I have a Fairphone 4 and the battery is now at seventy six percent or so. I’ve been trying to have a conversation with Gemini about the state of the battery. In so doing I started with the question about replacing the battery but I soon moved on but AI, due to me mentioning a battery replacement is now object fixated.

I see that the drop was quite drastic, all of a sudden, after the battery dischanrged yet again to zero percent. It’s worth highlighting that this is a spare phone, just to experiment and stay familiar with the OS. As a result the battery regularly discharges completely if I leave it too long.

Recently every post I wrote got a dozen or more spam messages. As a result of this flood of spam comments Akismet or another app said “You need to pay due to the volume of spam comments. It struck me as tremendously unfair. Most blogs have little to no income, so if spammers target them with comments, and we saturate the limit of blocked spam messages then we’re paying for a nuissance to go away.

Years ago I saw that a UN organisation were looking for an archivist on Twitter so I got in touch and within two days I had signed a contract for work. In another spontaneous act of curiousity I saw that Adecco Geneva was looking for people that weren’t afraid of heights, so, out of curiousity I got in touch. I was then offered an interview and worked as a deicer.

Yesterday I went for a run and someone asked “Are people running or not?” and I answered yes. The person wanted to be added to the Whatscrapp group but I couldn’t add them because I have no privilieges within that group. I can’t post. I can’t share the group. I can vote “Of course I’m coming” but that’s all I can do.

The person asked, once she was added by the owner of the group, “Can anyone post?” and the answer was “nope” and she said “good, I don’t want too much noise.”

Recently while using Facebook and Instagram I noticed two things. The first is that photos are almost gone. The second is that videos went from being a few seconds each, to a few minutes each. This means that if you open the FB or IG apps and begin to watch a video you’re going to spend more time than you had expected to spend.

To put it another way, Facebook and Instagram have become more like television than web browsing activities. They have become more like radio, or television because they have become hot, rather than cool media. You scroll, and you watch, and you’re asked how many songs you recognise, or you’re getting a history lesson about priest holes in England (Where catholic priests hid under protestant reform) and more.

Science et Avenir wrote an article about why we should cycle as much as the dutch. They think that we should cycle instead of taking the car for short journeys. I disagree. For me, if a distance is less than three kilometres then it can be done in half an hour or less, on foot, and even less if we run.

The thing about bicycles, is that they don’t mean that people are more sporty. Most are not cycling 25km twice per day. They’re riding their bike to the pub, or the train station or the shops, and then back, because they’re too lazy to walk, rather than because they want to do sports. That’s why they want to dress normally, and arrive with their hair perfectly coiffed, rather than ruined by a helmet.

For years I was very happy with Audible, until it was bought by Amazon, and then I felt the desire to move away because I didn’t want to feed a monopoly. It is through my desire to break free from Audible that I began to experiment with stripping DRM from books, first so that I could listen on more devices, but also so that if, for any reason, Amazon, and Audible, went bankrupt I wouldn’t lose my library of books.

Normally there is water where I walked yesterday. At first I walked along the stones, where it was dry. After a moment I decided to take off my shoes and begin to walk through the mud and sediment. In so doing my feet sank as deep as my ankles. The mud felt soft and squelchy, and cold.

I removed my shoes because I was wearing my cycling shoes, and because I have speedplay clips I didn’t want to get them filled with mud, which I would then have to make an effort to remove.

Yesterday I ran from Morat to Fribourg in a race with 17,000 other people. One of them was wearing a 34kg suit of armour. Most were in shorts and t-shirts as you’d expect. The challenge for me, wasn’t to race. It was to run the distance, without exhausting myself, without pain, and without pushing myself to the limit.

This is a success because less than a year ago if I ran 200m my knees hurt, so gradually I built up my stamina, until I reached 5km and more with time. In so doing I gave my body time to adapt to the stress of running, reducing the likelihood of injury and more.

It is amusing that I would be nervous about a linear path that goes from A to B. I am nervous because I haven’t had the race experience yet, although in recent weeks I have experienced two triathlons, once walking, the second as a volunteer, and I experienced a crtiérium a week or so ago. In effect I’ve been in a race context multiple times in the last month.

What I haven’t experienced is a social run that is a race. I’ve done three or four Wake Up and Runs by now, so I am used to these. With the Wake Up and Run I ran solo in Nyon, and with someone else in Morges.