Just imagine that cup in shirt form. Anyway, the shirt colors fit the UNM colors. Pretty sweet!

Now fast forward to… now. I’m at the University of Michigan, and our colors are “Blue” and “Maize.” Our sworn enemy, Ohio State, has the colors of “Scarlet” and “Gray.” Which is basically the same as my old school’s colors. Kind of hard to disassociate with. Anyway, I’ve noticed that while walking around with my red Google shirt on, people seem to give me more dirty looks (than usual). Like I was at Meijer last week and I could’ve sworn I noticed some hostility.

I figured the Google shirt (remember, imagine the cup above as a shirt) reminds them of the Ohio State shirt:

That might just be my crazy theory, but I think it works. I’m sure from a far enough distance, the red Google shirt could look like the Ohio State shirt. And I’ve given my fair share of dirty looks to people wearing Ohio State stuff in Ann Arbor. How dare they, right?

I think it’s time I get a blue and maize Google shirt. What say you, Google?

I met a recruiter from this company called imo.im last week at the Mpowered career fair on North Campus. Basically, the event was a career fair for startup companies. For some reason, some really big companies were there as well. I think I saw NEC…

Anyway, imo.im is some sort of web-based IM client, kind of like Meebo. I even asked the recruiter something like, “I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but this company is like Meebo, right?” Anyway, it seems the claim to fame for imo.im is that they’re financed almost exclusively by one of the first 10 employees of Google. This post isn’t really about their company though. It’s about their HR!

There were a bunch of t-shirts on the table. I, being a t-shirt connoisseur, especially of the company shwag type, asked if I could have one. “But they’re reserved for interviewees,” the HR person Marissa Huang told me. She also said she could mail me one when she gets back to their headquarters, since they have a lot. I gave her my contact info and figured I’d never get the shirt. Here’s a story!

When I went to interview at Google, they said I’d get some kind of awesome bag with Google related goodies in it. Like shirts and lava lamps and whatnot. Maybe not lava lamps. Anyway, it was supposed to be in my hotel room but I never got it. After the HR person at Google asked for my address for them to mail it, I felt that I’d get the stuff for sure, but I never did. It was like adding insult to the injury of not hiring me. By the way, I’ve fully recovered and hold no ill will towards the big G. Just throwing out this story to prove a point: why would imo.im go to the trouble of sending me a shirt when I didn’t even interview with them?

But they did. And it came today. Which is why I award imo.im the official “Hung Truong Company Shwag Award Seal of Approval!” I don’t know if something can be both an award AND a seal of approval at the same time, but whatever. There was also a nice hand-written note in the package, which is unheard of as far as corporate HR goes. But imo.im is a startup, so I guess that makes them different.

Anyway, thanks, imo.im, for the t-shirt. As a bonus, I’m even not adding a rel=”nofollow” to my links to you! Rock on!

There’s another $10 sale going on at Threadless. I think the quality of Threadless shirts has kinda been waning in recent months. There’s a few fun shirts, but I’ll wait on ordering since this sale lasts until December 16th. Especially funny is this “November Was a Good Month” shirt. Going to a (sort of) library school, I think I’m starting to think more and more like a librarian. So I kind of find this shirt more interesting than I really should. But yeah, maybe I’ll hit the jackpot with a round of good shirts sometime between now and December.

Walking around the University of Michigan, I see a lot of people. And I’m really into shirts if you didn’t know already. So this combination leads to me seeing a lot of people and noticing their shirts.

A common “genre” of shirt here is a blue shirt with “maize” words that say “Michigan _______” with “Michigan” being on top, and the other word(s) being below it. So for example if you were a law student, you might wear a shirt that said “Michigan Law.” They’re basically available for all majors, minors, and anything else you might think of.

I surmised that it would be fun to have parody shirts. Ideas I thought up, along with Adam Torres (the guy who likes being mentioned in blogs) were “Michigan Culinary,” “Michigan Blacksmith,” and “Michigan Undeclared.” But then I walked around and saw someone with a “Michigan Squirrels” shirt and figured they had beaten me to the punch.

It turns out there’s a Michigan Squirrel Club that meets every Sunday at 4pm at the grad library steps. Their main mission is to feed squirrels peanuts. And they do it pretty well. There’s a squirrel call that they use to summon squirrels, and several advanced techniques like tree feeding and squirrel fishing.

I attended my first meeting today and fed some squirrels. The squirrels seem to be a bit wary at first, but after a while they became more bold, even running up to us to demand a peanut. I talked with the creator and ex-president, Jason, who is also a fellow SI student. He says people are always asking about the club, and sure enough, when we were feeding squirrels, people kept on coming up to us and talking.

I’m not sure how often I can make the squirrel club meetings, but I’d say it’s a fairly cool club. Also, not to brag, but the website is pretty damn bitchin’.

We actually arrived pretty late, but there were still free things to be acquired. Like a girl was walking around asking Google/Ann Arbor questions, and if you got it right, you’d get a maize Google shirt! I have to say, this shirt is freaking awesome. It’s wearable to game days plus it has the Google logo on it!

The questions ranged from easy to difficult. I was with two other friends, and the Googlers allowed us to combine our powers to summon Captain Planet (or at least to answer questions).

The first one was “What is Google’s motto?” In a mental lapse unbecoming of me, I said “Do no evil” when it’s really “Don’t be evil.” Oh well, they gave me the shirt anyway (It’d be kind of ironic for them not to, what with the motto saying not to be evil and all).

The second one was “What unusual thing does Borders (in Ann Arbor) and Google allow in their buildings?” The girl gave us a hint that it wasn’t something like “books.” Since when are books unusual? I said it was probably dogs, since Google lets employees take their dogs to work. I didn’t know Borders did though. And indeed, we got shirt #2.

The last question was “Who is Google’s CEO?” Who knows this crap? Well, I do, and my friend did, but we’re nerds. So we went 3/3. Thanks, Eric Schmidt!

There was also a bowl ‘o pens that I ransacked (I already have a green pen from my interview, but I decided to add a blue one to my collection) and some free ice cream.

One last observation: It’s pretty obvious that the Google office in Ann Arbor is an adwords office. I say this because all of the employees I saw are beautiful, beautiful people. Whereas the Googleplex has some smokin’ HR people and, well, engineering people. Note that I am not beyond calling myself an engineering person.

Fin.

Whoa! I just read about this from Google Blogoscoped. Apparently Gmail is sponsoring a Threadless t-shirt contest. Threadless usually has cool entities like bands sponsor their contests. This is the first time I’ve heard of a web company, let alone Google do one! I should try and enter a submission. I think the geek points for winning the Gmail Loves Threadless might be somewhere in the infinite range…

Threadless has been on a sort of non-roll of sorts. Or maybe you could call it a roll of sucking. Anyhow, this week they’ve got a shirt that doesn’t suck! It’s one of a genie in a lamp. Being bored as hell.

I actually feel bad for genies. Being locked away inside of a small lamp, released for maybe once every thousand years. Then having to give wishes to stupid people. Plus that TV is outright ancient!

Perhaps it’s not the actual content of the shirt that I like, more than the colors. Maize and Blue? Hmmm, perhaps a certain university is brainwashing me. Ah well, anyway, this is a “definite buy if a $10 sale was going on” shirt. For $15… I dunno. Maybe.

So I was checking out the Alexa ranking of MapsKrieg, and I saw this link that was selling personalized shirts based on the Alexa ranking of a site. Ummm, what!? The shirts display stats like your Alexa ranking and quotes like, “0.00005% say my site rocks!” (which doesn’t sound like something I’d boast about), and “Will dance for better Alexa rank.”

I find it scary that someone actually took the time to prepare the templates for these shirts (they’re printed by Zazzle). Has anyone in the history of the universe bought one of these? Perhaps an overzealous SEO fanatic? But really, is anyone so obsessed with their Alexa ranking that they’d buy a shirt (that would probably end up being inaccurate by the time the shirt was printed and delievered anyway)!?

If you know anyone who has bought one of these shirts, please inform me. And punch them in the face for me, too.

Anyway, here’s what I ordered:

Pencil Forest

When I saw Pencil Forest debut a few weeks ago (or was it last week?) I thought it was pretty cool. But not $15 cool. Luckily, it’s $10 cool.

It sorta doesn’t make sense though. So the guy is cutting down the tress to make pencils? But why are the trees made of pencil shavings? Oh well, I guess it doesn’t really need to make sense.

Para Poppins

I’ve wanted Para Poppins for a while now, though I don’t think it’s ever been in stock during a $10, which is usually when I’ll buy shirts from threadless. It’s just the kind of weird, off-beat shirt that I find myself gravitated towards. I’m sure Mary Poppins will show those insurgents who’s boss!

Stone Jungle

Stone Jungle is a pretty cool looking shirt that has some city stuff on the top, and nature stuff on the bottom! How artsy fartsy! I got it because I was forced to get 3 shirts. I like the design, plus green is my favorite color, so yeah, there ya go.

In fact, I just noticed that all the shirts I ordered today have a shade of green in them… Weird.

The Threadless Spring Broke sale lasts until March 12, so get the shirts you want now! And vote for this shirt to be reprinted!!!

Anyway, here’s me playing My Funny Valentine along with a cool dude named Jamey Aebersold. I recorded it using the iSight from my Macbook, and the built in mic, so the sound quality isn’t the best. Also, I screwed up a few times, but hey, the song itself is about an ideal non-ideal valentine, so my solo doesn’t have to be perfect!

And here’s the lyrics in case you don’t believe me:

My Funny Valentine

My funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart

Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you’re my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is you mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak?

Are you smart?

But don’t change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay, little valentine, stay
Each day is valentine’s day