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Most of us will associate Škoda with the Tour De France and vice versa. When my brother got a Škoda that’s what I associated it with. Škoda France has a team of people that organise group cycling events to promote the Škoda brand.

Critical Mass and Others

I have cycled with groups before. I cycled at Critical mass events in london, but also one or two smaller cycling events in Geneva. With critical mass bike rides everyone is dressed in normal clothes, on normal bikes, cycling at a sociable pace through towns and cities.

Next year all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks. Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.

The SMS Era on Twitter

URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS. Quite quickly Twitter found that sending SMS was too expensive so they abandonned the idea but the shortened URL stuck around.

Over the years I have enjoyed driving to the shops with a petrol driven scooter for daily shops. I liked that it was small, light and convenient. I only got rid of it, after sixteen years of use because of the cost for a service. Usually it was about 500 but I was quoted 500 CHF, so that’s when I decided to be done with it.

For a while I had no scooter, until I found an Ocean Drive E9 or similar e-scooter. This isn’t a sit down scooter. This is a standing one. Before ownning this one I had tremendous fun with a foot scooter, using it to get to the bus, and train, and then heading to work, and sometimes riding down from Grand Saconnex to Cornavin for fun. It was really enjoyable to use.

For as long as I remember I have enjoyed summer heat. For a long time I lived in a house that was like a cave in summer. It would be 30°c outdoors but 21 to 25°c indoors. It felt like stepping into a cave when I got home. For a summer or two I lived in a apartment on the 5th floor in Meyrin and during the 2003 summer heat wave I would open the windows on both sides of the building and get a nice draft.

Today I refuelled the car after 380 kilometres for about 30 CHF. A few years ago, when I refuelled another car it cost me 70 CHF to refuel a car, to travel 400 kilometres. This means that the car I drive now costs half as much, in petrol, despite the price going up by 10-20 centimes per litre.

These days I like to refuel after seven hundred or more kilometres. When I checked the range when driving home today I saw that the projected range was 900 kilometres.

Recently someone said “I wonder why they would build the Abbey d’Oujon in the middle of nowhere and someone asked the same about Romainmôtier and the idea is an interesting one.

It’s interesting because until motorways and before an extra four to six billion peoples wewre born and survived infancy the world, as a whole was much quieter. Look at photos of villages that are now towns. Look at villages where they have old buildings, and how old villas are now turned into apartment blocks instead.

This weekend I could have gone to Bellevaux for the VF, Thones for the VF, Kandersteg for the VF, and gone to Charmey, Rocher de Naye and one other places for hikes and climbing. I chose to do none of these things. My reason for this is to save money on petrol, after driving quite a bit last week but also to recharge.

I’m Still an Introvert

Last week I went for a hike and thought “I wish I had not gone”, until the end, when I was sad that the day was over. I wish one person had stayed longer, for a chance to talk.

I loved the idea of Substack as a replacement for a few minutes, or maybe a few hours. I loved the notion of a writing community for people to share ideas, and written words. I lost passion when I saw that it was an attention pyramid scheme.

What is the Attention Pyramid Scheme

It’s an idea I came up with yesterday. It’s the notion that we create content on Substack, so that others notice us. We then follow others, and give them our attention in the hope that reciprocate it to us. The more time you invest, and the more you comment, and like, the more your own writing is visible.

I have a 2016 Mac Book Pro that I still use daily despite it being old, and vintage by the time Autumn comes. The reasons for which I kept my mac for so long are that it’s about budget. I don’t want to spend 1600 CHF to get a mediocre computer that a cheaper computer can mirror.

Cheap Alternatives Like the Pi5

For web browsing a pi5 with 8gb of ram is sufficient to browse the web, write blog posts and more. A new Mac Book Pro would be more performant, and less prone to crashes due to overheating and ram saturation. It’s also 16 times cheaper.

For several years I explored every route that was walkable from my village. In the process I found loops that took up to four hours to complete. When there was no traffic they were all pleasant, whether it was wet, dry, hot, cold or windy. As cars and driving re-emerged plenty of the plaths I enjoyed walking became unsafe so I stopped walking them.

Over the last two or three weeks I have been looking at Komoot and Alltrails to find new hiking ideas and I tried two and they were both a success, in my own opinion. The first was to Oujou, and the second is the one I did two days ago.