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!

Last night, I watched a most fine documentary on SBS which talked about the historical (archaeological) evidence for and against the Biblical story of exodus, and surrounding the origins of Israel. It was refreshingly objective, but it left me thinking about the middle east as it stands, and how impossible it seems to root out hatreds whose origins are already the subject of unverifiably ancient myth. Time clearly has not healed this wound.

My workmate, currently on holiday, left a copy of a recent Time magazine on his desk. The cover article was all about the current resurgent conflagration in Beruit and that whole part of the world.

I propose a solution. I can’t help but think that I am probably not the first person to suggest this:

1. Define a region which covers the contested area.
2. Evacuate everyone who can be peaceably removed from that area, given that you have explained to everyone in the region why they’re being moved. Those who violently insist on remaining will be deemed to have waived all right to aid or further consideration.
3. Dust the entire contested area with radioactives of several thousand years half-life. Dust heavily enough that the area is no longer survivable for periods of more than a five minutes. Make sure the ‘dust’ agent is heavy and non-soluble, so that it will stay where it’s put, forever.
4. If conflict expands to go around this region, expand the region. If there is eventually no human-habitable land between Yemen and Turkey, between Suez and Tehran, so be it. Humanity as a whole has forfeit the right to these lands.

Disclaimer: This idea may be a measure of my slightly depressed frame of mind. It is certainly not a serious suggestion, nor do I pretend to hold moral superiority or judgement over any party in the present conflict. Violence begets revenge. We would be a better species if we had outgrown this kind of behaviour, but we haven’t, and we’re not.

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!

Owing to a couple of major australian clothing and homewares shops having new-financial-year sales of great magnitude, and the generosity of Erins, and the general madness which ensues when huge sales and a genuine need for stuff combine with a vague fascination for a new thing… this sentence got much too long. The clothing thing: it is fixed. I have a couple of magnificent new pairs of pants and a whole bunch of new Van Heusen shirts of much niftiness.
Now all I need is to somehow get enough sleep, and I will actually look something like a professional when I’m at work! Wow!

We watched War of the Worlds a-la Spielberg and Cruise on Tuesday night. While it did a number of special effects rather well, it still managed to suck quite a lot. Cruise played his generic anti-hero, with no respect at all to the H.G.Wells story, and Spielberg made vague almost flippant references to it through the naming and arrangement of a few characters and narrative signposts, then leapt wholeheartedly into the worst part of the original story: the it-was-all-alright-in-the-end-because-of-bacteria,-three-cheers-for-science ending. Eugh! Blech!
The sound effects were particularly good in my opinion. The noises of the intial ‘landings’ and all the many sounds made by the tripods were just right. I have decided that I have a real thing for some specific sound-effects. Those of you with a similar propensity will recall the hair-raising noise made by the ghost-zapping backpacks in Ghostbusters when they were first powered up. There’s a similarity to the alien ships, and also to the noise of a really big capacitor charging up. Thorne likes…

Anyhoo. That’s all the even semi-interesting things I have to say for today. Double Trouble is getting steadily closer, but there still isn’t anything particularly newsworthy to report. Soon!

For some reason, I have been giving more thought than usual to clothes lately. My new role at Kaz calls for a somewhat higher standard of formality than was called for in my previous jobs. Consequently, I have become very conscious of:

1. The poor quality of my pants; most of my pairs of coservative business pants are either way to tight or visibly falling to bits.
2. The high degree of casualness of my clothes; many of my shirts are very brightly coloured things, or black, typical of the semi-casual wear you might find at Rivers. I also have a lot of pants which are white or cut like jeans, with externally sewn pockets and so forth.
3. The contrast; my workmates on this floor often don’t wear suits or ties, but they wear a much higer standard of formal clothing than I’m used to. Black, grey, tan or beige pants, but always strictly cut as formal work-wear. Business shirts with subdued, non-contrasting buttons and such. They are always clean-shaven, or with neatly trimmed well-maintained beards.

Clearly I need to make time and set aside funds to get into line. Equally clearly, I can no longer go two weeks between washing day. Argh!

On the Geeky front, Double Trouble is still living up to its name: the modem hadn’t failed yesterday, rather something has gone wrong in the innards of Double which prevents ssh logins from working, and makes the whole process incredibly slow. There was nothing in the logs last night, but I have left a monitor plugged into the bastard with a logged-in session running ‘top’, in the hope that I might see what’s slowing it down when I get home.

Travelling on the Trains every day is good for my budget, and the walking is doubtless good for my health, but sometimes the train can be a truly horrible way to get around: last night there was aparrently a “Signal Failure” at Flinders St, with the result that the entirety of Platform 1 at Melbourne Central (my station) was closed; all passengers for those lines were directed to catch the #86 tram instead!!! My line was just suffering from a 20-minute delay, combined with multiple train cancellations. This meant that the entire 4:55pm-5:25pm shockwave of peak commuters were compelled to fit into a single train. People were screaming… it was difficult to find enough room to breathe until at least Clayton. By Springvale (where I got off) it was only down to the point where people were getting down off the seat-backs. Still a struggle for standing room. Hellish.

It has been a while since I posted anything about Trouble; it had been a while since I brought myself to even look at the damned thing.
Still, on sunday morning I did so, and was rewarded: finally I have eradicated the accursed SATA Disk Bug From Hell. For those of a non-geeky persuasion, skip this next text box. I publish it here for the benefit of all those who may, like I was, be stumbling through the net, lost in confusion, unable to obtain even the vaguest hint of answer from Kernel Developers anywhere.

All of that being said, Double Trouble is down again today: my relentlessly reliable modem which never crashed with PeopleInternet is crashing every 48 hours or so with Internode. Time to review my options modem-wise.

Back to work then.

I’m not sure how I feel about this but I’m leaning towards scared.

Many many thanks for all the wonderful comments folks! Even if some dodgy blog-spammer has abused the trackback ping facility on here (I still haven’t figured out how to get it off) I am overjoyed to know that so many people still have some vague connection with my life, however tenuous. Thank you!
Some quick reactions:

• I don’t know what blogware I’m gonna use yet. Am open to suggestions!
• Yes Aknyra, Tiki is a piece of crud. As a Wiki it is adequate. As any of the other things it tries to be, I am profoundly unimpressed. Tiki will not be appearing on the new Trouble.
• Beloved E, take-away chocolate isn’t Max Brenner’s strongest point, but I will get you some anyway. 🙂

My crazy new job is just steaming along like a runaway train. There is so much to learn! The whole concept of learning my place in the organizational structure is so alien and new! The complex bureaucracy involved in doing anything staggers the mind, but not so much as the sheer stunning amount of thought that has clearly gone into it all. So, I read until my eyes bleed. One day I will have the privelege of being allowed to do stuff! This should not be taken as anny kind of negative comment on KAZ, BTW: Only a fool lets a novice sysadmin play with live systems straight away.

Finally, it has come to my attention that someone has been inflaming old wounds by sending mail to my cousin. I want to be very clear that it wasn’t E, and it wasn’t me. The last contact of any kind that I have made was my attempt to post a retort to a post on her blog which was brought to my attention and seemed to me to overstep the bounds of propriety which I have been trying to maintain. That blog comment was submitted around the 29th of March. Since that time neither E nor I have made any attempt to communicate with them, whatever you may have heard. I have written about my feelings here on my blog, but I have held to my policy of not naming names, and indeed, I have done my best to bar the aforementioned parties from even reading my blog!
Besides any of these things, in the final analysis these troubles have been essentially of my making. E has had absolutely no part in it. She has only suffered, and I will retaliate vigorously on her behalf towards anyone who tries to smear her at this point. You have been warned.
While I feel perversely pleased that someone feels so strongly that they feel compelled to defend E and me, I am telling you, whoever you are, please stop. Please just leave it alone. Enough unnecessary pain has come from all this. Please, no more!