Oh yeah, welcome to 2026! I often forget about this thing till that darn DreamHost bill comes due, which it’s about to. $191 this year, ugh!

So yeah, I’m facing an existential crisis. A couple of crises, actually. Not my existence, but the continued existence of things I have loved and poured a lot of time into. They probably seem like small things to most, but they are impactful and matter to me.

The first is whether to continue with said hosting service. I’m hoping maybe they have some kind of lower priced package. It’s not like I use the most advanced services anyway, I just need my blog to continue to exist. I don’t know if the viewership numbers I see these days represent actual people looking, but assuming they do folks seem to still derive value from my experiences as a man with Norrie disease and thoughts on disability in general. My first posts go back some thirteen years, and i want this archive to exist for my and others’ benefit. We shall see. I can’t even find a number to call and inquire about child things with my host though.

The other issue I’m having is, my APH Mantis refreshable braille display has bitten the dust again. It’s the second time in almost exactly 2 years. The last time this happened, I noted that the NLS zoomax eReader I had then helped me do my job for the time while I awaited the Mantis’s repair.

But as I likely noted in here already, those machines just weren’t very durable. So now most NLS locations have switched to the Humanwareversion of their popular eReader, one of which I’m now writing on. It’s working pretty good, with excellent battery life. and I’m slowly etting used to reading with twenty braille cells instead of 40 as I have on the Mantis, and maybe even reading boobbs more quickly than I had been on the former by the time of its demise.

While I can use it with the JAWS for Windows screen reader on my work PC, because it only really has the Perkins-style braille keyboard I have very limited access to JAWS keystrokes, meaning I still have to use a qwerty keyboard to enter most commands. So I’m trying to decide whether to shell out dough and get the Mantis fixed again, or if it’s time for something else. What I probably wish is that I had unlimited funding, but then I suppose we all wish that.

I got this post’s title from a book I’m reading called The Puzzle Box, by Danielle Trussoni. The main character, Mike Brink, has a dog named Conundrum that he calls Connie, in honor of his amazing ability to solve puzzles after a traumatic brain injury playing football. And as an aside, the puzzle master at the center of this novel is a blind Japanese guy. Without spoiling too much, I’ll say that braille even figures into the solving of the puzzle, which I thought was awesome. It’s the second in her puzzle series, but you don’t necessarily have to read the still to enjoy it in my opinion. Hopefully more posts to come soon.