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It’s interesting, isn’t it? Flick is a website that I have been part of since 1996 and I have been so distracted by Facebook, Instagram and other social networks that I have forgotten about it. Several times I expected the website to wither and disappear but it hasn’t. It is still around and it still has an active community. What’s more, this is so many magnitudes better than Instagram. for a start it has tagging, groups, albums and everything else. Secondly you have galleries and more. You can control who sees what and when. You also have access to the API with a minimum of effort. I mention this last fact because I am tempted to play with it soon. I feel ready.

When rain becomes a treat you get used to looking at rivers that are running drier and drier with every passing day. The river pictured below is so low that you see the river bed in many parts. It’s a meter or more below it’s usual level. Imagine being a weather forecaster during a drought. Today it will be dry and sunny, as it has been for a few seasons.

Today I found a course about JavaScript patterns on Linkedin. I have been following course after course about Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Angular, React, EcmaScript, CSS and more, but most of them tell you how to do things. I watched plenty of their explanations and I managed to copy the code and get it to work but when they said “challenge time” I was usually lost.

I listened to the JavaScript Jabber podcast and in several episodes they described design patterns. In all of my learning I have learned how to read and copy code. By learning about programme patterns I will learn to structure code correctly. With these notes I will have a blueprint from which to work.

Today I started following the “Building Progressive Themes with WP Rig.” course on Linkedin Learning.

Before you start playing with WP Rig make sure that you have installed Composer. Composer is required to use WP Rig during the build process. Composer itself requires that you have PHP on your machine. After that it should be easier to use. I also ran npm-install-peers because I kept getting error messages.

During the daily walk today I saw that the grass along the side of the road is dry and dead. It crunshes as you walk on it. As you look at other fields they are dry and probably crunchy too. We had some rain a few days ago, but within minutes of the rain stopping the landscape was dry again. We never get rain. I am impatient for a day of rain. I am impatient to look forward to good weather, rather than bad. It seems to be absurd to want rain in Switzerland. In winter skiers and snowboarders want snow.

View of the Alps

Despite people doing what they can to keep the pandemic going, by not vaccinating, by not wearing masks, by not minimising social interactions, by avoiding busy shops we are in a 3000 new people infected per day routine in Switzerland. For some reason, fatalists and others have taken the decision that the pandemic can’t be ended, and that we might as well live with it.

Distracted Day

I often hiked with a Sigg one litre water bottle and it has served me well. It has been with me for rock climbing, via ferrata, hiking and more. I like it because it is light, easy to use and maintain. I liked the one litre version enough to get a smaller 600ml version for conferences and work.

Recently I noticed that the mouth of both bottles seems slightly discouloured. I don’t know whether they’re chipped or whether it’s oxydation from sitting around for so many months during the pandemic. I will probably still use them, once the world decides that Zero-Covid is the right strategy.

I saw a deer

What do I mean by such an odd combination of words? That today it was warm. 25°c at the time when I set off for my bike ride. It was warm enough to feel comfortable in summer cycling equipment. What was more unusual, for this time of year, is how dry the landscape is. The fields are dry. The sides of the road are dry. Grass lawns look dry, where they have been cut too short. It was a good day to cycle.

I did not write today, because I was busy.

For a while I have wanted to learn Angular, Laravel and other frameworks but I felt overwhelmed so I decided to learn JavaScript but then I found that I had gaps in my knowledge too, so I went over to Node.js. Now I feel that I am starting to understand more. I understand the context better. I understand the underlying code better. I have spent enough time studying around the subject that I have gained the contextual understanding not to be completely lost.