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.

Lexi at work

By | | , ,
2 Comments

My work and week was relatively uneventful: just computers, patching, rebooting, yardwork, and shopping, so I’ll share Lexi’s work week with you instead.

Lexi helping me exercise

Lexi helping me exercise

Before I get onto the elliptical, I’ll generally do a repeating series of stretches, alternating with exercises like squats, sit ups, and push ups. Above, you can see how helpful and encouraging Lexi is during this phase of my workout. Her prone position, her near-perfect lack of motion is extraordinarily motivational. Frankly, I couldn’t do it all without her.

*      *      *

Lexi on guard

Lexi on guard

When she’s not “helping” me exercise, or outright sleeping, Lexi likes to guard the house. Anything that she sees may be a threat, and she can warn us appropriately. Coming into Fall, she becomes a more effective guard beast. As the leaves drop from the trees, her detection range increases, and her blind spots drop to nearly nil. Soon, she’ll be able to warn us of automobiles driving on a nearby street, over a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of the community pool. She might also be able to spot a cat or dog or that most dangerously evil of animals – the hideous squirrel – as far off as the community playground, just this side of the afore-mentioned pool. We also sometimes refer to this as “Lexi TV.”

*      *      *

Our condolences to the family and friends of Spc. Kyle E. Gilbert, 24, of Buford, Georgia, who died on Sept. 21, in Bagram, Afghanistan, in a non-combat related incident.

Ch-ch-changes

By | | ,
Comments Off on Ch-ch-changes

Computational changes, at least…

During the past week, I migrated all of the public sites (including this one) from a machine running Scientific Linux (SL) 6 (an RHEL respin out of CERN), and onto a different box running FreeBSD 10.2. I did this for a couple of reasons.

First, SL6 was pretty slow to get updates from Red Hat and rebrand them, and release them to the world. I’d initially gone with SL because CentOS was suffering that problem. Then CentOS was picked up directly by Red Hat, and has become much more responsive. But I was ready for something different.

Reason the second: I’ve been running FreeBSD at home as my main system OS for a while now, and bringing the public-facing machine into the same venue seems appropriate. I’ve got a good handle on the security thing, and I like that it’s a well-maintained but lower-profile-than-Linux OS. I also especially like that I’m running on ZFS, which is a rockstar among file systems.

So that all got done during the week. Then, today, I replaced the D-Link gateway/router with an Intel i5 NUC device running Sophos UTM Home Edition. It’s a full-featured firewall with AV, web filtering and inspection, IPS, etc. And it’s free for home use. It’s a far more secure edge device than any consumer-grade router/gateway, with better logging and a huge feature set. That said, I’ve got … issues with the selected hardware platform. The NUC has but one network interface, so the second is a USB Ethernet device and it’s unstable. I’ve had to setup a scheduled job to refresh the hardware every couple of minutes to pick it up, dust it off, and start it running again, when it falls over. Which it’s doing. I may change the hardware on this sooner rather than later.

In between computer and networking gear swappage, I spent Saturday washing cars and doing yardwork. It’s been a tiring weekend, and I’m glad it is winding down. I can relax tomorrow at work!

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualties during the last week. Ciao!

Quiet times

By | |
Comments Off on Quiet times

It’s going to be busy soon, what with Capclave, and LISA15 … but this weekend was quiet. We went to supper and played Trival Pursuit with Mike and Linda last night. The rest of the time? Chores, a spot of shopping, a bit of telly, a dash of early morning system administration for work. Boring, really. But necessary. Oh, and I’m working on migrating the underpinnings of this site to FreeBSD. But not tonight.

*      *      *

DoD reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Mailing list etiquette, updated

By | | ,
Comments Off on Mailing list etiquette, updated

I am pleased to report that the Contact Conference mailing list owner got back to me, pleasantly and quickly, apologetically acknowledging the faux pas. One can merely hope that others will pay heed. Mailing list membership should always be recipient-instigated, and double-opt-in.

If you’re going to Contact, btw, I’m jealous. Just sayin’ …

Mailing list etiquette…

By | |
Comments Off on Mailing list etiquette…

7 zillion years ago (Internet time) – aka 2002 – I attended the Contact Conference at NASA Ames. It was wonderful, made sad only by the fact that a part of it was a memorial for Poul Anderson. Niven, Pournelle, Vinge, and many others were in attendance as well.

However, enjoying a conference over 13 years ago does not excuse the email I received today:

Welcome to the [Contact-conference AT listsDOTcontact-conferenceDOTorg] mailing list! …

My reply to the list owners went something like this:

 I should never, ever, ever, get a Welcome to… email from Mailman without first subscribing on my own. A *good* option would have been to send ONE email to all of the recoverable members of the old list, asking if they’d like to subscribe to the new list, and provide a URL for that purpose.

I’ve already unsubscribed myself, thanks, but you should consider sending an apology to the rest of the list, and provide clear, simple-to-understand instructions for unsubscribing to help those new list members who, like me, really didn’t want to be on a mailing list just because they attended a Contact conference a decade or more ago.

Just because it’s the Internet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be considerate.

Sigh. It’s not hard, people. Mailing list etiquette has been cast in concrete for ages…

Magic Blue

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Magic Blue

Or some silly color name like that. Anyway, that’s the exterior color of Marcia’s new car. She decided that hauling around her quilting friends and her quilting stuff in a low-slung, two door convertible was getting less and less convenient. So after driving a few different vehicles, she ended up with a Volvo V60T5 – one of their little sport wagons. Nice lines, I think, and she’s happy, which is a good thing.

I’ve spend a number of hours this weekend working on a project for $OFFICE, and got the front yard brown stuff mowed a bit flatter, too. Mostly brown, anyway: we’re hoping for some more rain sooner or later. We wrapped up June with about 14 inches of rain, which is about 4 month’s worth. Since then, only a couple of inches all told, and everything is dry. The trees are dropping leaves, too.

In entertainment news, Marcia and I are watching the modern Doctor Who series front to back, working on catching up to today by sometime in the middle of the coming current season. We started off with Eccleston’s 2005 doctor, and we’re a couple of episodes into Tennant run. Additionally, I finished a play-through of Witcher 3. Fun game.

Labor Day weekend here, so tomorrow’s a day off, and I plan on doing not much of anything, if I have any say in the matter. Wish me luck with that.

*      *      *

DoD has reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Toilets and Sewing Machines

By | | ,
Comments Off on Toilets and Sewing Machines

A toilet, and a sewing machine: these are both things I worked on repairing today. I was successful in repairing the toilet.  However, I don’t have the specialized knowledge I need to safely work on Marcia’s quilting machine. If I could have fixed this, it’d save us 50 or a hundred bucks. But I can do ever so much more damage than that … so I tried, and then I stopped.

I also had a fair amount of outside-of-business-hours work this week; Some yesterday, and more of that starting around 0645 this morning and going on for a couple of hours. That’s my excuse for not doing any yardwork at all. But since I can rarely talk about work, it’s boring here as a topic.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Capt. Matthew D. Roland, 27, of Lexington, Kentucky, died of wounds suffered Aug. 26 when the vehicle he was traveling in was attacked near Camp Antonik, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Forrest B. Sibley, 31, of Pensacola, Florida, died of wounds suffered Aug. 26 when the vehicle he was traveling in was attacked near Camp Antonik, Afghanistan.

Kerfuffle, Past and Future

By | | ,
Comments Off on Kerfuffle, Past and Future

The Hugo Awards were last night.

First off, congrats to the winners. I’m happy for them. I enjoyed the winning work in each category that had a winner. Well, except Guardians of the Galaxy, through no fault of its own. I don’t go to movies, and rarely watch them.

Five categories went to No Award. To me, that seems a bit harsh. I read everything that came in the Hugo packet, and dug up everything I could that wasn’t in the packet. For me, only four or five works out of dozens rated below No Award. The people who annoy me on all the sides of this kerfuffle are the ones willing to vote on the person or the politics, damn the writing. I don’t ask that my authors be sane, or kind, or pleasant. I ask that their writing entertain me. I’ll admit that the authors from the Sad|Rabid side of the aisle mostly floated my boat less than some of the others. But not all of them.

And from all the sides, I find myself in general less entertained by hot-button current issues in the guise of SpecFic. If your characters are interesting, compelling, worth caring about, then it doesn’t matter to me about gender, race, etc. If the character exists only to be the gender or the race or whatever … then that character doesn’t advance the story.

For the coming years, I can only see the Puppies continuing to get their authors into contention. That’s unless the anti-Puppies also start block-nominating. That defeats the purpose of a bunch of people reading and nominating a bunch of stuff, and the best of the best bubbles to the top.

Is there a way around the conundrum? Sure. Get everyone to vote. EVERYONE. If every purchase of a SpecFic book (online, print, whatever) came with a token for a Hugo nomination, then people who read LOTS of SpecFic would get more nomination power. But everyone who just buys ONE book also gets a nomination token. Some tokens will go unused. Others will be sold on a darknet market somewhere. But getting more fans into the process will bring it closer to where I think it needs to be – representative of the likes and dislikes of the readership. There are ways to make it relatively honest, though there will still be a dead (zombie?) vote.

Would this put more voting power into the hands of people who buy popular work, instead of less popular but more “literary” work? Sure. But if I purchase and read 17 works next year (especially easy, since I ought to get a token for every month of Clarkesworld, for example), I can apply all 17 of those tokens to the one literary work I read. Of course, no one of consequence will see this idea, and it wouldn’t happen anyway, because herding cats. But I’ve had fun with the thought experiment.

Also from WorldCon: Sigh. I don’t think I can make it to Helsinki in 2017. That’s a deal, because I was hoping that DC in 17, my local WorldCon bid, would succeed.

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Returns with a Vengeance

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Returns with a Vengeance

Summer, that is. We’re in a pattern of high heat and humidity right now, which makes working outside (and walking the dog) less than utterly pleasant activities. I strive, however, to not let that stop me. Today, after shopping and such, I managed a 3-gallon harvest out of the garden, much of which turned into the contents of these jars:

Mmmmm. Salsa.

Mmmmm. Salsa.

Yep, there’s still salsa coming out of the garden. It’s been winding down for a week or more, but there may be one more batch before the year’s production is done.

*      *      *

My dance card was full last week because Marcia was travelling. She did an eight day trip to Michigan, spending time with family and going to a quilt show in Grand Rapids. She tells me she had a good time. I won’t know how good a time until I’ve seen the credit card bill, however (grin).

*      *      *

DoD has reported no new casualties in the last few days. Ciao!

Belated Busy

By | | ,
Comments Off on Belated Busy

For reasons yet to be explained, I’ve been very, very busy. So here’s a picture of a new neighbor – a 10-week old shiba inu named Roxy:

New neighbor dog

New neighbor dog

*      *      *

Our condolences to the family and friends of Master Sgt. Peter A. McKenna Jr., 35, of Bristol, Rhode Island, who died on Aug. 8, in Kabul, Afghanistan, of wounds when he was attacked by enemy small arms fire.