Duck Tales
Ducks going out for afternoon tea on the Lac Léman. A mother duck and her ducklings.
Last night I came across the Infomaniak Mail App and began to play with it. It’s a simple app that allows you to read infomaniak mails from their own mail app rather than others. The one thing that I miss is swiping right or left to go to the next or previous messages, but aside from that it work like I would expect an app to work.
The app can be blue or pink, according to your preference. I tried both, and I’m fine with either. It allows you to have a compact, normal or large thread density, to see e-mails more efficiently, or more clearly.
It automatically logged me into two of my three infomaniak e-mails which is practical.
App lock is offered. This allows you to require a thumb or pin to acess e-mails.
You have the option of defining what swipe actions do, in the thread view.
The e-mail client only supports Infomaniak accounts, for now.
To choose between reading all e-mails or just unread e-mails you have the toggle on the top right corner with “99+ unread e-mails”.
It’s nice that after so many years they finally decided to create an e-mail client. It works just as I would expect an e-mail client to work. It provides us with an in-house solution for checking e-mails, rather than relying on Spark and other e-mail clients. Login is also simplified, because infomaniak knows how it deals with it’s own e-mail servers.
The app is now at version 1.0.4, as of four days ago. It was released a month ago.
A few days ago I saw that heavy rain was announced for that afternoon so I thought that I would not go for a walk. In the end I did go for a walk in the heavy rain. I was wearing a reasonable rain coat so I could have stayed dry if I had also worn rain trousers.
I didn’t wear rain trousers so for at least half the walk I was okay. I wasn’t too wet. Eventually though I started walking into the wind and my trousers started to get wet. Usually when you walk in the rain it’s not that your coat fails you. It’s that the clothing that is not protected from the rain whicks the water upwards, from your trousers, to your t-shirt, to your sweater, to your fleece. In the end you’re soaking wet.
By this point you realise that you need to keep walking fast, to keep warm and to prevent yourself from catching a cold. In Wuthering Heights they speak of “catching her death” and in other films or books they speak of being at risk from pneumonia etc. If I stopped walking I was at serious risk of getting cold.
For the entire summer I enjoyed walking in minimalist shoes, but now that the cold weather has come, and due to the rain I have been wearing On Cloud 5 for walking. They’re expensive by my standards, for shoes but they have one advantage over barefoot shoes. They lift you a centimetre or more off of the ground. When there are rivers running down the road you’re walking along it’s good to have thicker soles.
These are not waterproof shoes so they get wet when it’s raining, or if you walk through wet grass. When watching a video on Youtube one hiker said that sometimes he prefers not to wear Gore Tex shoes, because when Gore Tex shoes get wet they take a while to dry, whereas others dry with ease. The On Cloud 5 dry easily.
Another feature, and with someone like me this is a feature, the base of the foot is easy to clean. There are no nodules to trap mud like with other shoes. If I went for a walk in muddy conditions with the trail gloves I would spend half an hour clearing the mud from between every element of tread, before being able to walk into the building. With the other shoes I’m ready to enter within seconds.
The other reason for wearing thicker shoes is that the road surface will now be getting colder, due to the drop in air temperature. It is worth having thicker soles, to insulate myself from the cold ground. Having said this I wore the shoes that would be least annoying to clear of mud.
Recently I was thinking about why I grew so tired of car traffic. One reason is that I lost the freedom to walk in the mud. I lost the freedom to walk along paths that were safe from cars but muddy. In losing this freedom I found myself exposed to car traffic almost constantly when walking along certain routes. When I could walk in the mud I could avoid a bridge where cars don’t slow down, despite pedestrians crossing.
When you can’t travel the muddy path, you’re stuck with the dangerous path, and that dangerous path is fatiguing. By trying not to get muddy shoes I lost my freedom to enjoy the walks that got my shoes caked in mud. Recently I have brushed my shoes with a brush to remove all traces of dirt.
I am so meticulous about having clean shoes that despite the cleaner just mopping the floor I walked along it with wet, but clean shoes, so I left no trace. A day or two later I walked into the building and I saw that other people had left a mess, not me. I still don’t understand why it’s the parents of young children that get annoyed by mud, when they have young children. I find it absurd.
I find it absurd but my shoes are clean and I no longer drop clumps of mud, even after walking for one and a half hours in heavy rain.
And Finally, when heavy rain is falling it tends to clean shoes, as you walk, so the layer of mud that would form, doesn’t, because it’s waterlogged and washed away by the rain. Next time it rains so heavily I will wear rain trousers but I think that the rain will whick up from my shoes to my socks, from my socks to my trousers, and from my trousers to everything else. I should have been like someone else, and worn shorts.
“I don’t need to go for a one and a half hour walk. I said that to a neighbour before my walk. I could have cut it short, if it started to rain too heavily. Paradoxically for most of the walk it was grey and drizzling. Nothing to worry about. I was almost dry for almost the entire walk.
It’s as I walked the last one and a half kilometres that it started to rain heavily. Within a few minutes my trousers were soaked, and within a few more minutes my shoes and socks were soaked. Luckily the walk ended before it started to whick up through my t-shirt. The rain was so strong that when I took off my trousers my legs were soaked, as if I had just come out of the shower. I had. It was a rain shower.
I am fully equipped to walk in the rain for hours if it is required, but according to the doppler radar I did not expect rain. I was wrong. I got wet. I don’t mind. Humans are waterproof.
Yesterday I mentioned that I was studying WPRig. I finished the course. It looks like a very powerful tool to design wordpress themese but I think there is a learning curve and the course, pushed me beyond what I was comfortable with. The next course I’m studying is WordPress: Custom Post Types and Taxonomies and this looks like it will teach me just what I want to know to convert this website to a fully wordpress experience. When the site is ready I will play with permanent redirections before deleting the old pages forever. One more step into modernising this website.
What do you hear and smell when you go for a walk in Vaud at this time of year? You hear the sound of cowbells and you hear the sound of cows mooing. I like the sound of cow bells
A few days ago I could hear mooing from a distance. As I looked across, at an old train station, now used as a house or office I could hear mooing so I crossed the train lines to see where the cows were. They were mooing incessantly. Usually they’re quiet but not this time.
Weeks ago we walked by a plant but we couldn’t recognise it. Within the last two weeks the plants flowered and so we could see that they were cola. Colza are funny plants because they’re so different at every stage. At first they’re just leaves, then they’re taller plants with leaves, and then they turn yellow, and after that they’re yellow and they smell strong. After that it rains and they lose all the petals and they look strange. Eventually they’re harvested. It’s a plant that goes through several transformations. Now you have fields of yellow.
Geographically I am walking in circles but because I walk around in circles where there are crops every walk is different, from week to week and month to month. Recently Garmin Connect added expeditions so I am walking the Appalachian Trail virtually. So far I have covered 423 kilometres of 3500. I’m twelve percent of the way there.
I prefer the Pacer app and how it shows long hikes. I am currently doing the Don Quixote trail and every 35km or so I reach another waypoint, so I get a real sense of distance travelled, rather than an abstract notion of it.
I’m walking through Toledo now, after walking from Alcala de Henares to Madrid and from there to Esquivias before reaching Toledo. I have plenty more cities to cross. That makes the journey interesting.
If it wasn’t for cars that drive too fast, and too close to people on foot and on bikes, the walks I do would be great. There is plenty to see and plenty changes from month to month and season to season. I walk on a segment of the Jura Trail and part of the Camino De Santiago route. Where I walk is not lunacy. It’s part of three or four big hiking systems. If cars were more respectful of pedestrians, and if paths were made into the soil, then walking would be more pleasant.
Between some villages paths that were just grass have been worn away to being short grass, to being dirt paths because of the volume of people walking. If walking was made more pleasant, between villages, then the walks I do would not be lunacy, they would be fun.