Vision Du Réel is a documentary film festival that takes place every year, or almost. It is an opportunity to watch documentary films on a screen bigger than a laptop or television. Many films are screened with the director/producer but they are also screened a second time. Yesterday I went to watch The Mountains Won’t Move. It is an observational, cinéma verité style film. There is no narration. There are no subtitles.

This weekend I went on two hikes. The first was from St-Cergue to La Dôle and back and the second was from Marchairuz to St Cergue. It amounts to about 66,000 steps and thirty four kilometres of hiking. The La Dôle walk is a familiar walk that I have from multiple directions over the years so it was relaxing. There were some patches of snow where appropriate shoes and crampons or hiking sticks will help but other than that the conditions are good.

It’s easy to look at what people are doing and to travel two hours on a train or in a car. In practice it’s a way of exploring the local area and seeing things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. On the flipside sometimes it is nice to stay local. I went from seeing that a hike was in Gstaad that would take two hours to get to, to seeing a hike that would take an hour to get to and participate in, to another.

This morning the transition from Swisscom to Galaxus was completed. I moved from Swisscom to Galaxus because it’s up to 50 CHF cheaper. Whereas I was paying about 70 CHF with Swisscom I now pay 19 CHF per month when I am within Switzerland, and I can pay 39 CHF per month when roaming in Europe. The one issue with this is that if I switch to roaming then it lasts for two months, not one before I can switch back.

Yesterday I went for a hike from Le Day down to the Saut du Day before going up towards the Aiguilles de Baume and beyond. In the process I saw six or more wind mills. The hike is 21.71km long, took about 6hr41 1178m of ascent and 895m of descent.Moving time was around 4hr55min. To simplify the route, it follows the Chemin Des Crêtes du Jura most of the time. To be more specific it was stage 12 There is a detour to explore a little cave which is not as spectacular as other caves I have been through.

Sometimes when we go for a hike we walk along a route that makes getting back to the car quick and easy. For tomorrow’s walking getting back to the car would take three trains and more than an hour. For Londoners this is a familiar routing situation, but for people in Switzerland it might not be. When I was looking at the route I found that the best place to park might be near Cossonay and another town.

Yesterday I asked MyAI by Swisscom, which is still in Beta, if it could help me write a JavaScript app to generate passwords and it did, with ease. It provided me with the javascript code I needed so I could cut and paste it, and then use node to run it straight from terminal. People often think that AI will replace us, and if certain companies in the US have their way, then it will.

If we use Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or a few other AI models we are using AI that has data centres in the US. If we use Le Chat by Mistral or MyAI (Beta) by Swisscom we are using AI that is based in Europe, or Switzerland. The data stays here. The first thing to note is that MyAI is in public beta. It is still at a 0.0. version number rather than a 1.

I know of two chargers that I can use when shopping. One of these costs 2 CHF just to connect, and then the cost of the charge. At the second shopping centre I can plug in for five minutes, or two and a half hours and I will only pay for the charge. Not having a connection fee makes the cheaper option more attractive. If people want to charge quickly they have four fast chargers outdoors, by McDonald’s but if people want to charge slowly then they have the cheaper indoor parking chargers.

When some people are away it feels pleasurable. The reason for which it feels pleasant is that they are loud. They will use the phone and have a full conversation when a three sentence e-mail will be enough. They will posture and show off rather than consider that not everyone in the open plan office needs to hear them pontificate for a quarter of an hour or more. During the pandemic I noticed that people like to yell on their phones, rather than speak quietly.