Friends ⁽³³⁾

Brian Bilbrey September 12, 2016

12 Sept 2016

Welcome back, us. We hared off to Atlanta for the weekend to visit our friends Jen and Kris. We've not visited since their wedding, four or so years back, so this was lovely! We drove down on Friday (12 hours door to door). Saturday we went to the Chihuly in the Garden exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The installation in the Japanese Garden was my personal favorite. I've always had a soft spot for the suprises to be found in meticulously kept tiny gardens. Sunday we wandered around quaint downtown Roswell. There was shopping for some, and dogs to…

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 November 8, 2015

LISA15

The LISA 15 conference is in full swing. I was up at 0600, and on the road at 0630. People to see and things to do before two half-day tutorials today: Go for SysAdmins, and Software Testing for Sysadmin Programs. Both were interesting and potentially useful and applicable to my work. Tomorrow, I'm doing the System Internals course, but if there is too much overlap with Ted Ts'o's course from last year, then I'll bail at midday and attend the Systemd tutorial in the afternoon. Tuesday I've got a couple more tutorials on tap, followed by three days of conference…

Brian Bilbrey August 2, 2015

A Princess and her Pea

Lexi, protected from peas There's better be a pea under there... * * * Last night, when all was quiet, I finally got a around to putting together the Metal Earth Dragonfly model that I picked up from Amazon weeks ago on a whim, inspired by Jenny's 1000 Ferris Wheels post. It's good to have a focused distraction from time to time. The work took me away from myself for a double handful of minutes, and reminded me that I can focus when I make the effort. There's been so much going on that I'm spending more time putting out…

Brian Bilbrey May 31, 2015

Vacation Over

So... the big deal is that we were in California for purposes of vacation and only vacation - 15 days worth. We visited family in the SF Bay Area, in San Diego, and near Sacramento. We visited friends in Saratoga (SF South Bay) and Dillon Beach (North coastal Marin). What a wonderful, wonderful trip. Oh, oh - AND I got to make it to Maker Faire Bay Area 10th Anniversary. That was fun and awesome, too. I could give you the full rundown on the trip, but it's a lot like inviting you over and showing you slides, so I…