I had to work, and in between that tech-support rollercoaster - where you think "aha ! this is the missing piece of information that'll magically solve all my current problems", and then it's not, and you go through the process again - I wandered over to Orange in Chapel St for lunch. Eggs benedict never tasted so good, when you're in the grip of despair, but I suspect it was also just that i hadn't eaten all day. There's a grungy little secondhand shop down the grungy end of Chapel St called Checkerboard that I hardly ever go into, and since I had a bit of time to kill I browsed through the entire CD collection, or at least, the main bits. The wall's covered with cassettes, but somehow I can't see myself wanting to buy tapes, even if they're $4.

• Opus Collective Volume 2 : I felt slightly guilty picking this up in a secondhand shop for $4 (yes, $4). I did get Volume 1 from some guy who was actually on it (who I'd somehow been in touch with via aus.music, "back when it used to be interesting"^TM), along with a tape of some of his other stuff. Ah, the early 90's. I miss the days of hearing "The Electronic Influence" on 3PBS-FM on a Sunday night, taping all the good bits and hunting the albums down later. Darrin Verhagen's soft ABC-announcer-like voice. Ring-up-and-win-something competitions that I actually had a chance at winning. Peter Johnson's wide array of 70's and 80's electronica, some of which I found for myself. We even corresponded for a while, and I can still remember him lamenting that nobody did albums as good as Robert Schroeder's extremely fine early-to-mid works, anymore. Funnily enough, when I finally met him at a 3PBS-FM open day, I had absolutely no idea what to say to him, and we spent a few awkward moments staring around the room wondering what to say. Still, I wonder what he's up to these days. Darrin Verhagen's still putting stuff out, running Dorobo, and working in Peril Underground occasionally. But Peter just kinda vanished, once they wound up the show...

• Man or Astroman? - Experiment Zero : Sci-Fi meets Surf Twang. I couldn't remember why I'd been recommended them ages ago, but it was very cheap, and it seems kinda fun.

• Minimum Chips - Freckles : My ghod, I didn't realize they sounded this much like Stereolab. Nice enough, though.

• The Strokes - Is This It : $15 seemed like a reasonable buy, plus it's the US-version, that doesn't have the Spinal Tap-like cover, and they subsituted that New York City Cops track for...er...something else. I started listening to this at work yesterday, but put it aside for later.

• Bigger Than Tina (soundtrack) : This was a purely speculative purchase too, based on noticing that the first half of the CD consisted of current(ish) Australian bands covering early 80's Australian hits. Custard do We can get together (can Iva Davies still rock like that ?), Moler do the Divinyls' classic Science Fiction, and so on. The Meanies work on the much more recent Better the devil you know, whose status was perhaps raised in some people's eyes in recent years, thanks to that Nick Cave lecture on Love and such. Plus there's the title track by The Fauves, that takes the piss out of the whole autotune fetish of the time the film came out (1999 ? something like that). I never saw the film, I don't think it did particularly well. I remember the video for the Fauves track on Rage, at least.

On the way back to work, I ducked into Greville Records, where I was a little surprised to finally see that the new Church album was out. It's called after everything now this. There don't seem to be any absolute stunner tracks on it yet, but I'm still working on it.

Hopefully my amazon order ought to arrive this week, with the two Tipsy albums that CDNow suddenly (post-order) decided they couldn't get for me at all, plus the new Ladytron one, which I'm particularly looking forward to.