In February I walked or ran along the Asse river that runs from the Jura down towards Nyon and it was flooding. Walking paths had to be diverted and trees found themselves surrounded by water like individual islands. I walked by the same river during my daily walk yesterday and the opposite has now occurred.

The river that had flooded and turned into islands is now just a trickle. You can walk to the middle of the river without getting your socks wet. Having said this, having waterproof shoes does help keep socks dry. The point is that the layer of water is so shallow that you can walk to the middle of the river, take a picture, and walk back to the path, without getting wet.

This morning I saw two posts commenting on how Facebook was paywalling external hyperlinks. In order to link to an external site Facebook is now adding payed tiers. Pay one amount, and you can post more hyperlinks, pay another and you can pay fewer.

Years ago people spoke of the social media silos and Facebook is amplifying the problem, by rationing people’s ability to hyperlink to their own content on other sites. In effect, if you’re in the facebook silo, you’re expected to stay within the silo. Facebook becomes the portal and trap.

Continuing on from yesterday’s theme of publishers harming themselves through their behaviour today I want to comment on the fad of adding hyperlinks to comments rather than directly into a post. The idea is that you can use the image you want, and by clicking to see comments facebooks counts this as engagement.

It’s worth mentioning that if I click on a hyperlink facebook knows, and the website knows, so nothing is gained by forcing us to jump through the “comments” hoop. This is especially true since once three or four views have been expressed in a comment the rest is noise.

Yesterday I read what some might think is good news. Tabloids in England are firing human writers because Google AI summaries are undercutting human reader traffic to their sites. To this I have two comments.

Before every newspaper was pay-walled I would browse to The Guardian, the Independent, Le Monde, Le temps, Le Matin, and dozens of other newspapers. With time every one of them brought up a paywall and you might think “They’re right to, they deserve to be paid for the work they do but it’s worth remembering that for over a century, and during our lifetimes you could go to a newspaper stand or magazine shop and buy a newspaper and read all of the day’s stories, or you could buy a magazine and read all of the week’s or months articles. Now you’re expected to pay either for a single article, or per month, or per year.

Last night I was at a book about “The God of Small Things” and I’d be tempted to say that I hated the book for the same reasons that I don’t like Jane Austen books, that I didn’t enjoy Blindness and other books. I don’t know whether readying it, rather than listening to it, would have helped.

It’s a book I didn’t like because it used vile imagery. One image is about body functions into the mud, that is then washed away by the tide. There are mentions of other body functions or body party where we feel that disgust is a desired reaction.

Yet another article has been written about how smartphones are a trap we built for ourselves by VOX. The article is paywalled so I didn’t read it but it’s worth commenting on the headline.

This weekend I was in Divonne volunteering at the Triathlon de Divonne and during this time I was surprised by a single thing. I was surprised by how many people I knew through cycling, after-work drinks and one or two from running. Divonne isn’t a place that I go to very often. I usually go on the last Saturday of the month, to ride with friends.

Many years ago, I couldn’t drive for a month, so I saw this as a brilliant opportunity to take a break from driving. To replace the car I used a foot scooter, a bus, and one or two trains. In the process I had a tremendous amount of fun. In contrast, more recently I tried an e-scooter and I’d be tempted to say that the experience sucks.

The key reason that it sucks, for me, as a cyclist, and as a runner, is that it’s stuck at 20 kilometres per hour. If I run I’m slower, but I’m doing sports, and if I’m cycling then I’m twice as fast when riding down to Nyon. Heading home I am also faster, within reason.

It’s a very easy habit to pick up, once you find an affordable EV. The EV habit makes tremendous sense. When I learned to drive petrol was about 1.21 CHF per litre, and when I was driving the most it went to about 1.71 CHF per litre. Recently, due to recent electoral choices petrol has risen to between 1.98 CHF to 2.20CHF per litre in Switzerland.

When you see this price increase it means that your fuel costs from 70-100 CHF per refuelling stop. Even with the petrol scooter it went from 6 CHF up to 9 CHF. Within this context it means that driving to Geneva with the scooter doubled in price. That’s a discernable difference. That is quite the psychological wall.

For the first time in months it is raining properly. We don’t have torrential rain, and we don’t have drizzle. We have proper rain. Proper river filling rain. Proper lake filling rain. It’s the type of rain that falls and hydrates the soil, the planets, the lakes and more. It’s the type of rain that cleans roads of their greasy films.

It’s the type of rain, where if you walk in it for five minutes you will be drenched. It is the type of rain that cleans veluxes, and potentially cars. It’s the type of rain that makes a nice change from constant sunshine.

According to MétéoSwiss, as the app is called, if you have your iPhone in English, it is currently 34°c in Nyon, that 16°c hotter than the norm for this time of year. After the summer of heat waves the heat persists at least until the anticipated storms this evening.

The storms, yet again, may be torrential. Cycling earlier today around the Vallée de Joux saw me fighting a wind from the west on the way back towards the car. It was strong and persistent.