The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey May 1, 2016

1 May 2016

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…

Brian Bilbrey April 24, 2016

24 April 2016

Another day, another birthday. And this one accompanied by a wonderful cake made by Marcia, with a decoration assist by Linda Rose: * * * I, of course, witnessed little of this activity, because I spent the weekend absorbing InfoSec goodness at BsidesCharm 2016. An excellent two day conference with interesting keynotes and talks. Because of the setup of Bsides, the sponsors don't get the attendee lists, there are no scannable badges, and sponsors don't automatically get speaker slots. Truth be told, in our area, the sponsors weren't there to sell (mostly), they were there to recruit. As one of…

Brian Bilbrey April 21, 2016

21 April 2016

RIP, Prince. Helluva musician and entertainer. * * * I'm taking a couple of days off "work", so that I can get some work done around the house. This kind is much more tiring. Today: This year's mix - 28 tomato plants: Rutgers, Better Boy, Sweet 100's + two other varieties. 16 pepper plants: sweet bell, cayenne, habanero, jalapeño. Cucumbers. Zucchini. Butternut squash. Cantelope. Broccoli. Hmmm. I may be missing jalapeño, I'll have to check. I *do* have four varieties of pepper... So, that was a pretty full day, and my back kind of hates me right now. But that…

Brian Bilbrey April 17, 2016

17 April 2016

This was a good week. Not a great week - that would have required all seven days to have been above 32° F for the full 24 hours each. That only happened four times. That said, work was good and productive, including the weekend work that ate half of yesterday, as well as patching last night and this morning. The rest of the weekend was given to yard work of assorted types. I mostly did lawn care, but we did get a couple of new rose bushes for the front porch pots, a couple of herbs for the herb box…

Brian Bilbrey April 10, 2016

10 April 2016

A good week, overall. I was on-call for the first half, which is tiring, even when nothing happens. Yep, I sleep a lot more lightly when responsibility requires it. But one week out of every few weeks ain't bad - and our monitoring and remediation are in a state of continuous improvement, so we get far fewer alerts and calls than in years past. All to the good. I also executed terminal retirement on a stack of former virtualization hosts. Spin down, uncable from last network connections and from the SAN, spin up again with a DBAN disk in the…