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.

Summer?

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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.

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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 catch-up, because it’d been at least three weeks since last I mowed (well before the Red Hat course). The one mitigating factor is that even though it hasn’t been super hot, there also has not been a lot of rain. So the lawn stayed mostly dormant. Today, Marcia joined me for the shopping, then I did a bit of around-the-house maintenance before heading into the office to do some patching of Solaris systems. I could do that work remotely, but it’s a lot easier to do on my multi-screen setup at work. All of the patching stuff (both days) went well, and systems are stable, which is good.

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Marcia and I recently started watching a new (to us) show on HGTV called Fixer Upper. The hosts, Joanna & Chip Gaines, have a great chemistry and fun working together on their projects. It makes the show a joy to watch. Recommended!

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

  • Staff Sgt. Girard D. Gass Jr., of Lumber Bridge, North Carolina, died Aug. 3, in Jalalabad Air Field Hospital, Afghanistan, from a non-combat related incident while on patrol that occurred in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.
  • Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, 55, of Schenectady, New York, died Aug. 5, in Kabul, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his unit was attacked by small arms fire.

What I’m Reading – The Setup

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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 get into. How real people use and integrate technology into their lives and their jobs is very interesting to me. And the fact that the initial link confronts my consciousness via Deirdré and Brendan helps for traction, since both of those folks are on my personal “smarter than me, I should pay attention, I’ll learn something” list. What I found at The Setup was that there are a lot more people in the world that belong on that list. I’m happy to have found some more of them. One of the best things in (my) life is to be surrounded by smart people.

My thanks to Daniel Bogan (@waferbaby), who came up with the idea, and keeps on truckin’.

Be well.

 

Certifiable

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OOOooo … err. Certified. That’s whut I am. The week of death march revising on RHEL7, followed by two certification exams on Friday, it is over. And most interestingly, I passed both exams, and now have my RHCE. Coming out of the building after 5 on Friday afternoon, I was sure I’d passed EX200 (the RHCSA exam), but frankly wasn’t feeling too warm and fuzzy about EX300 (the RHCE). So I was pleased as punch to learn that I had in fact passed both, and by comfortable margins.

Better yet, I learned a hell of a lot about the tools and technologies in this latest iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I’ll be putting that knowledge to use in production systems within the next several months. So, that’s a good thing, too.

This weekend, I tried to stay awake, and to do some chores. I almost got enough done. What really needs doing is … everything. The house needs a deep cleaning, and the yard needs quite a lot of attention. All in good time. Oh, and while the garden isn’t doing well, it is still producing a bit:

Garden Goodies -2 Aug 2014

Garden Goodies -2 Aug 2014

Some of that has turned into salsa, we’re having more in salads, and some goes to work to make people there happy, as well.

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DoD has announced no new casualties in the last 6 days.

A billion, billion comment spam

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Well, that might be an exaggeration. It was more like a few hundred comment spam. Fortunately they were all so marked, making it easy to click–delete.

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Monday? Monday?!? So sorry to have missed y’all, yesterday. I’ve been preparing for this week’s RH300 course, and stayed pretty focused on that goal. We’re covering 14 days of regular Red Hat coursework in four days of grueling review, followed by the RHCSA and RHCE exams on Friday. And the exams are … challenging. I’m really good with the bits I use. And I can puzzle out the bits I don’t use often. But come exam-time, there’s 2 or 4 hours to do a WHOLE BUNCH of stuff, and it all has to work right, and it all has to survive a reboot.

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

  • Pfc. Donnell A. Hamilton, Jr., 20, of Kenosha, Wisconsin, died July 24, at Brooke Army Medical Center, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, from an illness sustained in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Benjamin G. Prange, 30, of Hickman, Nebraska, died July 24, in Mirugol Kalay, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device.
  • Pfc. Keith M. Williams, 19, of Visalia, California, died July 24, in Mirugol Kalay, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when the enemy attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device.
  • Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Yeshabel Villotcarrasco, 23, of Parma, Ohio, died as a result of a non-hostile incident June 19 aboard USS James E. Williams (DDG-95) while the ship was underway in the Red Sea.

Tiger Lilies

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The tiger lilies are in full bloom right now. There’s the sad, short ones around the perimeter, however … those were cropped by deer roaming the neighborhood. Still, tiger lilies:

Tiger Lilies - 2014

Tiger Lilies – 2014

Cool July

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We’ve had several days of unseasonably cool weather. I’m not complaining, mind you. But all the same, it’s weird. Temps in the early mornings in the high 50’s, and barely breaking into the low 80’s. Who’d a thunk? But they let me take Lexi on a two mile walk this afternoon without arriving back home as a sweatball holding a dead dog.

The garden, it fares poorly. I gave it virtually no attention in the days leading up to Marcia’s surgery, nor in the weeks that followed that event. Bugs have killed my zucchini plants, the tomato plants are small-ish with yellowing leaves and low production, and my herbs have all bolted. But I was paying attention to the important tasks in life, so that’s okay.

I’m otherwise tired. I had a couple of rounds of system work today: an hour early, and a couple of hours following the shopping run. In the coming week, I’ve got to spend a fair bit of time working with RHEL7, in advance of a Rapid Track training course the week following, with an RHCE certification exam at the end of that.

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Another week, another span of time during which DoD announced no casualties. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of unpleasantness in the Middle East and in the Ukraine … but I sincerely hope we stay the hell out of those conflicts.

Feel the Power

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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 is working just fine. I’ll keep an eye on other houses on the street – when their light go on, I’ll flip back to street power.

 

 

Improbably So

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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, for work I’m starting to bone up on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, which was released a couple of weeks ago. There are some big changes at the system level in RHEL7, worth learning more about before I go into a rapid track course and certification exams at the end of the month. For myself, I’m getting into Harvard’s Statistics 101, via iTunes U. Statistics seem like they should be intuitively “easy”, which is usually, well, wrong. So learning more fundamentals will do me good.

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For a second consecutive week, no casualties have been announced by DoD.

Summer Arrives in Force

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Yeah, we’re making mid-90’s and up this time of year (both temp and humidity), although that storm gave us a couple of nice days in the mid-80’s, Friday and Saturday.

Marcia news: She’s mostly tapered off her pain meds, with a plan to be fully off by week’s end (or earlier), and driving, too! She got fed up with the walker by Friday, and put it to the side. Now she’s using the cane everywhere, which is much better for her in several ways. Her gait is better, and she leans less on the cane than she did on the walker. More mobility, the faster the recovery will go. Yay!

The week in pictures:

From the garden

From the garden – first of the summer.

So, those were yummy. But then there was the Fourth of July, and the day after that …

Lexi disagrees with bangs

Lexi disagrees with bangs

The noise was still going on the day following the Fourth, so she walked into one of my cabinets and looked like she’d prefer it if I closed the door. Then today (Sunday), the heat came back … in more ways than one:

Spicy grilled chicken

Spicy grilled chicken

We had spicy grilled chicken. The prep was in a habañero/pineapple marinade, then I grilled all of the chicken. I dressed mine with lots of happy, happy jalapeño.

 

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No new casualties were announced by DoD in the last week. So that’s good.

At the Edge of the Woods

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We’re not out of them yet, but there’s more scrub brush at the edges, right? Stuff that needs pushing through before we can be out of the woods? Yeah, that’s it. Overall, Marcia’s doing well. We got here home midday on Wednesday, and had formal outpatient PT on both Thursday and Friday. We managed a lot (relatively) of exercise yesterday, including a couple of walks up and down the sidewalk on our block. So she’s improving rapidly. Today: blood test (for effectiveness of blood thinner) and PT.

Me? By the time I was done with all the chores plus the Marcia-care, I was wiped. That’s my reason for failing to post last night. Sorry about that. This week I’ll be working from home as many hours as I can manage, starting in just a couple of minutes…

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

  • Staff Sgt. David H. Stewart, 34, of Stafford, Virginia, died June 20, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Lance Cpl. Brandon J. Garabrant, 19, of Peterborough, New Hampshire, died June 20, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Lance Cpl. Adam F. Wolff, 25, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, died June 20, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Sgt. Thomas Z. Spitzer, 23, of New Braunfels, Texas, died June 25 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.