Score another one for having a personal archive. Or having a shred of a memory.
I cannot say I follow the European Football Championships but did pick up a sense of the surprise victory by Iceland over England (skip all Brexit puns here).
But something triggered when I saw this tweet that Pat Lockley re-tweeted today:
This is where Ragnar Sigurðsson, the Icelandic goalscorer, grew up. #engice #emísland pic.twitter.com/LTSXmafX3C
— Dagur Hjartarson (@DagurHjartarson) June 27, 2016
That shore, those little houses by the water, looked very familiar. And that green boat.
It’s like I was there.
Because… I was.
And digging through my photos of my first trip to Iceland in 1999, I found myself looking at my own photo of that exact location:
I remembered this place as a museum about the hard life of 19th century Icelandic fisherman located in Bolungarvik. A replica of the real kind of fishing center from the era, it is called the Ósvör Maritime Museum.
The featured photo on this post shows me leaning on that boat, here is another shot I took of it:
These photos are assembled in a really old thing I built in maybe 2000 as template for a javascript based slideshow, it was called the “jClicker”. Since my Maricopa web archives are gone, I hoisted my own at http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/proj/jclicker/. Here is what my Icelandic photos looked like in that interface:
I knew I had that photo!
I’m impressed that the old slide show template still works. I think I had some trick to preload the next image because that was the era of “fast” dialup speeds.
Yes, the photos are pretty small — THIS WAS 1999! I was using an Olympus D-450.
Now I am not going to argue with an Icelander, but I doubt that football player Ragnar Sigurðsson grew up in that fishing museum (maybe it was an implication he is from Bolungarvik. Being “right” here does not matter.
What does matter is that (a) my brain somehow identified that photo in the tweet and (b) I knew where in my personal archive to look.
I consider this another score for the self hosted archive. A goal if you will…
UPDATE: June 28, 2016
More proof to my case, thanks to a DM from Pat Lockley
@TV2Kadafi What, in a fishing museum, in some recreated fishing huts?
— Fredrik Naumann (@felixfeatures) June 27, 2016
And just for clarity, according to Wikipedia, Ragnar Sigurðsson was born in Reykjavik — that ain’t Reykjavik in the photo.
#LetsKeepTwitterTruthy
Top / Featured Image: A younger version of me in front of one of the boats at the Ósvör Maritime Museum in Bolungarvík, Iceland. This was in 1999 doing some sightseeing after doing some workshops in Reykjavik.
This was before Creative Commons, before flickr. But I will put a standard Creative Commons BY license on all my photos.
Picky point, England Lost to Iceland in the Euros;-)
Scotland didn’t make the Euro 2016 but perhaps we can stay in the EU!
lovely pictures though.
Rats, I did not do my research well! Making updates. I did know it was England. I swear, they are very easy to distinguish from the Scots.