When Rain Doesn’t Show Up
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When Rain Doesn’t Show Up

Byrichard

They forecast rain and I looked forward to going for a walk and having clean shoes as shoes are washed by the rain keeping shows slick. The rain didn’t come so my shoes got muddy and I stood by the tap trying to get the mud to drain away from between the tread, without much luck. Tomorrow if I run down the stairs as I always do I will leave thick clumps of mud from my apartment down to the garage


Apparently the cleaner doesn’t like seeing clumps of mud that has fallen off shoes. If I was a cleaner I’d be happy. I’d ask if they want to increase the frequency of my visits, or alternatively I would ask for a shoe brush to be placed at the front door, so that people may clean their shoes before coming in.


Of course, in the 21st century shoes never get muddy because they are worn from the car park, for the walk and back. People never go for muddy walks without the car so they never have muddy shoes by the time they get home. By that time their shoes, and the mud has dried, and fallen off inside the car.


It is absurd that someone would go for a walk straight from home. Who in their right mind would do something so quaint and old fashioned. I write this as a joke, but also with seriousness. If people did go for walks from home, rather than taking their cars, walking paths would be more prominent, and easier to find.


It’s only during the pandemic that paths were worn out from villages and back in. During the pandemic people went for local walks, especially during lockdown. Now that people have their freedoms to burn petrol to go for a 40 minute walk, away from home, they do. People haven’t learned not to use their cars for everything.


I don’t make stairwells and halls muddy on purpose. I make them muddy because it’s hard to walk locally, without using a car, without walking where it’s muddy. If everyone was like me then you would need those taps and grates, like you see at football stadiums, where shoes can be brushed clean before going indoors. That will be my next purchase. I really need such a brush.


Puddles and rain would do the same, but for some reason, despite the ground being wet and muddy it never rains at a time, to prevent me from going for a walk.


A Call for More Cycling and Walking Paths

A Call for More Cycling and Walking Paths

Byrichard

I walk or cycle almost every day across five or six villages per walk, and more on bikes. During these walks and bike rides I see that there is a chronic lack of safe walking and cycling routes, if you want to go for any distance. Almost every village has five, six or more roads in and out of it, but there are no safe walking or cycling routes


We hear about how people want to make cities more cycle friendly but there is a problem in the countryside. If you want to walk from most villages to most other villages you need to walk along roads where nothing is in place for walkers. You are forced to walk into muddy fields, long wet grass and more.


I frequently have cars at 70-80km/h passing me, more often than not they do not deflect to the opposite lane, to pass safely. They drive at 80km/h half a meter from you. This is deeply unpleasant, and in a time of global warming awareness, and environmental consideration this must change.


Walking between villages, to avoid using the car, and to enjoy what the local landscape has to offer, shouldn’t be an unpleasant and scary experience. I say scary but it’s actually anger. Anger that car drivers show no empathy for cyclists and walkers, that if a person walks along a road they are an idiot for doing so.


Thousands of hours have been spent discussing how to make cities more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists but in my experience that is not where the problem lies. That’s just where it’s most attractive to talk about.


The place where we should resolve the lack of pedestrian and cycling routes is the countryside because that is where it is pleasant and rational to walk. The routes I walk are seven to ten kilometres. If I walk where it is safe for pedestrians I’d be walking two kilometre routes. That’s too short. Every village and town should be connected by safe walking, and cycling paths. If they have the space for four roads then at least one should be for pedestrians and cyclists only.


I often cycle and walk along agricultural roads but in my experience they are more dangerous than roads, because cars overtake unsafely. They squeeze you off the road, they don’t bother to slow down. They just force their way through, and if they hear you yell abuse at you, they threaten to beat you up.


“Oh, but you shouldn’t yell at strangers”. I argue from the other angle. Stop making pedestrians feel unsafe, by the way you drive. The more you walk along roads, and the more you cycle, the more toxic the behaviour of drivers becomes. Scuba diving is considered an extreme sport, and so is climbing. I am beginning to think that walking and cycling between villages and towns is an extreme sport too. If you’re a cyclist you often feel cars pass too close and too fast. Drivers rarely slow down, and despite no traffic coming from the opposite side, they insist on squeezing us.


I do have one trick, when cycling. Turn around regularly and keep fixing cars. I have found that if I behave as if I am a scared, paranoid cyclists cars slow down, and give more space. It’s tiring and boring to do, but it does drastically affect my sense of safety.


What I want is not complicated. I want farm roads to ban cars. I also want paths to be built that connect every single village to every other village, so that pedestrians can walk safely from one to the other, without walking along roads. I want it to be pleasant to walk as pedestrians, or cycle, from every village or town, to every other village or town.


We need to encourage people to feel safe to walk from village A to village B, without being endangered by discourteous drivers. We need to make drivers walk by the road side, to experience what it feels like to have a car coming towards them at 80 km/h. We need car drivers to show empathy towards cyclists, and walkers, hikers and more. We need to change the culture that pedestrians and cyclists have no right to use roads.


I would cycle more, if it wasn’t an extreme sport.

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Moving Sugar Beet

Byrichard

For a few weeks you see piles of sugar beet at one end, or another of fields. They stay that way for a while, until it rains for some reason. When it rains those piles of beet are loaded into hundreds of tractor trailer loads and transported to the train yard. The closest to Nyon is in Eysins.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BbmPT3Ut9A&feature=youtu.be
A tractor lifting a trailer to unload sugar beet into a machine to load train wagons.


During this time you see two things. Tractors going back and forth from the fields to the loading yard all day long filled with sugar beet and muddy roads. I don’t know whether they wait for the rain to clean the sugar beets before moving them, or if the wagons just happen to be free when the rain falls. In either case the roads around this train stop are covered in mud. It’s dangerous for scooters and bikes at this time of year.


Sometimes you see six to eight tractors with their loads parked with a sheet of paper with “25m3” or some other reading. Apparently the farmers drive their tractors to be unloaded and seem to leave them there either because it’s lunchtime, or because they are waiting for the train or loaders to get more wagons ready.


It would be interesting to pick up one or two sugar beets that fell by the side of the road during transport and try to process the beets to make sugar.


I walk almost every day, and by walking I see the seasonal changes in fields, and the different stages of different plants. We can all get in cars, drive for an hour, and walk for an hour but I prefer to walk locally, to see local seasonal changes, and to avoid spending money on petrol. I also like to reduce my carbon footprint, by driving less.


That’s it for now.

The Season of Muddy Shoes

Byrichard

We are in a pandemic and I like to walk away from people. To do so I need to walk along muddy paths by the sides of roads, motorways and fields. In the process my shoes get covered in mud and I need to find ways of removing that mud.


The challenge isn’t with dry mud, because that’s easy. Run down some stairs and the mud that was on your shoes will be on the stairs, and the shoes will be clean. The drawback is that neighbours and cleaners hate this, apparently. Enough to complain about it but not enough to put something to clean shoes by the entrance to the building. We’re not in 1901, we’re in 2022. Who still walks in muddy fields today?


So far I have tried walking with a flathead screwdriver to remove the mud, short sticks to pick at the mud at the end of the walk, a running tap and even puddles. All of these work to some degree but they’re annoying.


This year I am trying a new strategy. Crocs. Crocs are mediocre light shoes that are light to carry, but that you can also leave in the garage, or even carry with you, without too much inconvenience. Walk down to the front door, change to the good shoes, and hide the crocs in the post box, your bag, or with the bikes. When you finish the walk change into the crocs, attempt to rinse the shoes under a tap and head up.


If there was a good doormat on the floor I could remove the mud in seconds, rather than spend time thinking of innovative solutions. I wish everyone walked in mud. I wouldn’t stand out then.

Quechua MH900 Shoes

Byrichard

People who walk as much as me wear through shoes within a few months. The soles that were deep and ridged when new, become smooth as we walk, and wear away the soles. Usually I know that shoes are new, or that they need replacing the same way. They start to cause blisters, and I feel that stones are starting to be felt through the soles.


These shoes stand out from others because they are waterproof almost to the top of the shoe, so as long as lake waves are small you’re fine. I tried on the lake, but with a speed boat passing seconds before, I didn’t insist. I tested in the blue shower by the lake to see the result. They performed as expected.



Usually we would put shoes on, and walk once or twice, down the aisle, to see if they were comfortable, but this time I took a liberty, I walked around decathlon with two or three pairs of shoes, to see which ones I liked most. This is a worthwhile. If you forget you’re wearing the shoes you’re trying on, then that’s a good sign. That’s how I chose these over two other shoes I tried on.


According to the marketing content they are meant to be comfortable for walking 20 kilometres a day, 6hrs a day. I haven’t put them through that test, due to recent rainfall.


Testing waterproofing


It feels childish, to put a shoe in a basin of water like I did in the photo above. It confirms your expectations of how waterproof a shoe is. Now that I have confirmed my suspicions, I can walk through puddles, without fear of getting socks wet. With these shoes, the problem is rain seeping in through the trousers and socks, rather than through the fabric. They also have “gaiter” although I would call it a gaiter, to keep stuff out.


With time, we will see if I like them more than other shoes.

Playing With Harmonicas

Byrichard

During a walk a few weeks ago I came across L’Harmonica pour les nuls, Harmonica for Dummies, so I picked up the book and within a day or two I had ordered a harmonica to learn the instrument. The harmonica is a small versatile instrument. that can be used to play a range of music.


The greatest advantage with harmonicas is that it fits within a pocket. It takes very little space and can theoretically be taken anywhere. Despite what I thought about harmonicas the book is quite big. It’s over 300 pages.


I play a few minutes a day and I found some online lessons in the form of videos and more. I have spent a lot of time while cooking just playing with the harmonica, rather than playing the harmonica. I got used to the feel. I got used to the sound. I eventually learned to play individual notes. It takes time to learn.


I had a good studying routine before this summer but it has been destroyed by the summer months. When winter comes back I will be back to my healthy routine and I will progress with all of my projects, instead of stalling like I have. I went from studying three to four hours a day, between programming and harmonica to one or two hours, sometimes even less.


I don’t like the pandemic. I don’t like not being able to socialise with single people. I don’t like that the risk of COVID is always hanging over us. I want the pandemic to be over, so that I can socialise doing the things I enjoy, rather than doing things with people that remind me of what I don’t have.


I hate pandemic summers, and weekends. I long for the pandemic to end and to go back to doing group activities.


Too many people live in denial. Too many people behave as if the pandemic was over. It isn’t. The statistics show this very clearly. For over a year I didn’t worry about catching COVID because I was self-isolating and wearing a mask around people. This week I started worrying again. If I was going to get COVID it is during summer


I prefer self-isolation and solitude to being with couples who don’t understand what living through a pandemic as a single person is like.


I am fatigued by the pandemic but playing the Harmonica, rollerblading, cycling, studying and more help me regain my mental health. People drain it.

A Storm Warning

A Storm Warning

Byrichard

Today I see that there is a nice storm warning. Storm warnings, during a heatwave are nice because it means that despite the heats we will have a short fun reprieve. I hope for thunder and lightning. There is every chance that the anticipated storm will not happen. We can sit and hope. This type of storm brings with it a risk of hail.


The number of cases by district.


For a better idea of the pandemic situation in Vaud we can look at this data. It is updated regularly. I am tired of people’s attitude to this pandemic. I am tired of people not being worried by it. Furthermore, I am tired of politicians not being fearful of what would happen to their job if they were responsible for thousands of disabled or dead people. I am tired of the pandemic not being taken as seriously as it should.


I would love for Europe and the US to take the same attitude as Asian countries, of being humble enough to wear masks, forward-thinking enough to avoid crowds, and conscientious enough to avoid spreading the virus.


I finished the async section of the course I am following and have now moved onto modules. I am getting closer and closer to the end of this course and that feels good. As much as I enjoyed this course at the beginning, I am now looking forward to having another teacher to listen to.


I might cycle in the next half hour or so. The wind is calm, for now.

Playing With VIM

Byrichard

For a while I liked playing with VS Code but I grew tired of it because it autocompletes everything, to the extent that you end up deleting rather than writing code. For a while I was playing with Atom but Github have decided to retire that application so I decided to look for an alternative and that’s when I came across VIM once more.


Through modern eyes VIM looks like a simple, featureless app but if you dig beneath the surface then you see that it is a fully featured IDE, just waiting to be woken up, part by part.


One of the unique selling points of VIM is that it is designed for a mouseless workflow. It is designed so that, for a touch typist, they can work at the speed of thought, rather than the speed of their IDE, mouse, arrow keys and more.


You have a command mode, where you move around with the hjkl keys. These are familiar to editors (JKL for rewind, pause, play) (at various speeds).


There are three key modes. Command, Insert and visual. You switch by typing i or v to go from command to insert or visual, and escape to revert to command mode. I find it fiddly and it does require for me to be focused but I can see how such a tool would be fun to use in the near future. I want to become fluent with it for two reasons. The first is that I like a challenge, and I feel that by learning this IDE I will be a better coder because I will be ready to work on any machine and two, because by not helping me as much, the code is encouraging me to think critically about the code I write, and how it is structured.


If the IDE does all the work for me then I am just assisting it, but I want the situation to be reversed. I want to be assisted by the software. I want to understand what I, and it, are doing. I also want to know that if I am asked a question in an interview I can answer, at least theoretically, about how to resolve a task.


And Finally


In the 90s educational systems said that I had terrible hand writing so someone suggested that I use a computer so I did. At the time I used Word Perfect, a DOS based word processor, where you had keyboard shortcuts functions keys and more. Many of the features that we find in VIM remind me of the functionality I knew of when using WordPerfect. Wordperfect dates back to 1979. That’s it for now.

A Field Filled With a Multitude of Flowers

A Field Filled With a Multitude of Flowers

Byrichard

Plenty of yellow, some purple and other types of flowers in a field nearby


The pandemic continues. People continue suggesting to do things in the physical world but I find little to no desire to be in close proximity to others, The only moment I am, is when I am cycling.


Today I didn’t bother wearing a mask to recycle, not because I didn’t have it with me but because there were no people around. This proves that when the pandemic is over and that risks are minimal, I will resume normal life, without a mask at all times.


I can keep dreaming of that day.

A Weekend Walk During a Pandemic

A Weekend Walk During a Pandemic

Byrichard


Today I went for my daily walk and I saw a shape. I thought, “That looks like a fox” and as I approached i had a doubt about it being a dog and I felt fear but I continued forward anyway. Eventually the fox noticed me, looked at me and then fled the other way. This is good news. This means that the fox was healthy, rather than rabied. It also means that I can keep being relaxed about seeing foxes.


Plenty of flowers in a field


At this time of year fields are filled with flowers by the thousands and if you walk around the right fields you hear the buzzing of bees. I didn’t hear them today. Summer heat seems to be back now. The thermometer is going up to 26 to 27 degrees. Warm enough to cycle in shorts and not feel cold. This is a nice time of year for such sports. I have cycled 100 kilometres so far and tomorrow I expect to add another 20 to 30 kilometres so I will have reached my pre-pandemic goal for the first time in two or three years. I haven’t cycled seriously since I broke my arm.


I have now completed 50 percent of The Complete JavaScript Course so I am finally closer to the end than the beginning of this course. I feel that I am learning new and interesting things, as well as consolidating knowledge about other topics. What I am learning about JavaScript can be found here. This is sorted by learning, rather than projects. I keep this as a notebook rather than a repository for others to use. When I am confident about the projects I am working on I will share them in an organised manner.


Coquelicots, and the Alps