I hate how at 42, my vision has fallen into the mud like a doomed, obstacle course challenger. My preference to not wear my glasses introduces all sorts of syntax errors, whether in writing or code. Indeed, a double quotation mark can be mistaken for an asterisk!

I hate that I’ve now entered that section of the populace that wonders why they make the fonts so small on phones.

But, hey, when I equip my rims, it’s a +5 to intelligence!

Last night, I moved my Windows 10 laptop over to Linux Mint 19 with an upgrade to 20. As my blinking cursor just bolts over to this post’s intro paragraph despite my specifically installing a tool to stop that, I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake. I’ve also now have a broken Jekyll install that worked great on 19, but, grins back at me like a chimpanzee in 20. I wouldn’t have even migrated to the less stable 20, if it didn’t off the allure of fractional scaling for the display since, it’s either TINY TINY fonts or just a fuzzy font experience after popping open a can of spinach, something I can achieve on my own without glasses.

So, I cannot do a lot of meaningful tinkering on this site if my DEV is down. And OS X not withstanding, my experience with Linux GUI’s for the last 15 years has been an abysmal one.

But, I really don’t mind so much about its font rendering if the platform is rock solid; stability is something I’ve always appreciated about Linux. But, OF COURSE it’s stable if you gotta work hard just to get all the dependencies ironed out or your grabbing from really old software repositories.

And there flies off my cursor again...

Perhaps, my return to Linux Mint isn’t going to work out. I hate to move back to Windows 10, because I’ll have to move the ISO from my air gapped server to my laptop to put on a USB and then there’s ALL the system updates which I wouldn’t think twice about it in a modern broadband world, but, loosely tethered to that world out here in the country, well, I guess I’ll just kick it old school with overnight downloads.

Does it speak larger about my new initiative to move away from Big Tech? I don’t know. I mean, I wanted to move away from Microsoft, but this might be a microcosm of the overall theme. What’s my user experience / involvement? Another example, yesterday through the use of LibreOffice Calc, I CONCAT’d my book table into a bunch of li tags complete with span tags for styling. While it achieved what I wanted, the final product with 100+ books is...not helpful even for the guy who read them. Do I return to Good Reads / LibraryThing? And if I make that return, does it kill my push to leave Google? To what end? Do I bring back Last.fm as well? What does this focus of oscillation take away from?

Our parents’ calculators had it so good!