The Infrastructure Day

-

Morning routine. Long workflow refactoring session. Mac file access troubleshooting. NFS setup between Synology and Mac. Mac upgrade to Tahoe. NFS breakthrough. Emma's book review. Nap. Exercised. Walk to Suds. Winco groceries. Project Hail Mary audiobook. Hot tub. Sherlock Holmes, Outer Limits, Hogan's Heroes.

Technical Breakthroughs

Events and activities that occurred on Saturday, January 10, 2026

Random shot from the past
Woke early with systems on the mind. Morning ritual accompanied by soup—an unconventional breakfast that somehow fit the day's rhythm. What began as workflow refinement quickly cascaded into deeper technical territory: file access problems on the Mac, then the pivot to solving the fundamental NFS mounting challenge between Synology and macOS.

The breakthrough required patience and methodical troubleshooting. After hours wrestling with configurations, the solution emerged: enabling NFS to use non-privileged ports when connecting to the server. A simple setting, but finding it felt like unlocking a door that had been stuck for months. While the Mac upgraded to Tahoe and ldmrp03 gained its network cable, the pieces finally aligned. NFS now works reliably—the foundation for everything else.

Exercise kept me honest: five stretches, three forty-five-second planks, fifteen bird-dogs, fifteen ten-pound curls. The walk to Suds delivered the required thirty minutes, plus a couple of beers and popcorn. Stopped at Winco on the return for groceries, Project Hail Mary continuing through headphones as the soundtrack to movement.

Between technical victories, Emma's book received serious attention—depth reading that demanded focus. The hot tub provided processing time, while The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (original black-and-white, 4:3 aspect ratio, wonderfully dated), The Outer Limits, and Hogan's Heroes closed the evening.

A day of building the scaffolding that makes everything else possible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Humanity Worth Saving?

-
Image
It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...
Read more

Understanding

-
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...
Read more

Identity

-
I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.
Read more