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Month: September 2018

Quality Mountain Day 13: Park Fell, High Street, and Ill Bell (Lake District)

I’m still attempting to get in the twenty Quality Mountain Days (QMDs) I need before I can book myself on a a Mountain Leader course. I contracted to work four days per week for Moodle. As I worked five last week, I took the opportunity to work three this week and sneak over to the Lake District this Thursday and Friday.

QMD13-14-getting-there

I’ll get my excuses in now: I developed a bit of a cold the day before I went, my right knee felt a bit weak, and the Mountain Weather Information Service was forecasting winds of 35-50mph on the peaks in the Lake District. That’s why, instead of plotting my own route for QMD 13, I chose one of the ‘premium’ routes provided to Ordnance Survey Maps subscribers (like me!)

QMD 13
In the event, I modified the 24km route a bit. It ended up being the same length but, of course, the bit I changed as a ‘shortcut’ ended up being the hardest part!

QMD 13 - map

It was easy going at first. I parked at Low Fold, and walked down to Church Bridge, along through Limefitt Holiday Park, and along the valley towards The Tongue. I had nipped up the hill quickly to see if I could see the cairns supposedly on my left (I couldn’t) and stopped for a coffee.

QMD 13 - Troutbeck Park

As I sipped my less-than-stellar brew, I looked up and realised what my ‘shortcut’ entailed: a steep ascent up Park Fell. I girded myself and plodded up it, stopping occasionally to, ahem, ‘admire the view’.

QMD 13 - Thornthwaite Crag

I continued on to Thornthwaite Crag in the glorious sunshine and more to eat and drink. There were quite a few other walkers out and my walking poles made this shallower ascent much easier. The next bit was just a saunter around the corner to the top of Racecourse Hill. Annoyingly, it was just off the edge of my paper OS map, but I’d seen on the online version that it wasn’t much further.

QMD 13 - mist

As I started back from Racecourse Hill, the weather started to turn. I could see it coming in from a distance, so I had to decide whether to continue with my planned route or whether to modify it. I decided to keep going as modifying would mean either walking further or a steep descent.

QMD 13 - Ill Bell

By the time I got past High Street and on to Froswick, I couldn’t see the top of the next summit, Ill Bell. In fact, as I got to the incline to start the ascent up Ill Bell, the girl who was walking in front of me abruptly turned round and decided to go back. I, however, decided to power up it. It’s not often I put on music when I’m walking, but I needed some motivation. Getting to the top felt like an achievement.

QMD 13 - gate and map

From there, walking over to the Yoke, and then down to Garburn Nook was straightforward. I was tempted by what looked like a shortcut down to Limefitt Holiday Park, but when I got there saw that there was a lot of bracken. I’ve been seduced by that option before, and it didn’t turn out well. I kept going.

Six hours and 23.63km later, I arrived back at my car. It wasn’t the hardest walk in the world, given that I stuck to the paths, but I had to make decisions along the way and deal with changing weather conditions. So I reckon that counts as a QMD!

Things I learned:

  1. Think carefully about ‘shortcuts’ before taking them.
  2. Sometimes it’s OK to stick to the paths.

Weeknote 38/2018

This week I’ve been:

Next week, I’m working three days for Moodle (Mon-Weds) and onboarding a new member to the MoodleNet team. I’m then planning to head up a mountain.

The fate of private social networks

I knew this had been coming for the last few years, really, but today I discovered that Path, the social network I use with my family, is shutting down. We’ve been using it since 2010 to share photos of our children growing up, and to keep each other up-to-date with family life.

Last year, I started paying for Path, as a small effort towards making it sustainable. Obviously not enough people were doing so. To be honest, the value proposition for paid versus free accounts wasn’t exactly awesome. After all, there’s only so many sticker packs you can use!

So my family will be looking for something that replaces Path. This turns out to be something that’s both of personal and professional interest to me at the moment, as I’m leading the MoodleNet project.

My first port of call when I’m looking for an alternative to some software is alternativeto.net. Their crowdsourced list of apps that could replace Path doesn’t quite do the job, unfortunately. I’ve been trying to think about why that is, so fired up Google Slides and created image at the top of this post. You can remix it if you want.

My point here is to show that there’s many kinds of social interactions. I’m focusing on what my family uses, so haven’t put MoodleNet on there, but if I had, I think we’d be looking at it being right in the middle. The small grey arrows show the direction of travel I think that each app is, or has been, on.

It would be easy to look at this and conclude that we’re living in a world where everything’s moving to being more synchronous and public, but I’m not sure that’s true. Ideally, I reckon we want the option to communicate with one another in all four quadrants here.

What do you think? Is there anything out there which would replace Path? We’ve been trying out a private Google+ community, but it’s somehow not as… fun.


Update: after a quick dalliance with Google+ we’re currently trying out Vero.

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