Relaxing Cows – The Right Crowd To Be With During A Pandemic

Byrichard
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During a pandemic it makes sense to go to the mountains and it makes sense to walk where you have space to the left and right to keep social distancing. Today I saw the cows near St Cergue and they were all sitting and relaxing, chewing the cud, waiting for the tourist day to open.

I haven’t been to the mountains much over the last four years because of the pandemic, a broken arm and for one summer no car. I say this but I did go up, on a bike. I have been up at least three or four times this year. I’ve been up to St Cergue via the safe road, la Barillette via the normal road, once, and up the steep La Rippe climb twice. It’s not that I don’t go to the mountains, it is that I do go up and going up is the workout, not what I do once at the top.

I avoid the mountains during the pandemic because I can’t avoid people on narrow paths that go up a mountain. I’d rather walk where the paths are wide and where I can observe adequate social distancing. As we see the pandemic is far from over and we must actively avoid being disease vectors, and falling sick. I’m fully vaccinated but News shows that we should not be lulled into a false and flawed sense of security.

I miss going to the mountains to do group activities every weekend but for that to be possible we need to get the delta variant to be dealt with, and we need for people to vaccinate. Society has opened up, before people were vaccinated, and before 14 days of zero new infections had elapsed.

The situation is bad enough for Anne Levy to say, “I’m worried”, but whether she will act on it, or just play lip service is not certain. In the eyes of many people the Swiss government should act now, rather than wait.

The sooner the pandemic ends, the sooner I can revert to writing adventure blog posts.

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Spring Cycling
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Spring Cycling

Byrichard

The weather is relatively cold but the sun is out so the time for spring cycling has come. Spring cycling is like other forms of cycling, but you want to dress warm enough to be comfortable, but not so warm as to overheat. You also want to find routes that are short enough so that if it is cold you can get home without being cold for too long.


The conditions were mild today. The thermometer showed about 12°c so acceptable for cycling. For years I was cycling with Suunto devices but now I am playing with the Garmin instinct and the Garmin Speed Sensor 2 and Cadence sensor. I switched over to the Garmin Instinct Solar because I am curious to see how it copes this summer, and I got the speed sensor 2 and cadence sensor 2 because the Suunto device has finally failed, and I saw them offered at a good price so I decided to test them. So far I haven’t had to worry about them. They just work, no need to make sure the sensors are in the right place or anything else.


The speed sensor is self-calibrating so spend a few seconds attaching it to a wheel hub, and then pair it. Once that is done it will self-calibrate during rides. The cadence centre is easy to set up too. Strap it onto a pedal and you’re ready to go for a bike ride.


In the mobile application you can see the battery status for the sensors, so when the batteries are low you will know. With the Suunto device you would go for a ride and half way through stop getting data due to the battery dying without warning.


Eventually I may try to use these sensors in connection with Zwift. For two years now I haven’t used Zwift because my sensor failed and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of francs on a new indoor trainer. This is an affordable solution that I am happy with.


Rivella in a Sigg Bottle

Rivella in a Sigg Bottle

Byrichard

For months, or even years, I have seen adverts for the Rivella Unlimited Bottle. it is a competition that you can play, and if you win the competition you get a Sigg Rivella bottle that you can get refilled anywhere for free. I thought the idea of putting Rivella into any reusable bottle was absurd and messy so I didn’t try. Today I did.


As I poured the Rivella from a half litre rivella bottle into the Half litre sigg bottle I was afraid that it may overflow and I was careful not to lose too much gas. Eventually the transfer from plastic to metal was complete so I went on my daily walk. I wasn’t thirsty during the walk so it was air cooled by the ambient air temperature. It is currently 6°c according to the Apple weather app via an apple watch. It is fridge temperature outdoors, so perfect for such an experiment.


I drank it when I got home, and it seemed fine. In summer, or if you store rivella in a bottle that has been opened for too long it will ferment. If you try this experiment drink it within a few hours. Rivella quickly starts to ferment so it is an unforgiving drink for slow drinkers.


Coop and other shopping centres often have PET and other forms of recycling nearby so if you buy some rivella, or another drink, you can transfer the drink from one container to the other, and the bottle is recycled within minutes of being bought, and you are then free to walk with the drink in a container appropriate for hiking. Of course aluminium does not crush down into a compact shape once you finish your drink, but at least it can be used for another drink after a quick rinse, or proper wash.


Before I leave you, another use case is restaurants. Restaurants. I often go to restaurants, order a coke, get it in a plastic bottle, and then hike with what remains. If I have an empty sigg bottle I can take whatever is left in the sigg bottle, and leave the bottle with the restaurant, especially if it is glass. It removes the rush of trying to finish a bottle before you leave, or vice versa.


Recycling PET and capsules is not an issue, in Switzerland, as recycling centres can be found anywhere, but there is a justification in walking away with a drink you bought, in a container you own, rather than one you will recycle, when the next opportunity presents itself.

The Case for Reverting to Web Forums

The Case for Reverting to Web Forums

Byrichard

There is a case for reverting to web forums. Web forums are small communities of like minded people that form around topics, ideas, or ideals. They want to have conversations where you look at topics and sub topics, rather than following people. By having conversations on a smaller scale there is more waiting around for answers, but the connections should be more worthwhile.

Recently the ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress jumped to version 1.0.0 from version 0.0.something. In so doing I expected to find that two way conversations would be possible from wordpress to the Fediverse, and back from the Fediverse to WordPress and ClassicPRess.

That isn’t the case. Much Ado about Nothing. I really thought that the experience would have bounded to be a full-fledged solution.

Facebook and Twitter

When they were new Facebook and Twitter were great. Twitter was great because it was a community of strangers who had deep conversations online, so that when they met in person they felt like old friends. With hashtags, and the desire to have more followers people lost track of conversations, and so it became an impersonal popularity contest.

With Facebook we had a community of university friends that we got along with, in person, that reconnected with online, to share images, events and more. At the time this was great. The problem occurred when we went from conversing with friends, to playing Zynga, because after that Facebook became a place to waste time, through no fault of our own. It was designed to become a waste of time, to keep us active.

The Fediverse

For a few weeks, or even a few months I felt that the fediverse had a lot to offer. Eventually I saw that all the problems that I saw with Twitter were also present on the Fediverse. People wanted to be followed by millions, they wanted lists, and they wanted hashtags. I also felt quite a bit of aggression, trolling, and people with baggage. I deleted myself from several Fediverse instances because I didn’t feel that they were healthy places to be.

Enter phpBB.

phpBB is one of the oldest parts of the social web. phpBB boards have been around since the 90s but as we got used to Twitter, FaceBook, Myspace and other sites we forgot about the smaller, interest based communities. I don’t want to invest thousands of hours in a twitter clone. I went to become part of an online community that is small, but convivial. Setting up a web forum is easy. It’s finding a community that is challenging. That’s the challenge I face.

My Ideal

My ideal is to find an online community that is local, to chat with online, before meeting in person on a regular basis. I should be able to find that through a sporty community, like I had for years, before the current doldrums.

And Finally

One of the weaknesses of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other online communities is that we follow people, rather than topcics and ideas. Of course we can follow “hasthags” but for me this is awful because it helps people spam, and distracts people from having conversations around ideas. By following people, rather than threads of conversation we’re on an open web of noise. With web forums we revert to a quieter social network where we wait for answers. in theory we can ask for notifications, rather than waiting.

I think that reverting to web forums is a good idea, because it allows us to re-build communities on a personal scale.

For now I am trying My Friends Misfits

No Desire For My Daily Walk
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No Desire For My Daily Walk

Byrichard

For years, or even decades, I have gone for daily walks. For years I have enjoyed them and for years it felt like freedom. Since a dog charged at me, and nearly bit me in Autumn last year, and since cars are in the habit of driving too fast and too close, on a regular basis, my desire to walk has evaporated.

Looking Forwards to Heatwaves

I find myself impatient for the heatwave to come back. In a heatwave dog walkers and normal people stay home. In a heat wave you don’t live in fear of a dog sensing that you’re afraid, and attacking. In a heat wave you have the freedom to walk off of roads without getting muddy. The ground is dry.

Dogs and Cars

I used to walk on agricultural roads but I stopped. Either you had dog walkers with large dogs, or you had people in cars driving fast. The car drivers thanking me for stepping off the road. I step off of the road, into the muddy field because I’m tired of them driving too fast and too close on roads where they have no reason to be. It’s a farming road, not a main road. During the pandemic farm roads were nice because few people walked, and few people drove. Now that traffic is back to normal the dangers of dog attacks and being hit by a car are back in force.

Of course I haven’t been hit by a car, or bitten by a dog in years, or even decades. It’s the risk that became toxic. It’s the nead to be cautious that tires me. Even with a pram people do not slow down, as I was reminded of yesterday. Even yesterday a dog was threatening. I crossed the road. The dog barked.

The owner said “that’s strange, he doesn’t usually bark at people”. One person had tried to get its attention, but then didn’t consider that others are afraid of dogs. Since last Autumn’s incident I never get near big dogs. I’d rather walk across a rain soaked field, and mud, than have to overcome my fear of dogs.

A More Varied Life

There could be a positive reason for my desire not to walk the same routes every single day as I have done for four years or more. My routine isn’t as routine as it was. I went to Spain for three weeks, and I often drive to walk in another village more regularly. That my routine varies, may be why the sysiphean walk has grown less appealing with time. Before I walked five or six routes, both clockwise and anti-clockwise and now I walk just two or three variants.

I’m tired of facing my fear of dogs, and tired of bad driving because I’m ready for a change. Thst’s a good thing.

Learning by Trial And Error

Learning by Trial And Error

Byrichard

Every day or two I see people post about how the Fediverse should be simplified to welcome new people. It’s a shame. Signing up for a fediverse server is easy. It’s the same process as for every site. The biggest difference is that you’re signing up for a privately owned, crowd sourced community instance. The instances vary slightly from mastodon to firefish to ClassicPress to WordPress but at their core they are the same. It’s just the community that changes, but even that can be the same if you migrate from one instance to another.

Experimenting

A core aspect of the World Wide Web is that it is a platform where people can experiment with ideas, community tools and more. If you need a manual then you are stuck on websites like Twitter and Facebook, rather than exploring what the World Wide Web has to offer. You’re stuck in a silo.

It worries me that people want to simplify the Fediverse, to write guide books and tutorials. If you spend an hour or two experimenting you’ll understand how things work with ease. I don’t think we need manuals for everything in life, especially not social networks on the fediverse.

The Case for Manuals and Tutorials

There are moments when manuals and tutorials are important. That’s when you’re trying to use something that is not as intuitive as you had hoped. WordPress is plug and play and requires no manual. It works like every other CMS works, so it’s easy to pick up. Hugo is easy to pick up, but you might need to RTFM for one or two functionalities.

The moment you really need a manual or instructions is when you’re experimenting with Angular, Laravel, 11ty, Jekyll and other platforms. It’s when you don’t know what the options are that you need a manual. With the Fediverse all the answers are easy to find. You just need to spend a few minutes looking for them. I suspect that chatGPT, Bard and Bing AI can help you when you have questions.

With Hugo I was able to create pages and get a table of contents with relative ease. With 11ty I got a little stuck so I felt the need for a tutorial. I know what I want to do, and I know how I expect it to work, but it’s not like other solutions. that’s why I decided that for 11ty I would use a learning resource, or more, to experiment with, and learn how to use the tool. I am not against manuals and instructions. I like to read the fantastic manuals, when I get stuck. I even like to ask AI for help in some cases, because I can ask a tailored question and get a tailored answer.

The Case Against Manuals

The more time I spend on Mastodon and the Fediverse, the more it feels like a waste of time. I love the concept, and the freedom we have on the website. What I don’t like is that people want to write manuals and instructions to make the same mistakes as people made, on mastodon, and if that is the case, then I have no reason to stick around. Every day people discuss how to use hashtags, bully people into writing alt text for imagess and encourage thousands or tens of thousands of people to follow individual accounts. If that is what people want then there is little reason for using Mastodon, rather than Twitter. Twitter has the community of friends amassed from 2006 to 2023. The Fediverse is a network of strangers.

I Want the Community to Teach Itself

I want communities to learn by participating, rather than reading. I don’t want people to read a manual about how to use the fediverse, I want them to learn by trial and error, and by what feels good, rather than by doing what is expected. The more time I spend on the fediverse, seeing people speak about better onboarding, the more it feels kitsch, and the more I want to close the tabs.

Experimenting with Eleventy

Since I was getting stuck with eleventy I decided to follow Learn Eleventy From Scratch. As I said, it’s not that I am opposed to learning from guides, manuals, or documentation. I like to learn from these sources, when trial and error doesn’t yield the results that I am looking for, or where trial and error takes more time than is reasonable to figure out.

What I want to do is simple. I want to have one directory for posts, and so far that works quite easily, but I also want another folder that acts as an archive. That is where I am getting stuck, and that is where a manual can streamline my learning process. It’s when I see that I have gaps in understanding that I use manuals to fill them.

And Finally

In my experience the people who write manuals on how to use social media websites are utilitarian, rather than humanists. They encourage people to develop a utilitarian approach to social media and that’s what I fear, and object to.

When you look for books about blogging none of them are about the philosophical or intellectual process. They are all about monetisation, which is fantastic, if you want to be a spammer, but awful if you want to be a humanist. I blog to explore ideas, concepts, and speak of cycling, walking and climbing experiences. If I followed the guide books my blog would be aimed at making a fortune, rather than developing and elaborating ideas.

I will always try something new, without RTFMing (Reading the fantastic Manual), before getting stuck and following a tutorial. What has changed is that now I am learning through manuals, instructions and more, rather than online tutorials. I am learning independently. I am a step further along now.

A Saturday Walk During A Pandemic

Byrichard

Last week it was comfortable and warm so it was tempting to go cycling. This week it has gone back to being cold. Yesterday it was cold and windy and today was cold but sunny. I went for my usual walk but rather than listen to a podcast I watched TikTok videos as I walked at full speed. I am so used to the paths that I do not always need to pay attention.


The paths are dry. It hasn’t rained in days. The rivers are lower than they’ve been in a while and in theory river walking may be possible once again, as long as you don’t mind cold feet.


What was out of the ordinary today is that I saw people walking through fields on two separate occasions. On one occasion it was a trio of older people and their behaviour made no sense to me, for the simple reason that you can very easily walk around the field, and that the field has crops on it. If you’re going to walk through a field make sure that it has been harvested, that it is fallow or that no cows are using it.


I later saw a duo of people doing the same thing on another field and this does seem odd. Why would two groups of people have the same discourteous behaviour of walking over a crop?


Rather than walk along the usual routes I cut through the forest, walking through leaves, over dead branches, between trees and more. I filmed the progress I made. At the moment walking through forests is easy because none of the undergrowth is out yet. Walking between trees is easy, and so is navigating. When the undergrowth grows in spring such explorations will no longer be possible. That is when cycling will be more fun. I look forward to the cycling season starting properly once again. I went to be on the bike, and to explore. I also want to feel that something is finally changing.


I saw a Trio of older women and I thought that they may be having adventures like the three men in Last of the Summer Wine. A trio of friends going for mischievous adventures in nature during their afternoon walks.


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