Author Archives: bilborg

About bilborg

I am who I am, there's plenty of data on this site to tell you more. Briefly, I'm a husband, computer geek, avid reader, gardener, and builder of furniture.

27 November 2024

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A Holiday

Y’all, if you’re in a place where you can or will celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, please enjoy it! Family? Friends? Pets? Alone? All or any of those are a reason to give thanks each and every day, regardless of a specific date on the (Hallmark(tm)) calendar. So even without a holiday, have the best day you can.

For us, we’re going to be starting the day with blueberry scones (so Marcia tells me). We’re baking a large, unpardoned turkey for the main course, and there will be some mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade cranberry sauce (just cranberries, water, sugar, and some orange zest), and possibly a salad or something else green to take up space better served by one of the other menu entries.

OS updates

I’m pretty good about keeping my home and internet facing servers updated. I use FreeBSD for the main home server and for the system that presents this site and Marcia’s sites to the world. I keep them lock-stepped, and always update the home server first, so that if there’s a glitch in the updates, I can solve it here where I can attach a screen and keyboard to debug boot issues. That’s a pattern that’s served me well in past years, and did again yesterday.

I updated the home server from Freebsd 13.3 to 14.1. Didn’t come back online to network connectivity after the first phase of the upgrade and the first reboot. Turns out I forgot that I really should have been updating the loader.efi on a regular basis (like, after every version update) so that changes to the OS aren’t stumbled over. The core of the error looked like this: “Startup error in /boot/lua/loader.lua: LUA ERROR: /boot/lua/core.lua:68: attempt to concatenate a nil value” … fortunately addressed by the following forum post:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/problem-upgrading-from-13-3-release-to-14-1-release-lua-error-upon-booting-kernel.93737

From the boot error OK prompt, I could just type “boot” and the system would do so, which is a good thing to know. Then I did some research, identified the partitions that contained the EFI data I needed to mount and copy the loader.efi to, and for each available partition, mounted it, copied the file, and unmounted. Thereafter I had no problem with booting.

> gpart list | grep -Ew '(Name|efi)'
 ...
> mount_msdosfs /dev/ada0p1 /boot/efi
> cp /boot/loader.efi /boot/efi/efi/boot/BOOTx64.efi
> umount /boot/efi
# rinse and repeat in mirrored boot environments

By following this process for the remote server (from which your are getting this content), I had zero problems with the update. Thus my new OS update pattern will be to do these steps immediately before, and immediately after the update.

Fall Winding Down

We’re a few short weeks from the end of Fall, and we’re also getting close to the days when our daily high temperatures will also be below freezing. Most of our overnight lows already are there – I woke this morning to freezing fog and a skim coat of ice on the board walk leading to our front door. The other part of this season that’s almost done is deer season, firearms. We’ve got a few days left for that, which is why on our walks, I’m in an orange hat and/or sweat jacket, and Georgia is sporting her fall line wear.

Georgia, american bully mix dog, wearing her orange fall hunting season vest, walking on leash, on a leaf covered trail.
Georgia in her orange fall hunting season vest

That’s about all I have to report at the moment. More as time and events permit.

13 November 2024

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Happy Friday the 13th

Yeah, so Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday this month. That happens.

Automotive Safety

Every time I receive an email, or see an advertisement for a car touting the safety features, it makes me want to go out, buy an old Lamborghini, and drive like a hoon with four outstanding ASBOs.

We got a survey about Subarus recently. We really like our Outback, but the Driver Monitoring System (which can be temporarily disabled, but not permanently) drives me bonkers. I said as much, noting that it would probably keep me from buying another Subi…. but then I bet ALL the freaking cars watch the driver now, don’t they?

Photogenic

Nice raking sunlight just before sunset, our view to the south-east…

View south-east, sunlight on the ridge line.
View south-east, sunlight on the ridge line.

3 November 2024

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Before leaves and firewood…

Just FYI, I took another 9 truck loads of leaves to the city composting heap on Friday. This was the big batch. In another week I’ll clear leaves one more time, and call it a Fall for those purposes.

But before the leaves and the firewood, it was September when the boat saw it’s last few outings for the year, and the final fish was caught. As Fall approached, the acorns were falling like mad. Felt like it was going to fill the boat… I exaggerate, of course:

Fallen acorns in the bottom of the boat.
Fallen acorns in the bottom of the boat.

Three weekends in a row, I cleaned out acorns from the boat before going out for a few hours. The second to last fishing weekend, on September 22, I caught this bass, 18″ long, 3#10:

Holding up a large mouth bass.
Holding up a large mouth bass.

The following weekend, I went fishing one last time, to little effect. Then we took the boat out of the water and put it into storage until Spring. Meantime the leaves started falling, and I started getting sunrises like this, right around the time I was starting work each morning:

Orange/red clouds at sunrise, the view east out of my home office.
Orange/red clouds at sunrise, the view east out of my home office.

That’s all for now, I’m trying to relax before the upcoming work week.

17 October 2024

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First Frost

Today was the first proper frost of Fall 2024. We had some spotty frosted areas on Monday, but this mornings temperature out on the deck was 28°F, and all the grass and fields were frosted white. This also means that all of the leaves on our trees, and the trees across the road that have been waiting for the “drop” signal, should do so in the next few days.

Two weeks ago I took two loads of leaves to the city compost site. On Sunday, I took a further six truck beds full – picture is the accumulated pile from Sunday before I started hauling off:

Pile of leaves staged in the driveway behind the collector/mower
Pile of leaves behind the collector/mower

Late last month, we got our annual two cords of firewood dropped in the back of the house. It took me 5 hours over a couple of days to get it all stacked into the lower garage:

Two cords of wood stacked into the lower garage

Nothing else to report right now. Back soon.

29 July 2024

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Summertime Blues

But only around this site.

In real life, earthquakes aside (USGS event link), it’s been a pretty full dance card kind of summer. Work continues apace. Marcia and I get out fishing when we can. Georgia Aileen and I get out for a daily 2.5 – 3.0 mile walk: our current pace is around four miles an hour, which is a pretty brisk walk. The front yard continues to delight, with flowers of some sort or another in nearly continuous bloom.

White lily in foreground focus in front of blurred flower bed background.
These lilies started blooming in the last day or so

We got our money out of the mower that came with the house, and not one cent more. That old mower, a Cub Cadet GT 2544, would take me 3.5 hours to mow the whole yard at the best of times. Biggest part of the problem there was the high center of gravity and relatively narrow wheelbase – that made picking my angles for up and down the slopes in our yard an interesting proposition.

So last month we shelled out for a new Cub Cadet ZTS1 50 mower. Now I can mow the whole yard in about an hour and a quarter. Woo! And … Hoo! Compared to paying for a bi-weekly lawn service, my ROI should be about 3 years. That’s a win, too.

Back again, sooner or later.

29 May 2024

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Almost 26 Years

Tomorrow is our 26th anniversary, Marcia and I. It’s been joyous, occasionally challenging, and all wonderful. Yay, us!

Catching up

Georgia has been standing in the water a lot – this is her normal routine at the 3/4 mark on our daily walk.

black on white american bully mix rescue dog, standing chest deep in pond
Georgia standing in the reservoir

Spring has been springing – lots of stuff has been coming into bloom. The lilies are coming up, the roses are pending, the lilac smells wonderful…

Small cherry tree in bloom
Small cherry tree in bloom in our front yard

Time to go fishing – We put the boat in the water a couple of weeks ago, and have made it out fishing a couple of times already. On Sunday last, we both caught some bass…

Small mouth bass caught at the lake, shoreline and boat motor in background
Small mouth bass, caught then released

And that’s the highlights of the last few weeks. It’s been busy.

20 April 2024

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Quick Takes

  • Georgia Aileen, the american bully rescue mutt, is whuffling and twitching on her bed here in my office/foyer. It’s a good life, I think, being the dog that owns Marcia and I.
  • I pre-ordered Robin Sloan’s next book, Moonstruck, this evening. I *think* I have everything he’s written, and I enjoy the hell out of his premises, his characters, and his writing style.
  • Looking back in email searching for something else, I came across something I wrote to Jerry Pournelle back in December 2011:

Congress is a bunch of loons whose only concern is where the money is coming from for the next election. Yeah, there are occasional principled and knowledgeable folks there, but follow the money.  Who goes to jail and who doesn’t? 

The record companies are said to rob their artists blind … and no one cares one whit. Their old business model has gone the way of the buggy whips, and their response? Artists sue for not getting paid, and the companies sue the fans of the artists. My only real thought on your comments below is that suing your customers is a great way to ensure that when you’re done, you don’t have any customers. 

Use guilt? Sure. Market the hell out of yourself online and in the social media scene. There’s plenty of folks making a living doing just that. This includes former nobodies like Pomplamoose and Zoe Keating and Robin Sloan, and well-established authors like Gaiman and Scalzi.

And it’s pertinent to this conversation that it’s TRIVAL to get a copy of nearly anything today. So, on a purely technical basis, I need never pay for content again. I pay for books and music to support the artists and creators who do the work I love.

Those who won’t pay, mostly never would. You can make it so difficult to use a DRM copy that you make legitimate customers run screaming, and it won’t stop the “piracy” for a moment. And while we’re at it, let’s not keep helping the bastards by framing the argument in terms of assault  by ship on the high seas.

It’s silly to argue that every unpaid copy is a lost sale, but that’s what the BSA and the MafiAA  would have our legislators believe. But for our bought and paid representatives, it’s polite to at least pretend to believe in the people who fund your next campaign. And that “pretend” is what gets turned into sausage. Errr, law.

  • There was a .signature quote from another email I glanced at:

My favorite yoga pose is the one where I stand upright, watching the class through the window while eating a cheeseburger. — @shazzz_lee

  • Finally, I broke the shorts streak this week – it was cold and raining today, so back on with the jeans for walking the dog … but she still went and walked into the reservoir when we got to that point in the journey. Yay, dogs.

19 April 2024

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More Catch-up

So … we were in California last week. Sadly not for fun, but to lay my mother to rest. She passed in late February after a short battle with leukemia. It wasn’t expected, because the meds were moving her blood work in the right direction, but in the end, we think her heart gave out. She was wonderful, caring, sharp as a tack, and interested in just about everything. I’m missing her terribly. While it was lovely to see all the family, everyone in town to console each other, I wish it had been for just about any other reason.

There. That’s enough of that for here.

Shorts Week

So, still in the 30’s and occasional high 20’s (F) overnights, but I’ve set the jeans aside – it’s shorts weather every day now, including the dog walks (as long as it’s mid 40’s and up when we start the walk – I warm up quickly at our pace). At about the 3/4 point on the walk, we get to the reservoir, and Georgia walks right in:

Georgia, an american bully mix rescue dog, black on white, standing in the water at the edge of the nearby reservoir.
Georgia standing in the water

And spring is springing – the first crocuses are pitching up their flowers. Then first the yellow, then the white daffodils started opening. Spring flower season in our front yard is fun.

Crocuses blooming - light and dark ... purple?
Crocuses blooming in the front yard at our house

That’s all I’ve got for y’all today. Back again soon, I hope.

24 March 2024

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A Boston Song (aka Long Time)…

I got a wellness check email from the estimable Rick Hellewell recently, which brought to mind just how long it’s been since I was here. Let’s just say, it’s not you, it’s me.

As I noted in my reply, I’ve been hideously busy with work, which I can’t really discuss publicly. And some family stuff has been going on and distracting, which I won’t discuss publicly. So the things that have consumed most of my mental energy don’t currently have a place here. I haven’t had time for much in the way of interesting fun things to share, so this just dropped off the radar for me for a while.

Maybe I’ll just post with some more regularity, but on trivial outtakes for a while, to try to get back in the groove. Wish me luck.

From early last month – Georgia and her cousin Raven hanging out in a patch of sunshine in our dining room:

Georgia (black on white, american bully mix) and Raven (black lab)
Georgia and Raven

From earlier this month – Georgia watching television, as dogs will:

Georgia (black on white, american bully mix)
Georgia watching something on Discovery streaming

From today, a couple of views of yesterday’s snowstorm output:

Snow covered landscape, dog prints on snow in foreground.
Snow covered landscape view east from our house, planter boxes in foreground, fields and distant ridgeline.
The view from my home office (aka, the foyer)

The snow was supposed to be 20″ plus of fluffy stuff, but about 8-10 inches in, it switched over to sleet/ice/rain for a couple of hours, creating a thick, crunch layer. Then we had a bit more snow before the event ended overnight. Not super fun to clear. Good thing my snow blower works and is substantial.

9 December 2023

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Snow days

Snow days don’t really matter much unless the storm takes out the power and the internet, these days. What snow days do is make everything prettier … and slightly more difficult. Everything is an exercise in dressing appropriately for the task and the wind and the temperature.

Last Sunday night, it started snowing right around sundown. We were due for 4.5 inches or so ending mid-Monday morning. Instead we finished up with around 6 inches early in the afternoon, then another inch or so that night. Here’s my Monday morning (12/4/2023) view from my office window:

Snowy view east from our house, fields and brush all coated.
Snowy view east from our house

The snow was heavy enough that I used the machine instead of shoveling, late morning on Monday. I did, however, shovel out some walking and bio-break spots for the dog on the front yard. Through the week, Georgia and I did make it out each day on abbreviated walks, only a mile and a half or so, I had to break out my snow and ice cleats, it gets treacherous pretty quickly:

Georgia the rescue american bully mix dog, in her safety orange vest, on a tree-lined trail, everything covered in snow.
Georgia scouting ahead.
Georgia the rescue american bully mix dog, in her safety orange vest, on our way though one of the quarry areas, snow-covered granite blocks in the middle distance.
Georgia trying to figure out the ATV tracks

The other treacherous bit was the bitingly low temps for this early in the season. Overnights dropped hard into the single digits: 9°, 8°, 5°, 4° – that was Monday through Thursday night lows. Since then it’s warmed a little bit, but not much – we got all the way up to freezing yesterday. Today we got up to the mid-30’s, and Georgia went walking out on one of the smaller, shallower frozen ponds on our walk today.

Be well.