A Rebel Sunflower.
One sunflower is looking the wrong way. The morning sun is in the other direction.
Today I’m going to write about happiness, and specifically about routine happiness. During the pandemic I noticed that people with children all looked happy. There is a simple reason for that. Children don’t understand what a pandemic is, so to give them a feeling of normality you distract yourself from the pandemic with children. The result is that all the parents I saw were in their own little happy world. I noticed that parents were laughing, happy, going to parties and more, ignoring the pandemic, despite having the most to lose.
I didn’t have children or a spouse, so I had to find happiness from another source. For months and months I was desperate for zero COVID to be reached but eventually the inhumane head of Switzerland decided to ignore common sense, and that the vaccine was enough. This act doomed me to solitude, because it meant that COVID zero would never be reached.
I value my health, so I still mask to this day, when I am indoors. It makes me both absurd and consistent. It makes me absurd because I’m surrounded by people who are happy to live in COVID denial. They are happy to ignore the inconvenient truth that COVID can result in Long COVID and long COVID can last a lifetime.
I really suffered when I saw that COVID was a new disease that people wanted to make endemic so I had to change where I got my happiness from. That’s when I learned to derive happiness from moving forward, of having a daily routine. My routine is that I write a blog post every single day. By doing this I spend an hour or two being mindful, thinking of topics, and taking the time to elaborate on them, as if I was having a conversation with someone.
The second part of that routine is the daily walk. It is almost always an hour and a half, whilst listening to podcasts or audio books. The third part is to spend an hour or two each day studying IT related topics. Recently I have been practising with the provisioning of Linux systems on raspberry pies. In theory once you’ve set up a system you know how to do it.
As I have learned, through playing with Nextcloud you provision the machine, you get it up and running, but then you find that it can only be accessed via one wifi hotspot, not the other. You find that the device overheats as you try to sync 19,000 pictures from a mobile phone. You also find that you need to adjust the folder permissions so that the phone app can create folders to organise the photographs you’re sending from your phone to your Nextcloud instance. Finally you find that it’s better to use your old mobile phone for these experiments because you can leave it plugged in for hours, or days as it syncs.
You also find the need to learn about cooling, how to plug a fan into a pie, and more. You also realise how noisy that fan is so eventually you turn off that Pi instance.
The point of routine, and working on projects, is that it helps you forget that you’re lonely and isolated, so you don’t feel lonely and isolated. This is an emotion that people with family lives never experienced for real. People who are not alone think they feel lonely, but they haven’t been alone during a pandemic, for months in a row. They will never understand.
Due to the pandemic requiring me to redefine my sources of happiness I derive happiness from reaching my daily goals, not seeing people. People put my personal goals on hold.
Back in 2006-2007 I was working on my dissertation for a few minutes a day, every single day, seven days a week, for months. If I didn’t spend five minutes every day on it, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to move forward with that goal. What amused me in this scenario is that I really enjoyed the process. Other people called it “The D Word” because they had not invested as much time, over as long, as I had, so they were panicked. I was happy.
The point is that I’m happy to see people, once I have reached my personal goals, either for that part of the day, or for the entire day. If I don’t work towards my projects because I’m with people, then I feel unhappy, until I have reached my daily goals.
Once I have reached my goals I am happy to be distracted by other things, but only once I have reached my goals, not before.
If I see people spontaneously I am happy, but if my presence is required I am miserable. People love to say that we can always say no, but we can’t. We can’t say no. “I don’t want to” might be a valid reason for a child, but not for an adult. Mental health is a valid reason but I don’t want to play that card, despite it being the real reason for me not wanting to do something today. I will burn over an hour of petrol to see people who a few days ago said “don’t come over unannounced. That message is the reason I don’t want to do a chore today. I don’t like being told I’m unwelcome, and then told to go a few days later.
There is nothing to gain, by saying no, because I have a favour to do nearby anyway, so it’s absurd to say no, but after today I will take a break from driving to that location. Last month I drove over six hundred and eighty kilometres, not for work, not for pleasure but for a favour.
Last time I went up I left the electric car, because I had no intention of going back up. I want my life to stop being absurd. The last five to six years have been absurd. I want my routine to stabilise once again, so that I reach my goal of feeling employable again, but I want to work remotely because I am not a friend of COVID.
Today I went in to a shop without knowing that the limit was two people at a time. Paradoxically there were not two but five people in the shop because if you’re a parent with a child you’re allowed to be two, so there were four people. I saw no sign on the door because the door was open so I didn’t know. The shop in my village doesn’t have that rule.
It seems stupid to ignore the rule for two parents and their kids from separate families. I thought that I would walk my traditional summer route today but of course that was a mistake. A trio of three people from one family were walking lined up making it impossible for me to pass them without them entering my two metre exlusion zone so I waited by a petanque field for them to pass.
A girl and her mother were distracted doing something and the bike began to roll down a slope and I questioned, “How do I help without touching the bike. I thought of running and stopping it with my foot but as it gained momentum I ran out of time. It rolled into the road.
I was thinking “How can I help the mother walking with her children and I came to the conclusion that the safest part of the bike to grab and place it back on the pavement was the down tube. Saddles and handlebars are always touched but it’s unlikely that people, in normal circumstances would touch the down tube.
These are the things we need to think about during a pandemic. Helping someone as a spur of the moment thing is temporarily out of the question as a moment’s kindness could lead to tragedy, not that I expect either of us to be at high risk of catching the virus from each other. According to a recent article there were just 40 new contaminations yesterday. Now we’re even further into the long tail of the pandemic.
As I looked straight down from a bridge today I noticed that the river is so low that the river bed has become bone dry in places. In other places you see that the gress is turning yellow. When tractors tend to the fields you see that they are stirring up clouds of dust. It is so dry, so often, that it is only a matter of time before forest fires burn down local forests.
Plenty of people are miserable for the rain, but when these consistent droughts lead to forest fires that remove the landscape and vegetation that we are used to they will not be so happy. They do not understand that these droughts are not normal. The fact that I didn’t use weather apps for years tells you how stable the weather system we’re in is.
I often walk by a door in a wall that frames this view. It’s a nice view. A nice garden with nice trees, the lake, a boat from the Belle époque and behind it the French side of the Lake, Haute Savoie and the Alps. A churchyard has a similar view, but with the train line as a bonus. If I was patient I could get the boat, a train and the rest of the landscape.
I am currently studying node.js, to see what I may eventually understand. So far most of the ideas and concepts are self-explanatory. The challenge will be in finding a project idea and getting it to work. Slowly I am getting to understand this topic. Node.JS looks intuitive to use.
Part of my motivation came from listening to the Javascript Jabber podcasts while I walk. It’s easy to hear about React, Angular, Laravel and other frameworks but it’s more interesting to hear about all the other smaller projets, like history.js, apline.js and many others. I like the idea of having specialist frameworks for specific tasks.
I felt overwhelmed by Angular, and then by Javascript. By changing context I am trying to get a different perspective, in an attempt to get a broader understanding of what various parts do. I am already better equipped for when I return to Laravel or Angular. I am also better equipped to understand typescript and Coffeescript etc.
I bought the Garmin Instinct Solar because I was interested to see how the Solar option works. As with most watches the solar panels take several hours to recharge the watch, even during summer heatwaves. The Solar part is great, if you’re in Spain and leave your watch to recharge in the sun while you do something else.
This leaving the watch alone for hours, as it charges, is a paradox, since other metrics cannot be tracked, rest, heart rate, steps. They’re all stagnant whilst the watch charges for several hours in the sun. Having said this, if you use the watch as a watch, and you spend the entire day in the sun, then it will fill its role fantastically. I had it tell me that it had 99 days of power, at the current rate of charge and discharge, while in Spain.
In winter we wear long sleeves, days are shorter, and we spend more time indoors. This means the solar aspect of the watch is barely used, unless we strap it to a bag, and make sure that it is facing the sun. This isn’t a likely scenario so it’s better simply to rely on recharging it from a usb port.
Of course it’s a computer, so it just runs programmed but I have found, on plenty of mornings, that it doesn’t want to sync with the phone. I will tell the phone several times “refresh” but nothing. I just have to wait until it decides that it wants to converse with the phone and update the stats. This frustrates me immensely. When I am supposed to wear a watch 24 hours a day, for it to get my HR, body battery status, step count and everything else and it doesn’t bother to connect with the phone I have a problem.
I don’t like the term addiction so I’m going to use the term forced loyalty instead. Until the Garmin Instinct watch I was very happy with Suunto devices. I’d wear them and they’d sync all the data when I got home. Then Suunto offered the option of step tracking and heart rate monitoring and I was happy with that.
Then when I got the Apple watch Apple wanted the same loyalty, and then Garmin wanted the same loyalty and at this point you have to make a decision. “Am I the type of idiot who walks with two or three watches at all times? Do I wear just one and lose interest in the step data?
In the end I dropped the Suunto, retired from active service after several years of good use. It’s because of a weaker battery that I even shopped around for new devices.
For a while I wanted to get a Garmin cycling computer, and as I cycle this would make sense. The issue is that I like quite a few sports, so having a device dedicated to just one sport would be a shame. It would lie dormant when I am not cycling, for weeks, or even months at a time. I workout every day so the Garmin Instinct made sense. I chose the colour and model I did for a simple reason. It was the cheapest option.
Aside from the watch I also saw that I could get the speed and cadence sensors at an affordable price, and wireless. They were easy to install and use within minutes and have been reliable sense.
Garmin has walking, cycling, running, yoga and body building challenges every month that you can participate in. Some of these challenges are short weekend challenges. Some challenges are month long challenge, for example 300,000 steps in a month of cycling 700 kilometres, or more. Some of them are easy to reach, and some of them are more challenging. Yet more are special day events, for example Halloween or other. You can participate in as many, or as few challenges as you like each month, and it doesn’t really matter whether you succeed or fail, except for collection of badges you end up with.
One of the encouraging, or discouraging screens is the Insights screen. On this screen you can see how well or how badly you are classed depending on sport, age and gender. I am in the top 1percent for floors climbed, top 22 percent for Sleep, top eight percent for steps per day but am not classed for cycling, swimming or running, due to not doing these sports enough recently.
After one year of use of this watch I have not had issues with this battery. I think it has always lasted throughout my workouts. After a year of daily use the battery still seems fine and I can still go for several days before having to recharge. I do turn off oxygen stats though because that halves the battery life from over 27 days to just 10. The data is not that accurate, so not that interesting anyway.
As I mentioned earlier if you wear the watch and use it as a step counter, then, with the Spanish sun it will eventually display that it has 99 days of battery left, so if you want a sports tracker that you forget about for three months then this is perfect. I say three months, but in practice that’s the maximum number of hours it can display. If I remember correctly it then displayed infinity.
Two or three times I selected the wrong sport. I chose walking when I was cycling, which was frustrating as it meant that I missed some data from the start of a ride or two, and thus an opportunity to see how big an effort I made.
As with plenty of sports watches it takes a few seconds to detect the satellites and if you’re on a phone call or distracted in some other way, then you tell it to spot satellites but you forget to tell it to start tracking and timing. Result, you do an entire walk or bike ride and you are left with a step count.
If it wasn’t for the decision it takes not to synchronise on some mornings, despite being worn 24hours a day I would love this watch, instead of really like it. If it wasn’t for that I would never have considered replacing it. With 27 days of battery in theory, after over a year of daily tracking use for one and a half hours a day, it has been great for cycling walking, cycling, and hiking. It also plays well with the Garmin speed and cadence sensors. This provides us with a cheap versatile solution for cycling, without the nuisance of a single purpose device.
Compare the old and new watches
This watch was at least 100 francs cheaper than the Apple Watch Series 4 and I never worried about breaking it, or worried about the battery being too low to finish a walk or bike ride. It doesn’t need to be charged every day, and the strap doesn’t start to smell after weeks of being worn. If you’re looking for a lower cost watch then this is a good solution.
One of the reasons I switched from Suunto despite loving their products, and that they are a European company is that they went for Android and Google wear rather than their own watch OS. Their battery life declined and the niche they were in was lost. Suunto also stopped the web interface for Movescount, so that it became mobile only. That’s a shame because I loved Movescount and Sportstracker. Garmin Connect is a nice alternative nonetheless.
We’re having dry weather which means that I have clean shoes, once again. They cut the grass recently but rather than see greenery we see yellow. We’re in March and it already looks as if we’re un June/July, with how dry the landscape is. The sides of the road, where it was once muddy, is now dry and hard. We are in summer dry weather despite being the first of march.
It’s windy and cold at the moment. You want to wear a good hat, good gloves, and to have layers that stop the wind from blowing through to chill us.
It was cold enough to kill the airpods after an hour of exposure to the weather today. On a warm day the airpods last for two or three hours. On a cold day they last for half an hour to an hour. With walks that last from one hour to one and a half hours I usually never run out of batteries. It’s a sign of cold weather that the batteries last less time than the walk.
In other news twitter failed again today for at least an hour or two. With mobile devices I tried to refresh the feed but saw nothing. I could still post and see replies, but I couldn’t read new tweets. Now that we expect Twitter to fail on a regular basis we don’t feel the same angst as before. It is unimportant.
At least one Londoner loves the mud because it absorbs his steps and lowers the pain he felt when walking on tarmac and other hard surfaces. I am puzzled by one recommendation. “Have a towel ready”. I know that football players have a brush and running water to clean their shoes. The idea of using a towel is new to me. I can think about it, next time it rains, in a few months from now.