The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey October 9, 2017

9 October 2017

Good morning. It's a holiday for $FIRM, in the midst of a five day weekend (for me), so I've only been doing email and tickets for an hour or so, and work is done for the day. A busy weekend. First up, Capclave. Capclave is a small-ish literary SFF convention put on by the Washington Science Fiction Association. It's been held at the Hilton Gaithersburg for at least the last several years, and I've attended several now. It's simply lovely. Loads of writers, editors, publishers. I've been attending intermittently since 2012. It's good to catch up with some prior acquaintances…

Brian Bilbrey October 1, 2017

1 October 2017

"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?" * * * I'll just leave that there, okay? In other news, I just called my oldest best friend (I've known him since I was four) to wish him a happy birthday, which was pleasant and fun. I also left a voice mail for pater and mater, they're probably out painting the town red. Some of our weekend was normal routine - shopping, roasting coffee, washing the car, going to the office to get some hardware maintenance done during off-hours, doing other chores, but... Speaking of painting the town red, we had…

Brian Bilbrey September 25, 2017

25 September 2017

That was a chore-filled weekend. The lawns are all lovely and flat, and nearly the whole house is much, much cleaner. But I was bloody exhausted by the time last night rolled around. So sorry. * * * Only big news is upgrading my MacBook Pro to the latest MacOS release: High Sierra. I'd popped for one of the Beta releases earlier in the Summer, and put in a few issue reports before reverting to Sierra. All of the issues I reported actually garnered responses from Apple, and they've all been remediated in the GA release of the OS. Frankly,…

Brian Bilbrey September 17, 2017

17 September 2017

A busy week and weekend. We made it down to Melford Pond for a couple of hours of fishing on Saturday morning. Well, Marcia was fishing (and caught a decent-sized catfish that she put back, might I add!), while I walked the dog around the pond. It was a nice start to the weekend. Chores: Mowing the lawns, changing old, worn-out locksets out for new ones that work properly, etc, etc. * * * Tech-side, I've been playing around with Flask (a Python web framework). Yeah, should I find something more bleeding edge? Probably. Maybe I'll revisit Node shortly. Or…

Brian Bilbrey September 10, 2017

10 September 2017

Sad. There's a Jerry Pournelle-shaped hole in my personal Universe. Jerry passed away on September 8, 2017. I was a fan of Jerry's fiction from early on, and additionally a huge fan of his Chaos Manor user technology columns in Byte Magazine. We met in person for the first time at a West Coast Computer Faire (1982, I think, at the San Francisco Civic Center). I'd previously corresponded with him via BIX (the Byte Information Exchange service) on a variety of technical and fictional topics. He was gracious enough to take the time to have lunch with me at that…