MiB

Plugging away at home and at work. I seem to be on a productive streak lately in both cases – not only am I churning through a lot of paperwork at the office (which deadline is approaching like a freight train) but I have also scheduled an eye exam, a CSDC appointment, come up with an anniversary plan (of sorts), replaced the filter in the icemaker and finally ploughed through the enormous backlog of dirty laundry and dirtier dishes.

Coming up on the to-do list: schedule my first 10.5 certification test, see about changing to a credit card with a lot of travel benefits, switch all my automatic monthly payments over to said card, and finally, dig through my wardrobe and see what I really need to start looking like a respectable human being on a regular basis. See, my last job entailed a good bit of manual labor, and by “a good bit” I mean “I had my knee scoped and am still going to the chiropractor regularly.” As a consequence, my normal apparel ran to increasingly-roughed-up jeans, an endless stream of company T-shirts, and of course nice stylish black steel toed boots that would make me look like Frankenstein even if I hadn’t got size 13 feet.

Now, I know what system administrators are expected to look like. However, I like to think that I and my crew are a cut above the typical knuckle-dragging troglodytes that normally reside in the basement tending the machines. Hell, we once turned out in suits for happy hour to try to impress a pack of girls in the next department over. Much good it did us, but still, we cleaned up real good, and the PC hardware guys went to great lengths to look sharp on a regular basis (much to our frequent chagrin). Anybody who saw the spectacle of Del Boca Vista Social Club should know that we rolled in style.

So I want to look a little nicer than the typical Sleestak you see in the server room. Problem is, a lot of my wardrobe is black. And fading from overuse. A string of coincidences meant that I went out for a walk last night in head-to-toe black – jacket, sweater, jeans, boots – and every piece was a different shade of black. Not too money!

Oddly enough, I found myself mixing a lot of brown and gray in the last year or two. I thought maybe I was really botching it. However, on Timbuk2’s website, pretty much every new bag for 2008 is in some combination of brown and gray, so who knows, maybe I’m ahead of things. I still walk around wondering whether I’m on safe ground with a black jacket and brown shoes, or vice versa, but I made sure to buy a reversible belt so I’m covered there.

Maybe I should stop with all the black, but look here, my main influences were St. Johnny Cash, St. Roy Orbison, and Darth Vader, so what do you want from me?