Swiss walks

Plenty of rain today. Plenty of people wear masks, both outdoors and indoors. You also see people wearing masks on television.

For most people over 20 degrees air temperature and twenty one degree water is okay. I struggle. I like water to be warm. I like to be warm before I go in. I like to know that when I get out I will still be warm. Today with a little effort I managed to convince myself to swim. I didn’t swim much. I swam three hundred meters. Usually I would swim further.

One treat of being in Spain is that some people do wear masks when walking outdoors. You are normal for wearing a mask. In Switzerland you are looked at as if you are eccentric or absurd. It is nice not to be looked at as a curiousity. It is nice to have the security of a mask without feeling like a freak. A paradox of mask wearing in Spain is that it’s hot.

Have you walked by the Mediterranean recently? I walked by it today. It was blue and Green, turquoise and red. The sea was calm and a sailing boat or two set off to sail from one place to another.

People wear masks as they walk and do waiters. This is nice. It’s nice to see people wearing masks during a pandemic. It’s nice not to feel like an outlier. It’s nice not to feel eccentric for mask wearing. I went for my first swim in at least two years. I didn’t go in the sea but in a pool. I haven’t forgotten how to swim despite not swimming for years.

Today I drove for twelve hours with hardly any breaks and finished two books. Twilight of Democracy and Almost Human. These were good books to read during a drive because they are both entertaining and informative. They are also well read. I think my day of rest yesterday helped too. 12 hrs, three countries, 1200+kilometres and I felt comfortable almost the entire time. I did see a scene in a cafe that reminded me that I am tired of solitude, but pandemics are not a good time to break out of solitude.

Today I saw a queue of tractors without drivers. Tractors with trailers full of beat were parked by the on loading dock at the railway siding. There is a machine. The tractors come up to the machine, back, and then start to pour the sugar beet into it. The machine then transports the beets from the receptacle along conveyor belts before they are dumped into a train wagon, ready for transport by rail to where they are needed.

The most I drove was 3600 kilometres in four days. I went to Western France, Barcelona, back to Western France, and then back to Switzerland. It was an average of 800 kilometres a day. About two or three hours from home I was so tired of driving that I stopped at an empty motorway stop and just zoned out for ten minutes or so before continuing to drive. Sports and Driving I like driving, and I like long journeys by car.

Today the Service Industriel de Nyon, SI Nyon, sent an e-mail saying that tap water is one thousand times more environmentally friendly than bottled water. Bottled water is sold at between 20 to 90 centimes per litre and tap water is sold at about 0.1 centimes per litre. It is 200 to 900 times cheaper. Depuis maintenant cinq ans, ce déficit hydrique se répète et influence notablement le niveau de la nappe phréatique et le régime des sources.

A conventional tech blogger would usually just write about JSON-LD and completely ignore the fact that they went on a walk. I like to combine the two. JSON-LD, short for JSON Linked Document is an agreement for certain data fields to be used for specific purposes. The idea is to standardise terms within a database to make the sharing of data easier. When you work with databases and data it is important to define what the schema will be.