A reader asks: “Are you sick, retired or dead? Please advise.”

• Reader Craig Kovach asks:

“I used to be a Langalist subscriber way back. You’ve left Windows Secrets, and I sent an e-mail asking about you. They never answered. I googled you instead, and here I am (at Langa.com). Thanks for all the info over the years. All your columns were extremely helpful. Thanks.

“But I wondered if you’re sick, retired or dead? Please advise.”

Thanks for asking, Craig!

My presence among the living is, I hope, self-evident: I am communicating from Boston, not from the Beyond.

I’m lucky to be relatively healthy, too, knock wood. However, I am now well into geezerhood, and “use it or lose it” is now in full swing: If I stand or sit at a desk all day — stationary/sedentary activity —  I’ll feel like crap the next day. So, I now spend some of what used to be writing-time in physical activities that keep me moving.

For example, twice a week, now, I do volunteer shifts as a manual laborer loading trucks on the main shipping docks of the Greater Boston Food Bank (https://www.gbfb.org/); a pretty great nonprofit organization. Aside from the social good I hope it does, the volunteering gets me off my ass and moving.

And once a week during spring and early summer, I volunteer with the Mystic River Watershed Association (https://mysticriver.org/), primarily in monitoring the annual herring migration; using the health of the fish population as a proxy for the overall environmental state of the watershed. The actual monitoring isn’t strenuous, so I rain-or-shine bicycle from home to the Mystic Lakes dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_Dam), and use that as the start of an exercise bike ride through parts of Boston.

I also do some periodic volunteering with the Red Cross.

So there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do a full-on newsletter, like before. Sigh.

But here’s another thing: Windows itself has changed. Under most normal circumstances, on decent hardware, Windows 10 is mostly self-maintaining. There’s just not as much need for deep-geek repair work anymore; and thus not as much to write about.

Even Microsoft knows this: It actually killed off its Microsoft Windows division earlier this year (see example story), and distributed its functions to other divisions within the company. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.

Plus, the rise of mobile computing — especially Android — means Windows, per se, will never be the Big Kahuna it once was.

So, that all that adds up to me being kind of retired now — but not all the way.  🙂

And it’s also why this Langa.com site isn’t a recreation of anything that’s gone before, but something different and simpler, covering more than just Windows.

Still, I hope you’ll find some things of use and interest here.