Odds and Ends 06

I had it all planned out this morning. I filled the water bottles and even checked the tire pressure. Got out the door and it felt like I could ride okay until it got warmer, as the weather services predicted. I got about a half-mile from the house when a northern front rolled in with heavy cloud cover. My fingers were so cold they hurt. I turned around and made my way back to the apartment.

Today I cut off all that long hair. It looked okay, but my hair is naturally frizzy and the tangling drove me nuts. The constant itching didn’t help. I’m not interested in all that wonderful expert advice on hair care; if it can’t cooperate with what I normally do, it has to go. So I’m bald again and likely to stay that way.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the major technology services. Apple will gouge on their hardware, but it never works better than the commodity stuff, in my experience. Android is like selling your soul to the Devil if you aren’t really careful about how you configure the settings and various apps you install. I’m not fearful of the Google Empire, but it will devour you if you are lazy. I’ve already said enough about the likes of Facebook; those folks sell their own mothers and lie about it.

As much as I’ve groused about Microsoft, I can tell you that there is zero evidence they are selling your private information. Their own internal advertising is bad enough, but they have agreed to make it possible to tone that down. Everyone who knows enough about their technology will tell you that Win10 was rushed out the door and foisted on unsuspecting users quite happy with previous versions. But I cannot deny that their office suite works pretty well, and the latest iterations of Win10 are the most secure Windows has ever been.

I think Microsoft has been burned enough with consumer complaints on crappy updates that they may have learned their lesson. We’ll see in the next few months when their first major update for 2019 comes out. And they seem to have kept their SJWs quiet by comparison to the outrageous behavior by other Big Technology providers. So I’m suggesting you can trust Microsoft better than most of their competitors.

Even the Linux community has begun taking a dark path on some things. You have to be careful to pick and choose what you use. It used to be fun exploring ways to make it work on peculiar hardware, but most of the hardware has become pretty generic. Meanwhile, more and more resources are poured into things I really have little use for. So I’ll keep the XPS laptop running Ubuntu, and I’ll find some use for the Android tablet, but I’m just about ready to accept the idea of using Win10 on the next system I buy.

As more and more of my energy and resources are absorbed in this Radix Fidem thing, fewer and fewer side issues like that stuff are worth the battle.