As if they were flying
As if they were flying – you see a few sequences with the Jet D’eau in the background. They appear weightless.
Normally I walk from village to village. My walks can take me through four to six villages per walk. I walk from village to village in part because I live in the middle of a landscape where walking from village to village is easy.
I had doubts about today’s run because I can feel various parts of my legs. I can feel that they are under a different strain than usual, due to the running. I felt fine when I was running, but after sitting I could feel ligaments and tendons. I find myself considering taking proper rest days where I don’t walk at least ten thousand steps as I think that running and walking puts a lot of strain on my body. It could simply be that I need to perfect my running technique.
I seriously considered delaying the run. I started walking and when I felt fine I decided to run, and when I ran I felt fine for the entire run. I was ready to stop running when I met the required distance for today. Somehow the running distance, and what I feel comfortable running are well matched.
The next run will be on Sunday. 2.4 kilometres should be easier than this three kilometre run. After that it will be a four kilometre run. I think that for that one I will either run by the lake or around the Lac De Divonne.
I am getting close to running the distance I set out to run. From then on it will be about having the discipline not to push to cover a bigger distance, and to work on style and speed. I don’t want to make the same mistake as I did a few years ago. The aim is comfort, and time, over distance. The run and walk combination is working well for me.
It is possible to walk from Nyon to Gland and back in a single day, and to play Ingress in Gland, before meeting a meetup group to walk back to Nyon from Gland, via the Toblerone. The distance I walked was twenty eight kilometres but this is partially due to spending an hour in Gland, after arriving much sooner than planned.
The route I walked was around Emil Frey towards Porte De Nyon shopping centre, onto the roundabout where you can go East towards Prangins. I walked along the road that is below Duiller towards Prangins, down under the tunnel, up by the train station of Prangins, and then along the road that takes you by the Aérodrome de Prangins where the Junkers 52 aircraft, or an aircraft that looks similar was being started up. It took off sooner than I thought. If I had known I would have stuck around to watch.
After this I walked by some Toblerone and a bunker where junk was being stored, for some reason. I expected that I would walk by this point with the group but we didn’t.
When I arrived in Gland I had over an hour to kill so I walked around, playing Ingress before deciding that I should stop and conserve energy before the next bit of the walk. Nyon to Gland was just eight kilometres so it’s an easy back and forth, if you follow the rational route.
The Toblerone route is the long way round. One interesting aspect of the Toblerone walk, from Gland, is that you walk by the HS2 data centre in Gland. It’s a large building with very few windows. It has 14,000 m2 of server racks and more with 40mw of power usage. It is the biggest data centre in Switzerland.
KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.
With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.
With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.
With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.
Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.
KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.
In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.
I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.
Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.
For more information about KDrive. The Prices.
Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.
KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.
Today I walked around Geneva and in at least three locations I spotted these blobs guarding various places. These two are guarding the entrance to the old town. I like the contrast between the modern blobs above the gate to the old town of Geneva and the statue of Pictet De Richemond.
Two more of these blobs were playing by a merry go round where you walk up from the new town to the old town.
Two more of them were playing on the columns of St Pierre’s. I don’t know what they’re part of. I don’t know whether they’re part of an art exhibit or some other form of activity. It’s amusing that they would choose to climb up the columns as they’re shown to be doing.
For three hundred and sixty two days I have struggled to find a topic to write about. In that time I have, more than once, felt, during my walk, that I had a great idea for the next day, only to deflate the next morning.
Yesterday as I was running I considered writing about the On CloudNeo Shoes. They’re shoes that you pay for, monthly, rather than weekly, and you can get them replaced every 90 days. If you browse to the site you will see a count down for when to get them replaced.
They started being so clean and white that I didn’t like having such obviously new shoes on my feet. I don’t like when clothes are so obviously new. I prefer them to have a little more character.
Or maybe I just prefer darker colours on my feet. Light grey shoes are fine. The thing about white shoes, in rainy weather, is that they quickly get caked in mud. Once they’re muddy the’re less obviously new, so they’re more comfortable to run in.
The CloudNeo are interesting for two reasons. The first is that they enable you to get running shoes at a monthly cost, and the faster you wear them out, the better the deal you get. The other advantage is that running shoes are often 200-300 francs per pair. That’s a lot to pay for shoes, that, in the end you don’t find comfortable.
Years ago I bought expensive hiking shoes, and I used them in the arctic circle, at first, before using them for hikes, via ferrata and climbing for years to come. That’s right, years. I then bought another pair of hiking boots and they lasted days, or weeks. It’s not the boots that failed. It’s that they were too tight around my ankles and I felt as if my ankles would break if I continued to wear them.
I then bought a cheap pair from Decathlon and these are nice and comfortable. The point is that expensive shoes can just as easily be fantastic, as cheap shoes, so it’s worth trying cheap shoes first.
When you get the Cloud Neo shoes they come in a white bag with velcro. You open the velcro, pull out the shoes, and wear them indoors for a bit, to see how they feel. This is because you have 30 days to test these shoes before you’re commited for six months. If you try them outdoors and find they’re uncomfortable then they’ll be dirty and will be recycled, rather than sent to someone else.
When I determined that they were comfortable, walking around indoors, I tried running with them, and they felt okay so I kept them. I’ve been with them for several runs now and they’re fine. My knees don’t hurt as I run with them.
I did notice with normal shoes, after wearing barefoot shoes, that my ankles tend to roll more, especially on rough surfaces. I don’t know whether it’s because the shoes are not stable, or because I lost the habit of wearing normal shoes. In either case I have had to relearn to run, in normal shoes, on uneven surfaces.
I like a little more rigidity in the back. I often find that my heel folds the back of the shoe as I put them on. Other than that I like the shoe laces and I like that they’re light. They’re not weatherproof but they’re so light that if they do get wet it doesn’t matter because they dry without any concious effort.
The base of the shoes has very basic grip, so if the ground is slippery you’ll know. Some people might see that as a drawback but I see this as an advantage. If you go running through mud, for any reason it takes seconds to clear mud away from the shoes, rather than minutes. Last year I regularly spent 10-20 minutes after every walk clearing the mud from my shoes. With these shoes I don’t need to.
They are aimed at road runners and dry trail running, not muddy or uneven surface running. It’s on roads that you want good padding so they’re well suited to various types of road running.
After 90 days, or when you’ve worn them through, within six months, you can get them replaced and get brand new recycled shoes and start again.
These shoes are made from bio-based resources and the expectation is that you will recycle them every three to six months. They say “You don’t own these shoes, you just use them for a bit, and then return them.
When you get the shoes they come in a white bag with a velcro fastening. Within this bag you have the shoes, but you also have the return address for the shoes. You can send the shoes back, and a new pair will be sent to you.
With conventional shoes you wear them, and once they’re worn out you attempt to get them recycled but they’re counted as bulky recycling so I don’t know what happens to them. With these shoes they’re sent back to their home, they are shredded, cleaned, and then turned into new shoes.
An added bonus to having shoes that are made from “bio-based resources” is that as they get worn down through use, their remains are not harmful to the environment. Mine will, in theory, be ready for recycling in over 65 days from now.
If you replace these shoes every three months then they come to about 105 CHF. If you replace them after six months they come to 210 CHF. The faster you wear through a pair of shoes, the more affordable the plan is, but conversely, the worse your habit is for the environment, since shoes require energy to be recycled and reused.
Although they are sold as running shoes I wear them for running and walking. I usually run for a set distance and once I have finished the run I walk. These shoes are okay for both but I don’t like these shoes like I like the Merrel trail glove 7 shoes. If I had this deal for Merrel Trail Glove 7 then I would be very happy. I have been using Merrel shoes for years and I like them, especially since some of them are so cheap, but I wear them out too fast. With a subscription model I wouldn’t worry about how fast I wear them out because I would get a new pair when I needed it.
As I write this I believe that a good niche market for this would be children, because children grow out of shoes, before they even wear them out. By renting children shoes you would ensure that children always get new shoes when required.
The moment when I don’t like these shoes is when I am walking in the grass to avoid being run over by a car driver who doesn’t slow down or take precautions when seeing pedestrians by the side of the road. I feel my feet and ankles twisting at unsafe angles. That’s why I walk on agricultural roads where I know there are very few cars.
Running shoes are usually expensive, so paying monthly to spread the cost makes sense, especially if they are replaced every three months. If they’re replaced every six months then they’re much more expensive and the deal is less interesting. You have one month, tho choose to keep the shoes, and then you’re committed for six months, before you can terminate the contract. There is a huge “cancel plan” button, should you decide to cancel the plan.
These shoes fill a niche. They fill the niche of the person who runs 600 kilometres every three to six months and wants their shoes to be recycled, and turned into new shoes. It fills the niche of the person who wears through shoes at a rapid rate. I do, so such a deal is interesting for me, especially if I burn through 600km per three months.
At a rate of 8km per day it would take 75 days to walk/run 600km. This puts me comfortably within the 90 day recycling window.