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

Reading Time: 3 minutes
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.

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.

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

And of course this one.

@mamma.miaaaaaaa
After you solve that mysterious bug. ##coding ##geek ##programmerslife ##computerscience ##stackoverflow ##develop ##build ##maven ##bugfix
? Can-Can - Johann Strauss Orchestra

For people in solitary confinement, house arrest or more I would ask that we remember Rieux from Camus' La Peste and The Count of Monte Christo who spent seven years in solitary confinement. Read the part about how he found a way to cope with being locked up. Has the experience of the Pandemic changed how you read that part of the book?

See you tomorrow.