Category Archives: Fallen Warriors

2015 Nov 22

By | | , ,
Comments Off on 2015 Nov 22

This last week, we saw a brand new play, Poe, staged at the Reynolds Tavern by the Annapolis Shakespeare Company. An excellent show, good food, and a wonderful evening. How can I tell that a new play is wonderful? It leaves me wanting to know more about the subject, and in awe of the actors plying their trade. The 1747 Pub in the basement of the Reynolds tavern is a great place for the work, too. Only two more nights, this week, so go if you can! We also had Linda and Mike over to supper and a game of Ticket to Ride last night. Otherwise it was a normal, if busy, week catching up from my conference week. Nothing too exciting to report.

*      *      *

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

2015 Nov 15

By | | ,
Comments Off on 2015 Nov 15

This last week was a blast at LISA 15, the annual USENIX all things system administration conference. I averaged 12 hour days over the 6 day run, so I’m still decompressing a bit. More of a report on that in a day or few.

Nothing else of particular importance going on in our part of the world just now. Terrorists killing random innocents for kicks seems to be increasing the world suck factor by a billion elsewhere at the moment, though. That makes me sad. Condolences to those who suffered loss in Paris, Beruit, and everywhere else in the world where people kill other people to make a point religious, political, or for reasons psychopathic. Redundant much? Sigh.

*      *      *

DoD reported no new military casualties in the last week, for which I am grateful.

LISA15

By | | , ,
Comments Off on LISA15

The LISA 15 conference is in full swing. I was up at 0600, and on the road at 0630. People to see and things to do before two half-day tutorials today: Go for SysAdmins, and Software Testing for Sysadmin Programs. Both were interesting and potentially useful and applicable to my work. Tomorrow, I’m doing the System Internals course, but if there is too much overlap with Ted Ts’o’s course from last year, then I’ll bail at midday and attend the Systemd tutorial in the afternoon. Tuesday I’ve got a couple more tutorials on tap, followed by three days of conference talks, BoFs, and evening meetings. Busy, excellent week ahead. I’m tired already, just thinking about it.

Yep, I’m going to learn a lot,  but really, the best part for me is seeing all these wonderful folks that I only cross paths with once a year at best. I’m quite thankful for that part of this event.

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualty reports during the last week, for which I am grateful. Ciao!

Central Time

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Central Time

Me, I’d set every clock to UTC, and just work with it. Marcia would, however, balk at the idea. Yep. DST is over for the “year” but they A) paid back the hour without interest, as usual, and B) are going to steal it back again in just a few months. Sigh.

Fun: We went over to see the Annapolis Shakespeare Company production of As You Like It on Friday evening. It was a blast. I’ve seen two or three productions of As You Like It over the decades, but they’ve generally been fairly traditional stagings. Not that I’m knocking that. Compared to some interpretations, traditional is most excellent. However, Director (and ASC founder) Sally Boyett put together a lively production set in 1930’s Appalachia, with period specific (and play appropriate) musical interludes between many of the scenes. It made for a rollicking good show, while not sacrificing any (well, not much) of the Bard’s original language. We both enjoyed the show immensely, and plan to be regulars at future ASC performances. Highly Recommended!

Hallowe’en has come and gone. We kept the lights off, which keeps the dog much, much calmer and happier. Pleasantly, we found while walking the dog today that not much in the way of candy or discarded wrappers were strewn about. A departure from prior years, but one that is welcome.

Speaking of Lexi, here she is in a recent photo, paying attention to the world and not to me:

Lexi on "Relaxed Guard" duty

Lexi on “Relaxed Guard” duty

Now if we can only keep the kids on dirt bikes from abusing our trails and roads (and keep those kids from getting themselves killed by inattentive drivers). I got a picture of some of them yesterday, and posted it to our neighborhood website, in hopes that the parents in question would observe and take action. We’ll see what happens. Next for me, a rocker for the front porch, so that I can shout at people walking near our lawn.

And yeah, I’m still waiting for my car. If I’m lucky, it’ll be before the end of this week.

*      *      *

DoD posted no new casualty announcements over the last week. Ciao!

Falling

By | |
Comments Off on Falling

Fall is well and truly here – and the temperatures are trying, occasionally, to match the season. We did drop into the low thirties a couple of nights, and once into the high twenties. Since, though, it’s been warm-ish: mid-40’s overnight, into the high 60’s during the days. Lovely weather, really. I got some house cleaning done over the weekend, and shopping today. A bit of work for the office today, and lazy for the rest, sadly. What I should have done is finished the house cleaning, or done something else productive. Oh, well.

Marcia and I are car-sharing this upcoming week, so I’m working from home on the two days she needs to be out and about. Nothing else really exciting on the known-things schedule.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the family and friends of Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, 39, of Roland, Oklahoma, who died on Oct. 22, in Kirkuk Province, Iraq, from wounds received by enemy small-arms fire during an operation.

Suicide by BMW

By | | ,
Comments Off on Suicide by BMW

At 0635 EDT (pre-dawn at this time of year), a deer tried to commit BMW-assisted suicide while I was driving to work. I’d have to say, that deer is a failure. It got up and ran off, and my car is in the body shop for the next few days. Bummer, I know. It jumped out of the bushes ten feet in front of my car or less. I barely got to the brakes before the deer was in my grill. Torso to the grill, neck took out the headlight, and the head dented the driver-side front quarter panel. And me with no venison!

That event rather owned my week, sadly. Still, yesterday we puttered on up to the Maryland Home Show up at the fairgrounds in Timonium, MD. We wandered about for a couple of hours, and spent much more time on the crafts side, and less being pursued by rabid window and siding salesmen on the home-show side. A nice little half-day trip.

*      *      *

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

  • Maj. Phyllis J. Pelky, 45, of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, died Oct. 11 in the crash of a British Puma Mk2 helicopter in Kabul, Afghanistan.
  • Master Sgt. Gregory T. Kuhse, 38, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, died Oct. 11 in the crash of a British Puma Mk2 helicopter in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Back to the grind

By | |
Comments Off on Back to the grind

Tomorrow, I’ll be back to the grind. Today wrapped up a four day weekend for me. I just took Friday and Thursday off for fun … then spent those two days worrying about a hurricane headed our way that ended up turning right instead of left. So it goes. It was also a low-energy weekend – I felt pretty washed out the last couple of days. Maybe my body was missing work?

Still, you might have noticed a bit more activity around here than usual over the past week, from foxes to Apple upgrades. Most of the activity was indoors, because outdoors was a bit damp. While the hurricane chose a different destination, we still had 5.6″ of rain measured in my back yard over the last five days. The wind finally came up and blew the moisture mostly out of the area, but it’s still cloudy with occasional drizzle. Additionally, there was apparently an EF-0 tornado that cut a minor swath 20 miles away, last Tuesday. But other than that, not much else to report on the home front.

*      *      *

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

  • Seaman Philip Frazier Manes, 21, of Fairfax, Virginia, died Sept. 27, in Manama, Bahrain, of a non-combat related incident.
  • Capt. Jonathan J. Golden, 33, of Camarillo, California, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.
  • Capt. Jordan B. Pierson, 28, of Abilene, Texas, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Hammond, 26, of Moundsville, West Virginia, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.
  • Senior Airman Quinn L. Johnson-Harris, 21, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.
  • Senior Airman Nathan C. Sartain, 29, of Pensacola, Florida, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.
  • Airman 1st Class Kcey E. Ruiz, 21, of McDonough, Georgia, died Oct. 2 in the crash of a C-130J Super Hercules aircraft at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan.

 

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!

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!