Lexi ⁽⁹²⁾

Brian Bilbrey September 10, 2017

10 September 2017

Sad. There's a Jerry Pournelle-shaped hole in my personal Universe. Jerry passed away on September 8, 2017. I was a fan of Jerry's fiction from early on, and additionally a huge fan of his Chaos Manor user technology columns in Byte Magazine. We met in person for the first time at a West Coast Computer Faire (1982, I think, at the San Francisco Civic Center). I'd previously corresponded with him via BIX (the Byte Information Exchange service) on a variety of technical and fictional topics. He was gracious enough to take the time to have lunch with me at that…

Brian Bilbrey August 6, 2017

6 August 2017

Well, Marcia's home from Michigan. She went up for the week to visit family, and had fun. Lexi spent the week eyeballing me and asking when Marcia was going to be back. This is that look: Along with doing a bit of remote work each day (and going to the office for a few hours on Tuesday), I got a lot of chores done around the homestead. Garage clean up. Mowing. A couple of days of pressure washing the deck and stamped concrete pad. All-in-all, a fairly productive week. Today we did the shopping, then I roasted coffee and relaxed.

Brian Bilbrey July 30, 2017

30 July 2017

So, in the last eight days, we've had 6" or so of rain in my part of the state. We've had a couple of intense pop-up storms that hovered and dumped huge amounts, along with the other storm lines that the whole state got. And miracle of miracles, it was 58 degrees outside when I woke up this morning. That's unheard of in July in these parts - it was a truly gorgeous day today: low 80's at the peak and but moderate humidity. Lexi was the beneficiary of that, with a couple of long walks to her credit. I…

Brian Bilbrey June 18, 2017

2017 June 18

Most of a post-vacation work week gone by - I've just been dropping back into the groove. We've got patching and virtualization updates scheduled for the near future, so I've got a fair bit of planning to do to pull it off without causing unplanned downtime. This weekend was ... hot, mostly, and humid. It'll take me a while to drop into summer accommodation mode. We did celebrate a friend's birthday this weekend, and we're going to help a neighbor celebrate a birthday next weekend. I made the Father's Day phone call today, it was nice chatting with my folks…

Brian Bilbrey June 11, 2017

11 June 2017

A week in Maine We had a nice week in Maine - two 10+ hour driving days, two sunny days, and a fair bit of Seattle-influenced weather. But a relaxing, wonderful trip. A few small fish caught - all sent back to eat healthy and grow bigger. Pictured above is the camp (the word for house on a lake, in Maine) we were staying at. No, you can't build that close to the water anymore. Yes, we did bring Lexi with us. And yes, there were more than a trillion mosquitoes around, just lurking around the camp waiting to feed…