One treat of being in Spain is that some people do wear masks when walking outdoors. You are normal for wearing a mask. In Switzerland you are looked at as if you are eccentric or absurd. It is nice not to be looked at as a curiousity. It is nice to have the security of a mask without feeling like a freak. A paradox of mask wearing in Spain is that it’s hot. In theory this would make it less…
A conventional tech blogger would usually just write about JSON-LD and completely ignore the fact that they went on a walk. I like to combine the two. JSON-LD, short for JSON Linked Document is an agreement for certain data fields to be used for specific purposes. The idea is to standardise terms within a database to make the sharing of data easier. When you work with databases and data it is important to define what the schema will be. A…
Today I looked at two of the masks I used over summer and they are both bleached by the sun. So is my hat. I normally expect things in Spain to be sun bleached, not Switzerland. The reason is simple. First, it never ever rains, and even clouds are rare today, and second, I spend an hour and a half outdoors a day walking. Plenty of time for my things to get sun bleached. If you’re an extrovert you could…
Today we might as well speak of blue skies and autumn leaves because that is what we’re facing. The Septemper/Autumn grey clouds, fog, and cold are not here yet. Instead we have warm sunny days. The habit of walking one and a half hours a day is perfectly safe, with such a stable weather system. Sigg Bottles I have two Sigg water bottles, the half litre and the one litre. For months or even a year they lied dormant due…
If you walk around at the moment you see that they have cut corn, sunflowers and beet. You also see that there are piles of beet in fields, queues of tractors waiting to send them on a train journey and more. Agriculture is busy at the moment. This morning I heard quite a few sirens of emergency vehicles and as I looked out of the velux I saw a column of black smoke rising. I was curious as to its…
I’m afraid to open the veluxes because of the threat of finding yet another large spider. I don’t mind having to dispose of it, but I hate the idea of having one walking around without me knowing. A great alternative to open windows is to go for your daily walk. You’re far from neighbours, from smokers, from metalworking and more. You are free to daydream. Today the Mont Blanc was clearly visible. The image is at max zoom with an…
Today as I looked at the ground I saw broken stones. The one in the image below is especially beautiful. I don’t know why there were more broken stones than usual. It seems that the conditions were right to bring the stones to the surface and for the farmers’ machinery to break them all to pieces. It’s impressive to see the size of some of the broken stones. The leaves have started to turn, as various plants give up on…
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…
I often hiked with a Sigg one litre water bottle and it has served me well. It has been with me for rock climbing, via ferrata, hiking and more. I like it because it is light, easy to use and maintain. I liked the one litre version enough to get a smaller 600ml version for conferences and work. Recently I noticed that the mouth of both bottles seems slightly discouloured. I don’t know whether they’re chipped or whether it’s oxydation…
For a while I have wanted to learn Angular, Laravel and other frameworks but I felt overwhelmed so I decided to learn JavaScript but then I found that I had gaps in my knowledge too, so I went over to Node.js. Now I feel that I am starting to understand more. I understand the context better. I understand the underlying code better. I have spent enough time studying around the subject that I have gained the contextual understanding not to…