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Via Ferrata - Les Baumes du Verneau

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Via Ferrata in the mist

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On Saturday I went with a Glocals group up to Vex in the Valais for a short hike. We passed by the thermal pools before heading up to a village where we had some lunch. after that we kept going up towards another village before catching a bus back down.

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Yesterday I tested the Olympus camera during a rafting trip down the Dranse river in France.

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Zynga and Maxis are from very different computer gamer times. Maxis came at a time when the game was the source of entertainment. You would build a farm, worry about pests and locusts, about fertilizing the fields and having enough income to build the next series of crop. Zynga on the other hand is a game that teaches you to behave like a machine rather than a human, where repetitive actions are the standard. Simfarm, among other games was one of those games that you could play for weeks at a time. You would select a difficulty level and according to that difficulty level you would need to use knowledge you acquired through experience. If you put cows next to fields without a fence they would walk through and eat the crop. If you didn’t save enough money then if a crop failed your farm was toast. With Zynga you can put pigs with crops, animals in barns and more. There is no intellectual aspect to this game unless you’re a garden designer. You plant the fields, you wait a while and then you harvest. This is great if life doesn’t get in the way. How many of you know what you will be doing in two hours, 8 hours or sixteen hours? i kind of do, but my life will not center around such a simple game. What I liked about simfarm is that it was not mechanical. There was an aspect of game strategy. By obeying certain principles you could progress quite nicely in the game. Zynga has two ways for progression. The first is patience and the second is money. If you pay money then you can have everything immediately. If you spam your friends and they participate then you are rewarded. Do you really want to have to spam your friends to progress in a game? I don’t. I don’t like this trend, that you encourage people to spend money for a mechanical rather than intellectual game and I think that game makers should take this into consideration. If Civilization V came to facebook then I would play it. I would pay an upfront payment and expect to have the full game. And this reminds me of a recent documentary on the BBC called Coast. Do you, as a gamer, as a facebook user want games that are teaching you a different form of managment where right decisions bring profit or do you want penny arcade style games that require that mechanical put the coin in the slot type response? I would like to leave you with an interesting TED talk to help you think about this topic. I watched it a week ago but it’s relevant to the question of time spent gaming and what we should expect to get out of it.

Finally I have received the Over the Air (OTA) update from 2.1 to 2.2 for my nexus one. As a result of this my mobile phone can now be used tethered to a computer for internet access or as a wifi hotspot. The WIFI sharing option allows you to use wpa2 PSK encryption. The reason I was so interested in this update is for use with the iPad. I already have two mobile contracts, one through work and the second private. Both of them allow for at least a gigabyte of data per month. With these contracts and tethering I have the ability to download 2 gigabytes of data from anywhere without paying an additional 19CHF per month to swisscom. the next step will be to see by how much my data consumption will go up as a result of this option. At least one side effect is a lot more freedom. Disclaimer, I would add an image if it was easy to get screengrabs with the nexus one but it’s not. Google, can we get that built into the system?

There are four phones on my desk that are well adapted to tracking hikes. There is the nexus one, the e51, n95 and n97. The reason I mention this is battery life. In my experience if you go on a long hike at least one of the phones will die. You could buy an extra battery or two to make sure that this never happens but a more practical solution is to take all of your phones, install the tracking application on them and swap phone once the battery dies. Of course this would involve taking three chargers with you but at least this way you could track the hike in terms of chapters and somehow aggregate the data for a true hike map.

Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work. Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all. That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on. Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations. That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it. Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that. Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar. By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this? I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.

Once again I have deleted my twitter account. Here are ten reasons to give up on twitter. 1. Europe is neutral about the site. If you want friendships with people an ocean away join. 2. Whenever you want to post some technical problem means you have to post five times 3. If you have a real job, not freelancing, then you can’t afford to check updates all the time. 4. Lack of user engagement, when less than a tenth of your replies are responded to you know there’s no point staying up to date with those people. 5. Virtual community, unlike with facebook and other social networks the people you interact with here are strangers. 6. Spam, as more and more marketers come to the site so the more you use certain words the more unsolicited messages you get. 7. Veteran community: Aside from Facebook all websites are at their community most interesting when the users are new and passionate about the service. That has faded with twitter. 8. 140 characters; Although it was great three years ago mobile phones are now far more capable mobile devices. Limiting yourself to 140 characters is no longer an interesting option. 9. Server downtime. For three years they have been struggling with making the platform stable and for three years they have been failing. If you have to try five times to post 140 characters then something is wrong. 10. User indifference. They are indifferent about their user base. Just take a look at the FAQ and try to offer them feedback and you will first have to go through an FAQ before being able to explain your views. Having a full time job means that my free time is more precious than before. As a result I’d rather be out in the real world doing real things. It’s also about how much time you need to invest into such a service before getting anything of any value out of it. As a result a year after I first left twitter I have left again. This time I think it will be for good. I don’t like the way the company is run and I don’t like the way the users are using the site. Goodbye twitter. On to better things.

I have updated to the latest version of Wordpress since yesterday morning and it is now running smoothly. I have made sharing of blog posts easier now.