There is a move away from desktops and laptops towards ultra portable devices like the ipod touch, HTC phones and more that enable you to connect to the web whilst on the move. As a result of this a new breed of services have come into being. Facebook and gmail are two of the better known ones. Yesterday whilst watching the twitterstream I saw wphone mentioned. It’s a plugin for wordpress that, once installed, gives a simple intuitive user interface so that you can work on your website on the move.
There are a number of screens of which the main ones are; write, manage, comments, plugins, users and latest activity. Each of these has an individual page and you have a nice amount of control over the content of the website.
It’s a great little app and I think it would be useful to anyone that finds there are two or three quick changes they want to make to the site whilst on the move.
Plumbing and scuba diving are not unrelated. If you understand o-rings and pipe/hose connections then you’ll be fine. I dismantled a system, cleaned it, and then reassembled it, checked for leaks and then ran the tap to see if all was well. Once I saw that everything was indeed well, I struggled to place the drawers and then moved onto the next issue.
My website was hacked again so I am now writing this blog post in the day one app, rather than directly to the blog. During a pandemic it’s frustrating to find that your website is hacked because life is already limited without adding new issues.
Facebook and Twitter have still not been reinstalled on my phone. I see no reason for them to return. The beauty of not having either on your phone is that it takes longer to post something negative, so a negative thought, is abandoned .
Last night I watched two episodes of iZombie and for the first three quarters of the episode I thought I had found something that I would enjoy watching during this pandemic. Since then I’m not sure. We’ll see how it goes when I watch an episode or two today.
To Shop Or Not to Shop
I have the nagging feeling that I should go and shop today, so that I can skip the need to go tomorrow or the next day but when I check the fridge I have food for at least three days, and even a fourth. I think I still have a week of reserves so shopping is not urgent.
Is it worth going through the maze in front of the shop, to disinfect my hands, to grab a number, and then to go into the shop and get some drinks, and leave.
Back in the good old days, before the pandemic, people such as myself would think “I want a bottle of Apple juice” and we’d walk to the shop, buy a bottle of apple juice and it would take a minute or two. The same behaviour today would see you queue for half an hour. I hate queuing and because the rate of infection is not going down as fast as I would like I am happy to stay isolated.
In normal circumstances if I had seen that the sink was blocked I would have gone to buy a plunger and I’d have had some fun playing with it. Of course my goal would have been serious, but humour is useful in surreal times. “How was the pandemic for you?” “Surreal, but nice”.
I like writing blog posts because it’s like having a conversation. You start with an idea and you develop it, and you start to play and have fun, and by the time you finish writing a blog post you have cheered up. The solitary nature of this pandemic is negated for a short moment.
Today I went for a fourteen Kilometre walk and I crossed paths with just two other people. It was a couple of runners and we crossed paths at just the right place as I could slip into a clearing, wait for them to pass and then continue on my way. I think this is the quietest walk I’ve been on in a while.
During the walk I saw that some fields had been harvested, that new barriers were being put up and that someone’s Mini adventure involved a bike in an open top Mini.
Before the daily walk, I continued studying CSS and after learning the basics I am learning how to fine-tune and control what CSS is doing with more granularity. The finished product is looking better and better.
This month I’m trying something different. It’s Nanowrimo. It’s a strange word for the unitiated but it’s short for National novel writing month. It’s the time of the year when people around the world set themselves the goal of writing 50,000 words without proofreading. The idea is to produce as much writing as possible during this month. It’s next time that the challenge of editing takes place.
Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions.
The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people. Since the end of March I have been staying as far away from people as possible, which is how I discovered all my new walks.
The second reaction is that wearing a mask outdoors in a city makes sense. It doesn’t make sense when you’re out for a two to three hour walk along main roads where you rarely cross paths with anyone. To be forced to wear a mask even when we are kilometres from any other human would really suck. I know it’s not a scientific term, but that’s a step too far.
No one had to say “Don’t socialise, don’t meet friends, don’t go to restaurants, don’t go to pubs, bars or nightclubs.” No one had to say “Walk along rural paths where no one else walks to avoid any and all human contact”. These are things I did of my own free will. It’s not easy, but the documentaries I have watched and the books and articles I have read make this logical.
If I have to wear a mask for the entirety of my three hour walks where my exposure to others may last half a minute or less then I will be quite disappointed. The reason for that disappointment is that we would never breath fresh air if this rule was enacted. We would always breath mask air. We will suffer from Vitamin D as a result of not getting any exposure to sunlight and we will fall sick, for a new reason.
From what I understand in the Le Temps article this will not include my cherished quiet walking routes, luckily. I will have to keep hoping for rain as the only valid reason for indoor training. 😉 (I know an ascii wink is not good form, but I want you to know this is meant to be taken as a joke.)
For Context Switzerland, yesterday, became world leader in highest percentage increase in the number of new cases. “C’est en tout cas le pays qui compte la plus forte augmentation de nouveaux cas de Covid-19 ces 7 jours: +106%,” Within this context Switzerland must take rapid and immediate action to get the number of new cases per day back in control.
“Reduce your contacts by half”
For those who understand French this article presents the situation.
The three points of the article are:
The situation is similar to how it was on the 16th of March.
only semi-confinement helped to reduce the number of new cases.
If the measures were taken today it would take three to four weeks for things to get back under control.
For months I have been saying that people need to take responsibility and that everyone has to do everything possible to reduce the risk of propagation of this virus, and as we see from the current crop of articles the scientific and medical communities say the same thing.
It’s a shame that ordinary people need to be confined for a pandemic to be controlled and then contained. It’s a shame that people can’t take a one or two month break from socialising during a pandemic to get life to return to normal as soon as possible.
The Guardian Article: Inside the Airline Industry Meltdown is an interesting article that looks at the growing number of planes that are being mothballed until better times come, about the removal from service of 30 aircrafts from a single airline etc.
source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020
Switzerland got down to 11 new cases per day in June. Yesterday there were 6600 new cases.
Daily Percentage of Positive Tests and Daily Tests per 10’000 (Last 7 Days) Source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020
Newly Reported Cases per Canton Source: https://www.corona-data.ch/ accessed on 24/10/2020
The amplitude of the second wave is much greater than the first as we can see from the graph above.
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