A public holiday today gave me something to aim for, though. I forced myself up and out into the cool, reasonably early morning air for breakfast somewhere long forgotten and a walk through some less-remembered streets.

It's lovely to be up so early that you can have some space, even in the inner suburbs. There are people, but not all the time; not so many to invade your thoughts.

Near Carlton Gardens I found a single light pole full of seemingly sociable birds – none of the other nearby ones were like this.

Reaching the core of the city I felt the heat rising, and figured it was a good time to close the loop by hopping on a tram towards home. Stopping for a coffee just near home, I couldn't quite overcome my shyness around asking the staff how to order a long black coffee in Mandarin (is it a 美式咖啡 or something else?). Next time, I swear.

#walks #photos #Leica #digital #Melbourne

This was a post from Cos.

You can follow this blog on the Fediverse at @cos@apintandaparma.club or subscribe in your RSS reader.

I’ve been hanging around the Internet since the days of UUCP connections. The distributed / less-centralized nature of those times is something that still appeals to me, which is why I’m still here #selfhosting and hosting for others – I’ve loved empowering friends to get their thoughts up and into the Internet so that it’s not just the same old nerds like me in here.

I’m trying out WriteFreely as a way to better aggregate my writing and some other information. This post serves as both an #introduction and a test.

what do I like to do?

A significant part of my brain seems to be filled with #music – lots of it. I used to try and blog about it long ago, but now I'd rather just keep listening than finding ever-more convoluted ways to describe it.

I love #walking, especially as a way to explore #FilmPhotography (or digital #photography). I’m not scared of #PublicTransport and quite like #trains.

My photography goes way back on Flickr, a little less further back on Instagram and I've more recently been experimenting with Pixelfed – see @cos@pixelfed.social or @cos@pixelfed.au. Either way, I try to find beauty in the everyday with my images. I'm particularly fascinated by blankness.

what do I care about?

The world's a better place when we don't feel we need to hide who we really are. To me, this means (among other things):

• Trans rights are human rights.
• Black lives matter.
• Human beings are not “illegal”.
• Love is love.
• People should have control over their own bodies.
• Science is real.
• Kindness is everything.

where can I be found on social media?

These days, the Fediverse is where it's at – you can find me at @cos@aus.social.

what do I do for work?

I spent a long time as a systems administrator, network engineer, systems engineer and otherwise, but these days I focus on the people aspects of #DevOps, #SRE or #PlatformEngineering by managing teams, growing people, and helping everyone understand that Software’s Not Just For Christmas. If you want to know more, you can read my LinkedIn Profile.

what's some other tech-related stuff that I'm interested in?

#emacs is not a dirty word. Given my change of work focus, I’d guess that 98% of my time in it nowadays is spent using #orgmode to keep notes on what’s going on at work.

Once upon a time, I helped some friends start a #Linux User Group called LUV. It's been a long time since I was involved, but I'm glad that it kept going for all these years – plenty of other people put in a lot of work to make it so, and more power to them! Despite that love for Linux, I've enthusiastically used other #Unix / Unix-like operating systems over the years too, and happily use a Mac desktop these days – it's all ok by me.