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a wake of mental dissonance
Thursday, December 10 2015
It seems the place I've been salvaging firewood from along the Stick Trail is another whole region that will take awhile to deplete. Today I brought home a 120.75 pound load of very dry Chestnut Oak, ready for burning. The indoor woodrack is accumulating wood, indicating I'm gathering wood faster than I'm burning it. But the accumulation is slow, suggesting I'm burning more than half of a backpack load every day. That's a lot of wood considering how mild the weather has been. It was so mild today it felt distinctly springlike, though that feeling scurries away in a wake of mental dissonance when darkness begins to draw in at around 4:00pm.
In recent days I've been trying to find a good version of Adobe Photoshop to install on my Hackintosh. I don't need it to be a recent version; the version I use these days is version 8.0 for Windows, copyright 2003; it does everything I need with a minimum of distraction and only occasional crashes. Its only downside is that it has trouble reading PSD files from more recent copies of Adobe Photoshop. Sadly, though, copies of Photoshop that old running on the Macintosh OS require legacy Java libraries and perhaps other things with which one doesn't want to junk up a shiny new OS. I was eventually able to get the latest version of Photoshop working on the Hackintosh, bypassing the now-substantial barricade of network-based copy protection (the method for doing this has all been figured out by others, and I just followed a recipe). Both Adobe and Microsoft are ultimately hoping to move all their desktop applications "to the cloud," where they can charge a subscription to access them. But their products are fundamentally desktop applications that don't benefit in any way from a connection to the internet (though I suppose that could change), so my feeling is that a critical mass of users will replace them with freeware alternatives the moment hacking them to work standalone becomes difficult or impossible. At that point, hopefully the new norm will be for my colleagues to send me graphical mock-ups and text documents using open-format files instead of crappy ever-changing proprietary ones.
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