anatomy · of · distance

I'm listening to (a delayed recording of) Local And/Or General (the weekly Melbourne local/live music show on 3RRR); they just played the new Heligoland single, Coming Up For Air; none too shabby, fact244. The show at the Empress this Saturday, with Becus and the amazing Light Music Club, looks set to be good; if I was in town, I'd so be there.

Anyway, I've now got a system of sorts for auto-recording programmes on RRR.
It's a bit of a kludge; it uses TZ="Australia/Melbourne" at $TIME to start the recording script at a fixed time. These scripts will be launched from a cron job timed to fire a few hours before the programme is on, as cron doesn't understand timezones well. The recording script, meanwhile, just finds a proper filename, i.e., local-20050905.ra, for the output, starts mplayer capturing it, sleeps for 2 hours (or whatever time the programme is meant to go for) and then kills mplayer. All this is required because there's no way of telling mplayer to get 2 hours and stop.

Anyway, it's good to hear Melbourne bands again, even though I'm nowhere near staggering-home distance of the band venues of (North) Fitzroy.