Yesterday I went for one of my usual one and three quarter hour walks and when I came into one village I noticed a green cupboard so I opened it and looked inside.
A green cupboard - “When I think of all the books I have yet to read, I feel happiness.”
Since the start of the year I have been running regularly. Yesterday I went for a run and I found it easiser than other runs. It might be thanks to the audiobook, on the one hand, and to consistent training on the other. I am not pushing hard. The training program is a 5k programme over twelve weeks. I don’t need twelve weeks for this. I was a runner before. I don’t care about beating distance records or other things.
We are one month into 2023 and so far I have read four books in four weeks. The aim of reading one book a week, so far is going well. I have read Last Book to Woodstock, A Man Called Trent and Riders of the Dawn as well as The Hunt for Red Octobre and The Cold Killer.
I have a tendency to buy and collect books faster than I read them. Having a love of books is good, because it shows that we want to read/hear stories and that we want to learn about a diversity of topics. As I read in one article “a library is a catalogue of the things that we would like to learn more about. I like this idea. I like the idea that books are about what we would like to learn.
Switzerland is living under the illusion that the pandemic is over. If you look at the data on the RTS website and other sources of information such as Cotrack - Grafana then the pandemic is over. The number of new cases has gone done so if you look at the metrics then it is over.
There is a good chance that this is an illusion, demonstrated in three ways. The first of these is the number and saturation of hospitals now, with many of them overloaded and in a situation of crisis. The second indicator that things are not fine is the increased mortality for years, at this point. The third indicator is that people with COVID compromised immune systems might have stopped testing positive for COVID but there is a lag between when someone stops testing positive for COVID and when their immune system has fully recovered from the disease, able to combat other illnesses that would otherwise have little or no effect.
I have had the Suunto Spartan for around five years, the Apple watch Series Four for Four and the Instinct since November 2021 and I find myself gravitating back towards the Suunto Spartan watch again. I pivoted away from the watch and Suunto because it moved towards WearOS and smartwatches, rather than sticking to fitness tracking.
I was afraid that MovesCount, known as Suunto App now, and the Sportstracker app would both be killed off or allowed to die but this hasn’t happened. I see that Sportstracker and the Apple watch play quite nicely together so if I want the power of sportstracker and the Suunto app I can stick to an Apple watch.
There is value in studying Laravel and context. By this I mean that over a year ago I wanted to study Angular but after feeling lost in Javascript I decided to take a step back, to study JavaScript. I studied two or more courses over a period of months. I could have followed a single course and claimed that I knew and understood JavaScript but that would have been misleading.
At the start of this year I started running again. This wasn’t a new year’s resolution. I just decided that I wanted to start running, so I did. For five years I have been walking around in circles. Some take me above the A1 motorway and others take me below it. The walks are all familiar and I do them so regularly that I see the changes from week to week.
During yesterday’s walk I found that I could read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen as an audiobook so I listened to a few minutes. It took me back in time to 2006 when people worried about the detrimental effect that bloggers that were not accountable would have on information, disinformation, reliability and accountability. At the time people worried that bloggers and certain social networks would spread inaccurate information and manipulate people.
Twitter has a new For You page inspired by TikTok’s For you page according to Quartz. Many years ago we had Seesmic, a video chat community where people could share video messages 24 hours a day. We even experimented with recording videos and sharing them by phone when this was still novel.
Tik Tok has a critical flaw, as do plenty of the more popular social networks. As someone said on Mastodon today, “You have to be fast to say something new, before hundreds of other people have posted every possible reaction. That is what’s wrong with social networks today. I use social networks because I think social media is an awful term, used to encourage abuses rather than empathy.
Time for a new discussion to take place. Reading time. Do you read through articles or do you skim them. Is reading the headline enough or do you read every word of the article? I ask because in the age of chatGPT and GPT3 I would ask the same question as I asked about social media.
If you want to discuss ROI for businesses and PR firms or advertisers then you need to discuss ROI for users too. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wanted to control the timeline by using a “home” feed. The Home feed is an algorithm driven feed that shows you popular content, rather than content by friends, that you and they would converse about. The result is a lonely social media experience. The ROI goes down, That’s why I took a break from Twitter to play with Mastodon and revive my blogging habit.