King #2

Obligatory Friday morning hangover. Oh, dress-down day. Shit, what casual clothes do I have? Just the stuff I wore last night and a pile of old T-shirts and jeans. I consider wearing a suit and ignoring the DDD, but don't want to miss out on this once-in-a-month opportunity. OK, those light blue jeans look (fairly) clean. And I can survive in a climate-controlled office without the luxury of a shirt/jumper. But which T-shirt? I wore the only decent one last night; it now stinks of fags and is stained with beer. In the end I plump for the 'mod' target, hoping to avoid any amusing comments. Ha, I should be so lucky. I thought I'd heard every joke during the four years that I'd owned that mod t-shirt. But I was wrong.

After a week of trying, I managed to break through a mighty barrier of red tape in order to do a task which had been requested of me. It involved many emails, and taking things to absurdly high management levels, but at least the job can now go ahead. I don't enjoy this sort of thing, my people skills are not finely honed yet. I'm a developer, a programmer, a computer nerd, a geek. I adore logic, not bureacracy and the ways of business.

I complimented a colleague on his model of calculator today. It was a Sharp EL-557, my all-time favourite. Fortunately he didn't accuse me of being insane, or strange, because he too was proud to own an EL-557, and respected it's power. Since I got my own EL-557 for Christmas at the beginning of this strange decade, I've owned many other calculating devices, often professing to have greater functionality. But to my mind the EL-557 is a timeless classic, like a fine wine, classic car, or favourite record.

Later, home again. It's been a long and fairly busy week, something which these journal entries do not adequately convey. I forget too much of the detail, and neglect to note down far too many of my thoughts and musings. A handheld PC is, I think, becoming a 'necessity'.

This evening I did some surfing, and 'accidentally' spent over $100 at Amazon. Then I played around with my workstation configuration for a while. I tried to install NT4 Service Pack 4, but it didn't work, and the HP printer went a little crazy (spewing out blank sheets continually). Uh-oh, I can see another re-installation of the OS approaching...