Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

The mysterious art of ball slapping and the decay of man

It was a normal Sunday evening trawling the socials in front of the fire. Time not well spent, but Dostoevsky was denser and more meaningful than the fluff available on X (formerly Twitter). In the old days, we watched the Sunday movie on the TV, now we watch the world burn in what my wife would call the dystopian political imaginary. Or something like that.  It popped up on my feed just as my daughter fired up her electric piano. A fancy Roland bought the previous  Christmas. Someone had commented that Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, billionaire, was …

The shit fuckery of late capitalism in Australia

The Melbourne Cup is Australia’s version of the Kentucky Derby, The Epsom Derby, and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe a couple of times. It’s a national celebration of buffoonery, alcohol abuse, and questionable fashion choices. Oh, and gambling. The first time I attended was when I was nineteen and worked the bar in corporate marquees. As a hospitality job, it was relatively well paid due to the public holiday penalty rates and I had the unique experience of being the only sober person out of 80,000 race goers. I was living in St Kilda with a girl that loved heroin …

Adrift in a sea of intoxication

My first alcoholic drink was sometime in Wagga Wagga, a large town in the Riverina district of NSW on the west coast of Australia. Rich farming country that bred healthy football players and at least one famous cricket player. Anyway, the first drink was from a long neck of Crown Lager or Fosters while our parents were out. My twin sister and I tasted the beer and then screwed up our faces in revulsion. How could our parents and their friends drink so much? The next day, my mother found evidence of the stolen beer and come down upon us …

The sad tale of the chicken coop that never was

February 2020: I had just finished a board meeting at the property technology startup that I was working with, and it felt good. The numbers were heading in the right direction, we had traction. It was going to be a good year. In an excellent demonstration of the developed and developing world dichotomy, it was easy to ignore the early murmurings of a virus in Asia as something happening “over there.” March 2020: The virus in Asia was becoming hard to ignore. Cases had spread to the USA, Europe, the UK, and Australia. Real estate listings, which drove the proptech’s …

Ferny Creek: cults, weirdos, conservatives, and the enterprising Breen

On the 30th of March in 1918, while the so-called Great War was raging in Europe, there was a land auction on the Holly Hill Estate in the Dandenongs. The land was owned by William Breen and the auction conducted by Coghill and Haughton, respectable auctioneers based in the city, 42 kilometres to the west. Being offered was land from 0.5 acre to 2.0 acres that the brochure proclaimed as being suitable for Mountain Homes, Health Resort Homes, Weekend Bungalows, Camping Sites, Horticulture Purposes, and Intense Culture Farming.  Seventy six allotments were offered and the local newspapers called the auctioneers …

Upper Ferntree Gully: bland, beige, and not many ferns

Before Uber came to the hills if you wanted to be picked up from Upper Ferntree Gully Railway station, 41 kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, the taxi driver would confirm the pick up address as ‘Upper Gully Rail’. Often there would be a long wait and I would have to relocate to the pub, affectionately known to the locals as the upper. Upper Ferntree Gully and Ferntree Gully has three pubs. The Upper, the Middle, and the Bottom. Each of them filled with gaming machines for the poor and addicted souls desperate for a win. Originally built in 1889 …

A brief history of working from the (home) office

When I started my working career in an engineering business, I worked in the office, with no exceptions. The working day started at 8:30 am in the office and finished anytime after 5.30 pm, often later. Technology limitations meant that calls, invoices, meetings, and customer support all happened from a building filled with co-workers (hopefully) working together to achieve a common objective. Before I could afford to buy a car or motorbike I got public transport – the 96 tram from St. Kilda and a train to Footscray station which was exploding with $2 shops and heroin. At work, bikini …

Paying attention to how we pay attention

There is a special type of braggadocious social post that manages to get the bile rising in the throat faster than a greenwash post from a fossil fuel company. I’m thinking of the disciplined time schedule post that says, look how busy I am, look how successful I am, and consequently, look at how much better I am than you. Whether it’s real or not, Mark Wahlberg was a pioneer of the genre in 2018 with a brutal schedule that went viral. It features a 02.30am wake-up with ample time for snacks, prayer, and exercise. Bless Marky Mark’s, patriotic god-fearing …

Reveries of a solitary walker

Reveries of a solitary walker or Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire by Jean Jacques Rousseau is one of the first modern love stories dedicated to the art of walking. Written near the end of his life, Rousseau reflects on his life and his perceived persecutions for his ideas. The writing is quite beautiful with Rousseau mixing personal reflections, thoughts about getting old, and pointing out particularly interesting plants. He reflects on his age, writing: Youth is the proper time to acquire wisdom, age is the period when we should practice it Beautiful. In COVID times, I learned (again) that if …

Getting in action, focusing on the real problems

My poor little website has been struggling recently, and initially, I thought it was due to DDOS attacks after looking at the logs of strange p0rn related requests. Initially (in late October), I blocked IP addresses, added CloudFlare, reviewed logs. The website was still broken and I thought the only solution would be to migrate to a bigger server which would be long and hard. So this year, after much procrastination, I ssh’d into the server and discovered that MySQL was running at 97% CPU utilization due to a bad WordPress plugin. I fixed the problem in 5 minutes by …