Empty Brussels – Easter Sunday 2020

Palais Royal de Bruxelles

Today I got out of the flat for some exercise by walking into and around the centre of Brussels and back again – some 12 km! The more touristy areas would normally be very busy. In the usual run of things, Grand Place would have hundreds of tourists milling around examining the medieval architecture of the square.

I had an eerie experience walking down the steps onto Mont des Arts, which was almost completely deserted and was so quiet I could hear my own footsteps.

 

My next door neighbour got locked out of his flat and his only spare key is at his office, about 15km away. I helped him out by ordering an Uber to his work, which gives me the strange experience of watching the car returning to the block of flats as the app tracks the car’s journey.

One month back on the indieweb

Latest Update

2 March 2020: So, 1 month back on the indieweb. Depite it being a very busy month at work, I’ve dipped my toes more and more into the indieweb. Not always successfully, but getting there.

I’m fascinated by the generational concept of the indieweb, and suspect that for all my techno-joy, I’m definitely a lot closer to generation 3 or 4 than 1 or 2. I don’t code, other than very, *very* basic html and if I’m honest, I don’t really understand what an ‘endpoint’ is or what it does.

Despite this, I’ve cobbled together a (sometimes) functioning indieweb site. I still get a *lot* of errors on bridgy and I’m not entirely sure why.

Next Steps

I’d actually like to participate in the community more, despite my lack of technical skill. One way I think I could do this is by assisting on the wiki. My day job involves distilling a lot of complicated information and distilling it down into crisp, clear language. I think I could do the same here.

And on the website, I’d like to sort out the sidebar – the Author profile h-card witget doesn’t really fit in (it’s justified in the wrong direction), so I’d like to work out the html to include my image and rel=me links without using the ‘off the shelf’ widget, useful though it is for newcomers like myself.

Finally, to use my website more and more as my portal to the internet and social media less. The bridgy errors are my main obstacle to this, but so is just changing my own habits.