On plaids, fashion, and style

Yesterday I got my new grey Glen plaid suit delivered and I must say that I really love it. I recently had a discussion with some people about plaids and the view they held was that plaids were horrid and should never be worn. I found this view especially strange, considering that plaids are very traditional and will stand the test of time very well. My friends held the opposing view. After some bickering, it actually turned out that with plaids, they were referring to those horrid overshoots from a couple of decades back. This allowed us to find some common ground as I will admit that those sorts of extravagant plaids might be something that you would want to steer clear of. But as for more traditional plaids and checks, like the Glen plaid and the Prince of Wales check, are very traditional and stylish. And as such, there is nothing wrong with either, in my opinion. Quite the opposite, I think that a subtle dark grey Glen plaid suit with a nice tie and maybe a vest or a knit can in fact look very sharp.

This leads me to another discussion that I had yesterday regarding fashion versus style. The worst mistake you can do, from my point of view, is to treat the two words as synonyms. I dislike fashion and the fashion world. I think they just artificially and commercially create fashion fads that run a multibillion dollar industry that forces (or allows?) fashion aficionados to scrap their wardrobe every six months and buy everything again. Additionally I often get this feeling that fashion is exactly form over function. Take, for instance, very tight and slim jeans. What is the point of them, exactly? I would imagine that moving around in them is very tedious and restricted. Additionally it represents one end of the scale, and extremes are rarely good things.

Enter style. I would define style as your personal taste that you develop and which evolves through time. But unlike fashion with its sharp corners, I would say that styles, at least for me, evolve more slowly, gradually and with softer edges. One might say that every time your style changes slightly, that you might have started to follow a new fashion. And I guess that's a fair thing to say. But still I would hold the view that style is stronger than fashion and for me, my personal style dominates fashion in the sense that if fashion brings about something that I in fact do like, I will adopt it into my style. This, of course, would also include some background work on the thing being adopted. In this regard I guess I am very conservative when it comes to clothing. I would've also said pragmatic, but that would've just been provocative and nobody would've believed me.

I would like to have you believe that fashion and style are very far away from each other and you should never ever use them interchangeably. But that's quite a harsh view and isn't very true. I think a better interpretation is to see the dynamics between the two. Fashion tends to be very blunt and aggressive; it makes sharp turns, tight corners, reverses itself every six months, and so on. Style, in turn, is slower, more refined, more subtle and when style starts turning somewhere, it turns very much slower and different fashions are just slightly steering it. As an analogy, think of fashion as a speedboat and style as a large cruise ship (I don't know how well that analogy works in practice, but it captures some broad points). I think another distinction might be that style is very personal whereas fashion might be less so. I'm not, of course, saying that I outright despise fashion. Instead, I just find it slightly silly and prefer a more traditional approach. But this topic is of especial interest to me, so if you do want to share views or just spend an afternoon argueing about this in good faith, just drop me a line.

Equilibriums, aging, and censorship

Many much more wise (and also older) people than me have recently been explaining to me that I might have a tendency towards taking very hard line views on different topics. The same people have also tried to comfort me that it's all very normal and in due time my views will stop swinging from one extreme to another and I'll find my balance. Balance and equilibriums seem to be all the rage now, too. The topic keeps recurring in yoga all the time and most things at work revolve around finding equilibriums and balance. It's a cliche, but life seems to indeed be a very complex balancing act.

In light of this, it seems that as you begin your life, you get the grips on the basics and when that's done, the pendulum is set in motion and it starts off oscillating between extremes. If we can trust the wiser and more experienced people, the pendulum will slowly slow down and work towards the equilibrium in the center, which should represent the balance you find after life has taught you some more lessons and you (hopefully) have also learned the lessons. In a way I guess this is somewhat of a sad or depressing thought. That life will eventually mold you into a person that knows better than to take hard stances. But I guess at the same time it's also kind of comforting.

And speaking of stances and hard lines, the discussion around the Finnish internet censorship program has been heating up recently. It appears that yesterday a fellow student from the university decided to mirror Matti Nikki's original site criticizing the censorship practices and disclosing the list of censored sites on the school servers. This, interestingly enough, led to the school deactivating his account, which seems somewhat out of proportion if you consider that technically I don't believe he did anything really wrong. And the most interesting thing is that apparently the school's representatives are not willing to disclose any sort of information on why they have done what they have done to him. This is very appalling, especially considering that the Helsinki University of Technology is supposed to be one of the better schools in Finland. And to think that the school also engages in behavior such as this, to blatantly censor sites that do not host anything illegal and just criticize a completely and utterly silly law which should never have been passed in the first place (according to EFFI and some experts from the University of Turku's department of legal stuff, the law might even be very unconstitutional). Anyway, the best of luck to Jyry on his quest to find justice and for taking a prominent and hard stance to help a cause that tries to keep the freedom of speech alive.

Saving projects

I was recently asked at work what I felt about a project that I had been closely working with and putting in a lot of effort. I was seeing only problems and not that much potential in the project and we were getting our back against the wall as a competing project had emerged recently and they were cutting corners by taking a less academic approach. So I had to suggest that our project be canned as it hadn't produced any tangible results for a while. Since then, I allocated 50% of my personal targets into the said project for 1H08, which, all things considered, still is a completely idiotic thing to do, if you would want to optimize your bonuses. This is starting to resemble a hit-or-miss situation with the odds against me.

Today we were finally able to deliver preliminary results to the powers that be and right now I have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic that we just might be able to pull this off. In fact it seems that the ground work that we've done is in fact sort of decent and the approach might be the right one, after all. And I have to admit that maybe it was my pessimistic self again who was standing way too close to the project and the problems to see the potential in it. I guess that's a common problem when you're hitting your head against a wall; you lose your perspective of things and then you're in trouble. If you're an optimist, you keep digging yourself into a swamp since you can't see the reality. But if you're a pessimist, you can only see the things that can fail. So maybe it's time to learn a bit of optimism again...

Affluenza

My parents brought me a copy of Oliver James's Affluenza from London recently and I started reading it yesterday. It offers quite an interesting view and theory that explains the reason why we're unhappy even though our wealth has been increasing over the past half a decade. James's idea is that a virus called affluenza is currently the plague of developed countries--people are unhappy as they chase material possessions, money, power, and recognition. And what more, apparently most of the developed countries have the same problems. And even the ones that necessarily don't have the problem in the general population, the elite is still plagued with it. And affluenza in turn creates emotional distress in people.

According to James's description, I guess I have to admit that I recognize some symptoms of affluenza in me, although more recently I've been talking with some people about what the actual point of all this is and have been changing my perspective slightly. The problem with money is that when you are lost or don't know where you might want to go, it's easy to start optimizing money and just make sure that the building blocks are there when you do finally figure out what you want to do. But that's with the assumption that you figure out what you actually want, and it might very well be that I'll never figure out what I truly want and what makes me get up in the morning and in the mean while I'll just continue onwards and try to accumulate wealth and become affluent.

James interviewed quite many affluent people in his book and one thing that was strange was that just about none of them had any real and stable relationships. Some were married and others were switching girlfriends every three months. But none had a real relationship, but all had either learned to deal with the lack of intimacy or then the lack of intimacy was never really a problem in the first place (and that's a spooky thought). I guess these are the types of people who will say that intimacy is overrated. Finding intimacy isn't easy, but it is worth it. Cynicism makes it even more difficult.

Another interesting thing this far was that people in Singapore exhibited signs of affluenza, but didn't really have the symptoms of emotional distress. This led me to wonder if that might have something to do with the cultural differences. The western societies have always embraced rationality and reasoning (cogito, ergo sum, etc.) whereas apparently Asian cultures have been much more concrete and living in the moment. This is in fact in line with the suggestion to think less and observe more that was put forth in last week's yoga lesson. This might also explain why white collar workers are experiencing illness emotionally. Work that focuses on abstract things and in which you won't see any concrete result in years, if even then, can seriously start to undermine your feeling of being useful. You just have to believe that you're doing something meaningful. James suggested that developing countries are a lot more happy according to some metrics, and it's not hard to believe that from an emotional standpoint he's correct. You're a lot more in touch with the present when you do mundane physical tasks, but you can derive happiness and pleasure from the fine tuning that you can do there.

Taylorism was originally devised as a method for making manual labor a lot more efficient and commoditizing the worker. And nowadays McDonald's is commonly believed to be a company that exhibits this idea on a very large scale. Previously it was assumed that tayloristic work is not fulfilling for the worker and as such the worker has to be compensated for doing the tedious tasks. Apparently, however, there are some views that recently people have started embracing and enjoying Taylorism again. I would have to guess that it's the same reason why white collar jobs are making people unhappy. I even recently talked with a coworker about this and how, in the long run, I was thinking that maybe I'll just leave the current society and put up a small grocery store somewhere in the Caribbean, or something to that extent. Just as a hobby, assuming that I can arrange a financial position in which I can get enough money to allow me to barely stay alive with capital incomes.

So yes, it seems that I've also caught affluenza, but on the positive side, at least I recognize it and am actively thinking about what it is that I in fact want from life. Even though it might not always seem like that for people on the outside.

On yoga

Yesterday I started another new hobby, yoga. Actually the course started about a month ago, but since it'll apparently last quite a long time, I could still join. I was somewhat skeptical in regards to whether or not yoga is just some trendy thing without any substance. But after the first time, I have to say that even if that is the case, I felt that it was fun and it helped me relax better than I've been able to do in ages. And even just for that, I'm ready to pay the monthly fee. Overall the experience was sort of strange.

I know nothing of yoga, but I got the feeling that it's sort of like feng shui. I know nothing of feng shui, either, but I've been led to understand that it's more or less common sense wrapped into a nice packet with the knowledge presented in the form of metaphores, and so on. I'm not exactly sure what variant of yoga we're doing, but it's very light and focuses quite a bit on stretching. So it's not astanga, for sure. But the stretching is also actually pretty bloody marvelous as I sit in meetings and at the office all day long and I get very tense at times. So in light of this, the feeling afterwards was undescribable. Brilliant.

I'm still skeptical about the religious aspect of yoga. For some reason I sort of reject it off hand, as I seem to do with religions in general. Again, the stories basically suggest that it's based on common sense stuff like suggesting that you should observe more and think less to achieve some sort of calmness of the mind. Which I guess is quite a good suggestion if your life and job and studies happen to be the sorts that encourage and reward quick and objective analytical skills. Oh, and I'm very much looking forward to next week's session. Yoga seems to be very addictive...

On subsidizing art

Recently a professor at a course focusing on venturing suggested that one reason that Finnish start-ups weren't really huge on the international level was that the current mechanisms for supporting venturing and entrepreneurship in Finland were too much of what you'd expect in a European welfare state. The government was shoving money into start-ups to just keep them alive, barely. But because of the level of support, you didn't have the survival of the fittest effect kicking in, which in turn meant that eventually some internationalized start-up would show up and be a lot more lean and mean and would put the Finns out of business, because they weren't in a shape to put up a real fight.

I also recently (well, a year back) had an interesting discussion on how Finns subsidize art at a governmental level with a family friend of ours. In a typical Finnish fashion, the discussion took place in sauna. His view was that the current mechanisms for subsidizing art are sick and that they should be scrapped and the tax rates cut accordingly. Then private people could invest the "extra" money into whatever art they wanted, if any at all. I didn't really agree with this notion in its entirety. But I've been recently reading Chris Anderson's excellent book on long tails, and a thought occurred to me which helped me understand what Jussi was in fact suggesting.

If you consider long tails and how the internet has allowed the democratization of distribution and connected supply with demand on a global scale and as such helped a massive amount of small niches to be born, it's intuitive to see that the age of hits, as we previously knew it, is over (Anderson demonstrates this situation in the music industry). Maybe fine art that is subsidized by the government is another ill thing about our society in Finland? Some people who have a big degree and are vocal enough about silly little things decide what is good art and what is bad (ok, I'm being very provocative here, but play along). They, in turn, spread the support for different artists based on different criteria. And one is what sort of network of connections the artist might have.

Is this really the optimal scenario? Maybe the expensive, massive art forms that need state subsidization have lived beyond their best before dates? Maybe the only reason we have opera is because the rich demand that we lug along the legacy relics? Why not let the masses themselves decide what sort of art they want instead of forcing something on them? It might be that previously it was impossible for artists to efficiently reach all the people in the world, but that's changing now (just like Anderson is suggesting in other long tail examples). In this sense more people should be able to get together and appreciate similar niches and as such it might not be a good thing any longer that galleries, opera houses/production companies, etc. control the bottlenecks. And that states in essence help keep these status quo institutions in shape by pumping money into them.

Granted, it would appear that quite many of today's art forms are tied to time and place and are presented as performances. And performances may be a lot more difficult to distribute via cheap internet connections. But maybe this is because the art forms have not changed at the same rate as other parts of society. And maybe this is why the Finnish government keeps pumping money into an art society that is based not on democracy, but a very tight system of control that is enforced by tightly knit groups of friends doing favors for each other. This isn't democracy, it's more along the lines of an aristocracy or oligarchy.

I don't know if this was the reasoning behind Jussi's argument, but it's how I've interpreted it. And as always, I think it helps to provoke an interesting discussion. I have to admit that I know very little of the world of fine art, but it seems like a bunch of snobbery and as such the resources that are shed into it might be better off used for other things? Like improving public transportation, fighting poverty, etc. Even according to Maslow fine art is at the top of the hierarchy of needs and can only be enjoyed when the needs below have been satisfied. And with the current form of things, I doubt that very many people can say, even in Finland, that they have the other levels satisfied.

On Gordon Gekko

The antagonist of the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, is quite possibly one of the most hated and still most loved figures in the fictional world. He's the embodiment of greed and shrewd tactics and shows no sense of real conscience. Yet after Wall Street hit the movie theaters, there was supposedly a huge surge in the amount of applications sent to business schools all around the US. Investment banking was where it was at. And apparently up until recently, nearly two decades later, investment banking was again very hot.

I personally think that Gekko is a very interesting character and that people should observe him more closely. He might also have some positive impacts on the world. If you think about it, Gekko was a hyper-competitive businessman who just had to go on winning. In a way, these are the alpha males of the world, in a sense. The bad guys in the phrase "Nice guys finish last." I'll offer the provocative opinion that the world needs people like that. Money makes the world go round and these guys make the money go round. Granted, there's a real danger that the money ends up piling in the hands of the Gekkos of the real world. But that could of course be offset by mechanisms like taxes. In fact, taxing people who make millions and millions over long periods of time more harshly than one-time winners and then the rest of us sound intuitively appealing. And why shouldn't it. But competition is good. Wars are less good, but they can still be classified as crises that enable the world to change, albeit in a forced way and driven by the few in power.

Now, let's approach this from the opposite aspect. What happens if the Gekkos disappear. Greed is dug out of world and everyone is satisfied with the average. In this regard the intuitive result is stagnation. Why in the world would you want the status quo to shake if you like how the things are. In a way, we're no longer moving anywhere, just staying in a single place. Or going around and coming back to the starting position. I have been led to understand that this is sort of similar to the view of life that is held by our friends in the far east. And don't get me wrong, if things were like this, if we lived in a world where everyone could be happy with what they have and where they are, things would be bloody marvelous, to say the least. But for some odd reason one way to look at and define your degree of satisfaction is to reflect yourself against your neighbors and your peer group, overall. And in this sense if everyone is equally happy, then everyone is equally unhappy. And someone is bound to be unhappy when they notice that they can't move up or down or get ahead at all because there is no longer a concept of getting ahead or winning. Must be a terribly boring world to live in.

So, enter Gekko & Co. They grab the money they can and fight each other to come out on top. What sort of effect does this have on the rest of us? Possibly quite little. Capital is moved around, some companies may fall, others won't. You can be happy with your job and try to get the raise next time you see your boss so you could maybe upgrade your housing a bit. Maybe treat yourself with a more luxurious car or that bottle of premium vodka. And you feel good with yourself, for a moment. For that small moment in your life you can get a taste of the high life. And then, to cite the lyrics of Here Comes Another Bubble, "... back to work you go again!" And, that's not necessarily a bad thing, since typically the journey is a lot better than the destination. The entrepreneurs behind different start-ups continuously demonstrate this point. And this is where the Gekkos come in. One could say that they, in a way, help facilitate the journey towards the "better" life. And when you hit your midlife, if you can look back and see that you've done lots of interesting things and actually lived and led a colorful life in the pursuit of the gold at the end of the rainbow, I guess that's better than just lying in the couch and cursing at Gekko and the greed he represents.

This is of course just a provocative view and I don't exactly completely sign it myself. But in a way, when kept in check and control with different mechanisms, greed is good. It's a powerful motivator, and getting it in line with the common good using different mechanisms and motivators may allow the rest of us to harness the relentlessness of the Gekkos and relieve the pain of the everyday life that the rest of us lead. Either that or I have to start adopting a Zen Buddhist approach to life.

The problem with British suits...

... is the fact that the British insist on having their pleats on their trousers the wrong way round (and they even dare call them forward pleats! bah!). I dislike pleats in the first place, but having them mirrored! Annoying!

Valentine's Day

Today was Valentine's Day again, which was spent in a fairly uneventful way, first at work and then at school. In Finland Valentine's Day is in fact known as Ystävänpäivä, a day for friends, and thus has a slightly different tone than the lover's day that it at least is in the United States. But if we take the Finnish interpretation, I of course must take this moment to thank my friends for all the support that they've recently offered, regardless of the fact that more often than not I can be a fairly difficult person. So, from the bottom of my heart, Hyvää Ystävänpäivää!

But fear not, this temporary lapse of arrogance is soon to pass and I'll be back to my normal self...

Cars and blogs

Yay, I'm no a guest writer on Antti's recently established blog where the topic of discussion is none other than cars. I have to admit, I know nothing of cars and my taste in, well, everything, is notoriously bad. And I'm a wannabe-Brit without the nice accent, the passport, the family, and the estate. But that doesn't mean that I can't go shout around my opinions and try to act in an arrogant, Clarkson-esque way. So, without further ado, feel free to go read the rants and raves at b-pilari. (Oh, and apparently some of the content there will be in Finnish. But worry not, I will never forsake the only True language. ;-)

Of plans

I recently met up with an old friend of mine and we spent some time catching up with what had been happening since we last met. And then of course we continued right onwards from there and talked about what was going on now and what was planned for later this year. And an interesting discussion spawned regarding planning. We had slightly different points of view--I have plenty of plans and even multiple plans for the same things but my friend brought up the point that planning was sort of scary. Well, not exactly scary, but difficult and restrictive.

I started to think about this and what was my relationship with plans. In a way I don't see plans as restrictive or normative in any way. Plans are sort of like a framework or a support structure which I can use to keep track of things. And multiple plans allow you to plan for contingencies. And if you deviate from plans, that's ok too since plans are in fact organic. At least I feel so. I even like to plan things over different time horizons. Plans spanning the following year should be pretty clear. Horizons of three to five years need to be done with a slightly lower granularity. And 10+ years are just broad directions and ideas. And of course I will readily admit that none of my plans have ever worked out the way they were originally envisioned. But that is really alright, because the planning process itself has benefitted me as it has made me think about certan issues in advance, hopefully even before they become acute.

My friend's point was of course very valid also. Plans can of course feel restrictive if they are planned to be static and rigid. I'm of course a firm advocate of the opposite, aforementioned way of using plans. But it might be that formal plans (such as the ones you sometimes have to do at work, or at school) may be scary as you have to quantify the goals and steps and present them to other people. And then I guess it might be problematic to admit to yourself that now that you have told about your very thoroughly quantified plans to everyone else, it's shameful to admit that you can't follow through on them in their current form. But I still firmly feel that these cases can also be solved by taking a more relaxed view of the plans. If deviations start occuring or the goals have moved and the plans seem to solve problems that aren't relevant anymore, then the drift should just be countered by changing the plans. Or adopting a contingency plan. And that itself should be simple enough, since you should be able to motivate the plan to at least yourself, preferrably also other people if the plan includes them too.

Creating cars...

... and that's how they created the new Audi A4...

First contact with Coelho

Paulo Coelho seems to be quite a prominent writer, but I've been in the dark in regards to his work. A person recently suggested that I might want to look into Coelho's By the River Piedra I Sat and Wept and that it might give me some insight on the things that I've been experiencing and been a part of for the past half a year. Yesterday I went and got the book and I more or less read it in one sitting.

While reading the book, it felt very much like it had intelligent things to say. There was substance, it explained things that I hadn't known how to phrase properly. It was written in a manner which allowed it to be read very quickly. But when it ended, I guess the top most feeling that was left was bewilderment. In a way it felt like the book had spoken to me. And even now I will admit that it was decently well written. But in a strange way I felt sort of similar as when I finished the notorious Da Vinci Code years ago. It was entertainment, it made you feel fluffy. But in fact I'm still questioning the actual substance in both. I've heard Coelho being praised for giving insights, but I felt that he had chewed everything for the reader and didn't really leave that much to think for the reader. Everything was handed on a silver platter, and this was a bad thing as in fact I don't think there was that much new or interesting that he contributed. The book was entertaining, but ultimately I have to classify him and his book into the same category is shallow consultants and fortune tellers.

If you read the previous entry, I guess this was one of the things that gave me the motivation to type it up. Don't get me wrong, though. Coelho might be a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker and according to some quick research with Google, he even seems to be quite a nice chap and engages in many types of charity work. But personally I was left feeling a bit empty. But in a way he rises above so many other authors, since I did get provoked enough to actually brush on him and these subjects in two blog posts. Not that many authors have recently done that to me.

Bookshelves

Traditionally the first thing you do when you visit a friend of yours (or any person) is to check their bookshelves. Unfortunately it seems that nowadays more people decide not to invest in their library. And more often people forget to check what other people are reading. At least I have to admit that I seldom check bookshelves anymore. And if I do check, I don't bother acting on the information later. I guess it would be wise to actually understand what people are reading. It gives quite a bit of insight on how people think and act and why they think and act like they do.

Most people, myself included, typically absorb most of the stuff they read in one way or another. This leads to another possibly problematic thing. Just as people can be manipulated by other people, I guess people can fairly easily also be manipulated by the writings of other people. Pseudo-sciences come to mind right up front. Just because it's in the form of a book doesn't mean that you shouldn't take it with a grain of salt. If school teaches you that you can learn things from books, I guess at some point people should be taught to critique what they read. The university taught me this important lesson. Try to look behind the text and try to understand why the person is writing what they are writing. I guess as an exercise you can try to figure out why I'm writing what I'm writing. Trying to maintain an objective and analytically rigorous approach at all times, again, seems to be the key to success here too. It's too easy, especially with text that is intuitively appealing, to automatically assume that it provides answers to everything. The situation is familiar from a situation where another person is attempting to sway your opinion with rhetorics, or even blatant manipulation.

I guess this leads me to religion, as it is something that people often readily accept or totally disregard offhand. I'm not in a position pass judgement, but far too often people don't take that small grain of salt with what they are fed. I would classify myself as an agnostic and I typically steer clear of these discussions. I feel that various holy books shouldn't be taken word for word. But at the same time I guess defining God as the force that got things moving in the first place is fair. Be it the laws of physics or devine intervention or anything from between. I also think that holy books may have a slight bit of truth in them, but it might as well be that the books and the stories in them were just developed as means to convey rules and guidelines to live by and to get a herd of people to survive in a primitive and hostile environment. The rules and guidelines might of course be taught using metaphores and stories that are in turn interpreted further and when the origin is forgotten, they are interpreted as factual situations. Who knows. Miracles may happen, but then again, statistically improbable situations also occur occasionally. And when unexpected things happen, they might happen in twos or threes. Or it might just be that they spawn copycats and "me too" events which are just fabrications.

But too often when you are feeling like the world is kicking you in the head, it's just easier to seek comfort from stories and discard rationality. I'm of course sort of biased when I say this, considering my branch of studies and the overall mindset that a typical aspiring engineer has. In a way I guess I like to be in control of things, or at least understand why things happen as they do and see the mechanisms behind them. And in light of this, accepting parts of Nietzsche's writings is natural for me. I don't agree with everything, but there are parts which I can take and with the help of a pragmatic nature apply to my personal life and use them as tools to continue onwards. And this is why I will not and cannot overtly criticize different religions and people who believe in their teachings offhand; the religions may just be tools for them to achieve movement. But this doesn't mean that I can or will subscribe to all teachings. And this is why I consider myself an agnostic on this topic.

Clones

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is a brilliant book. The movie is also more or less decent, but I would still urge everyone to read the book and possibly skip the movie. One of the more humorous parts in the book are the parts where Bateman and his friends desperately attempt to look unique and spend tons of effort on fine tuning their image--clothing, business cards, etc. Or it was funny up until I noticed that some guy at work had bought the Boss Black overcoat that I had been thinking of getting a while back. This intrigued me a bit and it turned out that about a quarter of the mens overcoats in the coat hangers on our floor were in fact Boss overcoats. I guess Boss isn't that prestigious as a brand as certain others (*cough*Savile Row*cough*), but I still like it. And apparently so do many other people. So much for uniqueness.

Oh, and the aforementioned parts in American Psycho are still funny, regardless...

Homeless

Well, things are changing quite rapidly again. Today was the first day at work when I was no longer sitting in the original cubicle that I got when I joined the company, nearly two years back. We're being moved around as the powers that be are preparing to start a massive renovation of the HQ. And because of all this moving around, I won't be having a personal cubicle for the next three weeks, thus meaning that I'm more or less homeless at work for the time being. And even though this is just the first day, I'm quite annoyed by the nature of the flexispace office; no fixed seats, take any free seat when you want when you come to the office. But it means that I can't leave stuff lying on the desk, etc. Annoying...

But on a more positive note, I finally got around to arrange time to play some tennis with Juha. It wasn't much of a game as we were both pretty rusty, but at least I felt like I was slowly getting the hang of it again... And best of all, it was fun, regardless of whether or not we had any actual control over the ball.