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:
- The poor quality of my pants; most of my pairs of coservative business pants are either way to tight or visibly falling to bits.
- 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.
- 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.
