I am working in Melbourne Central Tower, a place of great evil all too easily likenedto one of The Two Towers (no, not WTC!), as it looks out balefully over the teeming abyss of Swanston St to the lesser tower, built in imitation of the Great Cone: QV.
Today I decided to spend a few bucks of my shiny new pay-packet on lunch in one of the many food-court places under one of these places. I walked for half an hour, and was eventually rewarded by Bubble Tea down in QV. A treat which seems to have all but vanished from the streets of Melbourne in the last few months. Clearly, that fad is over. Time for the next fad. What I did not find was anything terribly interesting or original in the way of food. I passed two eeeevil Max Brenner stores, both of which called softly to me in their muffled, chocolatey voices, but they only offered After Lunch, not Lunch itself.
Eventually I wound up eating a few terribly disappointing sushi train plates at a place called Tomodachi. I do not recommend.

On the whole I am now siezed by doubt about the sanity of the Food Court as an idea… there is a certain pressing mediocrity enforced by competition for custom and space, and by the restricted modes of customer service. Tattersalls lane is a much better option, methinks.

double Trouble has achieved a new milestone as of yesterday: It now upholds the holy grail of website design: Single-Sign-On. The combination of enforced https (SSL) with Apache’s “Basic” authentication against my LDAP means that SquirrelMail, MoinMoin, WordPress, the doc server, the remote admin interface and web-server statistics pages will all use a common single login, a login authenticated against the same store which drives UNIX shell access, IMAP and SMTP mail, etc, etc, etc. It is most sweeeeeet!