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Stormy Skies Near Nyon
The weather was finally dynamic today. The storm warnings were flashing towards Hermance, on the French side of the lake. This gave a nice contrast between the yellow of the Colza fields and the dark threatening clouds behind.
At moments I thought that rain would begin to fall but luckily the doppler radar, and my instincs were correct, so I did not get drenched in rain or pelted with hail. At one point it did feel as though hail could be a possibility.
In the last week or two I have cycled around 150 kilometres, which isn’t bad. It could be better but single rides are around 49 kilometres. Once the ride was 49 kilometres but I saw that I could easily get an extra few meters to make it 50 so I made the effort. The second time I skipped.
My only trips into Geneva this year have been by bike, but only up from the lake, up the Via Appia and then back towards Vaud. No stops in Geneva itself so far. We are still in a pandemic and I am not going to play Pandemic Roulette, as I like to call it. I am not taking risks that are not worth taking.
If you are so inclined you can now listen to Germinal as podcasts via France Culture. Each episode is 28 minutes long so easy to slot into your day, either commuting or doing other things.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time reading swiss news, to keep up with current affairs. Now that the Swiss government has decided to pretend that the pandemic is over I have stopped reading the RTS info site. There is not much value when they do not provide relevant news and information.
I will update this blog erratically because it’s hard to know when I will or will not be inspired. Today’s blog post is mainly as an excuse to share photographs.
TimeTagger and Christmas
It’s the twenty fourth today, and people who have been good will soon get things, and those who haven’t will get a lump of coal. Given enough pressure that coal could become a diamond. At such a time it’s interesting to take stock of how productive, or unproductive the year has been. One tool with which to do this is timetagger. Timetagger is either a free app, if you set it up on a local machine, or a paying app if you use a cloud services version.
What makes this app interesting is that it allows you to keep track of tasks by title, and tags. Imagine that you’re writing a blog post. You can use writing, blogging and relevant terms to make finding all time spent working on a specific topic quick and easy.
Resume
An interesting feature of this app is that if you work on a task, and then get interrupted to make coffee or for a fire drill you can pause the activity, and then return and set a second start time. You can count the same task and keywords more than once. If you have a task that you do on a regular basis this saves time.
Simple to Use
To start tracking you press play. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at yesterday or another day. It will automatically start “today”. You then press stop and you’re done.
At the end of the day, week, month or quarter you can see a report for specific tags in isolation, or relevant tags. It’s quick and easy to use.
So far I have tracked twenty hours but by this time next year I will have tracked several hundred. I find that by using this server based app I don’t kill the battery on my phone as fast as before. I start the timer and know precisely what I have been working on. I know by title and tags.
If you’re tracking for yourself then you can add as many tags as you want, but if you’re tracking for a client then avoid using more than one tag, unless requested to use more. I experimented with reports and you can select to see all “linux” time, but you also see secondary tags. This might look less professional if you use this app to track time spent professionally.
If you’re working as a freelancer you can use the name of a client as the tag and log the time you arrive, and the time you leave. Even if you don’t need to give a time sheet you can double check it to make sure that the hours are correct.
A To Do Variant
For a while I was playing with To Do apps. You give yourself tasks that you have to complete on a daily, weekly or other basis and you just tick that you did it. Time tracking is taking the To Do list a step further. You’re actually tracking the time that you spend on a task, daily fo weeks or months at a time. It’s important to account for the time you spent, not just what you did.
It’s a good habit to have, whether you’re being paid to track or not. If you get into this habit, in your free time it will be able to do this automatically when you can justify your hours. This app only allows you to track one activity at a time. You can start a second activity but it will pause the first. You can’t track “Time spent in the office”, and then “time spent on a sub task”, at the office.
Self Hosting vs Paid Solution
Self hosting is free but you need to configure the app, and make it accessible when you’re away from the server. With paid solution, for three francs per month you have access from anywhere.
And Finally
With this app you can track the time you spend filming an event, and then you can track the time you spend ingesting footage, logging and more. You can track the time you spend editing and then the time you spend exporting the video files. You can then track time spent on modifications. The application is highly modular and you can start and stop timers with ease, and tag tasks.
The beauty of self-hosting on your local network is that the data is private. No one can use it, other than you, and those you hand reports to. Other solutions may use AI and other tools to quantify the data you give them.
With TimeLogger you could track “learning Linux” or “Learning German”. With this you can track “learning ‘irgendwie’, ‘irgendwo’, ‘irgendwas'” and more. It’s as modular as you want it to be.
Another Pandemic Weekend Without Plans
Normally at this time of year, as the snow melts and the temperatures increase the opportunity for spring and summer sports returns. These sports are via ferrata, outdoor climbing, hiking and more. This year is different because although today is Friday no plans have been made for the next two days. There is a excellent chance that I will either hike or cycle alone. Usually I avoid cycling on Saturdays because that is the day when people are anxiously driving between their homes and their shops.
Walking feels like the safer option on such days. It’s usually on Sundays that I like to go for a bike ride, to range a little further than when I am on foot, and to enjoy different sensations. During this pandemic my favourite route is not possible because it crosses the Franco Swiss Border in two places and I prefer to avoid crossing the border unless it is essential.
At the moment the prospect of everyone being vaccinated, and of everyone being able to meet in groups of ten to fifteen to do via ferrata, hike or climb seems unlikely. It would seem that this is another year of relatively solitary sports. Hiking and cycling are good solitary sports because we often go at our own speeds anyway. These are also sports with almost no carbon footprint. You just walk out of your house and enjoy.
Scuba Diving, Climbing, Via Ferrata and other sports sometimes require a two or more hour drive to go to and come back from the activity location. With cycling and local hiking you burn no petrol, except for the rubber soles of your shoes but those wear out quite slowly. We’re speaking grams, rather than litres.
During my walks I often visit the old phone boxes that have been converted into libraries. I browse through the books. Some villages have a good selection of free access books. No one has thought to block access to them during the pandemic.
If I wrote a blog post for every walk or bike ride at the moment it would either be a clockwise or an anti-clockwise loop that always begins and ends in the same place. The main change are the crops, the animals and people I see, and the weather.
Yesterday I did meet someone in the physical world, for a walk, and I came to the conclusion that I much prefer to meet people for bike rides. The problem with walking with people during a pandemic is that you don’t have the freedom to walk into a field or patch of grass as you’re walking “with a person” rather than alone. You’re also working on set paths.
I like to walk along roads and other paths, and I like to change route as soon as I see people come the other way, or to climb up an embankment, or to choose a path between two fields. When I walked in Geneva yestreday I decided to take off my mask because I thought that there would be an opportunity to always be two or more metres from people but this wasn’t the case. If I was alone I would have put the mask on. In this context I didn’t feel as free to do so.
Cycling, during a pandemic, in contrast is excellent. The first reason for this is simple. You’re going at 20 to 30 kilometres per hour so whatever you breathe in or out is going to be diluted into the turbulence that is behind you. The second reason is that you’re on a road or path and the pedestrians you encounter are close for just a second or two, not even two breaths.
The other advantage is that you’re on some type of agricultural or normal road and there are usually not that many people on the same path so it provides us with greater freedom. People are cautious of bikes, but not of other pedestrians. Being on a bike makes us safe.
During my walks I often see people on bikes. Today I was surprised to see three women riding alone. Usually it’s two or three guys at a time, riding together and talking. It makes a nice change. Having said this the conditions today were unpleasant for cycling, a cold strong wind. These are the right conditions to make cycling cold and tiring.
I hope that Sunday will be good for cycling.
How far will we cycle in pandemic solitude? We will have to see.
The Day Switzerland and Denmark Decided to Ignore the Pandemic. This Isn’t Freedom, This is Exposure.
Today is the day that Switzerland and Denmark decided to ignore the pandemic. They and other European countries have decided to lift quarantines, remove the need to work remotely and other such safety measures. Health indicators shows that there is a consistent rise in new cases in Switzerland and Denmark. They say it’s over but the graphs and data show that it is not.
Switzerland says that since 90 percent of the population has been exposed to the virus there is no need to worry anymore. Several governments have just decided to wash their hands of the pandemic. This moment is insane. It makes no rational sense to just decide that a pandemic is over like this. I think it will come back to haunt these leaders. I want them to be held responsible for their decisions, several months or years down the line.
This is a frustrating moment because it means that Covid-zero could be years or even decades ago. Going to cinemas, to restaurants, to bars, to indoor events will always carry an inherent risk of danger. This isn’t like the risk of flu or a cold. This is a new disease that the current generation of politicians have decided to live with, rather than eradicate. Remember that the Romans drained the swamps of Rome to get rid of Malaria, so there is no valid reason for 21st century leaders to do the same with Covid-19.
This moment doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense that politicians would choose to let people fall sick, rather than prevent it. It doesn’t make sense that they aren’t losing their jobs. If the 737 Max had its issues today, would anyone bother to investigate it or would planes have been allowed to continue to crash due to that issue with trim that was eventually fixed.
As a media student I have to ask, has the media landscape and the Fourth Estate, become so superficial that politicians, can act or fail to act, in impunity, without consequences for their actions or inactions. England, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and one or two other countries seem to have no Fourth Estate, to keep politicians accountable. It feels as if the Fourth Estate is failing in its democratic role, of keeping government transparent.
People are angry with what is happening. They feel that they have been failed by their governments. They feel that the governments could and should have done more during this pandemic to keep people safe.
That’s why I would like for leaders, during this pandemic, to be investigated for Human Rights violations. The right to health is in the UDHR and other documents. The Right to Health for Children is in the Charter for the Rights of Children. The pandemic isn’t over by a long shot, but in the meantime investigations should be mounted to investigate whether leaders behaved immorally, and if so to hold them to account.
We can’t control a pandemic, but we can control how we react to it once we have more information.
I just noticed that the idiots have used freedom day:
Les milieux économiques demandent un retour à la situation ordinaire. “La Suisse doit apprendre à vivre avec le virus, sans que les droits fondamentaux garantis par la Constitution ne soient restreints de manière disproportionnée”, avancent-ils, proposant à nouveau un “Freedom Day” (jour de liberté, où toutes les mesures seront levées).
The Freedom Day they speak of is not a freedom day. It is a day to ignore the danger posed by the virus, to risk an inordinate amount of people, to fall sick from Covid-19 at once.
From one day to the next the government has decided the pandemic is over. This isn’t a war. This is a pandemic. You don’t just sign a peace treaty with a virus. The virus will continue to pick us off until moral leaders decide to eradicate it.
I will conclude today’s post by saying that I am sad. I am sad that the government has failed us since June 2020 until today, and that as of today it has decided just to ignore the danger, rather than protect the society it is responsible for. I am sad that there is no end in sight for this pandemic, and I am sad that we have little hope of a normal life, unless we choose to ignore the risk. This isn’t freedom. This is exposure.