From Terabytes to Twenty-One

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Morning routine. Published previous day's blog post. Completed journal. Networking troubleshooting. Apple MCP infrastructure work. PhotoPrism deployment. Sage's 21st birthday celebration at Squirrels and Block 15.

PhotoPrism, Memetics, and a Birthday That Wasn't on the Schedule

Events and activities that occurred on Thursday, February 19, 2026

The morning began with a discovery that the Set Up Tomorrow automation had been quietly failing for weeks — the Gemini API quota had run dry without anyone noticing. It's a particular kind of infrastructure irony: the system designed to keep the day organized had been skipping its own job. A manual run fixed the immediate problem, and the rest of the daily workflow fell into place.

From there the day turned into an extended infrastructure sprint across multiple fronts. On the Mac Mini front, the goal was to bring up a new local MCP server, and that much succeeded — though stability remained elusive. Getting the Mac recognized as a host for its own MCP services meant working through SSH tunneling patterns and deciding between replicating the existing architecture or starting fresh. The session raised more questions than it answered, which is often where the interesting work begins.

The deeper infrastructure work involved replacing the mcp-shell-server with a custom implementation, deploying bash MCP servers for both Linux and macOS environments. Both now share identical command lists, which simplifies the mental model considerably. Meanwhile, the session initiation architecture got a useful simplification — collapsing a three-tier approach down to a direct reference, reinforcing the principle that the most maintainable solution is usually the least complex one.

Perhaps the most satisfying work of the day was the PhotoPrism deployment on ldmsvr01. Three NFS-mounted archives totaling roughly 81 terabytes of photographs — PhotoMaster, Photography, and Scans — now have an indexing system running against them in read-only mode. A MySQL incompatibility required a detour through MariaDB, and a wiki documentation session revealed a CSRF token bug in the internal proxy that needed a curl workaround to publish. The wiki pages made it through in the end. PhotoPrism looks genuinely useful.

The Scott catch-up didn't happen — a calendar sync failure on his end meant the appointment simply disappeared from his view, a reminder that the infrastructure holding schedules together is only as reliable as its weakest link.

The JRM Book Club met in the afternoon, working through the second part of their AI series. The conversation ranged through memetics — Dawkins' original framing of how ideas propagate like genes — and into the social acceptance of smart glasses and the phenomenon of change blindness. Jim Cole had to leave early. The group is already thinking ahead to the next meeting, where the prompt is to bring an AI book or movie report. Colossus: The Forbin Project came up as a natural candidate — and there's the Project Hail Mary film opening in March to look forward to as a group outing.

Sage at Squirrels
The evening took an unexpected and welcome turn. Sydne called to suggest going out to celebrate Sage's 21st birthday. The celebration started at Squirrels, where Dakota and I fell into a conversation about the Oregon Country Fair while Sydne and Sage retrieved her ID. There may be pre-Fair sanitation work in my future. The group then moved to Block 15, where Sydne and Dakota's friends joined the celebration. Sydne drove home at the end of the night.

A day that began with debugging automated systems ended with exactly the kind of spontaneous gathering that no automation could have scheduled.

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