Preventative Maintenance Meditation
Having backslid on MCAS, this is what I do.
After several weeks of what I would call normal adult sleep, things went sideways … badly.
I’m trying to roll and re-enter my cyberkayak.
And when I can’t really do anything else, because I’m sleepless and disorganized, I do preventative maintenance …
Attention Conservation Notice:
Mumbling about the value of cleaning house when it’s not clear what else to do. This is the way of the ISP plant engineer. There is seldom a time when this does not have value; if one must procrastinate, this is how the experts do that.
Backslide:
This sucks. After a couple weeks of 6+ hours right in the zone, I’m back to sleeping like a six month old instead of someone pushing six decades. Bah.
But since I’ve got my fancy AI health tracker thing, I just said “What changed?” and it came back with “When did you run out of taurine?” Now taurine is NOT part of the official “stack” for dealing with MCAS, but it’s the only major change that correlates. I got resupplied a couple days ago, but I can’t yet tell if it’s going to make a difference.
I ran out of taurine … the day Charlie Kirk got shot. I disagreed with the man on most everything, but there are a lot of people who held him in high regard, and his assassination has set the whole country spinning. We’re getting a foretaste of what succession will be like when Trump dies.
And it’s affected me badly. Yes, both the taurine drought, and the condition of the country.
All The Things:
Having gotten into MCP servers in a big way at the start of July, I’m finding out that for many package publishers that initial burst of enthusiasm has faded. There are a lot of things that have six month old initial commits and serious Issues that have received no attention in the last ninety days. As for my personal Github …
Parabeagle is my Chroma fork, it works well, it was a significant investment, and it’ll be maintained.
I use Memento on an ongoing basis and the author appears to have abandoned it, so I have a fork and I’m keeping up the Dependabot stuff.
Brainz is my from scratch Python based attempt to replace TypeScript based Memento with something I can maintain.
There are a LOT of MCP servers in the Github world that are just sitting there, not getting updates. I removed a number of them from my Claude Desktop config, then scrubbed their repos from my gits folder. After that I went through the stuff I had cloned, but which did not work, or which I stopped using, and I expunged those, too.
There’s been a sea change in my life thanks to Claude Code. Prior to this fall, I was a consumer of properly maintained Github repos, and I had a minimal yet messy approach to hosting my own stuff. Given that I’ve got an AI expert handy, I am making the effort to do things skilled professional style. I would never have had the patience to climb that learning curve on my own, but now that I’ve got that assist, Memento is being maintained correctly, Parabeagle is getting there, and Brainz will be a proper package of my own creation.
A Bigger Thing:
I’ve had endless battles with the Sqlite3 and time MCP servers for my AI health tracker. Logging stuff at the right time has been a battle, even with the time handler MCP running. I was thinking I would fork the Sqlite3 server, like I did with Chroma. All that’s needed are a few commands so the logging of food, medication, and supplements is done in a deterministic fashion, instead of the endless, unwanted creativity of the Anthropic LLM, when unreasonably commanded to do the same thing it did yesterday.
But that server is TypeScript. Having done Pascal (1985-1997), Perl (1997-2012), Python(2012-current), and a small detour into PHP this year, I am superstitiously fearful of all non-P languages.
Enter MindsDB, which seems to be The Anything String for database operations with an LLM. It’s both libre, gratis, and it’s written in Python(!) It supports pretty much everything - it’ll connect to the Sqlite3 I’m using, it’ll talk to the Parabeagle Chroma format vector store. Perhaps best of all, it’ll interface with Elasticsearch, which I’ve not touched in a couple years, but have been wanting to get back to using.
MindsDB is the sort of package one can put on a resume and it speaks volumes about where you are and what you do. I am still not self-describing as a software developer and I probably never will, but I’ve always been a strong integrator of tools built by others, and I very much want to add this one to my collection. I’ve let ArangoDB and RabbitMQ slide, along with Elasticsearch, but those two won’t be coming back. I see Neo4j everywhere with MCP, while ArangoDB is an ocean away, in the kingdom of LangChain.
Physically Speaking:
I find myself deeply frustrated at a hardware level; this 16GB M1 Mac has been more than enough for eighteen months, but Docker based MCP servers got shown the door the last time I was in the mood to do deep cleaning. I was wondering why things were so slow and flaky, then finally figured out my machine was not just swapping, but thrashing due to memory demands.
The minimum solution for this is $800 for a 24GB Mac Mini and $1k will get you 32GB. I am utterly unimpressed with the 24GB MacBook Pro - I’ll use this model as a desktop, but I don’t see how anyone uses this sharp edged beast as a laptop. There’s a 24GB MacAir, and I could trade Pinky to get one, but then I’d have an Air in a desktop role, and heavy, sharp edged Brain as the laptop that goes in my bag when I work away from home. That ain’t gonna happen.
If money were no object, I’d slap down $3,400 and bring home a 96GB refurbished Mac Studio M3 Ultra. This is the sweet spot for AI development due to its crazy fast memory bandwidth. And this is no longer an idle fantasy - my commercial role that I just started isn’t paying yet, it’s taking a while to fill my queue, but that IS happening. On top of that I am now participating in a daily stand up project management meeting for a startup, and for what we’re doing, this machine is an actual need, not just a want.
Conclusion:
I have a backlog of security work and not enough to pay rent for October, so I am again scrambling, but for the first time since 2007 … I have a backlog(!)
I am annoyed about the sleep disorder, but given how this summer went I am confident it can be resolved. There are enough things wrong with my life that if I were inclined to beat myself up over them, I’d never get out of bed. But I do think there is a subconscious “not this shit again” reaction that needs some work.
There’s a story about a Zen Buddhist monk who was not very educated when he started. This story often comes to mind when I am “sweeping up” around here.
Huìnéng was an illiterate woodcutter who entered a monastery. Because he had no formal education and couldn’t join scholarly study, he was assigned menial labor — pounding rice, chopping wood, or sweeping the temple grounds.
Rather than seeing this as drudgery, Huìnéng used each act of sweeping as meditation. With every motion of the broom, he let go of thoughts, clung to nothing, and became absorbed in the present moment. Over time, this deep mindfulness ripened into awakening. His story became a model of how enlightenment does not require status, education, or seclusion — just wholehearted practice in daily life.
Most people who use computers tend to get things to the point they’re able to work, and call it good. Staying on top of OS updates, grooming file systems, evaluating new software, and all the other things that can be filed under preventative maintenance are often done only under great duress, and it often involves someone else doing them. It’s entirely normal for this to get swept under the rug of a new machine purchase every two or three years.
I doubt many of you are spending a day or two a week cleaning up, backing up, upgrading, and evaluating new things. I think you should try to develop some sort of practice in this area - replace an hour of doomscrolling each week with an hour of making your Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders presentable. Find some way to get a little satisfaction in being proactive; the data you save may be your own.
I don't think I've seen any koans derived strictly from digital practices but I think you're close