Gate, California,…

Brian Bilbrey June 24, 2018

24 June 2018

We're back! We had a two week vacation! Destinations: three days in Ithaca (NY), a drive-by for Ticonderoga (NY), three days in Stowe (VT), and a week in Winthrop (ME) at Cobbosseecontee Lake. We managed some hikes in Ithaca, along with visits to the gardens and arboretum at Cornell. On the drive to Stowe, we stopped in Ticonderoga, and beamed up to the Enterprise for a quick visit: The Star Trek Original Series Set Tour is great fun. Licensed by CBS, the team at TOS Set Tour have put together most of the sets you saw through three seasons of…

Brian Bilbrey May 28, 2018

28 May 2018

Memorial Day for those in the US. All respect and honor to those who gave their lives in service to our Country and Constitution. * * * A busy week last week, building new systems for new services, retiring old systems, and generally doing modern system administration stuff. Continuing to build out the configuration management system to improve system repeatability, reliability, security, and availability. So there's that. The three day weekend had a bit of lawn work, a bit of garden work, coffee roaster maintenance and roasting, etc. Oh, and a bit of old-school wood working to make a cutting…

Brian Bilbrey May 20, 2018

20 May 2018

Howdy. A full work week, followed by chores and theatre on Saturday, and mowing a wet, wet, tall set of lawns today. We had just one rainy stretch - it lasted from Saturday the 12th until this morning. All in, according to my still-poorly-sited rain gauge, we got just under 5" of rain in that period of time. Not too shabby. The abbreviated garden hasn't drowned or died from lack of direct sunlight, either ... yet. I've been working my way through some Python (programming language) training, and I've reached once again the point where I spend more time fighting…

Brian Bilbrey May 6, 2018

6 May 2018

Whoops. One third of a year is gone. And we apparently went straight from Winter to Summer this last week. It was still Winter on Monday, with a frost coating all the lawns and roofs in our neighborhood. Spring lasted about 6 hours. I say this because, for me, Spring is the period of time between turning off the furnace, and turning on the air conditioning. That lasted about 6 hours on Wednesday (it was a 40°F wake-up temp), I figure the furnace was running until about 10 AM; I turned on the AC at 4 PM (it was 87°F…