Daily notes

updated Nextcloud from 30.x to 32.x today
- NOTE: after every upgrade, go to /settings/admin/overview and perform any of the occ commands in the nextcloud container that it says are relevant. Typically these are DB updates and are relatively easy to run. It’s fine to run them in the container because they typically affect the DB, not the container state itself, the nextcloud container is just the runtime

2026-04-26 Notes

2026-04-26T07:09:22Z

yesterday: 2026-04-25 Notes

Logos Webapp Dark Theme

2026-04-25 Notes

2026-04-25T09:36:16Z

yesterday: 2026-04-22 Notes

2026-04-22 Notes

2026-04-22T06:43:40Z

yesterday: 2026-04-18 Notes

Work Compensation Note

2026-04-18 Notes

2026-04-18T20:00:38Z

yesterday: 2026-04-05 Notes

PC Crash #

Desktop crashed days ago, apparently my primary drive has been going bad for a while and eventually it just died.

live-booted to ubuntu server
found restic backup script to NAS
edited to be smaller, but did the backup to the NAS
rsync’d docker volumes to BX500 SSD which is a zfs pool
captured what I did on ghost at /home/nic/aurora-recovery-report.md and /home/nic/aurora-crash-disk-health-report.md

PLAN #

install ubunto on 500 GB Samsung
create zfs dataset for projects /tank/volumes/projects
mount zfs dataset /tank/volumes/projects to /home/nic/projects
zfs for home? probably not, keep home on ext4
mount old home and sync directly

Outcome #

This is going terribly… blog post coming on what I should’ve done. What’s actually happening is that I basically just lost everything on that desktop except my homelab repo thank God…

2026-04-05 Notes

2026-04-05T05:38:05Z

yesterday: 2026-04-03 Notes

Easter 2026
Data Loading is a Huge Deal
I have several competing streams of thought about Easter this year, I want to focus some reflection and energy in the appropriate direction, of what Easter is as a holiday in the Christian calendar, the day my Lord and King defeated Death in his physical body and resurrected himself from the grave - Easter 2026. It is in how holy and significant that this day is that my second stream of thought begins to compete… we profane it so much in America, maybe throughout the world, but I’m really thinking about my family-experience with Easter and other holidays… So I’ve got thoughts for the world there too

Stream 2 #

I want my wife and daughters to participate with me in celebrating Lent, Holy Week, and Easter with more reverance, but the problem is our own parents treating Easter and other High Church holidays that have been Americanized, as though they own those days for “family time”. The point isn’t to spend time with family, it is to observe a holy day and after this year I am about ready to reserve all holidays for ourselves. If grandparents want to come see their grandkids, they’re welcome anytime - heck we live 15 minutes away in on case and still the competition happens over a few select holidays. Well, perhaps no more. I think I’m going to block Easter and Christmas out for my family and we will participate in traditions that are more meaningful than sharing social media links while we all sit on our phones in the living room.

Dev #

Resurrected my OpenRouter API key for opencode after seeing a note aout Qwen3.6 Plus being free so I figured I’d give it a go. I think with some pushing I can use Nexus to get a lot done with free models as they change and get better. Maybe even self-hosted models in the coming years!

2026-04-03 Notes

2026-04-03T05:40:17Z

yesterday: 2026-04-01 Notes

Good Friday #

It’s Good Friday for the Christians in the world, a day named not for what happened but for a person. Jesus went to the cross some-2000 years ago out of his love for his people. If you are chosen by the Lord, today is a good day because his love was demonstrated for you in spilling his blood as the atonement for your and my sins. That blood covers us just like the sacrifice of Leviticus 16’s blood was sprinkled on the holy things. Jesus’ blood is sprinkled on us, as the temple, protecting the sacred space so that the Holy Spirit can indwell. It’s Ancient Near Eastern theology 101: wherever a god dwells must be cleansed, but the manner of the cleansing in Christianity is unique - God became man and died to provide the cleansing, his requirement of you and me is to answer his call, not work to cleanse the space. Praise the Lord the work is out of my hands.

One of my favorite comics #

Other Stuff #

had MiniMax help me craft a project page for Nexus finally. I’ll probably use AI to keep it up to date. It’s really biting at a boundary I was setting for having AI “produce” any writing on my website, but it feels appropriate as long as I’m reviewing those updates for consistency and ensuring it isn’t slop. The point isn’t a blog post there, it’s keying into an idea I have for my blog of having project-specific pages that just introduce why I built something and what it is - might end up being very close to just the READMEs of those projects.

2026-04-01 Notes

2026-04-01T05:30:40Z

yesterday: 2026-03-31 Notes

Reflection #

It’s the middle of holy week and my note from yesterday feels like it was months ago… The days are getting long again, and filled with some panic about work. I think I’ll find it silly how stressed I am eventually, I was just thinking “when I get to Heaven, Jesus sure will think how much I got worked up about work is silly”, but if he’ll think it then he thinks it now, if the perspective would be true in however many years I have left or before his second-coming, then the perspective is true today.

I’m not sure how to have the right perspective when the tightness in my chest is out of my control. I can breath deep and recognize a truth - my job is fleeting and the irony that my job is taking so much of my mental energy through today “Silent Wednesday” (a day also known as “Spy Wednesday” for reflecting on Judas’s betrayal) is in the betrayal of my thoughts about my savior, or lack-there-of. Judas sold the Lord for some silver, I’m sure as a man he had his reasons like any junkie rationalizing their behavior… But am I different? I’m so consumed with panic and worry about things happening at work that my mind is not on who my Savior is, just like Judas I’m fretting about the wrong things and whether it’s like Judas or not, I can’t seem to “just let it go”.

What if Judas had just let go of his greed? Would he have been saved? In the sovereignty of God it never was the case that Jesus wouldn’t be betrayed, that was apart of a plan known before time, but from the perspective of a man bound by time I can’t help but ask it - could Judas have relinquished his sin to Jesus and is my anxiety over my job a modern-day betrayal whose irony is simply made more clear by struggling with it on Silent Wednesday.

Post Day #

Ending the day OK… I’m taking a machete through Forge, my project at work, and that feels great. Something happened today where a lot more things fell into place about my role and what I’m supposed to be doing and how I will end up doing it. After sitting in the context for a few months, I’m seeing a bigger picture unfold about what Forge will be, but today I realized it was going in the wrong direction and so even with other people on this project I ripped out about 10k lines of code and will force push to master in the morning. Copilot was very useful in fully removing concepts and even service deployments (LakeFS this time around) to help me minimize the code and logic surface that Forge takes up. It’s calming me down a bit and I expect will make it easy to move fast and solve problems in silly ways while we figure out the better ways to solve them. So some peace feels like it’s on the horizon.

2026-03-31 Notes

2026-03-31T05:31:13Z

yesterday: 2026-03-27 Notes

tried to make a little progress on [[spring-cleaning-2026-homelab-edition]]
Also having M.2 MiniMax do something about a consistent neovim issue… if it fails this morning I’ll resort to real Opus later for the fix
It’s holy week and I barely know about it cause work is just taking up so much time… I really hate this but I don’t think I can just blame work. I am to blame, I have so many short comings and I’m not actively doing a lot about them, I’m just trying to mitigate them with AI. I’m trying to learn the problem space and solve problems how I used to: only faster, but there’s a lot of other people, competing priorities, limited hardware to test out ideas, and it’s a very heavy cognitive burden… Unfortunately I’m giving in and letting it take over, perhaps today the Lord will soften my mind towards work and give me an more appropriate level of care and help me to meditate on things that are true, pure, noble, and worthy of my full attention.

Note

“See how the patient Jesus stands, Insulted in his lowest case! Sinners have bound the Almighty’s hands, And spit in their Creator’s face.

With thorns his temples gor’d and gash’d Send streams of blood from every part; His back’s with knotted scourges lash’d. But sharper scourges tear his heart.”

Spurgeon, C. H. (1896). Morning and evening: Daily readings. Passmore & Alabaster.

2026-03-27 Notes

2026-03-27T19:35:02Z

yesterday: 2026-03-22 Notes

Might’ve had a breakthrough with a data modeling issue at work today… If you want it make it so strikes again. I can’t write about it here really, but I blew my own mind by remembering that I have quite a lot of say in what my work becomes as long as I’m solving problems, and some of the problem just really slid into place today. I love when that happens, it preceeds a butt-ton of work usually that I enjoy doing, but I hate when it happens late on a Friday

2026-03-22 Notes

2026-03-22T07:09:33Z

yesterday: 2026-03-07 Notes

Back to normal life #

We’re back from vacation, Florida was nice but a few thorns on the rose of vacation include:

several days of rain (but we got a blizzard up north, so beggars can’t be choosers)
I was so pre-occupied with work the entire time that I barely got a few minutes of relaxation the entire time

In dev news, it’s time to get a few things done today for the homelab, I’m going to audit my docker compose setup and work towards upgrading things that are horribly out of date and cleaning up my scattered stacks with the goal of hopefully eventaully migrating some things to kubernetes and using cloudflare tunnels in place of keeping 80/443 open on my firewall for traefik ingress.

[[spring-cleaning-2026-homelab-edition]]

2026-03-07 Notes

2026-03-04T05:06:36Z

yesterday: 2026-03-03 Notes

Happy Saturday, we’re at the GWL and I figured I’d take a few minutes this morning to reflect on the last few weeks

Work #

Cat Autonomy is going well for me, my team seems relatively pleased with the work and ideas I’ve brought to the table, and I’ve played a role in some pretty instrumntal changes. I have been piecing together more and more of a story, I’m not sure about Caterpillar specifically but maybe, about technical leadership and how a lack of it at the top level (C-suite, Execs, etc.) leads to long-lasting frustration and repetitive pain points at lower levels (ie. where I am). The reasons that I needed to make, or propose, all the changes I have is that a lack of leadreship has culminated over years into a sprawling mess of responsibilities, requests, deliverables, and a lack of a cohesive “thing” which was the original vision for the project I’m on now (I know this cause I was here when it started).

Agents #

Agents are making it possible for me to to produce the amount of work I have been for the last 2 months. It feels like the future in many ways, a lot is unknown still but I need a write a follow-up on Learning How To Agent. I’m not sure where I sit in agentic coding skills in the scope of the world, but at Caterpillar I am within episolon of 100% confident that I’m one of the most active and proficient agentic-tool-users (Specifically GitHub Copilot, but I am including peripheral things here - knowledge of context management, custom agents, harness engineering, etc). Nexus has been serving me really well and that is about to warrant its own post too - I have had a few Caterpillar peeps reach out about using Nexus for themselves and although it’s not there yet, it is coming together nicely.

Over the last 6 weeks I’ve come up with a platform idea, and stitched together/upgraded several existing solutions from the past 5 years, into a platform I’m calling “Forge”. For the past 2 years there’s been an internal effort to rebuild what I just recently consolidated, but that project has no users and is unstable AF… Just this week our leadership decided to ax taht project and put those developers on my thing. I’ve been struggling with this a little because I don’t like to think that I have so much weight at Cat now as to meaningfully affect the work othe rpeople are doing. I like to build tools to affect how people work, but in this case I effecitvely killed a 2 year old project and there’s more than 0 emotions to deal wtih. Overall the team doesn’t seem too bent out of shape about it, but nonetheless the influence I see that I have, and it’s continuing to increase, is somewhat daunting

Misc #

At the Great Wold Lodge and having a blast, minus kids not sleeping great (which unfortunately makes having fun sometimes a near-breakdown-experience). We’re hanging out with tbe BFFs and my best mate has recently become a Lead in his engineering firm. Proud of him for sure. I also am feeling acutely aware of a fact - that things change over time, and influence has lasting impacts.

Kids are up, time to sign off.