Yesterday morning I set two alarms for 0600 because I wanted to wake, have some free time, and then run at 07:50/08:00 but I don’t remember it waking me. I remember looking at the phone or watch and seeing 07:53. With the heat wave making sleep difficult, followed my a music festival making sleep difficult I reached such a point of exhaustion that the alarm failed to wake me. It even failed to register in my conscience that I turned off the alarms.

Near where I live there are three or four music events and two of them are multi-day events. Last night when I was walking home I noticed just how much noise was bleeding from the festival and it polarised me into commenting on it, on Strava.

When I walked in town two days ago, and again yesterday I was struck by how dead the town is. Cars are rare, swings are empty. Roads are empty. There is barely any sign of human presence. If I didn’t know better I’d say we’re back in Lockdown, except we’re not. It’s not even because of heat that people are hiding.

France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)

The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.

In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.

I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.

A modern village is one that has parking on the outskirts, so that you can drive to it, park on the perimeter, and walk in, to hike, run, cycle or other. It also includes affordable slow chargers where you can park for as long as it takes to charge to full.

Such a village is modern because it reduces the need for traffic to transit through it. If people can visit the village without driving in, then it becomes like Italian citadelles, but also like carcasonne, Yvoire and other villages and towns. Even Morges has this, to some degree.

The Guardian has an article about Going Offline is Fun. It’s about how “young” people are trying to disconnect from mobile phones and other technology. There was another article about how 61 million CDs have been sold as people buy physical media rather than digital copies.

When the web and social networks were young and built around communities rather than the cult of personality (aka Influencers) it was rewarding because the more time you invested in a community, the more you became a part of it. It was also a time when no one was online, so you had to spread the net very wide, globally, to find like-minded people.

This morning it felt nice and cool so I spent as long as I could ventilating before the sun heated the Southern side of the building to a point where cooling was no longer effective. I went from 30°c down to 26°c very, very fast. The Outside Air Temperature (OAT) was 18-20°c so it’s a shame I didn’t capture more of that fresh air. The Long Tail of the heat wave comes as soon as you close the windows.

Yet again I see an article about children being banned from using mobile phones before they are thirteen years of age and once again I find myself asking, “but what if parents had the required digital literacy to help children and teens?” and “What if teachers had that digital literacy too?” Ireland has yet, again said that it would ban children younger from 13 from using smart phones. In my eyes this is a mistake because it fails to address the technological illiteracy of their parents, and children, handicapping them for life in the 21st century.

Have you noticed how if an event is organised in the evening, long into the night, people see it as normal to participate. Have you also noticed how waking at the crack of dawn, to run, four towns away, is seen as lunatic, and crazy behaviour. We live in a society and age that has normalised being nocturnal, in the evening rather than the morning.

Last night was special because a storm was forecast, and expected. It took a while to arrive and at first it was just a gentle rain. The rain then got worse and worse, until eventually it was a sudden, intense downpour with litres of water being forced down onto the roof. I thought “This is as if a canadair had dumped its load of water on my roof, now that I’m writing about it. I started recording the sound, and I went to check that all the velux were closed, and that the blind was closed on the one that had a blind.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at expensive Garmin watches and thinking that maps are a premium feature, when, in fact they are not. Suunto and Coros offer them on affordable devices, should you require that feature for trail running, hiking, and more.

If you want to use the Coros Nomad for navigation while cycling then it’s bad. I tested it when cycling from Morges to Cossonay a few weeks ago. The problem is that it tells you “straight ahead” or turn left, but not in a cycling/driving context, so it’s unreliable for that.