echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

The beloved and I went for a walk through the back streets of Northcote and Brunswick today to visit an exhibition that a friend of ours is curating at Counihan Gallery, Embodied Energies. The works were predominantly statements on sustainability, many made from found and recycled materials, and all of them interesting.

One work, by an artist whose name now completely escapes me, was a Green Waste Sorting Table, which displayed reclaimed waste that was all green; green bottles, lighters, toys, bottle tops, packaging. People were invited to bring their own green waste to be sorted into the work. We had a chat to the artist and he invited us to fill in our green sins on index cards and add them to the pile of sins from others in our community, in return for a recycled badge.

Sins included things like "I spend too long in the shower - I can't help it!" and "I don't compost all my food waste." I chose two sins; I love to travel overseas and am in denial about travel's footprint, and I eat critters from the sea, even though I'm well aware of the damage of over fishing does to fish stocks, trawling does to the sea bed, and long line fishing does to bird populations. Not to mention a multitude of other little green sins.

Here's my badge, chosen because the CC reminded me of Creative Commons, and the maple leaf reminded me of friends in Canada (none of whom I've ever me in person).

The walk itself was like a gallery at times too. Melbourne has had a boom in stencil art in recent years. It reminds me of printmaking, and I love it. Here's a sample.

On my ride home from the city today, just after I rode up a small hill alongside Merri Creek, my bike computer told my I'd just completed my 5000th kilometre. I've been commuting around Melbourne for more than 15 years and I've only had the bike computer for about four, so I've done many thousands more kilometres than that. Today's ride was typical; I rode into the city, about seven kilometres, and home again. It was also atypical; I was coughing and spluttering and going at snail's pace, coming out of the worst cold I've had in years, whereas normally ...

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It seems like an eternity ago that the Habari admin was replaced with Monolith, and all in all, I think it's a good thing. We've had some great additions to the Habari community who have been really kicking it along and ironing out the bugs. Though I did miss though the incoming links on the dashboard. You might call me vain, but it was nice to be able to see who was linking to my site. Sometimes they were new Habari users who were using one of my plugins or themes, and I could pop over and say hi ...

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I've updated the Publish Quote plugin for Habari, and donated it to the Habari community. It now takes advantage of features added in Habari 0.5 alpha, so that you can set a template for the title as well as the content and specify tags that should be added to your quote entries. Let me know if you have any feature requests. It would also be great to hear from anyone who's using the plugin.

It's the most beautiful time to be at the farm. The sun is shining, there isn't any wind, at least in the morning, and the nights are cool enough to have a fire. First thing this morning we went for a walk in the hills, and were greeted by two kookaburras, sitting in a tree not ten metres away and laughing their heads off. If you've never heard a kookaburra laugh in the wild, you're missing something special. Same goes for magpies, which are bountiful at the moment. There are also lots of galahs, and while they're amazingly bright pink, ...

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If all goes according to plan, this should be my first post integrating Disqus comments into my blog. I've written a very simple Habari Disqus plugin that puts Disqus comments on posts that have no existing comments. Where there are previous comments, the native comment system will be used. At the moment, it's a bit fragile, as your theme needs to use a template called comments.php to display normal comments. I'm hoping that someone else will take an interest and improve upon the basic start.

(image from http://finance.yahoo.com) The graph above shows the Australian dollar steadily rising against the US dollar over the last two years. It's gone from about $US0.76 to just a touch under $US0.96. That's almost parity, and maybe soon we'll be calling them pesos. Now, if I go to the US, my money buys me a lot more than it did two years ago. Many things are a lot cheaper all the time because of tariffs and taxes, such as books and runners, but the things that make a big difference are food and accommodation. Doesn't it follow that ...

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Things have been incredibly busy and stressful at chez nous recently. The beloved is acting in a senior role for a couple of months, which basically means she's doing two jobs, I'm trying to get some serious work done on my PhD so I can submit before the end of the year (a little late, but not outrageous), we're looking at interstate business opportunities, considering getting some work done on our house (it _really_ needs it), I'm trying to continue to contribute to Habari, and there are all those other little bits and pieces of life that seem to take ...

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I met a guy at a party the other night who worked as a voice actor, doing voice overs for car ads and such. He recently had some trouble with a telecommunications company and had to spend a lot of time on the phone navigating through the endless menus. "Press one to be routed back where you came from." The only problem was, the voice on the other end of the phone telling him what buttons to push was his own voice.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the spike in developer activity after the merging of the Monolith admin theme into the Habari trunk (though I kind of regret the tremor reference, given the pain in China). Things have continued apace since then, and Owen has written a great post about what's been happening. Again, none of this would be possible, or anywhere near as interesting, without the great community. A small excerpt.

Since the merge of the Monolith code, there have been 99 commits. That's roughly one commit every three hours for the past two weeks. ... As ...

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