Protected: thoughts typed on a mobile phone
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
If you’re a geek and you like mobile phones with a data plan then ingress is for you. Over the last two days I walked 18 kilometres playing ingress and winning back the City of Nyon for the Resistance. It didn’t last long. The same evening the enlightened players destroyed my hard work. I will just have to go back and liberate the city later. I have more important tasks this weekend. Tomorrow Ingress FS Neuchatel will take place. At least twenty of us will be playing, walking around the city, looking for portals and trying to take over the city.
Staring at a phone while walking around a city may sound counterintuitive, or absolutely normal for those who still use text messaging apps or tweet. In this case though you discover details of cities that you would not notice. You notice plaques, the names of places which you always walk by but never knew about and more.
Playing the game has two parts. Attack and defence is one part and farming the second. Attack and defence are good because they don’t require much walking around. They just require having a lot of “toys” to play with. The drawback to having a lot of toys to play with is that you probably walked around like I did going from portal to portal and hacking it. You get weapons, modules, resonators and more. They are good for game play.
There is a cultural aspect to farming. Missions designed by L9 players of ingress have portals related to a certain theme. If you walk in the old town of Geneva you can follow the Calvin track, the park brunswick mission or the Geneve, around the Cathedral mission. There is a good chance that you will know some of the monuments and you will discover others. With each portal players can write a description. These descriptions can provide you with a new understanding of the places you pass by. In essence it could serve as a guide book for those who like to see things in a different light.
If we did not have seasons, and weather, then walking the same route several times a week would get boring. Thanks to the weather we see plants get sown, we see them grow, we see them harvested, and then we see new plants planted. Over time, we recognise plants at an earlier and earlier stage of development. Today I saw that cherries are close to being ready to be picked, so it may be time to prepare Foret Noir.
I installed WordPress 5.8 alpha on my local computer to play around with. I won’t play around with it today because I have to be focused on something else until tomorrow evening. Tomorrow evening, I will regain the freedom to study what I feel like studying.
One of the games I like to play is to look at the weather app and see when the rain is scheduled to arrive. I then estimate whether I will make it home before the rain. I took rain stuff just in case, to keep electronics etc dry but I don’t mind if I get wet, at the current temperature.
I went for a fifty eight minute walk and it’s as I sat down this blog post that the rain began. I timed it perfectly. It’s gratifiying to achieve such a fleeting goal. I had originally considered doing a slightly longer loop but as I saw the clouds, and the time it would take. I changed course. I also changed course because I saw two slow moving people blocking one route and I prefer to continue self-isolating.
The Delta variant has a well chosen name because it is really great at getting big deltas, big changes. Denmark had a big increase in the number of cases, and other places are increasing rapidly as well. Delta provides instant feedback. You don’t need to be patient to see that something was a bad idea.
Une quantité énorme de pluie est tombée sur la Suisse ces trois derniers jours: ces précipitations auraient suffi pour remplir complètement le lac de Neuchâtel, celui des Quatre-Cantons celui et encore la moitié du lac de Zurich.
Source: Radio Lac Article
In the last few days enough rain fell to fill the Lac De Neuchatel, the Lac Des Quatres-Cantons et part of Zurich’s lake. Around here it is hard to see that so much rain has fallen. I haven’t seen too many signs of flooding or ruined crops, but of course this part is on a slope and the Lac Léman can easily absorb that quantity of rain.
I’m glad I did make it home before the rain. I would have gone for a walk earlier but I got distracted by the Tour De France. It’s fun to see that they sprinted a few times, and at one moment I feel that one of the cameras scraped the floor. It still managed to capture the rest of the race so I think that it was fine. The camera operator just hung the camera a little too low.
When I think of Great Britain I think of the BBC and I think of the Natural History Units. I also think of radio programs like In Our Time, From Our Own Correspondent and Hard Talk. I also think of BBC World and the quality of their news coverage. I mention these current affairs programs because I believe that the British provide quality content. They also inform, educate and entertain us. That is their purpose.
In a healthy media environment the media should inform and educate their audiences. They should provide us with the facts and context for everything they write about. They should provide us with neutral and unbiased information. Radio and Television broadcasters were held to this standard until recently. With Video on demand services increasing in number and with the number of channels made available through satellite broadcasting and digital audio broadcasting opinion has found its way on air. This made it easier for satellite and television broadcasting to share opinions rather than facts.
“I think people in this country,†declared Vote Leave’s Michael Gove, “have had enough of experts.†His fellow Brexiteers were quick to back him up. “There is only one expert that matters,†said Labour MP Gisela Stuart, also of Vote Leave, “and that’s you, the voter.†Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, suggested that many independent experts were actually in the pay of the Government or the EU. All three reminded voters of occasions when “the so-called experts†had made mistakes.
source: Michael Gove’s guide to Britain’s greatest enemy… the experts
The role of journalists and the Fourth Estate is to understand the questions that people are asking and to understand what information people need. In the case of BREXIT for example if the campaign focuses on Migration then the fourth estate should provide facts and information about migration. It should look at the push and pull factors. It should also look at the goals that the European Union has set itself and how those goals can either help reduce or encourage migration.
Newspapers and politicians should never say “I think that people in this country have had enough of experts”. The raison d’être of the Fourth estate, of newspapers, current affairs broadcasts and expert opinions is to provide people with facts so that when they go to vote they have all the facts.
BREXIT on one side of the Atlantic, and the rise of Trump on the other, show that the fourth estate has failed. It has failed to keep people informed and grounded in reality and it has failed to keep emotion out of the debate. The politics of emotion are being exploited and this is having a negative impact on how countries are run. Alastair Campbell spoke of this when live on ABC news Australia.
To illustrate the challenge faced by modern politicians watch how Obama has to pause and think as he responds to the question.
Newspapers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail and other newspapers can publish anything they want and people will believe it. The Sun said twice that the Queen endorsed Brexit and twice they were shown to be lying. In a post-fact media landscape the lies are easy to spread but very difficult to negate.
London, Ireland and Scotland were not subjected to the same propaganda machine and their vote reflects this. They voted Remain because they understood the implications of BREXIT and the benefits of Remain. Their familiarity with the topic made Remain so easy to justify that certain people said of my generation that we “should not take what we have for granted”. I would encourage the opposite, that a dismantling of the EU should be unthinkable.
The Fourth estate has failed to do its job and the British people will now suffer the consequences for months and years to come. The rest of Europe and the United States should do everything they can to encourage people to keep up to current affairs so that facts guide their decisions rather than rumours and emotions.
We are in a pandemic and I am between contracts, two reasons for which having an interest in the latest mobile phones is a futile pass time. I tried to revive my old Android phone and succeeded. I sometimes find it hard to get the phone recharged, and when it is recharged I need to keep it charged. This time I had a bonus problem. No data connection
I tried to connecting to wifi, no luck. I tried using the mobile phone’s data connection, no luck. I tried using one phone as a hotspot. No luck either. Restart the phone, no luck. In the end I tried a factory reset and the problem was resolved. Data worked both on wifi and 4g. The phone is old, but at least it allows me to play with Android when I want to.
I read that Nettle tea tastes of various things, honey, grass, slightly minty, spinach and more. The combination of those tastes didn’t sound appealing, except for mint and honey. I also wanted to see what they taste of. I spent an entire 2.95 for twenty tea bags and I tried it. When it’s dry it smells like hay, and when you smell it in boiling hot water it smells quite bad, like fish, or some other unpleasant smell. I then tasted it and it tastes like it smells when it’s dry. Hay. It’s like drinking the smell of a barn. You can see why people mix it with other flavours. Now I have one less thing to be curious about.
Jungfrau Tea, named after the mountains is made from seven herbs. It is made from a combination of round leaved mint, citrous thyme, orange mint, fennel seed, Lemon balm, Achilles Yarrow and mauve. I am confused by the lat one. The taste is definitely different. It has texture and I consider that it could almost be good. I have not added sugar or anything else and it has had time to sit so I may not be getting the full experience.
For more info
I try not to write about the pandemic too much. We are stuck in a loop where governments make mistakes, and people who don’t follow international news go along with it. We are four or five waves into this pandemic in Switzerland and it is only possible to remain positive if we expect little from our governments. England, Switzerland and Sweden have governments that are trying to ignore the problem, and pretend that it is endemic as soon as possible.
Meanwhile in most of Asia the pandemic is under control and there is less human suffering. Europe and the US are suffering, and yet other nations are not. Some people say that it is because in the West we have selfish cultures where the individual is put on a pedestal and community is ignored, while in Asia there is community spirit, and this helps to control the pandemic.
Either way, Covid-Zero should be prioritised over the fool’s errand of endemicity.
Now you understand why I avoid writing about the pandemic.
People on linkedin were discussing whether social media campaigns are worth organising and keeping. When it comes to extreme sports such as Via Ferrata, rock climbing and other extreme sports then I believe that the audience is ready and enthusiastic enough for a social media presence to be desirable.
Via Ferrata is an outdoor sport that can be practiced in France, Italy, Spain, Switezrland, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Peru. As a result of the diverse place where this sport can be carried out so social media became an excellent avenue through which to share information about the sport.
I have loved the sport of via ferrata for five years now, half a decade. What I loved about it was the simplicity of the sport. After just two or three climbing lessons and going with a guide once I saw that I could handle via ferrata comfortably without a guide. I always insisted that I would take people with rock climbing experience, not absolute beginners.
Via Ferrata is a specific sport requiring specific equipment and specific experience. It requires a head for heights and an ability to hike for an hour or two before a climb and another hour or two after the climb. As the locations are usually remote it also requires someone with a car and whom can navigate.
Social networks such as Glocals for Geneva and Lausanne, Xdreams, for Geneva specifically and the Via Ferrata Suisse group for the French speaking part of Switzerland are good places to find participants. The first two examples are to connect with the international/english speaking community and the latter is to connect with the French speaking community.
Glocals is a local social network helping the international community in Geneva, Lausanne and other cities to meet up and be active. Through this site you can meet people to work on hangover, meet people to scuba dive and meet people to do outdoor sports such as hiking, climbing, via ferrata, swimming, canyoning and much more. Due to the nature of the social network are spread around Switzerland and the meeting point is usually the event, with car sharing from strategic points.
Via Ferrata Suisse is a nice online community for French speaking via ferrata practitioners on Facebook. As they are spread across the French speaking parts of Switzerland they can provide information and tips on via ferrata that are local.
Aside from connecting people social networks and social media are great for the sharing of pictures, personal accounts and textual information about via ferrata. Some people want beautiful landscapes and so pictures will help them select which via ferrata to do. Others are afraid of heights so they will avoid being too far from the ground. A third group will look at how exertional via ferratas will be. I have seen two people run out of energy at Plan Praz and I have seen everyone feel weak by the time they finish the Leukerbad Via Ferrata.
Tourism professionals and equipment manufacturers can benefit from a social media presence. I see that Iloveclimbing, Suunto, PETZL, Mammut and other brands actively share the adventures that either their athletes or enthusiasts of their equipment are enjoying. It’s a great way to make me dream of going to some locations, getting that piece of kit or trying an activity at that time of day.
To give a specific example I have wanted to do the Moléson by night Via Ferrata for years now and have never got around to it. For two or three years it was because of work and this year it was because of the weather and because I had already booked Leukerbad for the weekend it was moved to. Next year I will make it.
I love suunto, Mammut and PETZL. Rather than advertise to the city dweller like Apple, Fitbit and withings do they organise social media campaigns around the great outdoors and around extreme sports. As a result of their social media policy I identify very strongly with their products. In the case of suunto I have dive computers and fitness watches. I understand the passion that their athletes represent in their social media campaigns.
Social media is about socialisation and passion. Via Ferrata is a sport that people feel passionate about but because it requires physical fitness and a head for heights your pre-existing group of friends may not be the best suited for your passion to take off. That’s where social networks and social media can help find new via ferrata, see what to be wary of and meet new people. According to these three parameters Via Ferrata and social media are perfect for each other. Sports companies, tourism offices and transport infrastructure would result from a social media presence.