The Warm Sun
The Garmin Instinct warmed up in the Spanish sun while charging.
Years ago I wished everyone “Happy Birthday”. Almost every day I would wish two or three people a happy birthday. Eventually I noticed that all the wishes were ignored and I stopped. I stopped because facebook went from being a place where we could connect, or reconnect, with friends that we had not talked with, for a year or two. When well wishes were ignored I stopped.
People got into the habit of saying “thanks for the wishes, everyone” and that was it. There was no attempt to reconnect, to get news of how things were going, of wanting to meet once again or anything else. It was just a hundred “happy birthdays” rewarded by one “thanks everyon”.
In such an environment wishing happy birthday has a cost. We make the effort, and it is ignored. Why have a reminder of birthdays if people don’t give a duck? At least some people block posts onto their wall so we can’t wish them well. This is more honest.
I think having multiple conversations throughout the year is more interesting. I don’t think we should wait for a birthday to speak with people. We should do it more often. We should do it when it’s not expected, when it has value. We should aknowledge people on the other 364 days per year.
In Spain I keep seeing the BKL Prolimp bikes and I like them. They’re tricycles rather than bikes but I think they could be useful. Instead of transporting a broadcast camera and tripod in a car or smart you could transport them on the back of this bike. Instead of a bin bag though I would have the tripod bag and find a way to fix the camera as well.
I don’t like the price. These bikes are 3300 euros according to at least one site. I like these as a curiousity. It’s nice to have transport like this for cleaning, rather than a pickup truck or small car. You’re outdoors, riding a bike over small distances.
I saw a helmet being used as a parking brake so I don’t know whether these bikes come with a parking brake or whether they have to be improvised.
I know this post is random. I am lacking inspiration.
I have written a blog post a day for five hundred and one days. My legs are achy from a twenty minute run yesterday and I am writing this from a 2016 Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu 24.04 on an external SSD. I am running it this way because I wanted to test whether the OS bothers me, encouraging me to return to MacOS or whether it is stable enough for me to use this browser seriously.
Tomorrow I am going to the Creux Du Van for the first time in nine years. I went nine years ago alone, and now I’m going with a group of people. It’s my first group activity since the World sXR Forum in 2019, or maybe the last was the Black Movie Film Festival in Geneva in January 2020. In either case this is a big step. The pandemic never ended so I never resumed being normal.
Yesterday I was sent a message asking if I would like to cancel my participation tomorrow. I saw it this morning. The cruel paradox is that I hesitted. I’m an introvert. I feel that someone would enjoy doing the group activity more than me so I would leave them my place.
It’s four years since I did something with a goup. If I like it “tant mieux” and if I don’t “tant pis”. I could be like the others and catch trains and buses but that would add an hour to the travel time, and I love that my lungs have been COVID free so far. I don’t want that to change.
If I like the group then I would do more activities with that group, and if I don’t then I can do things with others. I could even organise things, as I used to, for a few events, a few years ago.
Spring and Summer are coming back, and the pandemic will never end.
As I write this with the Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu 24.04 I find that I keep clicking the mouse every so often and moving the cursor to where I do not want it to be. When I was getting used to this laptop I had this problem and now I seem to have the same issue with the new OS.
I installed Nextcloud and Photoprism on this machine, as part of the experiment. I want to see how different the experience is with a higher spec machine than a Raspberry Pi. Photoprism seems much faster. When I get used to using Ubuntu on this machine I will install it on the local drive.
The light is yellow today, due to sahelian sand being in the clouds. I noticed that the wind felt warm yesterday and today we see evidence that the warm wind came from the Sahelian region. Things will be covered in sand by the end of the day.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.
I love technology, especially in the form of online communities. I’ve been part of so many online communities I have some degree of expertise. I’ve seen the birth of the chatroom and it’s evolution, the popularisation of instant messaging and through flipside and nochicktrix I’ve seen the forming of virtual communities.
More recently I’ve seen the increase from virtual communities to real communities. Over the past two years, almost everyone I know has created a myspace account and for a while, this was the best place for people to be. More recently though people have moved to Facebook. Having more than 140 friends, of which only three I do not know, is a sign of how times have changed. It’s actually fashionable to be part of an online/offline community.
All the parties I’ve recently been to have been advertised on Facebook among other places and it’s become the social networking site of choice. If you’re not there you don’t know what’s going on anymore. It’s a great shift. It’s also replacing e-mail.
Why e-mail people when all your friends are on Facebook. Why not take advantage of unlimited photo uploads to Facebook to add all those past nights for everyone to enjoy.
I love the way technology is going. It’s sociable.