Category Archives: Beware of Leopard

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22 May 2016

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A busy, productive week, topped off by a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday evening. We saw the NSO Pops perform, backing up Boyz II Men. We’d never seen either previously, so it was a treat.

Us at the Kennedy Center

Us at the Kennedy Center

Additionally, the Boyz II Men fans are … well, enthusiastic. With a couple of songs to go in the program, women from the crowd rushed the stage. Hmmm. We took advantage of the opportunity and made our exit. Out of the parking and on the road in front of the crowd seems to have been a really good idea.

Today: shopping, chores, coffee roasting, and a bit of relaxation.

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

8 May 2016

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I spent yesterday cleaning house, and half of today doing yard work. THEN Marcia let me know I was supposed to be doing that for my mom, not us! Wrong coast, be damned. Grin.

Nothing much to report for the week. It was wet all last week, I think it rained every day. Even though today was sunny all day, it rained in the wee hours (very polite, that, if you ask me). The NOAA forecast for the week is, well, rain. Every day. The veggies that could be growing, aren’t. The cantelopes are dying, sadly. We’ll see if they recover, but I expect that cooler than expected temps and too much rain are doing them in. Same thing could happen to the tomatoes.

I should have roasted coffee today, but that can wait until tomorrow evening. Ordering more coffee? That I should do right now, since I only have 4# on hand at the moment. {Pleasantly mind-numbing hold music} …

Coffee ordered from SweetMarias.com. I’ve got 10 different 2# batches of green coffee beans on the way, with origins in:

  • Burundi
  • Brazil
  • Ethiopia
  • Java
  • Zamibia
  • Sumatra
  • Columbia
  • Bolivia

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

  • Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Charles H. Keating IV, 31, of San Diego, California, died May 3 in Tall Usquf, Iraq, of combat related causes. 
  • 1st Lt. David A. Bauders, of Seattle, Wash., died May 6, on Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, in a non-combat related incident.

5 May 2016

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Happy Cinco de Mayo, people.

I had three email messages in the Inbox this morning purporting to be from kind, helpful people who had found broken links on my site, and offered up new URLs to replace those that no longer worked. Usually those links are in the Brian and Tom’s Linux Book section of the site, which is getting pretty long in the tooth. Oddly, while the links are aging badly, the book really isn’t. Yeah, specific configuration stuff has changed, and I could make different recommendations about services, but the overall holds up, I think. Except for the OpenLinux part. @#$**@# Caldera.

Anyway, in case any of these emails are legit … I just won’t go back into the deep history of this site and change URL’s and links. Firstly, I don’t like rewriting history, and if someone cares enough, they can use the Wayback Machine at archive.org to look up content on the relevant URL. Second, I am unwilling to go to the effort to validate any proffered replacement URL, both for expected useful content and lack of dangerous content and secondary linkage. So, thanks but no thanks, imaginary helpful people.

NOW, if it’s a recent link (in the last month, say), then I might consider looking into the issue.

Anyway, back to work.

1 May 2016

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Four months gone. Four. Sigh.

So the good news is that we had a half-busy weekend. Starting Friday evening, I spent an hour or so preparing one corner of the garage for the new chest freezer. Saturday morning, I swapped out the crappy old AC socket for a new one, just in time for said freezer to put in an appearance. The balance of the day was spent touching every item in the garage, making a heap in the middle of the floor. Then we moved the shelving to the back wall, and put all the keeper stuff back on shelves. A stack went to a donation location (out by the curb, with a sign saying “Free Stuff” tacked to the tree above), and some smaller amount went into the trash. Garage is as clean as the day we moved in, and the setup is better, now. That’s good.

Today was lazy. Just shopping, coffee roasting, and relaxing. No point in trying to catch up on the lawns or the garden – it was raining all day. Oh, and Marcia baked some fresh whole wheat bread. Sadly, that’s gone already, between lunch and dinner. Grin.

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week, for which we are grateful. Ciao!

3 April 2016

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I survived another April Fool’s Day, mostly by staying away from the Internet except for specific purposes. Best tweet of the day, though, something like: “April Fool’s Day: The sole, single, solitary, only day when the Internet is full of lies.” That’s full of WIN, that’s what that is.

That said, two night’s of terrible, broken sleep mean that I’m pretty tired. I’m hoping for better tonight. Downside: I’m still on call, and will be for another three nights. Upside: We shouldn’t have gusts up to 50 mph tonight, so that the house makes massive amounts of noise, and keeps me awake that way.

Rain yesterday, cold and windy today, with a forecast four nights below freezing this week … glad I’ve got nothing in the garden yet!

Dod reported no new casualties in the latest week. Ciao!

 

27 March 2016

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Boring, I’m sure. First mowing of the year, yesterday. The front lawn is looking lush – that’s normal for this time of year. Today, no shopping because the store was closed for Easter Sunday. But since Easter is also a sigil of Spring, I used the day to clean house. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was before I started.

Oh, oh, we saw a WONDERFUL Annapolis Shakespeare Company production of The Importance of Being Earnest. The excellent company cast was superbly directed by Founding Artistic Director Sally Boyett. It’s a great play, Oscar Wilde was such a joy as a writer and playwright. If you’re in our area, it’s on for just another couple of weeks and you really, really should go.

That’s really all I’ve got. I’m working on learning Ruby, because it’s been a long while since I’ve picked up a new language. It’s slower going than I’d like, frankly. But probably to be expected. Good to exercise the gray cells, no doubt.

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

17 March 2016

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There once was a service called FandangoNOW, ah, Fucking Bastards, the company formerly known as M-GO. I logged into it once, because it was a featured service on our Roku box. As of this morning, I had neither purchased nor rented any content from M-GO. This is a good thing, because it appears that with the acquisition of M-GO by Fandango, you can either accept their new Terms and Privacy Policy (including the privacy policies of their corporate parents, NBC Universal and Warner Brothers), OR YOU, THE CUSTOMER, CAN GO TO HELL. Well, not HELL, as such. But if you’d “purchased” content from M-GO, but you assert that you cannot accept the conditions of the change of ownership … you lose access to anything you’ve purchased. In my opinion, that’s called theft, but then I’m an old-fashioned bloke. Here’s a quote from the exact text from the email I received last night:

If you prefer to opt out of these changes, click here and follow the instructions on the resulting page. If you opt out, we will remove your information from our database, including movies you have purchased.

Fucking bastards. Yes, I’ve had my information removed from their database, and I’m glad of it. But I’m glad that they didn’t get to steal any of my money from me in the process. I’m assuming that most people will just roll over on this sort of thing, but if they’re up front about being willing to deprive you of stuff you’ve paid for now, I’m willing to guess (and it’s just my opinion, mind you) that they’d do it to you again and again, in a heartbeat. Bend over, FandangoNOW customers.

In other news, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. May the Saint Piss Stale Beer All Over The FandangoNOW Business Plan.

21 Feb 2016

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It’s been a busy week and weekend. Lots of fun stuff at work, including setup for production patching this weekend and a big physical-to-virtual migration of a production workload. Several of us worked on it for several hours today, but somehow most of the tasks on the spreadsheet had my name on it … funny how that happens. So my work day today started at 0700 and wrapped up at about 1300, with a bit more email and ticket work late in the afternoon.

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Additionally, it was unseasonably warm this weekend, with temps in the mid-to-high 50’s. Nice for walking the mutt. And it let me do some work in my spare time in the garage and shed – replacing 7 fluorescent fixtures holding a total of (11) 4o watt 4′ tubes. All that has been replaced by two 4700 lumen, 40 watt LED fixtures. One each in the garage and shed. I may add one more in the garage, just to bump up the lighting over the back bench. Even so – cutting the load from 440 watts to 80 or 120 is a big win. And those fluorescent fixtures didn’t much like being cold. When the temps are in the mid-30’s or lower, it was a crapshoot whether I’d get light or not when the switch was flipped.

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Marcia spent much of the weekend baking, making beautiful things. More details there once they can be revealed.

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week, for which we are grateful. Ciao!

14 Feb 2016

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Happity Saint Valentine’s Day. Did y’all have a nice massacre?

To pre-celebrate the day, we went out to supper and the theatre last night. The show was Annapolis Shakespeare Company‘s production of Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters. It was a crowded main stage (20′ x 25’), between set dressing and at times all eleven cast members at once!

Three sisters is a melancholy and ever-so-slightly depressing drama about the titular sisters and their brother, trapped far from the desired Moscow in a semi-rural backwater of Russia. As the play opens, with their father the General dead a year past, the family’s slow slide into resentment, and the eventual acquiescence to their fates is just picking up speed. Well-played by Teresa Spencer, Olivia Ercolano, and Chelsea Mayo, the sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina, play off the poisonous Natasha (another excellent performance by  Renata Plecha) as she seduces their brother Andrei (James Carpenter) and slowly takes over their household. Natasha also is a barometer for the dreams of the sisters, large and small. From love to Moscow, all are dashed in the end. Even Brian Keith MacDonald’s fine portayal of Baron Tuzenbach, who remains stoutly optimistic in the face of all that turn of the century Russia doesn’t have to offer … well, no spoilers.

So you’d be surprised to hear me say that this cast made us laugh, from time to time. The wincing faces of Ms. Spencer and Ms. Mayo as they waited for their sister’s confession of her love for Colonel Vershinin (perfectly pompously played by Steven Hoochuk) had everyone giggling, as did the Colonel himself, from time to time. And to be sure, the blind optimism (or cynicism, in the case of Michael Reid’s Solyony) of some of the characters passed straight through tragic and into comedy. This did for me what a good, well-staged and excellently acted play should do – I cared about the characters and their fates, even when the outcomes were so clearly written in the stars. Highly recommended!

We’ve got our tickets for the next few productions lined up, too! Importance of Being Earnest as well as Romeo and Juliet are upcoming.

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

11 Feb 2016

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Lexi under a shawl

Lexi under a shawl

Yeah, Lexi is a spoiled dog and she knows it, but all on her own, she’ll go find something a bit like a blanket, on whatever piece of furniture is convenient. She’ll burrow in, then turn a couple of times and end up with her face poking out so that she can see what’s going on. Just in case we’re doing anything interesting, don’t you know? This time, it was Marcia’s red shawl, draped (for a while) on the back of the sofa. Lexi hauled that down, and draped herself. Cute as beans.

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It was roasting day today.

Roasting a Columbian coffee

Roasting a Columbian coffee

I generally roast about once a week, a pound at a time. This morning I put the last half pound of beans into the burr grinder hopper, so tonight is a good time to roast. That gives the freshly roasted beans a few days to rest before they’re up to bat, which is a good thing. Roasted beans should always rest first.

It was 6 years ago this week that I got my Behmor 1600 Roaster from Sweet Maria’s. I’ve upgraded the panel to the 1600 Plus version, last year, for $50. Including original shipping, I’m all in on this roaster for $375, and at 52 roasts a year, yielding 7 pots of coffee each … why that’s a cost of under 20 cents a pot against the roaster. Given my travel mug and Marcia’s soup tureens (yeah, she uses very large coffee beakers), it’s under a nickel a pop amortized. Good value for money, and still going strong! Behmor coffee roasters: Highly Recommended!

I will say, I take good care of it, including cleaning it well, on schedule. I’ve also taken the whole thing apart a couple of times to clear all the chaff and cruft out of the gears and the electronics and whatnot. Handy to have a shop, and an air compressor with a good nozzle on the end of the hose.