If I had the means, I would be the Imelda Marcos of bad-ass t-shirts. Since I’m not (yet) independently wealthy, I need to be selective, feeding my addiction with nothing but primo stuff. Selecting from the geek category, in no particular order, here are my top 5 favorite geek t-shirts of all time (that I own).

I’m Well Built

Atlassian - $19.95

Atlassian makes a lot of really sweet software, stuff I use on a daily basis, both at the house and at the day job.  While I’ve never actually used Bamboo (that’s next on the project list), I dig the shirt for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m a fan of all the Atlassian products that I’ve used so far, and I’ve always had good experiences dealing with Atlassian support.  Second, while you can’t tell from the lame graphic, this is actually a really good looking shirt.  Third, not being particularly well built, I love wearing a shirt that says I am.  It reminds me of my old “Who needs hair with a body like this?” shirt I wore when I was 220lbs of out of shape slob.  Oh sweet, sweet juxtaposition.

Get yours here.

Mine

ThinkGeek - $17.99

What can I say about this one? It was love at first sight.  The only way I could love it more is if it were an official Office Space Hawaiian shirt, which does not exist and would be another post anyhow.  The thing I can’t understand is how few people recognize the red Swingline stapler for what it is.  Last time I was traveling, the only guy that got the joke was a ticketing agent at the airport.   We both had a good laugh.  Everyone else just looked at us funny.

Get yours here.

fork you

RubyRags - $18

I haven’t ever used Git, I’m not a fan of their marketing strategies (svn sucks! Whaa?), I’m irrationally prejudiced against Rails, but I still love this t-shirt.  Grey is a splash of color in my mostly black wardrobe, it features cool typography, short, punchy copy, and it’s got a spot on the back intended for a little DIY customization, Sharpie style.  Mine says “sucks.”  Take that, Git. Har, har, har. Also, this is the shirt you want if you’re just angsty enough to want the world to fork off every once in a while, but not angsty enough to get yourself an FTW face tattoo (and I don’t mean “for the win”).

Get yours here.

SQL query

ThinkGeek - $17.99

I picked this one up when I was working as a technical support rep, taking calls for 8 to 10 hours a day and hating my life.  While the tech support career path doesn’t generally leave one with a working knowledge of SQL, I was doing everything I could to teach myself to program so that I would never have to take another support call as long as I lived.  While that hasn’t quite worked out (I don’t take calls directly, but I live in JIRA), this shirt has remained hilarious and relevant from the first time I put it on.  Making jokes in code is like learning to swear in a foreign language, you can express your frustration about those around you without having to worry about being understood and a) getting punched in the jeans, b) getting fired, or c) getting punched in the jeans and then getting fired.  WARNING: when you start making jokes in code, you’ve crossed the line from earth person to geek.  There is no going back.

Get yours here.

Real Programmers Wear Corpsepaint

Spaz - $17

I grew up as a metal baby in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve never lost my taste for the hard stuff.  The combination of two of my great loves, heavy metal and computer programming, in one of my favorite mediums, the t-shirt, makes this an instant favorite. 

Fun fact: Although not widely known, corpse paint has been worn by computer programmers as early as the late 1960s.  It’s rumored that Kim Petersen, better known as King Diamond, was first exposed to corpse paint by some LISP developers who were attending a mathematics conference in Denmark in the early 1970s.

Pro-tip: While real programmers wear do wear corpsepaint, real programmers do not wear nail studded gauntlets.  They’re a major contributing factor in repetitive stress injuries.

Get yours here.

The cost of Linda’s treatment and care are exorbitant. Just one of the medications for the clinical trial costs $4,500 per month, and that’s the co-pay! You can help support Linda and the Rambin family by spreading the word about Paintings by Linda, a collection of Linda’s original paintings on Etsy.com. The more people that visit Paintings by Linda, the more of her paintings will sell, helping the family to defray the cost of her treatment. (If you’re sharing about Linda’s store on Twitter, please use the hashtag #charlysmom. Linda’s daughter Charly has worked tirelessly on both Linda’s Etsy store and Linda’s Caring Bridge website.)

If you are interested in learning more about her story, please visit Linda’s Caring Bridge website. There you will find a more detailed account of her struggle, a daily blog, a guestbook for comments, and a photos page.

Please keep Linda in your thoughts as you enjoy her unique and vivid paintings. They have brought her much joy, and we hope they will do the same for you.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOvkcIhzGvI

Via Top 5 election day mashups at MAKE

jkendall@ventura:~$ uname -a
Linux ventura 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
jkendall@ventura:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
83 exit
70 clear
58 cd
47 ls
44 ps
35 svn
32 tail
32 jgrep
23 kill
11 sshdev

jgrep is a bash alias for 'grep --color -r -n --exclude=\*.svn\*', while sshdev is a bash alias that gets me to the dev box at work without having to type too much.

See more examples here, here, here, and here.

The brainchild of Scott Wills, the 400mToGo team includes Scott, Cory Wiles, and myself. We love to run, we’re passionate about the Nike+ sport kit, and we decided that we wanted to give back to and participate in the growing Nike+ community in a more meaningful way.

From the 400mToGo About page:

400mToGo is a Web site for Nike+® runners of all abilities. If, like us, you are obsessed with running data and refuse to go running unless you have your Apple® iPod® Nano and your Nike+ chip securely attached, then this is the Web site for you.

Current stories include a review of the Couch to 5k running plan, a piece about Scott’s excellent experiences with Nike’s customer support, and a bit of good advice for every runner by Cory.

Are you ready to get running? Visit 400mToGo today.

I’m a PHP / MySQL developer primarily. I’m working on my Java chops as we speak. My day job is a junior development position, I’m working on building a freelance development business into a second, viable stream of income, and I’m an Original Limu distributor as well. Find out more about Original Limu here.

2008 got here well before I was ready for it, and the new year finds me as busy as I’ve ever been with multiple new projects. What you’re seeing is a new CMS running on the home page, and me with no time to dig in and learn it. This is going to be a fun project, but as it’s a personal project, it will be catch as catch can until I get a few hours to spend reading some Drupal for n00bs stuff.

In the meantime I have some exciting Zend Framework projects in the works with a couple more on the way. I’m working on my first Java project at the day job, which is exciting but leaves my brain a pile of mush by the end of the work day. As soon as I deliver those projects there will be more time for my personal projects. I think this is what they call “job security.”