{"id":13922,"date":"2026-02-28T23:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T04:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13922"},"modified":"2026-02-28T23:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T04:56:12","slug":"an-ordinary-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13922","title":{"rendered":"An ordinary day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today was an ordinary day.<\/p>\n<p>I did some real work. Working on a slide deck for an upcoming seminar. Fixing code in my WISPL chatbot implementation, so that it can handle SVG graphics better. Working on a paper. Thinking about a referee report that I am about to write. Reviewing our tax returns that I just completed. Doing some ordinary bookkeeping. Answering e-mails. Posting several nice (I hope) Quora answers. Playing with a Feynman diagram in LaTeX (fhe feynmf package) for one of them. Listening to music through my workstation, and watching Netflix on the same workstation while eating a meal.<\/p>\n<p>Sounds perfectly ordinary, doesn&#8217;t it.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the things I wasn&#8217;t doing, well, not much anyway.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t thinking about Debian and KDE;<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t messing with a new backup for my workstation;<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t trying to rebuild my workflow in a new desktop environment;<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t searching for packages to install to allow software I need to run;<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t testing Wine settings for old Windows programs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, I was doing perfectly ordinary things on a perfectly ordinary Saturday on what feels like a perfectly ordinary computer&#8230; no longer thinking much about the fact that a few weeks ago, I abandoned Windows as my primary desktop operating system after 35 years of muscle memory.<\/p>\n<p>Why I did it of course has a lot to do with Microsoft&#8217;s policies and decisions, but also with the fact that Linux has matured in amazing ways. I tried this once almost a quarter century ago&#8230; I still have a VM of that old desktop. I almost did it&#8230; but there was too much friction, and my workflow was too dependent on Windows.<\/p>\n<p>Not anymore.<\/p>\n<p>Oh well. I am sure there will be moments of frustration, perhaps even regret, in the future. But by and large I actually feel liberated. And, well, things just work. Whether it is my taxes, my favorite games, my papers, my entertainment, or the software code I write: things work.<\/p>\n<p>OK, I lied. I actually did some work on the machine itself as opposed to with the machine. I installed my old copy of Maple 11, the last version that supports the Classic Worksheet interface, which I prefer.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-13923\" src=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/maple11-gamma.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"610\" height=\"531\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/maple11-gamma.png 915w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/maple11-gamma-300x261.png 300w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/maple11-gamma-150x131.png 150w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/maple11-gamma-768x669.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It works.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13922' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today was an ordinary day. I did some real work. Working on a slide deck for an upcoming seminar. Fixing code in my WISPL chatbot implementation, so that it can handle SVG graphics better. Working on a paper. Thinking about a referee report that I am about to write. Reviewing our tax returns that I <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13922' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-personal","category-11-id","category-35-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13924,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13922\/revisions\/13924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}