Stephen Hearn - musician, IT performance tester, motorcyclist, husband, photographer & traveller, living in Melbourne, Australia.

About me - Music - News_Links - UNIX Links - Microsoft Links - Testing Links - Miscellaneous Computer Links - Miscellaneous - Weather - Surf Links - Travel Links - Bike Links - Photography - Health & Fitness - Bonsai Links - Entertainment Links - Search Engines

Stephen Hearn’s home page

I am a musician, IT professional (specialising in performance testing), motorcyclist, husband, photographer, surfer, traveller, living in Melbourne, Australia.

About me

In past lives I have been a Civil Engineer (Water Supply/Resources) and a professional musician (electric guitar). Here's some of the computer stuff I do...

Software load & performance testing, mostly with Hewlett Packard (formerley Mercury Interactive) tools LoadRunner, Quality Centre, Performance Centre, WinRunner, QuickTestPro, etc. I've got certifications for a lot of this stuff (a little dated now tho).
System Administration - mostly UNIX stuff, & some Windows, but not exactly current experience.
Programming languages - C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, UNIX shell, Expect, VB, VB Script, etc. I pickup & use stuff as I need it to get the job done.
Performance monitoring & tuning.
Database testing, monitoring, tuning, etc. Mostly Oracle, but lately quite a bit of DB2.
I've also dealt with various other technologies - middlewares, CORBA, MQSeries, WebSphere, Siebel, etc.

While I have quite broad technical experience, the past 5-7 years has been focused mainly on performance testing. I enjoy technical work, and despite my advancing years, I have no desire to move into team-leader / management roles. So don't bother calling me for that kind of work - you're wasting your time and mine.

I have worked in many different market sectors: Telco, Automotive, Finance, Insurance & Government.

For more details, here is my CV in MS Word format.

You can email me at .

I have another homepage here.

http://www.stephenhearn.com redirects here too.

Music

I play guitar. My early inspirations were Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. I started on electric bass but soon switched to guitar. During the early-mid 1980's I played in original bands with friends, namely Justice then Fair Warning. We played big-hair hard rock - which was popular at the time. Fair Warning released one EP called Love To Rock'n'Roll (some mp3s here, and here) and had a reasonable following on the Melbourne pub scene. It self-destructed in 1987 so I started playing covers. These were the best of times for cover bands - lots of venues, lots of bands, lots of money. Ah, those were the days.

I got bored with popular music in the late 80's, but the 90's grunge thing got me interested again. Some of my favourites were Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice In Chains.

In 1991/2 I got the chance to play in the US with a talented Melbourne-based songwriter friend of mine, Kaliopi. We get together every few years to play & renew our musical relationship, which I enjoy very much. I have also played on another friend's project, the Crazy Diamond CD "Age of Descent".

Until recently I was playing with a Fleetwood Mac tribute band called "Fleetwood To The Max". That band is unfortunately no longer. I also play in a country rock outfit called "Bad Habits" (MySpace link below), and lately have joined another Fleetwood Mac tribute called "Gypsy". We're working around town (& the country) so check us out...

I still like a big loud guitar. I like Muse, Porcupine Tree, Opeth, Foo Fighters, Rod Hot Chilli Peppers, Tool, Sevendust, Chris Cornell, Queens of the Stoneage, and System Of A Down. Classic favourites include Deep Purple, Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Rush, Pink Floyd, etc. Of local bands I like COG, Karnivool, Electric Mary, The Butterfly Effect (they're latest album is absolute killer), Ash Grunwald, Birds Of Tokyo, Eskimo Joe, and evergreen blues guitarist Kevin Borich; he's one of the best live players you will find, go and see him...

Music Links

· Gypsy - the Australian Fleetwood Mac tribute show

· Bad Habits Country on MySpace

· Fleetwood To The Max

· FasterLouder

· Amazon.com

· Rolling Stone magazine

· Q Magazine

· The (now defunt) Tea Party

· Ticketmaster

· Ticketek

· Beat Magazine

· Esplanade Hotel, Melbourne

· Triple J Tour Information

· Kevin Borich - guitar legend

· MelBand - Melbourne Music Directory

News/Sport Links

· The Age

· ABC News

· CNET News

· Herald-Sun

· Crikey.com

· Washington Post

· USA Today

· LA Times

· USA Today

UNIX Links

Hewlett Packard

· HP Electronic Support Centre

· HP Forums

SUN

· SUN Servers (tech info)

· SUN Online Documentation

· Solaris FAQs & online doco

Linux, etc

· FreshMeat

· Slashdot

· UNIX Guru Universe

· NTP - Network Time Protocol

· Vendor MAC address ranges

· Rosetta site - various UNIX flavours command conversions

· Expect homepage

· Secure shell (ssh) homepage

· AARNET software mirror

Microsoft/Intel/PC Links

Microsoft-related web sites & resources

· Microsoft Developer Network

· Technet Search engine

· Download.com

· Shareware.com

· SysInternal (Filemon, monitoring tools)

· GNU UNIX tools for Windows

· VNC homepage

· Cygwin homepage

· Norton Utilities - Ghost/pcAnywhere/etc

Software Testing Links

Testing-related web sites & resources

· Open Source Testing

· Mercury Interactive

· Software Testing Hotlist

· OpenSTA - one of the better open source tools

· TPC Benchmarks

· SPEC Benchmarks

Miscellaneous Computer Links

· Wired Magazine Technology News

· internet.com - various net news, etc

· SysOpt.com - mostly hardware stuff

· ITNews.com

· ComputerWorld

· Google NewsGroups

· LISTSERV mailing lists

· Webopedia

· Standard Network ports

· Whois lookup

· RTFM Usenet FAQ's

· Sheilds UP - port scanner, etc

· ASCII Character set

My own web links

Various other bits and pieces

· Mail.com

· Google Mail

· Optus WebMail

· NAB Internet Banking

· Austral Credit Union

· Tattersalls

· Ebay Australia

· Australian Health Mgt

· Melbourne Street Directory

· Travel Distances

· WorldTime.com - Australian time, sunrise, sunset, etc

· CityLink

Weather

· Bureau Of Meteorology - Weather ( Current, Radar)

· Phases of the Moon

· Williamstown Tides

Surf Links

· SwellNet

Travel Links

Some places I’ve been, or would like to see.

· Ball’s Pyramid – how cool is this place? Near Lord Howe Island in the Pacific Ocean.

· Bay Of Fundy - largest tides in the world. On the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia.

· The Maldives

· Lake Baikal

Bike Links

I currently ride a 2001 YZF R6 and a 2006 Suzuki SV1000. I started on a 1996 Kawasaki GPX250 and until recently owned a 1997 TRX 850. Here are a few pics:

TRX1 (58kB)

R6 (73kB)

SV1000 (100kB)

And some bike links -

· Motorcycling Australia

· MotoGpNews

· MotoGrandPrix

· Crash.net

· World Superbike homepage

· Motorcycle Online

· MCNews (Aus)

· Motorcycle News

· SuperBike School (Aus)

· Balls Performance Tuning

· Girls on Bikes

Photography

Got into digital photography for awhile, then got out of it again – mainly bcos I fried my camera in water (yeah, NOW they make them waterproof…..). Anyway, I had a nice little digi-cam (FinePix F601 Zoom), then went to film (Nikon F90X), and have just added a Nikon D40. In film I like the Fuji stuff - Superia 100 & 200, 400 if I have to, and the classic Velvia. Never shoot much B&W but I love it when I do – should do it more often really. I’ve been pretty slack generally with my photography, but I did finally get around to putting some of my stuff on Flickr; it’s here.

Some photography related links -

· My Flickr stuff

· Michaels Camera Store

· Ross Halfin - Rock photographer site (& interesting blog)

· Depth of Field calculator

· photo.net

· Melbourne Camera Club

· Weather Photography

· Centre for Contemporary Photography

· Matt Irwin Photography

· Philip Greenwood Photography

· Camera Review site