fine whine

Threadless* is doing their irregularly scheduled ten dollar t-shirt sale again. Shipping starts at $5.50 and the shirts rock. The sale ends this Wednesday, but all the cool stuff will sell out well before then. Such as this one.

Since the site's getting somewhat hammered, I recommend using the stock chart for the sizes you wear.

* Note that the link contains a secret tracking code for me, so that if you order, I get some small pittance of credit. I've been saving up, so I bought myself this shirt for less than the price of shipping. Thanks to all who have used my link, and thanks to anyone else who does so today or tomorrow.

Just like everybody else who I have seen posting these, I don't often fall prey to these so-called memes. However, Skippy tagged me and so it goes.

Four jobs that I’ve had

• computer tape librarian
• fast food cashier
• lawnmower
• power equipment driver

Four movies I can watch over and over

• Starship Troopers
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Robot Jox
• Goodfellas

Four places I have lived

• Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
• Evanston, Illinois
• Columbus, Ohio
• did I mention Columbus, Ohio?

Four TV shows I like to watch

• 'Allo 'Allo
• The Sopranos
• Family Guy
• Six Feet Under

Of course I only watch them on DVD. We don't have cable and I don't feel beholden to the airwaves or programmers' and advertisers' whims as to when I can watch what.

Four foods that I like

• steamed buns, dipped in condensed milk
• cheese
• lasagna
• my microwave biscuit ring

Four websites I visit daily

• All Consuming to keep track of the stuff I hear, read, and watch.
• Bloglines for my daily feeds.
• Fatwallet, particularly the hot deals forum.
• Sploid, you know, for news.

Four things I want to do before I die

• Build a clock Update my site more regularly
• Build a desk so I don't need to use my computer on the floor
• Get 4 more friends to sign up for me to get a free ipod
• ... and the other stuff I've already listed on 43 Things.*

Four people I’m tagging

• Sandy
• Erich
• Dana
• Janice

Of course, almost to a one that list is filled with people who, if they do this, will preface it with "I don't usually do these but..." and I say, more power to you. Share the pain.

Someday, some interested person with spare time will track these backward to the original person who probably started out with "I don't usually start these, but..." but by then, everybody will have read a hundred and written one and won't care anyway.

* Yeah, so maybe that's cheating there at the end, but what's the point of making a small list when I've already made the bigger one? And I'm always happy to sneak in the 43T links.

Permit me to again point you toward All Consuming. While it allows members to designate books, albums, and movies as "worth consuming" or "not worth consuming" (or, neither, though that's not the way it's supposed to work), but that two -state system (well, three) isn't enough for my tastes. Some stuff is not not worth consuming, in my opinion, but I'm not so fond of it to actually claim it to be actually worth consuming.

I'm not willing to commit, I guess.

But some stuff I watch and read and hear is, in fact, well worth watching or reading or hearing, and I'm not afraid to say so. So that's when I use the easy-to-use tagging capabilities of the site, and have tagged such master works "fantastic". That link leads to a list of some twenty or so of them, and I'm working on a way to find all of the others. I've added Batman begins to the list (so bowled over by it as I was by it), and it's just one among a good many other movies and books that I've enjoyed consuming recently.

So I'm still not playing favorites, but I'm willing to show some favor and shower the superlatives. I may yet develop a heirarchy, from "crap"* to "adequate" and so on, up to "excellent" and with "fantastic" or perhaps something superior at the top. But not today. I'm willing to pick just the topmost for now.

* And you can find a list of the ones I deem to be "crap" in a similar, easy fashion. Like clicking "crap" in the previous sentence, or this one.

Not as a matter of a New Year's resolution or anything (namely since I was doing it mid-December), but I seem to be doing more reading lately. Fiction, even.

Once I started messing around with 43 Things and 43 People it was only a matter of time before I stumbled upon, and likewise began using, All Consuming, also currently run by the same people, the so-called Robot Co-op. The site had existed in some other form before* but in its current incarnation it is connected to the 43 whatevers sites. What matters to me is that it is a simple method of
keeping track of the books I've read and music I've heard (and the DVDs I watch, though those I record elsewhere already).

But that alone doesn't lead me to any more reading. It's effort enough trying to remember the books I've already read. The reason I am reading more books is that it is easy to see what the other members have read recently. At times it's easy to see how a commonly-read book spreads through everyone's lists, and the less common ones that pop up now and then.

But back to that part about seeing what others have read. I can look at which people who have read the books I've read and then the other books they have read, and enjoyed, and sometimes find interesting things to read.

That's how I stumbled across The time-traveler's wife, one of the best books I read last year. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it.

In adding to my list I thought back to the other books I've enjoyed this year, including Michael Kun's You poor monster, though I cannot recall how I'd found that one, unless I grabbed it because of the interesting cover image (a guy in a suit, underwater). It's a good read, and in remembering it I decided to seek out Kun's other books, and have already enjoyed his My wife, and my dead wife and look forward to reading The Linklater letters, the book that seems to pop up as the book he's also authored (you know, as in 'by Michael Kun, author of The Linklater letters).

Back to the other people, though, I've read some of Stephen Fry's books as well, though those are more hit or miss. In that The Hippopotamus isn't so much a hit as much as Making history is. And Revenge is somewhere in between.

Even the books that aren't so great are still mostly worth reading. And I do so enjoy reading, and having found a way to find decent books and moreover to keep track of them is all the better.

* To which I undoubtedly belonged, at one point or other. Being a sucker for signing up for interesting free communities as I am, of course.

Even since Carina wrote about 43 Things I've wanted to make a list of my own on the site. It offers people a very simple interface for making a 43-item to-do list of sorts*, and easy access to items and lists from other members. It took me some effort and thought, but I too have written my 43 things.

I've even begun working on some of them. This one is rather specific but still one that I want to do. The 43things site lets me add updates and even pictures to show what I've done.

What I'm doing, I should explain, is making the wishlist feature of online DVD retailer DeepDiscountDVD more usable. The way it works on the site is this: you add discs to your wishlist and then email the list to the people you hope will buy them for you. Other wishlists, such as the ones Amazon offers, are pages available online that link back to the site and can be accessed and updated easily without spamming people with more emails.

So the script I've created so far takes the email from DDD (which is sent to a mailbox I've created just for this), scans through the titles and links, and grabs DDD's cover art image links, and links those to the pages to buy the discs. My next steps are to cache links, so that I'm not hitting DDD's servers many times to get the same data, and to create some sort of presentation better than just the cover images.

Then again, it does look neat with just the pictures. Check it out.

* Other 43-item list sites provided by the creators are 43 Placess and 43 People. They are all linked together by userid and equally easy and fun to use.

Today is so-called casual Friday and as such I donned a t-shirt instead of the polos I wear the rest of the week. This is nothing new, really, as this is how I dress pretty much every week.

Today's t-shirt was my bright green one with the flocked yellow Atari logo. Jessica bought it and another one with the logo, but on a blue tee, and gave them to me as gifts. I like them both, but rarely wear them. The blue one has 3/4 length sleeves, and I have difficulty with that sort of thing. The green one, though, has totally normal sleeves. The only downside of it is that everybody notices it.

I get more compliments (or at least comments) on this shirt than any of my other ones, save perhaps for the Darth Vader/cK shirt. Atari is just cool, you know.

A lot of people have bought this shirt, mostly for significant others. While that is an interesting tidbit, it also means that this is by far not a unique shirt. I like having unique shirts.

Oddly enough, despite buying it at JC Penny so many years ago, I've never seen anyone else wearing another dV shirt. Not a one.

It would seem that t-shirts are my hobboy of sorts as of late. When making my wish list I scoured the web for e-tailers with cool shirts, and I watch threadless for its new shirts and the submissions for the ongoing contest.

I'm working on doodling up some designs of my own to send them, but probably won't have anything I'm completely happy with let alone capable of winning. Still, it's worth a shot.

I've also fed many a slogan to their sister site OMG, which operates on the same principle except that anybody can submit ideas in the form of a slogan, not a finished design. They're much slower to print new shirts, and so far none of my submissions, clever though I may think them, have been made into a shirt.

Of course I'm not new to the t-shirt making business. As a kid I painted many of them with fabric paint (some of which are cool, others are merely neat copyright infringement) and even once recently, and I even once screen printed a tee in high school, which was later lost. I spent a lot of time working on that shirt, too.

I'd like to print some more. If I recall correctly it was messy but rather fun.