Posts

On Monday we were running in the rain, and getting soaked and two women were discussing Caribana, Paléo, Festineuch and more. During another hike people were speaking about Montreux, and during a book discussion someone said “I don’t think I can be at the next book discussion because of a concert.

Now, on the flipside you have groups that wake up to run at 6am on a Friday and normal society says “But that’s too early” because normal society considers that going out at night until 2am, or watching TV until late is a good use of an evening.

For many months I have been using a Fiat 500 and I usually charged it to around 80 percent before stopping the charge because the last 20 percent took an hour, and I paid for electricity that was wasted as heat, when the car trickled charged to one hundred percent.

I knew that if I drove two trips to Morges I would either need to charge when I got home, or ideally on a private charger at destination. I knew that within around two hours I could charge from 20-80 percent, and be set for a few days.

The hike from Aminona to Leukerbad is a 22km+ hike with 1200m+ of climbing. You begin by catching the cable car from Sierre to Crans-Montana, and then the bus to Aminona, before walking along the road for a bit, before turning right and disappearing into the woods and walking along trails that head downwards for a bit before heading up a “steep” gradient.

During the steep gradient I found myself thinking about the mechanical difference between cycling up a hill or mountain and hiking. When you’re used to cycling up hills, your cardiovascular system adapts, but so do your leg muscles. They have to lift you, the bike, and cope with gradients. In contrast, on foot, the effort is constant. We way the same at the start of a climb as the end, without changing gears. We’re biologically optimised for the climb.

Today one group I know were cycling around the Léman with a détour through the Alps, the second group were cycling from L’Horloge Fleurie around the lake at a speed of 27km/h. A third group were cycling from Divonne to Vélomania around Vaud. A fourth were cycling a loop towards the Jura and back. The final group, that I joined, went for a 6.7km run around Nyon and then had a group brunch and green juice.

Yesterday evening I was playing with Strava heat maps, and especially with my own walking heat maps. In looking at the heat map I see deep red marks along the rads that are currently blocked by road works. You might ask “So what, who cares?” The answer is, of course, that I care, because with that critical bit of road being toxic it means that for an entire year my walking pattern is destroyed. Three months last year, and then at least nine months this year.

If, like me you still use Facebook, then you will have noticed a dark design pattern. The pattern is to hide hyperlinks to stories in the comments, rather than to make it easy to click straight through.

Facebook has convinced content creators and social media monkeys that if they post the hyperlink in comments, rather than directly, it will promote their content and make them more visible.

Rather than encourage me to click through that design pattern encourages me to comment on the clickbait headline, and completely ignore the original post.

We are familiar with the situation. We look at Saturday and we think: I want to do this, but then a week or two before you see that something else is available so you think “Oh now I want to do that”. The result is that the thing you were certain about now becomes a Buridan moment.

I have such a choice this week. A group I like to cycle with once per month, or twice per month if long rides become regular, has a ride scheduled at 09:30.

I have spent many hours, and got Gemini to hallucinate multiple times, through multiple chats, attempting to get my Eleventy blogging experiment to talk with Activitypub and the Fediverse with limited help.Setting p a webfinger was easy, but getting follows to be accepted, and for posts to show up has been a complex task.

The Gemini Limitation

While putting Gemini through its paces I noticed that Gemini loves to try A, then B, before trying C, and during the entire process it will tell me why the solution works. Ironically, it often doesn’t. We hear so much about vibe coding, but based on my experiences I’d say that vibe coding is deeply ingrained within the scope of plain dumb luck.

This is the first fediverse post from this static site. This is a test to see if it is visible.

Naturally we think of doing group activities in the evenings, after work, or over the weekend, when we’re free for the entire day. Some people take the opposite approach. They wake up early to go for a morning sunrise run or a croissant loop bike ride.

The concept is simple. Instead of waking up for work, you wake up early, and you do an hour of sport between 0700-0800. In so doing you get your bike ride or run, before your day of work. It then includes a café, a croissant, possibly breakfast, and then to work we go.