View of the Jura on a snowy day

A Snowy Day

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday we had a snowy day. I saw that the snow was beginning to pile up so I went and cleared the snow for fun. I could have left it as it was but I saw an opportunity to have some weight training, for free.

I regret that I didn’t set a fitness tracker to track the snow shovelling as weight training. It took a while and I got at least 2500 steps out of it, but as I wasn’t counting this as a workout the calories burned was counted differently. If I clear snow again I will track it properly.

What surprised me about shovelling snow yesterday is that I broke a sweat but I didn’t feel that I had pushed that hard. It’s nice to be fit enough to get a workout without suffering.

I did this for fun, but I still claimed the action. I do it for fun, but I don’t want someone else to be able to claim work that they didn’t do. I don’t want people getting free credit.

Winter Vines with the Jura behind them
Winter Vines with the Jura behind them

A Quick Walk

I went for a 6.6 kilometre walk afterwards. The light was good. Dark clouds with highlighted hills and trees covered in snow. At least today’s walk was atmospheric. Normally on such a walk I would wear at least one thick, warm layer but I didn’t bother. I think I had enough residual heat left over from the shovelling not to get cold. Luckily this assumption was correct.

And Finally

I haven’t used Twitter for at least two days. I took a break from the site because I don’t like the new owner and what he is turning the platform into but also because it started to feel toxic, rather than enjoyable. Twitter is meant to be a “social” network but how can it be social when we need to make our accounts private to avoid trolls, and tweet anonymously to avoid future problems.

There is an upside. Twitter revenue went down 40% on the same day, from one year to the next with over 500 advertisers suspending spending. Twitter blocked third party apps to control revenue. Tweetbot and twitterific were blocked, if I remember correctly.

Such actions won’t enrich Musk. They will simply encourage people not to trust Twitter, as it behaves erratically. To be of value social networks need to be pleasant and trustworthy. It is neither.

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Ignored by Sunflowers
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Ignored by Sunflowers

Byrichard

The title of this post is a joke, not a serious delusion of isolation. I saw that a few sunflowers had come out but that they were looking away, rather than towards me. They are looking at the morning sun and I was walking in the afternoon. They are still in the process of coming out.


Today I was asked if I wanted to go to a restaurant and I automatically said no. Given the data about the rising number of cases in Switzerland it makes no sense to go to towns or cities, and to eat in a crowded place, rather than to continue self-isolating. If I was okay with crowds at this stage in the pandemic I would have gone to the IFSC World cup. I am not fine with crowds, when the number of sick is rising.


One issue is that there seems to be no data for the Canton de Vaud for the last week or two. I don’t know whether that means that there are no cases, or that they have not been counted. Haute Savoie and Geneva are going up, so Vaud should follow.


Every Canton is deep red except for Neuchatel, for now.


The table above illustrates why it makes sense not to meet people in towns, cities, restaurants or other places. There is a chance that you could continue as normal, and be fine, but if enough people think that way then large crowds form, and what was safe, in small numbers, becomes a breeding ground for large numbers. At this point, it’s better to walk in the countryside and be ignored by sunflowers.


If I had been asked “Do you want to come over” then I would have said yes, without hesitation. I said no because in my opinion, and according to the data I see, it is not safe to risk spending time around crowds, for now.


Imagine going back to such habits
Imagine going back to such habits


When the pandemic ends I look forward to meeting new people to do new things, but for now the likelihood of this happening is low. Yesterday’s solo bike ride was good. I avoided the roads where traffic is aggressive as much as possible, and kept to the more rural, quieter paths. The weather was perfect yesterday.


Today, during the entire walk I felt that it would rain at any minute, but it didn’t. It stayed dry, and that’s good because I was not equipped for the rain.

Nyon In Spring

Nyon In Spring

Byrichard

Due to the pandemic I almost never go to Nyon. If I do I often wear a mask and avoid walking around too much. Most people think the pandemic is over. I see, from the data, that it is not, and I want to stay true to previous ethics and morality.


Flowers in spring on the slope behind the Musée du Léman
Flowers in spring on the slope behind the Musée du Léman


Flowers in spring on the slope behind the Musée du Léman
Flowers in spring on the slope behind the Musée du Léman


Magnolia buds in Nyon, by the lake
Magnolia buds in Nyon, by the lake


I am happier walking in the countryside where there are fewer people, and where it is easy to avoid them. I have no problem wearing a mask, but others do not approve of mask wearing, so I prefer to be a lunatic in the countryside, than in town. I also feel better, emotionally, when I am not reminded that others are living normally despite the pandemic.


On a related note I reached 24,000 steps today. I walked six kilometres in Nyon, this morning, before going for a lunch time run, and finally an afternoon walk. During the afternoon walk I counted 24 people walking along a small stretch of rural road. That’s a lot of people. That’s why I avoid that stretch of road. I prefer empty roads. I prefer solitary walks.


The lake too is exceptionally clear but I don’t dive at the moment, so I won’t take advantage of the excellent visibility. Maybe in the near future I will resume diving. I may start again, when I find job security, and a good group of people to dive with, given the fragility of safety when diving.

Day 37 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Future, Or Uncertainty
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Day 37 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Future, Or Uncertainty

Byrichard

I question whether we’re living in the future, or uncertainty during this pandemic. One friend on Facebook wrote that Coronavirus is making us live in the future because of a number of reasons, as listed in the embedded post below.





If I am being myself then I would say that we’re living in the past. We’re living in an age before cars where our village or neighborhoud has become our world. For the first month my home village and the shopping centre one village over were the only two places where I spent any time.


I resorted to walking from home and exploring more and more of the local countryside, to the point where I was walking along dirt tracks that only farmers use to avoid crossing too many other people.


It’s also living in the past because we’re living with very little to no use of the car. The car, for someone like me, is synonymous with going for an adventure in the mountains, whether hiking or other.


Working from home, in my case is blogging, and looking to find opportunities on various websites and through e-mails on an almost daily basis. We’re connecting with people online via WhatsApp, Zoom, Infomaniak’s video tool and other methods. I even used facetime for the first time in a long time.


We’re seeing which countries have good self-discipline and those that do not. I’ll focus on the positive without being negative. The positive is that Switzerland said that people should self-isolate, stay at home and keep two meters away from other people and to a great extent they did. I’m not saying things were perfect all the time, because previous blog posts show they weren’t.


What we do see in Switzerland is that at least at the time of writing this post the number of new cases was flattening to a couple of hundred a day compared to the higher figures from previous weeks. Switzerland said “you should stay home and avoid being to close to people” and people did this.


The consequence is that Switzerland is a rare eutopia, in that we could go for two hour walks if we wanted, we could go on long bike rides and more. In other countries people were restricted to ranging within one kilometre of their homes as in one country, and in other countries of being under house arrest, except for shopping, going to the doctor or other.


Uncertainty


We live in uncertain times because we don’t know whether we’ll have a normal summer. In Switzerland at least one third of people have cancelled their summer plans. On the oil futures market the value of petroleum went down to zero because those that had the ability to buy petroleum did not have the storage space to keep it.


Imagine being in a moment in time where petroleum is worthless, albeit temporarily. For the environment this may be great news because oil producing companies will have a strong incentive to innovate. We have to see if the fall in demand for oil lasts long enough for oil producers to reach a point of no-return in producing alternative fuels and technologies.


At least twice in the past oil crises have helped push innovation forward but that progress was abandoned when oil, once again became a cheap alternative.


A Short Daily Walk


Today my daily walk was a lot shorter than usual. This is due to the weather not being as nice as usual but also because my leg muscles feel tired and in need of a rest. After a 30km bike ride, a 16km walk with 790 meters of climbing and another ten-kilometre walk over three days my body needs a rest. It needs to recover. This wasn’t a zero-day so much as giving my body an opportunity to recover and rest.


I should prepare dinner soon.

Day Six of Orca in Switzerland – Stricter measures.

Byrichard

Today’ I’d like to discuss stricter measures. Coop and Migros both have online shops set up for home delivery but the system is overloaded by people ordering at the same time. They don’t have the truck fleet or staff to cope with the demand so I suggest a better solution.


Both Digitec and Galaxus allow people to order online and choose which shop they want to pick up their purchases. This idea is relevant today because Migros, Coop and other shops are now forcing people to queue outside shops before being allowed to go in and make their purchases.


Queuing, whilst keeping shops from getting crowded inside, will increase the risk of propagation of the virus outside the shops. People have a tendency not to stand with the minimum of two-meter distance separation. The larger the crowd the longer the queue, and the longer the wait the higher the probability of contagion.


If we could shop online and request distribution from a specific point the time we spend at the shops would be cut down to a minute or two and it would have the added benefit that we would not even need to go into the shop. I don’t want to go to the shops at all if I need to queue but there is no choice.


The system they put in place yesterday will result in more, rather than less hoarding and increase the amount of time people spend in proximity to others.


Vaud has flattened. Source


Having said this the graph for Vaud has flattened but I don’t know whether this is because they ran out of test kits or whether they have failed to update the figures at the time when I wrote this blog post. I hope the worst is over for this Canton.

An Entire Day Of Rain
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An Entire Day Of Rain

Byrichard

Due to the lack of rain for a few years, and the lack of opportunities to socialise through sporting activities, I look forward to rain. Yesterday we were lucky. We got an entire day’s worth of rain. I didn’t leave the flat for the entire day and I still slept fine.


Just a few days ago the daily average for new infections per day was 103 per day but it climbed up to 134 or so today. The R-Index went from 0.7 to 1.14 nationally and across Europe the number of new cases is going up again. Governments and civil society don’t mind. If they did then they would put their masks back on and they would continue self-isolating. I see the opposite happening. Regions in Spain that had been green, and relatively clear of infection, are now red. Nightclubs have had to close.


There is a part of me that thought, This pandemic will be one for the history books, and future generations will study it. We didn’t study the Spanish Flu/Influenza. We studied the war, but we never took a real look at the pandemic. Is that because we didn’t care, is it because people wanted to forget it, because it’s within the context of the second world war or is it because the disease does not capture the imagination like Ebola or the plague do?


If you took out the human element, then this pandemic is really simple to eradicate. For the plague you need to get rid of rats, fleas, bacteria in fleas, clothing and plenty of other places where the fleas and bacteria can hide. In the case of COVID-19 an open window and a draft will keep people relatively safe. If people around the world could simultaneously self-isolate properly for two months, the pandemic would be over. We are now many months away from any hopes of the pandemic being over.


I was happy to see that people at the World Health Organisation have the same message as I had. It helped me feel that my views and opinions are justified, rather than just thoughts by an ordinary person. I found the tweets encouraging. I often question why I am certain about my perception of the issue, and to have people at the WHO say something similar was encouraging.


Now we wait, to see when the next lockdown is implemented. I think it could be sooner than anticipated, in the current circumstances.

Day 42 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A Few Minutes of Rain
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Day 42 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A Few Minutes of Rain

Byrichard

Today at around lunchtime we had a few minutes of rain for the first time in weeks but it didn’t last long. By the time I went out for my daily walk the ground was dry, as if it hadn’t rained at all. There was no mud to walk through so I came back as clean as when I left.


Untitled


The daily walk is a good part of my day because it forces me to have some AFK (Away from Keyboard) time. That’s the thought I had when starting the walk. For two hours a day I spend time looking at the landscape, at how the plants and fields are changing day to day and more. I notice how paths are being worn where they would not be worn in normal times.


New trails are forming in some places. As people attempt to discover the area around them, and stay away from cars a new set of trails is emerging. Yesterday I was not even appalled by a woman showing off about walking with an umbrella in the mountains. Solitary confinement makes me long for the day when I can go back to hiking with people.


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On today’s walk I went to see the cows quickly and tried to get a few seconds of them mooing but they were uncooperative so I have several seconds of cows just staring. Some people think of them as sentient beings that shouldn’t be eaten but the cows I looked at today didn’t seem to have much intelligence. They certainly don’t have the same character as cats.


Cascading Style Sheets and Website Improvements.


I thought that the Latin page I have would take hours to make mobile friendly so I put it off for a few days as I took time to think of a solution. Today I used the viewport meta tag and CSS table options to make that page more modern. What I thought would take hours took minutes.


I went back to my first blog post and worked my way forward from there making twenty to thirty pages AMP ready. In the process I added tags to those pages as well as quickly corrected typos, dead links and related problems.


I also started porting my old “Surfing the World Wide Waves (WWW)” blog to this installation of Wordpress. My reasoning is that since it’s a blog it makes sense to combine two generations. When enough of the content is ported across to the blog I will use content views to provide a more contemporary looking interface.


These are time consuming tasks but now that I’m unable to use Facebook or Twitter due to the lack of social interactions in the physical world I feel no choice but to avoid them. Avoiding Facebook and Twitter has had a positive effect. The less time I spend on either the more I have to show for the day.


It was interesting to read blog posts I wrote as a uni student and articles I wrote as a school teenager. It’s interesting to see how things have changed today.


Having said that I really like the For You tab on Tik Tok. I get recommendations like these. I like these recommendations because they make me thing forward, towards the future, rather than feel negative about the present.


@freeridewtour

Hugo Hoff going to the speed of light! ##FWT20 ##ski ##freeride ##challenge ##foryou ##foryoupage

? Blinding Lights – The Weeknd

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