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The most I drove was 3600 kilometres in four days. I went to Western France, Barcelona, back to Western France, and then back to Switzerland. It was an average of 800 kilometres a day. About two or three hours from home I was so tired of driving that I stopped at an empty motorway stop and just zoned out for ten minutes or so before continuing to drive.

Sports and Driving

I like driving, and I like long journeys by car. I know that they can be tiring, either due to traffic, or because of the entire day. The Leukerbad Via Ferrata drives were tiring because I woke at 3am to get to the destination at 8am for the first ride up, and then climb for five to seven hours, before driving home. That is a demanding day. Eventually I booked hotel nights. That changed the experience. Spa and meal with people after sports is nicer.

Today the Service Industriel de Nyon, SI Nyon, sent an e-mail saying that tap water is one thousand times more environmentally friendly than bottled water. Bottled water is sold at between 20 to 90 centimes per litre and tap water is sold at about 0.1 centimes per litre. It is 200 to 900 times cheaper.

Depuis maintenant cinq ans, ce déficit hydrique se répète et influence notablement le niveau de la nappe phréatique et le régime des sources. Les étiages enregistrés se sont avérés une fois de plus très bas durant l’été et l’automne. Ainsi, en 2020, les sources n’ont participé qu’à hauteur de 48% de la consommation. Les apports de la SAPAN se sont révélés très élevés (34%). La nappe phréatique a également été très sollicitée (18%).

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 schema is like a template but with data fields. It is an agreement, or requirement to have specific data about a product, asset or other.

Yesterday I had a happy pan, when the oil smiled at me. I didn’t intend for it to become a smiley face. I poured in the oil as I always do before cooking. That’s when my imagination thought it saw something. Yep, a face. I was amused enough, and I thought that my imagination was seeing something clear enough for others to recognise, so I took pictures.

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.

One day I prepared Raclette and whtin a few days I prepared Goulash. I find the contrast between the two recipes amusing. One takes 15-20 minutes to prepare because of the need to cook potatoes for that long, and the other takes half an hour to prepare and then another hour or two to cook. One is just cheese, pepper and bread, the other is bread, pepper, tomatoes, potatoes, meat, paprika and more.

Sometimes we have to ask whether or not to tweet. We have to ask this question because social media is seen by many, in common culture, as an addiction. Everything that is perceived negatively by society suffers, whether justifiably or not. The same is true of cyclists.

In Switzerland there is an ad campaign that says that cyclists are responsible for half of accidents involving them. The truth is that sixty eight percent of accidents involving cyclists are caused by cars. That’s two thirds of accidents. This means that without cars, cyclists would have one third of the current number of accidents. The discourse needs to change, to favour cyclists, not to vilify them.

If you want a bag that isn’t a bag until you need it to be a bag then the Trevolution Ultralight Daypack is a great option. I like that it folds into its bag and that it’s easy to have with you at all times. What I don’t like about the version I have is that it’s too flimsy for daily use and the top opening is not practical. It requires both hands to open and close the main compartment.

This morning I found that I did have trip desire after all. As I drove out of a village towards the East I found that I had this desire. I did want to go for a long drive, and go on a trip. It has been January 2019 that I haven’t traveled. My reason, before, was that we need to stay locally, to stop the spread of the pandemic. I had the old fashioned notion that a pandemic should be neutralised as soon as possible.

Today I tried Switching from MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak as a webhost. This morning they sent an e-mail to say that we could switch from MySQL to MariaDB automatically so I tried. For the test I:

• downloaded a new install of wordpress to my local machine and put it in the MAMP htdocs folder under mariadb.
• I installed MariaDB on port 3310.
• Using the command line I created a wordpress database.
• I configured WordPress. Within seconds the website was up and running.
• When I saw that the interface was that the same and that I had to make no changes I went ahead with Infomaniak.
• Of course I backed up the MySQL server data, just in case.

Within a matter of minutes of telling Infomaniak to switch from MySQL to MariaDB the migration was finished and the website was up and running again. It was quick and painless. If something did go wrong I could easily step back but I also ensured that the user interface for MariaDB and MySQL were the same. When you’re coding websites from scratch some databases require different lines of code to function. That was my concern, and that’s why I decided to experiment with a small scale trial on my own machine.