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My Transformation into a Meticulous Person
Oct. 17th, 2025 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_knight( Depth year, 20x24 project, 8 of Pentacles )
I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.
( Taming the Fonts, once and for all )
The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.
I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.
But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.
Even in your fifties.
(Ugh, that sounds old.)
( Lessons Learnt )
It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).
Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.
And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.
Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.
I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.
( Taming the Fonts, once and for all )
The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.
I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.
But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.
Even in your fifties.
(Ugh, that sounds old.)
( Lessons Learnt )
It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).
Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.
And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.
Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.
Reposting anonymously — no speculation or questions about the author of this.
Oct. 14th, 2025 08:59 pmpauammaA Note on Windows 10
I want to talk about something boring, that most of you don't want to think about, but it's important so please stay with me.
Today, Windows 10 died but, like most deaths in IT, it will persist in an undead state, shuffling around for likely the rest of our lives. This is a VERY big problem.
When Microsoft stops supporting an operating system, the operating system continues to work - it just can't get patches. For decades, I've been in conversations like But I only use my computer to read my email, I don't need to upgrade, do I?
From a security perspective, my answer was You really should upgrade, but I get it, money is always tight. You might be okay for a while.
This is no longer true - for a few reasons. We live in a confluence of changes:
- AI is making finding new vulnerabilities much more quickly than before. In the past, a critical vulnerability in Windows 7 or XP could take several months to find, and even then, it was hard to exploit. Today, we have AI finding all sorts of issues in just a few hours and — worse — chaining them together to make it very easy to take over a machine.
- The browser wars are back, but not like they were. How often have you see the little button in your browser saying that you should really update it. How often do you click that button? I work in information security and even I don't always click it when I should. If you are running a vulnerable browser on a vulnerable operating system, you are one click away from an attacker having access to everything.
- No one
just checks email
. They go to social media, they go to Amazon and eBay, they sometimes check their bank and retirement accounts. This means that your attacker can see your social media, buy things on your credit cards, and take money directly out of your accounts. - We live in a interconnected society at a time when some groups in that society are being targeted by those in power *and* where other groups are emboldened by those in power to collect data to further target people. Whether it's in the form of doxxing, informing the police, reporting people and businesses to ICE, or direct surveillance by authorities, access to your computer does not just place you at risk — it places everyone you communicate with on that device at risk — family members, friends, social groups, political groups, whatever. A vulnerable computer risks everyone.
We can no longer rest on the idea that we are not interesting enough to be surveilled or attacked. We all have risks to ourselves and to others.
This is a long way to say that, if your computer does not support upgrading to Windows 11, you *really* have to stop using it. (Or install Linux on it, but that's a whole other discussion.) If you can use your phone or tablet for a month, there will some really good deals on laptops in mid-to-late November. If you can't, and money is tight, Dell and CDW have outlet stores that will be somewhat reasonable.
What you can't do, however, is to keep using that Windows 10 machine. It may be undead, but it's time to kill it all the way and move on to something better.
Addendum from pauamma:
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