Thorne is feeling exceedingly centred and peaceful tonight. Welcome back peaceful!

Thorne says:
The master tactician is a formidable opponent. He will win every fight.
The master strategist will easily beat him however. He need never fight.

Thorne is sure that this has been said before, by someone, because it is obvious, but swears that he had this thought for himself, just now.

Double Update: Double draws ever closer. Blog migration is now a going thing, but comments in this old blog will sadly not be able to follow, owing to deficiencies in Tiki, not in WordPress?. Just litting all you faithful commenteers know in advance.

Warning: Geek navel gazing follows. The easily bored may wish to dive screaming for the power point and violently rip their still humming computers asunder from their power source of choice. Or not…
There have always been a variety of trains on the Melbourne urban system, or so I gather. The ‘Red Trains’ were before my time, but apparently had extraordinary character and quirkiness, not to mention a great deal of asbestos. D’oh!

For as long as I have had the good fortune to be acquainted with Melbourne’s delightful public transport system (not sarcasm, really! Try getting public transport anywhere else and tell me I’m wrong!) there have been two main types of train: The now-venerable Hitachi’s, and the recently refurbished Comeng trains. These two breeds appear very similar at first, having the distinctive metallic horizontal ridges and recessed automatic-cloing-doors. The most obvious difference is the windows: Hitachi trains have bisected windows which open. Comeng trains have single-pane non-opening windows.
Anyone who has commuted in Melbourne in the past couple of decades will be familiar with the relative merits of these trains: Hitachis are loud and rattly. They have heating but no cooling, and they frequently smell like hot metal. Comeng trains are quieter, slightly more comfortable, and blissfully air-conditioned!

I write all this tedious anorak-clad drivel because I want to briefly sing the praises of a newccomer among the Melbourne trains, and offer a sincere prayer that more of its kind are coming: The Siemens trains.
I’d wildly exhort that they rock except that that’s one of the noteworthy things that they don’t do. They are comfy, astonishingly quiet on the inside, steady and stable. Not to be confused with the rickety rollercoaster that is the X’trapolis.
That’s all I wanted to say about trains.

In a similar vein of pompous unreferenced reviews and opinions, I want to stick in a quick note about Ramen. Ramen is freaking delicious. If you work in Richmond or Melbourne (Victoria, Australia), and you’ve never had Ramen, I suggest you go to either the nameless Ramen bar next door to The Curry Club on Bridge Road, or Ajisen Ramen, near the top end of the Burke Street cinema complexes. This is healthy, tasty, cheap food with non-trivial amounts of cultural heritage.

Ok.. done ranting for now.

p.s. innumerable thanks go to E for correcting my crapulous typing!

Why am I blogging in the middle of the working day?

Still, it’s not like I will have to do this again for, oh, hours.

On the bright side, Double is looking alarmingly close to finished. The only major piece which is still missing is the image galleries. I have decided to ditch all the wildly over-clever dynamically thumbnailing php poop in favour of some kind of static gallery-generator script that cranks out .htaccess files, thumbnails and indexes for any arbitrary directory of photos, so that one can just symlink them into one’s homepage. WordPress MU is very impressive, and I have concluded that, so long as galleries and blogs remain public, the wiki can just be made private-only. I may later make it accessible in a public read-only form at a slightly different URL, but that doesn’t seem to be exactly urgent right now. I have a little task-list, and it’s actually getting shorter for a change. Wheeee!