Stopping off for a mid-morning coffee after dropping off some slide film to Vanbar for development, I noticed that if #Marios on Brunswick St in #Fitzroy can make it along for another four years it'll be 40 years old! It's been a reliable source of Eggs Benedict and/or coffees for me for much of that time.
The entryway hasn't changed – from 2005:
One strong memory is from when I bought my very first brand new film camera, in 2008 – a Bessa R4A with a 28mm lens – and my first photos with it were taken there after running into a couple of Flickr friends:
I since took other cameras there (2010):
But also took other lovely portraits outside other, nearby cafés – this one on Smith St in 2013:
In the process of digging, some other good café window views came up:
from the northern edge of Thornbury in 2010:
from South Preston with a pinhole camera in 2010:
from Fremantle in 2009:
from a long-gone café in Xi'an in 2013:
and from South Preston in 2017:
Nothing beats the window at Captains of Industry in the heart of the city, though – I have countless photos of it:
Earlier this year I found myself in #Huế, a city full of pre-20th-Century Vietnamese history – to be fair, I found myself there because I'd read up on that stuff, hoping to get a little more from my trip than the usual “American War” fare and see some remnants of the Nguyễn dynasty and such.
Having some time on my hands is a gift – I've been using it to just get out and spend time on my feet, each day. I might struggle to suggest that I'm making the most of my time, but that's the point – I don't have to! The main battle has been to disconnect myself from the constant need to feel productive, and to just let it happen. This includes photographic opportunities.
When the pandemic hit and we were stuck with just being able to walk in an N-km radius from home, I assumed it’d all be fine because I’d still be able to pursue my #FilmPhotography and find plenty of things to take photos of. Somehow, though, it didn’t work out like that.
I’ve been on leave for three weeks and while I’d made a list of things to get done, I was careful not to let it dominate my break. Age has brought the benefit of feeling that I don’t need to make myself so busy, that it’s ok to do nothing sometimes.
A mixture of idle time marooned at home and my day job having taken me away from hands-on tech a long time ago has resulted in me prodding at the old shared server I’ve shepherded for a little over 20 years, now. A bunch of people once used it – fewer still do. You might think of it as being a bit like a tilde community. While it used to be more convenient to have it running from someone’s machine room (I'm not even sure exactly where, now) that’s no longer true, and I’ve worked out that I can support the few services it still needs to provide from my house, on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB SSD attached to it. In some ways it’ll serve more as an archive of old things more than anything else, really. In the process of sorting out a migration plan (something I’d had to do many times before, as we moved from machine to machine) I wondered if I wasn’t alone in looking back on those earlier days, wondering how we got to a year like 2020.
I’ve reached out to my old peers – most of us relentless journallers & bloggers back in the early ’00s – to ask not just “are you still using anything on this server?” but also “how are you going?” I’ve been pretty awful at actively keeping up with folk, instead relying on the passive nature of seeing updates floating past in the mix of news from the doom-scrolling apps that vacuum our time. Many of us moved away from Melbourne. One or two I never met in person, even. Some folk I’m almost too frightened to reach out to, but I’ll find a way. I’ll see how we go for responses, and hopefully one or two of them might write something we can publish for the archive, as it were.
What did I get out of running that host for all those years? Mostly I just wanted to feel useful, and I felt useful helping folk out, helping them say something no matter how small, and helping them connect with others in those earlier, potential-rich days of the Internet. In return, I received plenty of system admin practice that fed my day job (and vice-versa). I’m curious to hear from the others now – what did they get from it?
Fitness isn't for everybody. I struggled to find a way to appreciate it until I was the other side of 40, but thanks to a friend giving me the right kind of encouragement at the right time (thank you K), it found its way into my life in a way that I could work with. That was some years ago now, and I became (to my younger self's horror) a somewhat-regular gym attendee.
