When Temperature Plateaus

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Morning routine. Published previous day's blog post. Deployment system marathon. Gwen chat about AI writing tools. Sprint review turned smoker discussion. Exercise. Swan Dive dinner with Steve. Alexander the Great podcast.

Deployment marathons, smoking techniques, and observations on automated work

Events and activities that occurred on Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Yesterday's breakfast
The morning began with familiar rhythms—routine, planning, then completing the previous day's journal workflow. The blog post "Context and Countdown" went live by 6:39, the DayOne entry following shortly after. Dan Carlin's podcast on Alexander the Great accompanied the shower, his gift for making ancient history feel urgently relevant turning routine hygiene into intellectual stimulation.

The deployment system consumed most of the day's technical energy. Eight separate Claude sessions in the AI Infrastructure project pushed through Phases 11.1 to 11.10: building database schemas, importing eighty deployment mappings into PostgreSQL, creating CRUD tools for managing the manifest, and fixing a critical misalignment between sync and check scripts. The check script had been comparing against raw masters while sync deployed optimized SessionLoad versions—the kind of subtle bug that only reveals itself under specific conditions. Developer Mode gained a database-driven trigger registry, and the Google Workspace project underwent restructuring for deployment compliance.

The afternoon's Mandigo IS Sprint Review turned into something unexpected. Only Jerry attended, and the conversation drifted from infrastructure to the art of smoking meat. The cheapest cuts remain tough regardless of technique: brisket, chuck, round, London broil. A good rub matters more than most realize, and Jerry mentioned Pioneer Woman's recipes as reliable starting points. Temperature control proves critical—250 degrees works better than 210, though meat can enter a "stall" phase lasting up to ninety minutes where internal temperature plateaus despite steady heat. A probe thermometer becomes essential for navigating these quirks. The mention of gluten steaks suggested Jerry's been exploring plant-based alternatives with similar techniques.

Gwen and I connected briefly about AI writing tools, sharing observations on how these systems are reshaping creative workflows. The conversation touched on practical applications rather than theoretical concerns.

Physical work punctuated the screen time: three sets of fifteen goblet squats and twelve step-ups, maintaining the pre-New Zealand fitness trajectory.

Evening brought the bus ride downtown to Swan Dive, where Steve arrived a few minutes after me with his usual mix of technical frustrations and philosophical observations. His Raspberry Pi 5 had been giving him grief—wrestling with very large Debian OS downloads that tested both patience and bandwidth. The more substantive discussion emerged around AI and employment. Steve made the case that AI really is costing people jobs, or at least job opportunities. Not uniformly, and not for everyone, but for lower-value algorithmic work—what might have once been called clerical positions. It struck me as much an observation on people as on technology: those whose work consisted primarily of following procedural rules now find those rules executable by systems that never tire or request time off.

The evening ritual offered space to process the day's threads—deployment systems and smoking techniques, AI tools and employment displacement. Probably should have made it to the hot tub, but didn't. An attempt at the Formal Logic Great Courses series didn't quite land; sometimes the mind wants narrative rather than proofs.

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