In recent weeks I volunteered at two events. The Triathlon de Divonne and the Critérium de Céligny. At both events there is a social need that people need to be made aware of. That social need is for people to volunteer at sporting events, not just participate. The Course de l’éscalade is 42 CHF and the Triathlon de Nyon is 110+ CHF. The Critérium was a reasonable 20 CHF for people to participate. I don’t know the price for the Triathlon de Divonne.

For a week or so there were a lot of flies clustering. I believe that this was due to weather weirding. For months it was too warm, and dry, so they didn’t breed as voraciously. Eventually the weather changed temporarily so there was an infestation for those with bad luck.

During this time I noticed that a fly or three tried to fly into the fridge. Flies tend to slow down and hibernate or die when they get too cold, so they might be full of enthusiasm and optimism when they fly in but once the door is closed they’re trapped. The light goes out so they think “bed time” but they also realise “Wait, this is a very cold place, and all of the food is covered so I have no food or drink.”

Today I woke when it was still dark and cold. I went to Décathlon for a run and got there early so I waited in the car, where it was warm. I saw people arrive, and when 07:50 arrived I walked into the shop.

I learned at that moment that there were two runs planned. One was the usual Final Saturday of the Month Run, and the second was exclusively for women, to run, discuss running for women, and to shop without guys being around. It is part of the Breast Cancer Awareness Month in Octobre.

A few days ago I watched an interesting documentary in which Lucy Worsley investigated Jack the Ripper, but rather than look at the crimes, motivation, and identifying who the criminal was she took a “media and society” perspective focused on the genre of true crime journalism.

Within the documentary and podcast genre there are people that like to investigate and study crimes from the past, explore them in depth, and then discuss them at length.

Imagine, for a second that we reverted to the old habit of paying for a day’s content daily, a week’s content, once per week, or a month’s content, monthly. With Substack and many online newspapers they have the habit of saying “pay for the entire year” before we’ve had time to read a single article. At most we read half a paragraph before we see a popup saying “Please allow notifications, and half a scroll later “This content is for paying customers, please subscribe, or go away.

Recently someone said that the Apple watch is seamlessly integrated and easy to use. I never considered its simplicity of use because I grew up playing with GPS devices from the etrex 32 to the Nokia N95 8GB to several dozen watches and devices over the decades. As a result the difficulty of Garmin, Suunto and other platforms is normalised.

I did switch back to the Suunto Run watch on Monday or Sunday and I was surprised to see that I had not started the device properly. I noticed the same with the Coros Nomad a day or two later.

In February I walked or ran along the Asse river that runs from the Jura down towards Nyon and it was flooding. Walking paths had to be diverted and trees found themselves surrounded by water like individual islands. I walked by the same river during my daily walk yesterday and the opposite has now occurred.

The river that had flooded and turned into islands is now just a trickle. You can walk to the middle of the river without getting your socks wet. Having said this, having waterproof shoes does help keep socks dry. The point is that the layer of water is so shallow that you can walk to the middle of the river, take a picture, and walk back to the path, without getting wet.

This morning I saw two posts commenting on how Facebook was paywalling external hyperlinks. In order to link to an external site Facebook is now adding payed tiers. Pay one amount, and you can post more hyperlinks, pay another and you can pay fewer.

Years ago people spoke of the social media silos and Facebook is amplifying the problem, by rationing people’s ability to hyperlink to their own content on other sites. In effect, if you’re in the facebook silo, you’re expected to stay within the silo. Facebook becomes the portal and trap.

Continuing on from yesterday’s theme of publishers harming themselves through their behaviour today I want to comment on the fad of adding hyperlinks to comments rather than directly into a post. The idea is that you can use the image you want, and by clicking to see comments facebooks counts this as engagement.

It’s worth mentioning that if I click on a hyperlink facebook knows, and the website knows, so nothing is gained by forcing us to jump through the “comments” hoop. This is especially true since once three or four views have been expressed in a comment the rest is noise.

Yesterday I read what some might think is good news. Tabloids in England are firing human writers because Google AI summaries are undercutting human reader traffic to their sites. To this I have two comments.

Before every newspaper was pay-walled I would browse to The Guardian, the Independent, Le Monde, Le temps, Le Matin, and dozens of other newspapers. With time every one of them brought up a paywall and you might think “They’re right to, they deserve to be paid for the work they do but it’s worth remembering that for over a century, and during our lifetimes you could go to a newspaper stand or magazine shop and buy a newspaper and read all of the day’s stories, or you could buy a magazine and read all of the week’s or months articles. Now you’re expected to pay either for a single article, or per month, or per year.