You need to sign up to participate and an e-mail is enough. They want your name and address, to know whether you have your own equipment or whether you need to rent and whether you have already tried via ferrata before. Now that I signed up I am looking forward to the new sensation.
This is a via ferrata I have done when it was cloudy, when it was about to rain, with maintenance crew and with friends. I know it well. I look forward to experiencing it in yet another way.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the recycling centre is open from 1600-2000 or so, which is great if you’re working and want to go after work. The drawback to going at this time is that the one for local villages is down a narrow road where cars can barely pass each other. If you go at rush hour traffic you have commuters, and you have people heading to recycle.
When I had the scooter I would often go with that, because with a scooter it’s easy to go down a narrow road despite cars coming towards you. In a car you need to be careful that the mirrors on your car don’t hit the car coming the opposite way. There are two issues. The first is that the road was narrowed to slow down traffic. The second is that a road that should have no commuter traffic does have commuter traffic. Ideally this would be a one way road system.
If I go at 8 in the morning on a Saturday I miss the rush hour commuters, and I also miss all the people who can’t find the motivation to head to a recycling centre at 8 on a saturday morning. I used to be one of those people. I changed because I found that traffic is more fluid and because it’s quieter.
I find it hard to motivate myself to go and recycle. If it’s raining I use that as an excuse. If it’s sunny I use that as an excuse. If I have just finished my walk as it opens I use that as an excuse not to go.
I have been recycling for two or three decades or more, so the process of sorting recycling is normal. I’ve been recycling glass, aluminium, electronics, grass, paper and other things for a long time. It’s an ordinary part of life. It’s taking things to recycle that I find annoying. That’s why I wait until the car is full to go. I feel that it makes more sense to go when the journey is justified, rather than weekly.
I have started to keep recycling by the car. In so doing the excuse of having to run up and down stairs 3-6 times to take things from home to the car is taken care of. I just need to load the car and go. It’s important to remove key excuses.
I could take my walking loop by the recycling centre but people tend to mount the pavement where I’d be walking. I prefer not to go there by foot. The other option is to recycle things on the mornings when I shop. I could easily turn up five to ten minutes early, recycle some things, and shop.
I have a modular system. If you order things from online shops or other online stores you get boxes. I use these boxes to store PET bottles, glass and more. I wait until they’re full, and then I place them by the car. It’s my way of recycling cardboard boxes, before recycling them. If I use plastic containers, or paper shopping bags I need to bring them back up, after I’ve been to the recycling centre. By using boxes that need to be recycled anyway I have a convenient, modular system, for trips to recycle.
Although it could be seen as lazy not to go every single week I am one person, not two to four people. I generate half to a quarter of what others produce in recycling so it makes sense to go half, or a quarter as often as others. I also save petrol and wear and tear on the car. By going once every few weeks I help reduce congestion around the recycling centre, especially by going at 8am on a Saturday, when others prefer to sleep.
Recently I have been toying with the idea of removing Google Ads from my site and adding a donation option instead. This escalated, when, yesterday I was seeing ads in the admin panel of my wordpress blog. Ads are disruptive enough for users, with full screen invasive ads that require you to acknowledge the ads, as well as others that take up the lower third of the screen.
These ads bother me so much because they’re impossible to see subconsciously. They’re not passive. They’re invasive. On quite a few sites the ads are so invasive that it interrupts your browsing experience. What makes this so bad is that we choose to give free reign to place ads as Google sees fit, but rather than place discrete ads that are noticed subconsciously they want ads that stop us in our tracks.
Initially ads would be inserted in the blog feed so that every few paragraphs or every few posts you’d see an ad. Now they interrupt your browsing experience on every single page load. Not only do these ads disrupt the browsing experience, and encourage people to browse away from our pages, losing views and interest but they don’t generate any income anyway. We’re bugging people for nothing.
Google is getting the long tail income from all those disruptive ads, and we’re providing a bad user experience to those that browse to our site, rather than read what we write, in feed readers.
Recover Revenue From Ad Blockers
It gets worse. Not only does Google Adsense spam us in our admin panel but it wants us to pester people to turn off ad blockers. People turn ad blockers off in the first place because of how obnoxious they are. If an ad fills your entire screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on. If ads take up almost all the screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on.
I used ad blockers on YouTube because I didn’t want to see a minute of adverts before watching a video for ten seconds before deciding that it’s crap.
A Need for Better Adverts
When I use Twitter I block every advertiser I see. Anyone that advertises on Twitter deserves to be blocked. I hardly use ad blockers because I do want websites to benefit from my visits.
iOS App ads
When I use several iOS games I sometimes watch ads to speed up game progress but in so doing I get frustrated that the ads last for thirty seconds to a minute, and that they’re for spam games, rather than fun games. I call spam games those that require you to watch crappy adverts to progress, and that pay for ads for you to play games that are so awful that they need ads, rather than word of mouth to gain users. Ads are barely ever for something useful or desired, despite “we want to show you personalised ads”.
Looking for Advertisers
I currently write blog posts every single day about a diversity of topics. That I have written daily for 317 days or more should be a selling argument for encouraging brands to pay me directly for placing ads on my blog, rather than taking the easy “Google Adsense” route. If my blog was niche I could target specific brands or companies, but because it varies from day to day I could find a number of advertisers, or ask for donations. It depends on how pro-active, or passive I want to be. Google Adsense was a good option but now it has lost steam.
And Finally
With what I have learned over the last few years I could take control of how Google ads are displayed on my site, to make them less disruptive. It’s simply a matter of taking the time to tweak the layout to display ads in a way that I am content with. If I switch my blog to Hugo then the change is very easy to make. With Wordpress it will take a little more time.
For a few years now I have noticed a worrying trend, one that sees content become so sparse on a web page that you see one tweet or facebook post per screen height.
Before mobile first design, and the proliferation of React websites you would find pages that had twenty to thirty tweets per page. The same is true of Facebook. Now it’s barely one post per screen height. This means that you see one tweet, facebook post, instagram image and more.
I really dislike this trend because Twitter, Facebook and other content heavy websites show one bit of information at a time. You’re forced to look at content individually, before moving on to the next, and the next. We might be in a single page app world, but it’s also a single piece of content. I miss the old way of displaying content, where you could see ten to twenty articles, and choose the one that you find most interesting.
YouTube now shows 6 videos per screen height, compared to 20-30 videos at a time before. This means that if you’re browsing you’re doing so more slowly.
It seems paradoxical that a time when we worry about the energy spent on light or dark screens, we are wasting an enormous amount of power, relatively, to display just one tweet, one post, 6 videos at a time. We are wasting time and energy by designing for mobile phones, without considering that people are browsing on desktops.
It does get worse. Mobile phone screens are huge now, so when you design for mobile first you’re designing to display one tweet on an a 5.5 inch screen. We see less, in 2023 than we did in 2007. We’re wasting space.
Of course there is a clear reason for being so wasteful. It means that people see one advert or influencer post at a time. We’re guaranteed to be forced to see individual pieces of content.
We need to correct this error. We need to provide more content per page, once more. I’m using Day One to type this blog post and this use of screen space is better. We need to design websites so that we see ten more more articles once again. I’m typing this blog post in Day One and I see 30 or more lines of text.
We should see 15-20 tweets and posts per page. Even 8 would be an improvement. A post or tweet should only take up the entire screen when we select it.
And Finally
If people’s attention is measured by how little information you show on a single screen height then Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are awful. Their users are as distracted as kittens on a hike, discovering life outside of an apartment for the first time. We need to stop being so wasteful with website and content design. We need to return to using space more effectively. What is the point of having a screen in dark mode if we display one tweet per screen, before we need to scroll?
First things First, I have had a lot of fun at festivals, and I have volunteered for a few. What I object to is the noise pollution. In the 21st century we could avoid that noise pollution, so we should.
And now for the rant, now that I have told you I like festivals, when they don’t get in the way of other peoples’ desire for silence, for sleep.
As I write this I am in a sleep deprived state because I was unable to sleep according to my circadian rhythm due to a music festival. The sound engineers that work at music festivals are pretty dumb, so they build powerful stacks of speakers that are so loud that you need hearing protection at the music festival, and the surrounding countryside is filled with noise pollution.
I Know, I Know, They Don’t Care.
I know, I shouldn’t insult an entire profession for taking no pride in their work, and not taking any responsibility for the harm they do to the surrounding countryside. They can’t help it. They’re just not very bright.
I write this for catharsis, because for five hours yesterday the music festival upwind from where I live was noisy from 1900 to 0100. I felt like going to sleep earlier as I knew I had to get up early. In the end I failed to get to sleep until an hour or two after the noise pollution ended.
Highly Polluting
Blocked cycle lane, for a music festival
In the 21st century, and given the audience, you would expect music festivals to be environmentally friendly. They boast about “compostable cups” and recycling and more. They then encourage columns of cars to park on crop fields, where, if it rains, or if vehicles are leaking oil, the ground becomes polluted with festival goer hydrocarbons from cars.
The noise pollution is a serious problem. Near Nyon there are two big festivals. Caribama, which is taking place now, and Paléo, next month. Both festivals are filled with altermondalistes who want a greender planet, corporations to be socially responsible, and yet for a week each, these festivals make noise pollution several nights in a row from 1900 until 2 or 3am. For those weeks it becomes challenging to sleep.
Yesterday I had two fans going, at full power and I couldn’t block out the thudding from the bass that the music festival was pumping out. If I had wanted to, I could have listened to the festival for free.
FOMO
Although governments, the Far Right and the media they control have said that the pandemic is over it isn’t. Music festivals were a source of psychological torture because they reminded us that whilst we were self-isolating and trying to avoid long COVID the alcoholics, and less intellectually bright, were getting drunk and enjoying themselves, with no thought or consideration for the impact the substances, sleep deprivation, and long COVID could have on their health.
I Have Volunteered at These Events
I am not against these events, as such. I used to enjoy them as a young adult. It’s as a middle aged “grumpy” man that I hate them. I don’t hate them for what they are, but for their disregard for people’s intimate sphere. I dislike them for their invasion of the private sphere, through noise pollution.
In the 21st century, in the age where we can’t mow lawns between 1230 and 1330, where we can’t vacuum on Sundays and more, why is it socially acceptable to allow such noise pollution until two or three am for a week at a time?
I thought that festival goers wanted a fairer, greener, more responsible world, and yet they pollute fields with parked cars, make it impossible to sleep and more.
Do festival goers not realise the paradox of wanting a fairer world, despite their own selfish behaviour?
Let us sleep. Lower the volume. Be kind and considerate of those that are not participating in your event. Show empathy.
Before the pandemic, when life was normal, I would go to three or four events per week organised via websites. These days, on meetup.com things are organised every two weeks, and for just 15 people at a time. This means that if you’re not first to sign up you’re on a waiting list and you could be social once every few weeks, rather than three times per week. This frustrates me.
There is a simple solution. There is a demand for events to be organised. I recently bought fresh Via Ferrata stuff and may start doing them regularly once again. I want to accertain that I am comfortable with the sport after such a long break, and once this is done I can create my own via ferrata and walking group. I would organise things at least once per week, maybe more.
The biggest nuissance with Meetup.com is that it requires a monthly fee for having a group. The result is that groups are created, run for a bit, and then destroyed to avoid paying for longer. The alternative is to use Facebook but I absolutely hate what Facebook is and what it represents. Every time it abuses of peoples’ trust it and gets caught it never apologises.
I have car and I have three seats. Like I used to do before the pandemic I can pick people up in Nyon, drive them to and from the activity, and when it comes time to say goodbye they can contribute towards petrol and the cost of having a group.
I would never charge people a fee to participate in an activity because that goes against my ethos, but having people pay a fair share towards petrol is the right thing to do. If you don’t charge people for the petrol used, they abuse of our kindness as drivers.
There is an added benefit. The problem with group activities is that when they end people rush to the train, without saying goodbye and I find this really strange. Before the pandemic there would be a stop at a bar to have a drink, and then drive home. In the Pandemic age that stop no longer occurs. I find this to be a shame. At least by driving from Nyon to the via ferrata or hiking location there is a moment for conversation before and after the journey.
I could be like others, and take the same trains as they take but that would increase my costs for participating in events. It also doubles or triples the journey time.
Last week I walked an extra eight kilometres rather than take a train, so it isn’t that I want to use the car. I have spent five or six years doing almost all of my bike rides and walks from home. The point of the car is to expand my range, once again.
And Finally
As I got to the end of this post I noticed that I am included in the hike that I thought was overbooked, and I see that other people are doing a VF at the same time on the same day and now I am torn about which one to do. The beautiful irony.
The old paradox is back. Nothing to do for the entire week, and then two activities to do at the same time.
If you use the weather app on iOS 17 the weather app provides you with information about average temperature and average precipitation. It tells you how different the temperature and rainfall are, compared to average. Today, for example, I see that the temperature is 4°c warmer than the average. It tells me that usually the temperature is 17°c and that the current outside air temperature is 21°c.
For 25 September the normal temperature range is 5° to 21°, and the average high is 17°, today’s high temperature is 21°.
If I look at the average rainfall I can see that it should be 12.9cm rather than 12.6cm.
Historically the average total precipitation from 26 August to 25 September has been 128.5mm. Today, the total for the last 30 days is 125.6mm.
It also gives us the moon phase, the visibility, humidity and more. The current visibility is 27km. Some day they will tell us what the usual visibility is for this time of year, when they collect enough data.
Making Climate Change Visible
With the new weather app Apple is making climate change visible. We have gone from weather apps that tell us what the weather is and will be to what the weather usually is, and how big the difference is, from the norm. We can look at the temperature and rainfall differences. These are two easy to understand metrics. Within a second we can see that the weather is better or worse than it should be.
Comparing Locations
When you look at Chamonix it is 13°c warmer than it should be for this time of year. It is far out of the usual range for this time of year. The difference is 13°c. It’s 22°c and the average temperature should be 9°c. It’s t-shirt weather in Chamonix.
And Finally
With Big Data and AI it is easy for a company like Apple to look at the weather data from several centuries and comment on it, in relation to current conditions. Once per day it can be refreshed to give the current variation between the norm, and the current situation. By giving people this information it allows people to see how serious climate change is, as well as how it affects them personally.
I no longer have to say “it feels like it never rains” and “it feels too warm for this time of year.” The App provides quantitative data, to prove that the opinion, or sentiment, is correct.
This move makes the Apple Weather App more interesting. The Swiss weather app provides similar information but in the form of blog posts written by humans, every few days.
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