Some series, like Last of the Summer Wine, follow people going on local walks and getting up to mischief. We often hear of people that love to go for walks on the weekend. The issue, as traffic density increases is that the local walks that were along quiet roads are now along busier and busier roads.

At the same time, when road works block one road traffic is diverted along secondary and tertiary roads. Recently a very important road was shut to traffic entirely. As a result of this closure a route that was once an agricultural road, reserved only for rural roads was used by a Transport Public de Nyon bus as well as a French car from Ain. What was meant to be a quiet road, exclusively for farmers, by being metalled, became a short cut for local buses and commuters.

Normally I don’t like interval training because I don’t like pushing myself too hard. I like, instead, to work on endurance. I’m fine with a 23km hike with 1200m of climbing and I’m okay with a 5 to 8km social run but I don’t like interval training. Specifically I don’t like pushing myself too hard.

Having said this, yesterday I had a high energy lunch with beef and Spätzli which provided a good energetic base for my evening social run. The goal was very easy. The aim was twelve one minute intervals at 10k pace with a minute of recovery between each hard interval.

A few days ago my fears were confirmed. After a run I had a short talk with one of the people that prepares pedestrian routes during road works. When I spoke of one area he said “I don’t really know that area”, and more. It took professionalism, and empathy of my own not to be too heavy and annoying.

If I was planning pedestrian access for road works that were known to last for two years I would do something very simple. I would go on foot, and walk the routes to see where the friction points would be and I would work to preserve the shortest distance walk I could, to avoid disruption to a maximum.

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.