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Chindrieux Dives
Earlier today I was at Chindrieux, a lake side village looking out over the Lac du Bourget lake in France. It is a nice lake with good visibility. The dive site where my friends and I usually dive is a wall. You swim out for 300 meters before heading down the bank to a little gap in the cliff. At 9 meters depth you start going west along the wall. On this wall you can find lots of shells and the occasional fish hiding in one crack or other. There are overhangs and scree fields. The bottom of the wall is at 65m. From there it slopes gently off to 110m.
So far my dives have only taken me to 40 meters on this wall. Diving in this part of the world takes a certain character type. The water at depth is at a stable 5°-6°c but the water column varies from 21°c at the surface in Summer zo 6°c at the surface in winter. In summer you go from warm water to cold, and then you get back to warm. You’re sweating in your dry suit and to cool down is welcome. In winter the opposite is true. You’re cold. You’re happy to put your dry suit on, and gloves, and hood. The drawback is that you go from cold air to cold water and back. Friends of mine and I have come out of the water shivering in winter, unable to use our fingers anymore. This is all part of the fun.
Today for a change I went with my video camera. I am currently working on a diving documentary and I want to get footage of the surface as well as down below. The vista are nice. You can see parapentistes, the occasional boat, trains passing by and in the distance snow covered mountains. They serve as a backdrop to Aix Les Bains.
I will keep you informed about how this project progresses.
Facebook, a personal rather than social network
Ten years ago if you met someone and they gave you their visit card you’d put it away somewhere and eventually you might have come back to it but the information would need updating. Over the years social networking tools on the web have evolved from simple mail clients to web forums and finally to Myspace and Facebook. With Facebook we find what I think of as an enhanced phonebook.
When you meet someone at a party today there’s a good chance that this individual has a facebook presence. As a result when you go home they may add you as a friend and in so doing you are brought into their lives. You can see where they’ve worked, for how long and what they were doing. you can see whom they associate with and how they tend to meet people. Facebook has become a daily feature of contemporary life.
Facebook does not limit your interactions to the people you’ve met during your time at parties, events and more. It also allows you to join groups, some are based on occupation, others on passions and yet some more on soemthing that may be relevant to only ten to twenty people. As these groups multiply so you decide to associate through these people through forums and the likes.
For a time I was part of the Lecture napping appreciation society whilst others were part of the “curse of the N18” amongst other groups. Today a friend joined a group which I would never join for the simple and good reason (simple et bonne raison) that reflects the views for which I avoid the place. I’m living between London, a city of up to twelve million (depending on the demographics you chose) and a village of no more than 2000. I love the contrast between the two and as a result feel no need to visit the place that the group boasts about.
The point is that as a medium becomes more commonplace and as more people feel comfortable with the technology so their personalities are reflected in a variety of ways which give a great wealth and diversity of character to the medium they are using. It is precisely because of those differences in interests that we gain as a social group. We, the international internet users, have a great wealth of opinions and views available within a few keystrokes and we should constantly aim to promote those interests that most effectively reflect our character, things that friends may take years to notice but that can be made obvious online. Facebook, in my opinion, is a personal, rather than social network where you promote the interaction between friends you’ve had for years and friends you’ve only just met. There are other networks that are great for making new online friends but Facebook should be kept for those people whom you have met face to face.
Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.
I feel that way about watches at the moment. For plenty of people watches are like televisions. “I haven’t owned either for decades, my laptop and ipad are enough.” For years I was without a watch, and without a TV. As a student I never felt the need. It’s only because people had spare televisions that I ended up with one. I never bought one for myself.
Since I bought myself one or more raspberry pies I have been experimenting with various instances, to see how to set them up quickly, and experiment with implementation and more. In the process I am learning skills that I had not experimented with in years. One of these is to flash a USB key with a version of Linux and rebooting a PC from the USB key to run linux. It worked so well that now I am fighting the desire to install Linux over Windows and have the windows machine become a Linux machine.
Watches
Suunto, Casio, Apple and Garmin make watches, and each one tries to quantify the wearer, so it feels as though the wearer must wear all three or four brands to get complete data for all four platforms. but to do this makes us eccentric. The simplest workaround is to track with one device, and manually update all the others.
Whether you wear a Casio, Garmin, Apple Watch or Suunto is also about something else. User Interface. The Garmin Instinct and Casio g-shock watches look tough/solid, while the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak 5 look more fragile, more elegant. The other difference is that the Garmin watch is solar powered and can last for weeks in summer, whereas the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak five can last for a day, or several. The Garmin watches can last for years, by default, because they use mobile phones to do the hard work. They just count steps and time.
Personal Technical Debt
I like the idea of Personal Technical Debt. The concept exists for IT and programming. Writing code is one thing, but updating it later on is a challenge. To give a simple example, if you write a static website by hand then every page that navigates to other pages, needs to updated every time a new page is added. If you use Hugo or another static website generator you see this with every build. My blog is both on wordpress, and as a static site. As a wordpress blog it’s slow and clunky to update because of all the bloat wordpress has added over the two and a half decades that it has been around.
In contrast with Hugo you write you page in markdown, add the categories and tags, run “hugo” and fifteen seconds later the site is ready to publish via GIT FTP. I spent months updating my static site to PHP before being sidetracked by Hugo and blogging.
The New Machine Routine
A while ago if you started to use a new machine you would need to log into all your sites, across several browsers. When I did this once or twice a year it felt slow and uncomfortable. Now that I slide between web browsers fluidly the time it takes to be up and running in Chrome, Firefox or other, is a few minutes. This is because my personal technical debt is low, and because it has become routine to slide between browsers, whether different versions of Chrome, Firefox or other.
With the Raspberry Pi Imager app you can instantiate a new server on an SD card within minutes, and it will be ready for you to log in via SSH whilst connecting to wifi with no user intervention. This is great because you can setup a headless system in a location with no monitor or keyboard.
Devops
When I started following courses on JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby On Rails and more I would get instructions on how to setup an environment and I wasn’t familiar with the process so I had to follow the instructions attentively. By trial and error, as well as repetition the process became relaxed.
I find that, as I become more comfortable with doing things from the command line, I find docker walk throughs more frustrating than helpful. This is because I want to get instructions on how to setup the environment fully, without the overhead of docker running in the background. On a 2016 mac book pro docker slows down the computer.
And Finally
When we do something two or three times we need to follow the instructions when we get stuck. If we set the time on a casio watch several times then it becomes habit. If we implement Linux instances on SD cards and experiment until we break things, then we know how to do things, without breaking them, in a production environment. If we change web browser once every few months or years it can take a while. If we do it several times a month it becomes second nature. That’s what experimenting is about.
The Roche Au Dade Via Ferrata
Two days ago I was agonising about whether to go for a via ferrata(VF) or a hike. Eventually I decided that I would go for the hike, because hiking was an 18 minute drive away. I went for a walk/run and then I found that I had a burning desire to do the via ferrata. I went down to the cave and rummaged through to find various bits and pieces. I found my Grigri, climbing rope, harnesses and more. I also found that I had a tandem speed which I considered using.
It’s amusing. I had a real, deep, burning passion to do the Via Ferrata. I had forgotten how it feels to prepare for something that is potentially dangerous, but in reality very safe, if you follow the rules and regulations of the sport. It’s fun to consider whether to use the brand new VF set or to use the slightly older set. My slightly older set might have been used on one or two VF before I broke my arm and stopped climbing from 2019-2024 or so.
When I was walking along the port’s high wall in Javea in 2001 or so I felt scared at being three or four meters in height, compared to the road beneath. I questioned how I would cope with the heights that we encounter on a VF. I hoped that I would not be scared of heights again.
Luckily Via Ferrata is something you don’t forget. I found that all of my old Via Ferrata habits were still there. The habit of keeping arms straight, of resting when required, of taking pictures, of day dreaming and of patiently waiting for the rest of the group. At one or two points I was asked “why are you waiting” and the answer is simple. If I went at my speed the one and a half hour VF would take fourty five minutes. I have done VFs every weekend every summer for years so I am perfectly at home on VFs.
I was so “at home” that I took 72 photos during the VF.
The one challenge I faced was keeping the phone safe. I would have taken more photos but my key concern was dropping the phone if I slipped or lost my balance. I didn’t have as much flexibility to take photos as I would have liked. I need to find a system that gives me that flexibility. When I was doing VF all the time I had a strap so that if I dropped a camera it would drop less than a meter. Yesterday I was taking a risk every time I took photos.
In the past, when doing Via ferrata regularly, I have smashed one or two cameras to bits as they hit the rocks, over and over again. The best solution might be to use the Garmin virb.
About the Via Ferata Itself
The Roche au Dade Via Ferrata is about 45 minutes from Nyon. It is located in the valley that you pass by as you drive from Switzerland to England and vice versa. You get off the main road, drive through the village and head to a small simple parking. There are three or four routes that you can take. You have an introductory VF that takes you across several bridges. You also have the option of just going to do the zipline. There are two of them but for the second one you need to be more experienced to get to it.
For the most part I would class the VFs as easy but that’s with years of VF experience. There is one bit on the classic route that I think people should be wary of. It’s the vertical climb after the last monkey bridge because it is more vertical and physical than the other parts. This is where people might struggle if they are not prepared.
I like that there are three or four routes to enjoy because you can spend more than fourty five minutes here. You also have a picnick table. You can climb one part, get back down, have a snack or drink and do the other parts.
As you can see from the featured photo the via ferrata is right on the road, as is the parking so access time is quick.
And Finally
In the end I’m happy that I chose to climb with the Via Ferrata group rather than hike with the hiking group. One of the advantages of doing something with a smaller group is that you get to know the people better. I definitely want to do more activities with this group and I’m happy that we ended the day with a drink before driving home. I think that “end of activity” drinks, even if it’s orangina, are important.