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The 15th July saw hundred year floods hit Luxembourg. Thankfully the situation was not as desperate as in parts of Germany and Belgium and I am not aware of anything other than material damage. These are some photos which don't do justice to the extent of the local flooding in any way.

Sprint Qualifying

Yesterday I watched the enthralling race at Silverstone. It was the first Formula 1 race ever to use a sprint race to decide the pole position. This was a lack luster affair and did not bring the hoped for extra excitement. They have a couple more races like this, after which I hope they ditch them.

The race opening

The highlight of the race was the spectacular collision between Verstappen and Hamilton on the second lap at Copse. Having raced nose to nose for the opening lap, Hamilton saw a gap and dummied left before going down the right of Verstappen leading into Copse. They were more or less side-by-side, with Verstappen slightly in the lead, but Hamilton having the inside line. Just before the apex Verstappen pulled across Hamilton's line thinking Hamilton would move further to the right or lift off . He didn't. Verstappen's right rear wheel was clipped by Hamilton's left front, sending Verstappen sideways into the barriers with a 51G impact! He walked away, but was a littler dazed and got checked up in hospital.

The stewards decided this was Hamilton's fault and gave him a 10 second penalty, which he observed during his first pit stop. Their decision read as follows:

"The Stewards reviewed video and telemetry evidence," read their ruling. "Cars 33 [Verstappen] and 44 [Hamilton] entered turn 9 with Car 33 in the lead and Car 44 slightly behind and on the inside. "Car 44 was on a line that did not reach the apex of the corner, with room available to the inside. "When Car 33 turned into the corner, Car 44 did not avoid contact and the left front of Car 44 contacted the right rear of Car 33. Car 44 is judged predominantly at fault."

Whatever happened to letting the drivers race? Is F1 really dishing out penalties based on whether a driver's line will reach the apex. The racing line is not always the one which will win you the race. If in a collision blame is automatically assigned to the guy off the racing line, then what's the point of racing.

Maturing, but not yet mature

My take on the incident starts a few corners earlier, where the situation was reversed. Coming into Brooklands, Hamilton was clearly in the lead with Verstappen going down the inside as you can see in this clip at 1min 10seconds. But Hamilton gave Verstappen space and didn't turn in on him. Verstappen missed the apex and went over the curb. Hamilton ran slightly wide on the outside, knowing that he risked ending in a spin by having his left rear clipped by Verstappen's front right if he stuck to his line. If Verstappen had taken the same approach a couple of corners later he would have come out of Copse second. Yet, he would have had the whole race to catch Hamilton. Even if he didn't, he would have lost only 7 points, maybe 6 with the fastest lap. As it stands, he lost 25 points and the championship is again wide open.

The chase

After Hamilton pitted and observed the 10 second penalty he was down in fourth, 15 seconds behind Leclerc. He began to reel him in, passing Norris, Bottas and then Leclerc with a couple of laps to spare. I feel sorry for Leclerc who put in a brilliant drive. But Hamilton showed his class in the second half of the race, despite the crash with Verstappen. Roll on Hungary!

I have to watch the carbohydrates I eat, since I am Type 2 pre-diabetic, I made myself this list of foods I tend to eat by carbs per 100g. I've split them into 3 categories, based on the carbs per 100g:

• extreme carbs, above 70g
• high carbs, anything between 35g and 70g
• medium carbs, between 15g and 35g
• low carbs, between 5g and 15g
• very low carbs between 1g and 5g
• Negligible or no carbs, below 1g

My source is basically Google searches. This is a work in progress and will change as I add to this list.

Extreme (above 70g)

Sugar

High carbs (between 35g and 70g)

Chickpeas, Brown bread, Pasta (uncooked), White bread

Medium carbs (between 15g and 35g)

Banana, Grapes, Lentils, Kiwi, Sweetcorn

Low carbs (between 5g and 15g)

Apple, Blueberries, Cherry tomato, Grapefruit, Hummus, Strawberries

Very low carbs (between 1g and 5g)

Asparagus, Beer, Eggs, Cucumber, Tomato, Wine

Negligible carbs (below 1g)

Meat, Spirits

Over the last few months I've made my hosting environment entirely serverless thanks to the help of GitHub, Forrestry and Netlify. Next, I wanted a cloud based development environment, so if I wasn't at my laptop and wanted to make a change, I could.

There were quite a few options, but the two that seemed to fit the bill for me were GitPod and GitHub Codespaces. The latter is not yet available to the general public. Whilst I did register for access, it's not yet been granted. That left me with GitPod. So I signed up, pointed it at my preview branch on GitHub, added a few config settings and I was done. I had a fully fledged development environment in the cloud, including full preview functionality. The IDE is basically Visual Studio Code in the browser. It is true that coding in a browser is not quite as user friendly as in a dedicated desktop app, but it's still very much manageable for me. I don't code that much, most of it is tinkering with existing code.

So now I have both my hosting and development environment fully in the cloud. The cost of all this? Surely all these services must cost something. Well, for my basic needs the monthly cost is zero. Nothing, zilch, nada!

I've lived in this neck of the woods for a few years now, but hadn't yet come across this lovely view of our local jungle!

Walferdange, July 2021.

As the richer western countries approach their ceiling of who they can vaccinate freely, they are starting to vaccinate those under 18 in a drive to increase the overall vaccination rate. This is understandable, but I wonder if a better use for those vaccines would be to ship them to poorer countries to help them in their vaccination efforts.

The effect of Covid on the young is very small. It is true we do not know the long term implications of having had covid. Long-covid is a real thing, which also affects the young. But the long term effects of the vaccine are also unknown. It is looking increasingly likely that we will need yearly booster shots. Do we really want to be vaccinating 12 year olds and jabbing them every year for the rest of their lives? This is new territory, it has never been done before.

Let's get the world's adult population vaccinated first. As we get to understand the virus better maybe we will find a single shot solution.

Yesterday I had my second Pfizer jab against Covid. When I had my first jab I felt nothing, no side effects. A slight itch on the shoulder maybe. Nothing worse than a mosquito bite. The second one is a different matter. I woke up this morning sore, stiff and tired. No fever or other flu like symptoms, but definitely worse than the first jab. Hopefully by the weekend I will be better.

On the weekend we were in Oostduinkerke and were lucky enough catch some of the shrimp festival, before the downpours had everyone packing for home.

After almost a year away due to the ongoing pandemic, we finally returned to Plovdiv for a week in May. The city was as lovely as usual, especially in the central old town area. Here are some photos of the city from the trip.

Kapana

The word Kapana means "trap" in Bulgarian. This is a beautifully restored quarter of small winding streets in which it is easy to get lost - or trapped. Only a few years ago this area was dirty and run down. It has now been restored and largely pedestrianised, full of little shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs.

Having moved my site from Wordpress to Eleventy hosted on Netlify, I was looking for a better editing experience than the one provided by writing my posts in a text editor or even in GitHub itself. I've settled on Forestry for now.

This comment on an article about climate change really resonated with me:

It's wrong to frame radical pro climate changes as sacrifices which we have to bear with gritted teeth. Its good for your health to eat less meat, cycle or walk instead of hopping in the car. Its good for peoples health too because of reduced pollution.. Its satisfying to mend thongs instead of throwing them away. Its a pleasure to use beautiful things for a long time crafted by people who enjoyed making them, instead of throwing things away in an endless cycle of obsolescence of the ugly.

Most actions related to stopping cimate change would also be good for our general health, mental as well as physical.

Whilst reading an article about glaciers receeding in New Zealand, I thought this photo looked strangely familiar.

The reason it was strangely familiar being that I didn't remember the snout of the glacier to be so far up the hillside as in the photo of 2016. So I dug around in my albums on Flickr and indeed, the snout had receeded a worrying amount in just under 20 years. So I did some amateur environmental change analysis and added some date lines to my photo:

This may or may not be due to human made climate change, but this does show the changing climate on a personal level to me. Nature is not always as you might remember it, but changing all the time, for better or worse.

The web being the web, there are always opinions on which tool is better, which language superior or which hosting model future proof. The main argument for hosting appears to be traditional CMS (eg Wordpress) vs static sites and headless CMS (eg Netlify). A gentleman's barter was made between Matt Mullenweg and Ohad Eder-Pressman, with Eder-Pressman asserting that the JAMStack will be the dominant architecture by Sept 2025, overtaking Wordpress who currently host over 35% of the top 10K sites.

I've now moved my site over to Netlify. Having hosted it, at least in part, on Nearlyfreespeech for the best part of 15 years, I have decided to go fully serverless. This is not a slight on Nearlyfreespeech, I have had only positive experiences on Nearlyfreespeech and they will continue to host some legacy files of mine. The main reason for this switch is because I started using Eleventy, a static site generator, to build my site. This is great, it lead to much faster load times. But it meant I had to be on my personal laptop to update the content. I couldn't use an online service to update the site, like I could previously with Wordpress. At least not without a lot of extra effort and technical skills I don't really have. Sure I could create my content in GitHub, but to build and publish the site I needed to run the scripts that were on my laptop.

With last month's arguments between the EU and UK, regarding vaccine contracts and deliveries I did some back of an envelope analysis. It seems the real issue is not so much contracts, but the general lack of vacciness, partially due to the inability of one specific manufacturer to deliver their promised amounts of vaccines. Here are the stats as of the 10th April 2021:

All data from Our World in Data.

As can be seen from the table if all the vaccine doses administered by the 10th April had been spread evenly across the EU and the UK, the effect on the vaccination rate of the EU would have been minimal: an increase of 5 doses per 100 inhabitants. But in the UK the effect would have been drastic: a decrease of 31 doses per 100 in habitants. So whilst complaints about vaccine export controls and contracts mimicking such export controls might be valid, the real issue is the limited capacity to produce the vaccines. This is where the focus needs to be - not on blaming each other for hoarding vaccines.

Let's get the job done. Stay home! Stay safe!