The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey May 21, 2017

21 May 2017

A good week. I made progress on a couple of projects at work, patched a bunch of systems, and this weekend, patched another bunch of systems. Best of all, they're all still running and doing their assigned tasks. The lawns are mowed, the coffee is roasted, Marcia's new office fan/light is installed, and my energy: it is gone. But the wheel keeps turning. Three day weekend coming up next, that's a good thing. Oh, yeah, about that new office fan/light? I had tucked the receipt into the box when I bought it ... five years ago. Sigh. New means newly…

Brian Bilbrey May 14, 2017

14 May 2017

First: She's a good dog, Brent - 42/10. Lexi, above, at one of her favorite activities: watching DogTV (tm) from an ottoman at my upstairs office window. * * * Second: Happy Mother's Day, y'all. You know who you are! My personal celebration in honor of mothers everywhere is listening to a lot of Bangles music tonight. Yay! * * * Our second streak of Seattle weather in May finally broke today, after several grey days and a couple of inches of rain. We reached the mid-70's. That meant I could get out and take care of the mowing, and…

Brian Bilbrey May 8, 2017

8 May 2017

A good week, past. Got lots done at work, including some annual testing that went as well as can be expected from a technical perspective, and finished an hour ahead of schedule, which is wonderful, for weekend work. The balance of the weekend went to chores: from roasting coffee to cutting the hay in the front and back 40's. Seriously, about halfway through the back yard I stopped and sent a text to Marcia asking her where she was with the baler, because stuff was piling up... Oh, I also managed a couple of hours back on the coast road…

Brian Bilbrey April 30, 2017

30 April 2017

I spent two awesome days attending BSidesCharm this weekend (not an HTTPS link, odd for a security conference, eh?). I was there from morning keynote through final talk both days, and I learned something from every speaker. So, big win. If you're in (or interested in) InfoSec, and you're local to the Baltimore/DC area, you really should be going to this conference. The tickets sell out fast, so keep your eye on things for next year. That said, I got absolutely nothing else done this weekend. As it should be. Catching up should be fun... NOT! * * * Our…

Brian Bilbrey April 28, 2017

28 Apr 2017

Ubuntu upgrade news: I upgraded a Kubuntu 16.10 workstation to 17.04 this week. I ran into just one big issue. I'd previously been running the open source nouveau driver for the nVidia card in that system. After the upgrade, I could not keep the desktop running for more than about 5 minutes before the screen would freeze. After a bit of search-engine foo, I found that the recommended solution was to use the nVidia binary driver instead. As sad as that makes RMS, I went back down that rabbit hole. A brief visit via remote connection (unaffected by the frozen…