Dex 🔞

Based on some Mastodon posts from the other day, and some complaints on Cohost yesterday. Written while sleep deprived.

It has been about a month since our work machine was forcibly upgraded to Windows 11.

Some thoughts have mellowed; eventually, even our neurospicy brain gets used to some aspects of the cheese being moved.
Some have become more aggravating than I thought; it isn't just that the right click menu now makes use of mystery meat navigation, it's that the location of the icons to click on changes.
Snipping Tool is aggravatingly slow compared to how it used to be under Windows 10 - the CPU in work laptop might not be great, but it was good enough before.
Muscle memory is still struggling with the taskbar being forcibly locked to the bottom of the screen, when we've had it on the side since before we first bought an ultra-wide monitor.

Are all of these things fixable with shady patchers, registry tweaks, or other third party software? Yes - but work machine makes them a non-option (beyond maybe some tweaks in HKEY_CURRENT_USER). And all of these options require more maintenance if they were to be used on a personal machine. When Windows 11 first launched, there were registry tweaks to put the taskbar back on the side. Now there aren't. If you have one of the patchers installed, all it takes is one surprise update and suddenly your computer doesn't boot.

And this is an enterprise install - meaning that it's at least slightly protected from Microsoft's worst excesses, in terms of preinstalled Candy Crush, or displaying an ad popup for Bing when you launch Chrome, or now, random ads in the Start Menu. At least right now, there's an option to switch most Copilot things off (or at least hide them).

I do genuinely wonder where the breaking point is for most people - the point where learning something new is less frustrating than dealing with Microsoft's death by a thousand cuts. Because we would rather deal with the issues of something we've chosen than something new MS have imposed - at least outside of work; cases where we get to make that choice.

So, a friend asked me a question about my exercise routine, and I thought it might be helpful to put that down in more than 500 characters. (And apparently it's a writing day).

We used to follow at least the exercise component of The Hacker's Diet - getting in at least 15 mins a day in the morning, before work - before we changed jobs to one which required a commute that started a lot earlier. We never picked that back up, even as circumstances changed - but these roles required a decent amount of walking to and from the bus stop, every single day - and that was enough.

And then, March 2020 happened.
Our job became at home all the time (save a brief return to the office stint last year that upper management now seems to have completely forgotten about).
The only thing that kept us active, the only reason we left the house some days, was Pokémon Go.

In late 2022, a friend - an artist, a fantastic community creator and leader, and one of the most positive influences in our lives - announced her intentions to exercycle while streaming cartoons, three times a week, three episodes per session, to keep a consistent schedule and for those exercises to be accountable.

In June 2023, I started joining in with those streams more regularly as a viewer - as the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episodes had finally got ahead of the point where I originally stopped watching the series. ¹

And in August, I bought the absolute cheapest garbage AS SEEN ON TV exercise bike that'd take our weight.
(We didn't initially know if we'd stick with it - something a little more expensive might have been better for a better saddle)

And we've stuck to that same schedule since; every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, we do what we can.
Sometimes that's not much; we've overdone it on the Sunday, or bad leg is playing up after Monday's session. Sometimes that friend is unavailable and we'll stick to the schedule ourselves while they're busy.
We post our results after every session - but I never look back at the numbers; the goal here is more maintenance than muscle. The important part is just... trying - and then reporting on what was done.

It turns out there's a reason why the most common bit of exercise advice is to tell a friend that you're doing so.

1. If I have one regret with this whole thing apart from putting too much time and energy into Pokémon Go, it's not joining in sooner. Missed some very good series, and more importantly the conversations that would have come from them.