Port of Nyon in Winter
The picture above was done with an iphone and the autostitch application. To produce this type of photograph the process is simple. You take a series of pictures with the Iphone camera before going to the autostitch application. You select the photographs that you want stitched together and click the stitch button. The application will then find objects within the photograph before combining them into one panoramic shot.
Once the image is processed you have the option of either saving the picture as it is or cropping it to remove the edges hence giving this type of result.
During the short period when we had the “Siberian weather”. many people went over to Versoix to look at the frozen lake and the beauty revealed as ice and wind played with stillness to form nice creations. These pictures were taken between Bellevue, Versoix and the Port de Crans.
I particularly like the ice globs that have formed on the reeds.
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Self-Sacrifice and Pandemics are intimate friends. In order for a pandemic to end we must learn to do without things that we need. We go without meeting friends for months, we go without hugs or handshakes for months. We go without restaurants, bars, cafés or cinemas for months. We go without needing the internal combustion for days at a time.
I mention all of these things looking at the past 76 days. Yesterday I had my first human to human contact in that many days. Today I shook my first hand. Between yesterday and today I transitioned from being two or more meters from people at all times to being close. I went into homes that were not my own.
For those who were not alone in self-isolation this might seem uninteresting but for many of us, who live in solitude, is a big step towards post-pandemic life. We can return to being within society, rather than on its outskirts. We don’t need to be distant and cold.
Of course the two meter rules are still in effect, but in two specific contexts I have let the rules slide for family.
Although I didn’t make much fuss about the return to cycling this was a big step towards post-pandemic life. During the pandemic, I did not cycle because I wanted to reach only places that I could reach within an hour to an hour and a half of walking. By cycling, I decided the rule was no longer needed. My range of places to go, and experiences to have expanded.
During the pandemic people went on 80km rides, and I could have done the same, but I sacrificed because I believed that the cost to society would be too high, if I was infected and spread it, or if the opposite happened.
Yesterday someone spoke about feeling uncomfortable saying no to meeting friends during the pandemic after I had done the same. My reasons for not meeting those friends were:
The emotional cost of this was huge, because I really did need to be sociable for the first time in over 70 days and I couldn’t, because couples who were not lonely and in solitary confinement went together anyway.
If you were not alone with yourself for seventy plus days then you cannot understand. As a joke I started to say that I was a pandemic hermit because of the self-isolation.
So far during the pandemic the furthest I have driven is to the top of a mountain. I can get there within fifty five minutes so that shows how close it was. For sixty to seventy days I never crossed the Canton/state lines. I still haven’t been into a city.
The Brits got angry with Cummings for the road trip and I do understand that anger. I felt it when I saw people do touristy things at the peak of the pandemic in Switzerland. It made me angry that I self-sacrificed whilst they went on as normal, and it made me angry because of their apathy towards other people and the rules.
In a pandemic we must all sacrifice, and behave as a united society because solidarity is important, but also because the more seriously people take lockdown rules the sooner a pandemic is over. The less self-sacrificing people are, the more drawn-out the pandemic lasts.
The pandemic is still not over, but at least those of us who were in solitude for over two months can re-emerge and re-integrate society, one small step at a time.
Laptop backups are an integral part of my daily routine. I backup to the cloud with crashplan as well as to an external hard drive. I also back up files as they are every few days or weeks so that if a drive fails I have at least one or two backups. In some cases I have more backups.
Recently I was backing up the files from my most recent mac book pro because I noticed that the mouse was starting to fail every so often. When this happened on other mac book laptops it meant that the battery was starting to fail and to inflate. The battery was in a critical state so I expected it to fail and to take it to the apple store. I created a login just so that the Apple Maintenance team could fix it without having to log in to my main profile.
A few days ago I took this machine to Geneva to collaborate on a project. We didn’t work much so I left the computer in a room, out of view and where I expected very little people traffic. After half an hour or so I decided to go and recover my laptop bag. When I arrived I saw the flask next to it. When I lifted the laptop bag it felt stupidly light. I checked the bag and the tables around. No sign of the laptop. The machine I had backed up just minutes before going to Geneva was stolen. I reported it to the location where I was and within fourty minutes I reported it to the police.
I am really happy with the Swiss Police. Within fourty minutes the crime is reported and you can get on with preparing insurance details. A few years ago when I was mugged I was told to “come back tomorrow.”
I have been going to conferences, events, universities, schools and offices with my laptops for close to 20 years without a single theft. It’s ironic that it was stolen from a place where I have seen dozens of laptops unattended over the weeks. I should have left it in a room with a lot of people.
For another perspective and point of view: Benefits of Unlimited Cloud Backup for SMBs
In an age where mobile video streaming is cheap in comparison to the past it’s a shame that youtube do not showcase this technology and have three hundred people streaming from one city for example. Why is it that they chose to cover live music events instead.
Of course music is cheap to cover, excluding rights issues. Get three or four cameras in a room to cover the action on stage, two or three more cameras backstage and you’ve got a program, That’s not all though. It’s something you can rehearse. The singers do their sound checks, the vision mixers and directors know the music, know the cues. Everything can be well orchestrated. The production will be flat and boring.
The BBC stopped top of the pops and now you’ve got Youtube doing live music programs. Of course it’s a different program, of course it’s a different technology, but of course it’s just one more step on the trip towards a different age of television.
I love new media and new technology but I wish they would do something more creative with their time. Look at Autumn watch for example. Camera crews went to beautiful landscapes to cover the wildlife. They even broadcast whilst scuba diving. They use the website as an addition and they’re doing some outdoor event. That’s what we need more of.
In an age where everyone walks around with a video camera, whether flip, mobile phone or other so the broadcaster, especially when it comes to entitities like youtube, should reflect their user’s method of covering the world. They should get out of the studio and get twenty cameras in a city, and cover everything that’s going on in real life, nothing setup. Just capture life as it happens.
If that’s too boring then do some research, see of a live event that you could cover, whether it’s a car show where you’ve got lot’s of drifting, a festival where you’ve got hundreds of things happening at once or a ski resort where you’ve got snowboarders, skiers and other activities taking place.
You could have cameras at the telesièges, at the teleski, you could have some at the summit and some on the other side of the valley filming as people ski down. You could have dynamic cameras.
Just get out of that studio and give us something that’s not an advert for someone’s latest single. That’s just dull.
When you like to control the information that is available to you through feedreaders the one that I have found most useful is google reader. It allows you to navigate using keyboard shortcut keys rather than the mouse. As a result you are able to navigate more effectively through the sometimes hundreds of posts.
For a while now, about three years, I’ve been looking for an app that gives us the convenience of google reader whilst on mobile devices. For a while I had the N95 and ipod touch, the ipod touch and the miniS and now the Iphone and N97.
The problem I kept having is with keeping everything up to date on all the devices. I didn’t want to read through twenty articles on a mobile device only to have to wade through the same articles a second time when I arrived back at the main computer I use for content processing.
That’s where MobileRSS for the Iphone and ipod touch comes into it’s own. It is a simple, intuitive way to go through your google reader feeds whilst mobile. Select the view you want, whether using “show new” or “show all”. Show all will give you several thousand posts along with all the key words you’ve added, something that is not so easy to manage.
The “Show new” tab however is great. When I pick up the phone and update all my feeds it gives me all of the new posts in an easy to process format. I have the option to view all feeds if I desire or to see each feed one at a time.
As you know some information sources like to post dozens of posts a day whilst others like to post just one or two a day. Those that post once or twice a day are usually the first ones I’ll read. This is because they’re more specialised, more thought out posts. As a result they’re more relevant.
There are two three ways to navigate through the content. The first is by selecting the list view. You see the headlines you want to read. In the second view you can read article by article and click the up or down icons to get to the previous or next posts. You can also drag the article from the one you’re reading to the next one. This speeds up the process by minimising the number of button presses.
When I am reading each article I can add notes, keep unread, star, share or even send it to to a number of other places. As a result I can share the articles I find of interest according to the way I think other people prefer to share.
The options for sharing are email/facebook/twitter/readitlater/instapaper and delicious. This means that I can share content within seconds, rather than minutes, anywhere I am, whether in a traffic jam or waiting to pay for the day’s shopping.
Another advantage is that it’s always on. Whether I have wifi or 3g I have access to all of the latest articles. I’d recommend using it. See whether it makes information gathering and sharing easier for you too.