Parapente race
Something out of the ordinary.
During the 30,000 step walk at the Creux Du Van on Sunday I was wearing the Xero Xcursion shoes. For almost the entire walk they felt comfortalbe. These are light, thin soled shoes that are minimal. This means that you feel more of the ground, and the soles will take the shape of the floor beneath your feet. Step on a root and you will have your toes putting pressure and the rest of the foot adapting around the route.
With most barefoot shoes I feel the heel smash into the ground so I don’t like wearing them because I don’t like harming myself incidentally. With the Trail Glove Seven and the Xero Xcursion shoes I can walk normally and not feel my heel smashing into the floor with every step. These shoes were fine for the walk up. I didn’t feel any regret in wearing them. On the flat part I didn’t feel any regret either.
I walked through several muddy parts without caring because I knew that by the time I got back to the care the mud would have dried up and fallen off. It fell off during the walk down so when I did check for mud there was none. The other thing that surprised me is that when I walked in muddy patches water did not make its way into the shoes so my feet remained dry. Mud is not the same as heavy rain. These shoes are fine in mud.
It’s on the way down the hill that I noticed slight discomfort. It wasn’t serious discomfort. I could just feel my feet sliding and putting pressure on the inside of the shoe. I have no blisters after the fact so it was just a sentiment. I might wear proper hiking socks just to be safe.
I have been wearing “barefoot shoes for months by now so my walking style has adapted to “being barefoot” with the Trail Gloves. Vapor Gloves, Trail Glove six and the Merrel barefoot shoes I have are not comfortable for long walks. I only find the Trail Glove 7 and Xero Xcursion shoes comfortable. Experiment with shorter walks and normal walks, before doing a 16km hike.
The advantage of minimal/barefoot shoes is that they’re very light. They are not rigid so your foot can adapt to the ground beneath with ease, rather than balancing. For the most part they were so comfortable that I forgot that I wore them. The fact that I could descend with such ease is good. This was a proper test. 30,000 steps and with 900 meters of climbing and 860 meters of descent. I didn’t push through snow because I wasn’t worried about mud. If I had walked in snow I probably would have wet my socks. That’s why I had a spare pair in the car, in case. I would hike again in the Xero shoes.
Due to the lack of rain for a few years, and the lack of opportunities to socialise through sporting activities, I look forward to rain. Yesterday we were lucky. We got an entire day’s worth of rain. I didn’t leave the flat for the entire day and I still slept fine.
Just a few days ago the daily average for new infections per day was 103 per day but it climbed up to 134 or so today. The R-Index went from 0.7 to 1.14 nationally and across Europe the number of new cases is going up again. Governments and civil society don’t mind. If they did then they would put their masks back on and they would continue self-isolating. I see the opposite happening. Regions in Spain that had been green, and relatively clear of infection, are now red. Nightclubs have had to close.
There is a part of me that thought, This pandemic will be one for the history books, and future generations will study it. We didn’t study the Spanish Flu/Influenza. We studied the war, but we never took a real look at the pandemic. Is that because we didn’t care, is it because people wanted to forget it, because it’s within the context of the second world war or is it because the disease does not capture the imagination like Ebola or the plague do?
If you took out the human element, then this pandemic is really simple to eradicate. For the plague you need to get rid of rats, fleas, bacteria in fleas, clothing and plenty of other places where the fleas and bacteria can hide. In the case of COVID-19 an open window and a draft will keep people relatively safe. If people around the world could simultaneously self-isolate properly for two months, the pandemic would be over. We are now many months away from any hopes of the pandemic being over.
I was happy to see that people at the World Health Organisation have the same message as I had. It helped me feel that my views and opinions are justified, rather than just thoughts by an ordinary person. I found the tweets encouraging. I often question why I am certain about my perception of the issue, and to have people at the WHO say something similar was encouraging.
Now we wait, to see when the next lockdown is implemented. I think it could be sooner than anticipated, in the current circumstances.
I love watching television series on DVD and straight from the hard disk. You never understand the complexity of the storyline until you spend 12 hours or more watching entire seasons of series like Scrubs or House.
If you look at the series scrubs you’ll get to know the characters very well and they’ll become far more interesting than if you were to watch only an episode a week. That’s probably why they have channels where you run a series every day for a number of days before going back to the beginning again. The best example of that is the Simpsons and Mash. How many times have you seen certain episodes?
Recently I enjoyed watching the series House because it’s analytical nature. You’ve got a patient and you run tests, and lot’s of lumbar punctures. For some reason that seems to be one of the favourites… probably because it’s the most interesting.
When I finished watching a few episodes I saw how greatly I enjoyed the series but more than that how diagnostic you think you become. I don’t mind that you can cure diseases or anything of the sort. I mean that the series is exploring how reason and empirical knowledge can accumulate so that when you see something out of the ordinary you try to understand it. You start to notice smaller things. It’s great for students, It’ll encourage you to diagnose various situations and find solutions.
The most recent series I’ve been watching is Dexter. After I came back from New York I was curious about the program. The adverts had peaked my curiosity therefore I had to find a way by which to access the series. I’ve been watching the series and I’m enjoying it. I watched the first episode on my video iPod, to see just how watchable series were on an i-pod. It’s not that bad. I watched the next two or three episodes on my laptop since that’s more comfortable.
The beauty of holidays is staying in a quiet place and doing what you want, driving around and more. It’s just over a week until I go back to England and the fun starts again.
Today I went for a slight variant and came across a book dating back to 1930 so of course I picked it up. I like the look and feel of old books. I also like that they carry history. The book is 91, almost 92 years old and it has been passed on from generation to generation for almost six generations. I looked in the book and at first I just ignored the scribbles at the front of the book, not thinking much of it. Now that I looked closer I noticed the BCID so I looked up bookcrossing.com and logged that I found the book.
Now that I know about this project I feel that I should add books that I own to that database, for people to find and share them. One book has 601 hops, and the next only 198. That is how many times books have been passed on from person to person.
I see that the project is still new but it will soon reach two million members (bookcrossers) and approaching 14 million books. It is present in 132 countries, and what is impressive is that this is only since April 2021, so the site is still new. Registering a book is quick and easy. Note the ISBN, Double check the info, write a comment, create the book, and then add the BCID to the inner cover and a new book is logged. It takes seconds.
I believe that this is a great project because if you think that the use case for cars, is bad, due to how much time they spend sitting around, then imagine how bad it is for books. They spend years, even decades on shelves collecting dust, without being read more than once. With a website like Bookcrossing those dormant books are given the opportunity to travel, to be read, to be discussed and to be shared, over and over again. A book is no longer read by one person but dozens, or even hundreds. It works like a library, but the library is the world, and everyone can be a curator.
I could now create an entry for The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other favourite books of mine, and over time I could follow as they are shared, commented on, and as their locations move either west or east, south, or north. It would show how interconnected the world is.
I will participate in this project. I like the opportunities that I think it opens up.
Last time I went to the cinema I was in Paris and my name was in the credits. This time I was at the 20th Century Fox offices on Soho Square in London as a guest, along with Loudmouthman, Suzymiller, Danacea, Rupert Howe, Sizemore and many other social media participants.
We were invited to preview the film Juno, which will be out in British cinemas around the 8th of February 2008. It’s nice to be two months ahead of the crowd. It’s also nice to be in a private cinema. I enjoyed the leather seats along with the press package and the fact that when you lean back the seat tilts back at the same time.
It was also amusing to see all these faces. It’s a funny thing to be part of the social media mainly because you recognise and feel that people are familiar although you’ve never met them in real life. What makes this particularly appealing is the fact that it’s not someone saying “oh I’ve heard something about you”. They’ve actually looked at, and appreciated your work, or at least we hope so.
I enjoyed the film and so did the rest of the crowd. Frequent laughter could be heard from around the room quite frequently. I did enjoy quite a bit of the dialogue and the story is a nice one although the end is typical of American films.
Aside from the film and the crowds we did get to interview the organisers of the event as well as Danacea of Forbidden planet, Rupert Howe, vlogger and Robert… whose last name eludes me. It’s 1am and I’m tired.
The Twittervox video should be up by tomorrow evening at the latest. More concise information on those interviewed will of course, appear accordingly
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
Over a few weeks I have experimented with installing Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OSĀ on several Pis and then added docker containers, and tried installing straight to the system. In the process I have iterated and iterated until I developed an effective work flow. Yesterday I spent an hour or two preparing an Ubuntu SD card, snap installing Nextcloud, and then docker, and then Photoprism, Immich, Home assistant and maybe one or two other apps. I also set photoprism to boot automatically at start up. When I tried to do the same with Immich it failed. In the end I settled for a shell script, thanks to Chat GPT help.
I kept a copy of the 48 commands I got to setup the system but ignored the trial and error part, for now. Ideally I should setup a script that can do this configuration automatically. I would install ubuntu, boot it up, and then run the shell script to install what I want automatically, so that a system is quick and easy to setup.
Initially I had one Pi per service/server. This gave me the freedom to experiment with one service/server without destroying everything else. As I began to understand how the apps/services/servers work I was able to move them together on the same machine and have them run side by side. I go from needing several Pis with dedicated roles to a single Pi that can do it all, if I feel like centralising everything. Before I centralise everything I want to be able to migrate the logs and data from several apps to a central point.
I like that Home Assistant has weather data for several weeks. Part of the learning process is learning to move data between systems without losing their history.
By installing a system, and then re-installing it over and over I learn with each iteration, and with each iteration I see something that could be improved so I improve it. Eventually I get a work flow that is fluid and does what I want with relative ease. I kept those 48 lines of commands so that when I do this again I can refer to my “notes” rather than several pages from two or three sites, and Chat GPT. That I managed to install Immich and Homestation counts as a success, because I had tried and failed to install both of them recently.