Ain't No Sunshine When it's Gone

I honestly have no idea how anyone survives through a Winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Winter in the Southern Hemisphere is bad enough. Global warming seems seasonal at this time of year. Forget being closed in and cut off from the nearest settlement and having to resort to eating belts, shoes and wallpaper just to get some nourishment; I would just rather die than struggle through that particular hell. Low and negative temperatures really do not agree with me. Give me sunshine and blistering, brain-melting listless heat any day, thank you. I'll go for a swim and drink a cider or two to cool down, rather than pile on clothes in a vain attempt to get and stay warm.

Do I want to build a snowman? No, I fucking don't! I a snowman!

Having wrapped myself up in enough clothing to look like the Michelin Tires Man or a small blimp with extremities (vests, long-sleeve T-shirts, polar fleece jackets, a scarf and blanket), I am cold. (I'm annoyed and uncomfortable as well.) Now, there's a small chance that things will go my way for long enough that I might actually get some work done today. That assumes, of course, that Windows somehow manages not to behave like it usually does when I want to use it to do something constructive/useful (crashing, hanging, lagging, freezing or other general fuckery, such as restarting to install an unavoidable and unwanted update in the middle of an hours-long process to download and aggregate streamed video content; only MS would create such a frustrating and obviously senseless system). There are reasons why I avoid running it outside of a container/VM. That it's generally a titanic shitgibbon that gets in my way is one of them. (There are thirteen others, about which I wrote previously.)

Just don't do it, OK?

IMO, the "MS" in "MS Windows" no longer stands for "MicroSoft", but for "MaSochists'", because only a masochist would try to use it for anything useful, like drafting an action plan on how to kick a dead whale down a beach (in Notepad, since that's one of the few things that runs without triggering the aforementioned behaviour)! As far as I'm concerned, *NIX-based systems are the ones on which to do development (or any work, really), but I can't afford a Mac and VS doesn't run on GNU/Linux, as far as I can tell. AlternativeTo.net seems to confirm as much. Wine and PlayOnLinux won't help with that, either. It really is most unfortunate that MS bought out the Mono Project (the teams behind MonoDevelop and Xamarin Studio), slapped a price on the products (which didn't work, because most of us kept using the free, but older, versions), then stopped further development and abandoned it. However, that's a typical MS tactic when it comes to competitors and their products/technologies. Perhaps if we'd all contributed more to FOSS, it wouldn't feel the need to sell out to big tech companies hell-bent on ruining it in order to further their own ends. But hey, at least Visual Studio 2019 runs on Windows 7 (in theory, anyway; I can't get it to, so am stuck with the bloated and bulky monstrosity that is Windows 10). Don't get me wrong here. I like C# and VS, just not that I can't run it on GNU/Linux if I want to use a version of it post 2016.

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking . I'm going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google!"

?— Steve Balmer; formerly Microsoft

Thumbnail image: Photo by Jozef Feher on Pexels