Beware of Leopard ⁽²⁵⁵⁾

Brian Bilbrey August 10, 2014

Summer?

We're ten days into August, the last (usually) properly hot and humid month of the year ... and we've only made it up out of the 80's into the low 90's ONE day this month. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Our electric bills are lower, the house is more comfortable, etc. But this definitely bodes, eh? If the ice comes in September, I'm going to be upset. * * * In other news, like most non-lazy people, my time is defined by the work I do. Yesterday: patching an ESXi host, and mowing the lawns. The latter was a big…

Brian Bilbrey August 4, 2014

What I'm Reading - The Setup

Tech note - when you see a Twitter handle here, it's because I follow that person/entity there. For Twitter curation, I tend to lean towards the tech/tech security sector, with a light mixture of non-tech people added in. What I'm Reading - The Setup Recently, @deirdres (Deirdré Straughan) brought to my attention a brief interview with @brendangregg (Brendan Gregg) that was running on The Setup (http://usesthis.com/). Huh? The Setup is a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done. Ah, yeah. Now, you see, that's something that I can…

Brian Bilbrey July 14, 2014

Feel the Power

Outage Reported: The power outage in your area has already been reported. We anticipate having your service restored by 7/14/2014 7:45:00 PM. Generators are good. We just had a big thunder storm, lots of lightning and noise, with half an inch of rain delivered in about ten minutes. Just as it was wrapping up ... flash, sputter ... power is out. It tried a couple of times to spin back up within the first two minutes, then nothing. Given rain and a sump pump, I figured I might as well spin up the generator. Now everything except the air conditioning…

Brian Bilbrey July 13, 2014

Improbably So

A relatively lazy day for me today: just shopping, laundry, and coffee roasting. Yard stuff consumed the Saturday. Hot and muggy, still tonight, but storms are coming, and cooler weather is (unusually) due by mid-week (yay!) The garden is starting to produce some tomatoes and more peppers to join the zucchini and cucumbers. Maybe first salsa next week! Marcia's doing great. Up and down the stairs like a champ ... a hobbling champ, but much progress every day. She may be done with the cane by the end of this week, too, which is stellar. In my tiny elective time,…

Brian Bilbrey June 20, 2014

What a week!

To give you just a sense of what it's been like, here's the email I sent to my group at $FIRM early on Thursday morning: Subject: Not going to be in office todayMultiple appliance fails.Hot water heater wasn't making hot water, assumed pilot light fail.No, no, a partial containment fail instead, with leaking to carpets,yay! But most of the water went to the sump, and left the building appropriately. Cleaned up some water until time to feed and walk thedog.Heading out to do that, the garage door opener played up, badly.Repeat of winter problems that we tolerated until they went…