Not long after I saw Bessa and thought better of it, Hamish showed me his Canonet, which he'd recommended previously as a cheap but good entry point into the land of rangefinders - a little ebaying later, and here's mine:

I'm a little late to the bandwagon (as usual). I guess I'm supposed to grow a beard now, and run down the street proclaiming that autofocus will be the death of us all...

...at least, once I get the hang of this thing (especially the scanning afterwards).

It wasn't until after I took this screenshot of my last.fm profile and put it on flickr that I realised today's the 7th of the 7th. I don't even pretend to know what this all means - fortunately I'm not superstitious (though my mother wasn't keen on me cutting my fingernails on Sundays when I was younger).

Severed Heads are no more. This 5-disc boxed set collects a bunch of their earlier work. I only became a full-on fan at the start of the 90's (thanks, again, to a little show on 3PBS-FM that played lots of interesting electronic music on Sunday evenings), but collected whatever I could since then. There's plenty of other good stuff still available, too.

It started with Cuisine - the CD shop at Monash Uni used to let you rent discs back then - I rented it, and ended up buying it. Bulkhead, a compilation of singles and 12" mixes (remember them?), soon followed. Before long I found a mailing list on the internet for like-minded souls...

Tom Ellard continues anon.

#! /bin/bash
ifconfig $(netstat -rn | awk '/^default/ {print $NF}' | head -1)\
 | grep 'inet ' | awk '{print $2}'

• jira_alert.pl: create an issue in Jira. I'd suggest running this one after a while (like 5 minutes or so) so you don't get bugs created for transient incidents. It has to keep some state, so it uses a Berkeley DB hash - currently that's stored in /var/tmp - you should change that to somewhere better that you know your Lithium instance can write to.

• jabber_alert.pl: send an alert message to a (comma-separated) list of recipients. It turns out, of course, that somewhere in the twisty little maze of Perl dependencies there's some bitrot in an unmaintained module (XML::Stream) that causes it to barf if you're using the OpenFire Jabber server, so you'll need to patch a few lines of code - see the top of jabber_alert.pl for instructions on this.

• route_check.pl: check for the existence of a given route in a router's routing table. It looks in the RFC1213-MIB::ipRouteDest table, so should be non-Cisco-specific.

• cisco_ipsec_check.pl: check for active IPSec tunnels to a given peer address. This one relies on the CISCO-IPSEC-FLOW-MONITOR-MIB being supported in your router (it works on 870 and 2800-series routers).

• ccme_phone_count.pl: check your Cisco CallManager Express system for a minimum number of registered phones.

• cue_voicemail_time_check.pl: check that your Cisco Unity Express system isn't about to run out of voicemail space. You need to have turned on SNMP on your CUE NM or AIM (via the CLI - I haven’t noticed anything in CUE's web interface for configuring SNMP).

• check_ds0_in_use.pl: how many active DS0's (phone lines, basically) do you have? Perhaps you'd like to know before you're about to get a congested link...

I only bought a handful of copies of No Depression, but discovered the current one is the last issue, and they're retreating to the online world with a book-like publication per year (or so). What does this mean? I'm not sure. I guess we'll see.

Mick Harvey, Roland S Howard and Pink Stainless Tail will be playing a benefit show to raise medical fees for Bruno Adams who will also be making a special appearance. Bruno founded the band ‘Once Upon a Time’ which played around Melbourne through the eighties to rave reviews. They relocated to Europe, finding themselves in Berlin not long before the wall came down.18 years later, they are still there. Bruno was running clubs and promoting bands, including many local Australian acts that passed through Berlin, whilst playing in innumerable bands himself. In the last 7 years he has toured Europe extensively with the Fatal Shore (Chris Hughes, Phil Shöenfelt).Tickets will be $20/$15 at the door, 6pm.

I'll be there if I don't melt in the heat.

There's always something to see, around Sydney Road. I needed a refresher walk (well, that and I wanted to drop into Brunswick Bound).

[see all photos from yesterday morning's walk. ]

Thanks to a wonderful gift from two friends, Lian and I woke up real early on Australia Day to go up and over the city. You oughta try it some time.

[see all of our hot-air ballooning photos. ]

• pelle carlberg - in a nutshell (a bit more middle-aged than jens lekman. and there's that great song about mike joyce...)
• j.p. shilo - as happy as sad is blue (ex?-hungry ghosts guy. fabulous, even though i had to order it from Smells Like Records, and he's a Melbourne artist!)
• gravenhurst - the western lands (Warp is signing guitar bands, now?)
• jens lekman - night falls over kortedala (the older albums are certainly magical, legendary stuff. but this is still really good.)
• electrelane - no shouts, no calls (I guess it's the last one, then. but they went out on a strong note, at least.)
• david kilgour - the far now (I've yet to hear him put a foot wrong)
• blonde redhead - 23 (not sure how i feel about it with respect to older stuff, but found myself listening to it a fair bit anyway)
• devastations - yes, u (i like this more than the previous album, possibly thanks to the extra noises.)
• arthur & yu - in camera (chi? did you hear this?)
• richard hawley - lady's bridge (particularly un-hip but i don't care. we would've played "born under a bad sign" (from previous album) at our wedding, if it weren't for the name...)

honourable mentions:

• angels of light - we are him (i've been mining the back-catalogue via emusic. surprisingly, it's all good so far)
• new estate - is it real? (go and see them live. really.)
• mick harvey - two of diamonds (maybe not as un-hip as richard hawley, but getting there.)
• low - drums and guns (yeah, i like the old stuff and the new stuff)
• von südenfed - tromatic reflexxions (i gather Mark E. Smith just got sacked from the band, so consider it a one-off, then? prolly better than this year's Fall album, which was reasonably good nonetheless.)

things that might've been higher if i'd got around to listening to them more:

• githead - art pop
• bill callahan - woke on a whaleheart
• stephen cummings - space travel
• okkervil river - the stage names
• deerhoof - friend opportunity
• the pink stainless tail - the infinite wisdom of
• ladybug transisitor - can't wait another day