With an obvious timing during today's meditation, it occurred to me that there is value packed in the action of letting go. I am not referencing the practice of mindfulness, but, applying it to our lives beyond that mindspace.

How often do we get rankled by the things that have little bearing on our own lives? When I followed sports—Go Sports!—I'd get brought to a boil by its emotional stove. Sure, I wasn't playing, but, the emotions I experienced paralleled to participation, even from my spot in the bleachers from my TV. Clearly, it's fun being at the game itself as the home crowd atmosphere sweeps us up into its emotion-as-one wave; there's nothing quite like a breakaway run in that charged atmosphere!

But, from my couch? Why do I engage the fight-or-flight response and get so dinged up over something that has no bearing to my surroundings?

Further thought: this has potential of widescale adoption beyond the scope of foosball.

There's other areas of my life as well, things that while are under my purview, are things that I place more significance in them than they deserve. There's value in taking a step back and then letting that pesky thing be pushed along by the wind to the forgotten memories of the ocean.

For far too often, my fist shook vigorously, latched onto something that I should have just slowly breathed out away from my Technicolor world as it floats and fades into a monochrome landscape.

I'm learning a new approach to my workouts, leaving behind the all-or-nothing dogma of years past, a high-stress application that shortens lives. Rather, I simply listen to my body. When it is ready, I go. When it is complete, I stop. Clearly, for many, this is not the methodology where I suspect short-sighted turbulence can achieve short-term goals. But as for me...

...I swim along the chrono currents.

After the interlude of a night, I return to Windows and my innovation build. I did want to move on to Linux Mint, but, if the display is wonky AND my inputs are haywire, then I encounter direction dispersion.

And that sucks: I spend more time on fixes instead of focus.

On that topic, I feel good that I left Habitica, the sorta-task-sorta-RPG platform, but fails to meet expectations in both areas. Its developers are right at the brink of pulling off a wonderful service, but, it's like they stopped developing it after its initial release and haven't had any major upgrades in years—I dunno, maybe a key contributor moved on once it went live.

As far as MMORPGs go, Habitica's use of four classes fails in comparison to WoW Vanilla's 8 classes (later 12) or before that, EverQuest's 16; Habitica isn't defining a new genre of gaming. For that matter, the utility of the classes just doesn't offer much.

Habitica is like the seed of a great idea, but, it's not out of beta. While technically proficient, it's a shame the Habitica's developers didn't spend their childhood with text-based RPG gaming, like 1985's Bard's Tale so as to host actual adventures instead of status bar boss beatdowns...

I could go on, but lemme shove my geek inclinations aside...

On its core mission, Habitica just doesn't come off that strong as a task management software, especially as it encourages quick-fire resolutions of tasks over thoughtful considerations. And while I can make it expand past the current day, soon, the clutter from everything hides the things that I actually need to get done.

So, I'm moving on to Todoist. While not possessing Habitica's enchanting gamification, Todoist is better organized and its template system is well-conceived and applied...at least that's my initial thoughts on my first day!

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!