School ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Brian Bilbrey February 26, 2012

Columbus Revisited

Formerly lurking, kind reader Doug was sad to read of my problems in Columbus (as you might see in a comment to the prior post). Let me be clear - the problems in Columbus were those of my cold virus, a car rental company, and an airline. Columbus has always been a gracious and pleasant place for me to visit - everyone is seriously NICE! That's probably a middle-of-the-country thing that's also related to the pace of life far away from the loons (like me) on either coast. I haven't seen much of the town yet - I usually fly…

Brian Bilbrey February 20, 2012

Out the Wazoo

So, the good news is that I'm back on the upslope. Pending a relapse, I've gotten the better of this cold. I even got several hours of (non-contiguous) sleep last night. I did, however, fail at taking a nap during the day. Heck of a holiday weekend, eh? What I did do today was as much of the week's reading as I could manage. All of the Geology reading is done, and I'm slogging through Chapters 8 and 9 of my Principles of Software Engineering book right now. Slogging is the politest term I can come up with - I…

Brian Bilbrey February 19, 2012

Plodding along.

Someone who's had a bad cold in the last couple of weeks decided that I was lonely, and needed a cold, too. Thanks, Hon! Aches (but no fever), head congestion and throat pain. I sound like Kim Carnes on a bad day after a couple of packs of Parliments. But I make up for that with the loonie sense of not having gotten much sleep in the last two nights. I detect a little improvement, and hope to sleep better this evening. How I feel has no bearing, of course, on the work that has to be done for school…

Brian Bilbrey February 5, 2012

Gladiators: second door, down the hall, third office, please.

Yeah, apparently there's going to be a game of feet-baal or something like that. The pregame show was on the tube when we awoke this morning apparently, and may have been on before we retired last night, for all I know. I'm all caught up on schoolwork for the moment. I have some reading to do for Geology, and an assignment and midterm for that class this week as well. My Principles of Software Engineering class starts tomorrow. I've done the first week's reading for that, but there's an assignment there, too. This new eight-week pressure cooker format is going…

Brian Bilbrey January 21, 2012

Catch-up Time...

Weirdly, the other night (Wednesday?) both of the touch lamps we use as bedside light broke and would no longer light. The proximal event was a light-bulb blowout on Marcia's side (one of three small bulbs). I've observed in the past that the touch lamp circuitry, while incredibly convenient, seems to be terribly fragile (at least in consumer-grade gear) to spikes and dips. So yesterday evening I trundled down to Lowes and picked up a couple of three-way manually switched lamps and a pair of three-way CFL bulbs. Bloody profit-taking on the LED "bulbs" keeps those prices too high. *…