Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Byrichard

There is a level three risk of foresst fires at the moment. Now is a time when smoking and other forms of fire should be forbidden. Now is the time of year where the sides of roads catch alight easily. Forests are at risk.


Yesterday when driving home I spotted a fire by the side and I reported it on Waze. They don’t have a “warn about roadside fires” option yet. I have now added it as a suggestion.The sooner a fire can be reported, the sooner firefighters or other emergency services can put it out.


Hashtags


I hate hashtags. I have tweeted my hate for them since they came out in 2007  or 2008. I hate them because I came to the web when meta information was meant to be hidden in the meta data of a page, not plastered as white text on a white background to spam search engines.


I was playing with the Pixelfed iOS app yesterday and I wanted to explore the social network. I gave up within seconds. I scrolled down and I saw that rather than sub groups that were for cats, dogs, lemmings, landscapes and more the sub categories, or categories were hashtags.


Why Hashtags are crap


Hashtags are crap for two reasons. The first of these, as I argued back in 2007-2008 is that it makes it easy for spammers to look for a hashtag and start to spam a conversation with little to no effort. It neutralises the possiblity of good engaged conversations, especially around some topics.


The second reason is that with WordPress, Hugo and other content management system style services you can generate pages with tags and categories directly.


The Origin of the Hashtag


People forget that the hashtag was developed when Twitter was an SMS compatible system. Hashtags would allow people to quickly and easily see the topic of a tweet withing having to read the entire text. Now though, in the age of dedicated apps, the hashtag is obsolete, and should be destroyed.


Threads Wants Hashtags


I’m writing about this topic because I saw that Pixelfed uses hashtags, rather than tags or categories, which I find absurd, but also because I see that Threads wants to implement hashtags.


So Called Ugly URLs


The same culture that calls hyperlinks with extentions ugly is fine with #tags. That’s absurd. As an archivist and Media asset manager I think that having /topic/index.html that resolves to /topics/  is much uglier than /topic/ducks.html because when you want to find a file you need to sort through thousands of index.html files that mean nothing if you don’t read the front matter of the files.


Hashtags are Fashion Over Function


Hashtags, in my eyes, are fashion over function. By adding a tags text field, you could add keywords/tags, and have the software create relevant hyperlinks. Tags work extremely well on Hugo,and categories work well on WordPress. We don’t need to use ugly hashtags, when proper meta data practices would do the same thing, without wasting characters.


An Alternate Solution For Idiots Like Me


The alternate solution, to keep idiots like me, happy, would be to see that someone wrote hashtag keyword, and have the website parse the hashtag and turn it into a hyperlink to that keyword automatically. We have had href tags for decades, and that’s why hashtags are so absurd.


It encourages me to see that not everyone puts hashtags in every post on Mastodon.

Dry Weather, Clean Shoes

Dry Weather, Clean Shoes

Byrichard

We’re having dry weather which means that I have clean shoes, once again. They cut the grass recently but rather than see greenery we see yellow. We’re in March and it already looks as if we’re un June/July, with how dry the landscape is. The sides of the road, where it was once muddy, is now dry and hard. We are in summer dry weather despite being the first of march.


It’s windy and cold at the moment. You want to wear a good hat, good gloves, and to have layers that stop the wind from blowing through to chill us.


It was cold enough to kill the airpods after an hour of exposure to the weather today. On a warm day the airpods last for two or three hours. On a cold day they last for half an hour to an hour. With walks that last from one hour to one and a half hours I usually never run out of batteries. It’s a sign of cold weather that the batteries last less time than the walk.


In other news twitter failed again today for at least an hour or two. With mobile devices I tried to refresh the feed but saw nothing. I could still post and see replies, but I couldn’t read new tweets. Now that we expect Twitter to fail on a regular basis we don’t feel the same angst as before. It is unimportant.


And Finally – Mud season


At least one Londoner loves the mud because it absorbs his steps and lowers the pain he felt when walking on tarmac and other hard surfaces. I am puzzled by one recommendation. “Have a towel ready”. I know that football players have a brush and running water to clean their shoes. The idea of using a towel is new to me. I can think about it, next time it rains, in a few months from now.

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Byrichard

Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.


This risk of drought is recognised. The RTS wrote about how people are getting water tanks, due to the regularity of droughts. The problem is so bad that aside from the article about people buying water tanks to store their own rain water there is another one speaking about how the underground water table is at risk. “Il faudrait donc qu’il pleuve quasiment non-stop jusqu’à fin mars pour que les nappes phréatiques retrouvent leur niveau normal”. It would need to rain non-stop for two weeks for the water tables to find their required levels.


I miss the rain. I miss the rain because when it rains it feels like a treat to have good weather. I miss the rain because I like the sound it makes on the roof. I miss the rain because it fills the rivers and makes them interesting to watch. I miss the rain because without rain the sky becomes boring. There is no reason to look at the sky, or to look at weather apps when the weather never changes.


One of the most flagrant changes, when there is enough rain, is how the grass and other plants grow, by the side of the road. Paths that were easy to walk along, before rain, would become more challenging to walk along, when the rain has given the plants the water they need to grow. It means less grass cutting, it means fewer plants growing. We’re in spring now, and without rain we will not see plants germinate in the usual way.


I miss bad weather because the pandemic isn’t over, and there is nothing to be gained from the weather being good. Good weather is monotonous.

A River Runs Dry, Wood builds a Natural Dam and Corn Grows Eratically.

A River Runs Dry, Wood builds a Natural Dam and Corn Grows Eratically.

Byrichard

When rain becomes a treat you get used to looking at rivers that are running drier and drier with every passing day. The river pictured below is so low that you see the river bed in many parts. It’s a meter or more below it’s usual level. Imagine being a weather forecaster during a drought. Today it will be dry and sunny, as it has been for a few seasons.



In periods of heavy rain the water reaches to the tree roots currently covered in moss. At the moment they are high and dry. In another part of Switzerland some people decided to empty a pool into a local river. It didn’t explain why or how. The water was chlorinated and it caused fish in the river to die and they will now be fined.


One of the consequences of the lack of rain is that branches and logs that fall into a river bed have a tendency to accumulate for months at a time. When the rains finally come they serve as a means of transporting all that wood down the river until it gets blocked. As in the example below we see that two or more logs that got jammed across the river blocked smaller branches and detritus from getting by. They piled up and now we have the natural wood dam/mess.


River built dam
River built dam


Over my walks I have looked at corn, out of curiousity and for a long time everything looks normal, until one day you come across the condition we see below. This is called Corn Smut apparantly. scroll down that page. There are plenty of interesting names for corn ailments.


Corn smut
corn smut


When you go on your daily walks look around you. See what unusual things you spot, and document or take note of them when you do. Nature is interesting. Keep attentive.

Signs of Drought

Signs of Drought

Byrichard

Today as I walked I could see clear evidence that Switzerland is now dry. As you walk by the side of the road you see that it is yellow, and that there is no growth. Crops are withering away and water gauges are now filling with dust, rather than rain.


We now go for weeks without rain. If I wanted to pick up the soil it would crumble in my hands and blow away as dust. I see that one of the local rivers is drying up again.


  • A dry water meter
    A dry water meter – There is very little rain
  • View of Grass and the Alps
    View of Grass and the Alps
  • Dry grass by the river side
    Dry grass by the river side
  • Dry grass by the river side
    Dry grass by the river side


La Suisse bientot à court d’eau


Malgré la pluie, la forêt valaisanne est déjà en danger d’incendie

Nice Clouds on a Windy Day

Nice Clouds on a Windy Day

Byrichard

Sometimes you drive home on the scooter and you look up at the sky and you think “When I get out of this village I’m going to stop by the side of the road and I’m going to take a picture of the clouds because they’re photogenic.


Ribbed/rippled clouds


The reason for them being photogenic today is that they were rippled like the sea, rather than fluffy. Those ripples make you think of the sand underwater by the beach.


When clouds are around look up
It’s nice to see a sky that looks different than usual.


After so many hours spent walking the same landscape day after day you spend more and more time noticing the details. In so doing you notice the sky, you see the fields change, and the crops mature, from a muddy field to a field at full maturity, before being ready to be harvested, and harvested.


The summer road
For months we had very few clouds. Finally the sky is worth looking at, once more.


Day Twenty-Nine of ORCA in Switzerland – A Desire To Go On A Hike
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Day Twenty-Nine of ORCA in Switzerland – A Desire To Go On A Hike

Byrichard

We’re in day 29 of ORCA in Switzerland and I have an ever increasing desire to go for a hike. During today’s walk I listened to two podcasts about hiking and I walked yet another variant of my usual walk. Apple tree blooms are increasing in number and the Colza looks almost ready to harvest.


We’re also going into a dry summer. During this pandemic we have hardly had any rain for a month. The whole of Switzerland is either yellow, orange or red with the risk of fire. I’ve been walking outdoors with a t-shirt.


We could be under the illusion that Switzerland has beaten the virus but that’s an illusion, because the risk of a new center of contagion is possible. We have to continue self-isolating. Today two children cycled too close to me so I crossed to the opposite side of the road because they stopped and would pass me again.


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@ladylockoff had some fun photo shopping this picture of @marcusblatherskite and I. It reminds me of a similar picture that our friend Matt photo shopped. When I posted Matt’s ball pit bouldering photo my poor mother thought it was real and asked me how long it took to clean up all those balls. ????? Good times. 1rst photo by @ladylockoff 2nd photo by @matt_likes_climbing #climbingphotography #climbing_photos_of_instagram #climbinginspiration #climbing #climbinglovers #climbinggirls #climbing_is_my_life #climbing_worldwide #climbingrocks #climbingnation #climbinglife #outdoorclimbing #crackclimbing #tradclimbing #climbingpicturesofinstagram #iloveclimbing #climbing_pictures_of_instagram #climbingpics #rockclimbing #rockclimbinglife #climbon #liveclimbrepeat #climbingisbliss #climbingnation #climbingday #doyouclimb #rockclimber #climberlife

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