Looks nice in Chinese . . .

Looks refined? Looks cool? Get it on a shirt, hat, or mousepad. Depending on who you are, you may find that this pretty green text is actually one of your favorite slogans. Only your Chinese-reading friends will know for sure. Check it out on Work Redefined!

Gary Todd: "Work Redefined" - check it out

My little brother just made his first blog post. It's about his new CafePress shop. He's got some cool (read: snarky) ideas for t-shirts, etc. Check out Work Redefined (CafePress) and his blog by the same name (I sense a theme here). You can see who is the smartass in the family. He's actually a very nice guy, but I'm sure he wouldn't want you to know that. ALSO, I hope he gets rich because if he does, he owes me bigtime for the ideas to build a CafePress shop and start blogging about it. But the ideas for the products were all his. I'm not taking any of the credit (or blame) for those. If you've ever been ANYWHERE on the corporate ladder, you can relate to the products. (And no, he did NOT do this on company time.)

I'm also impressed by how fast he learned graphics. My brother is a very talented musician (I'm not kidding; there are three of us and you wouldn't want to hear the other two sing), and as such he could probably tell you how much money he's lost in that field of endeavor. As for the t-shirts and other products, even he probably didn't know he was a graphic artist, and I'm actually quite thrilled to see his store develop. At least now he has something useful to do with his twisted views on life :-p Hey, Gar, I love you! I'm proud of how you've navigated the learning curve. Next you can show me how to build a CP store. My ideas will be really different, though. Can we say, "probably animal-related"? Artistic, not so humorous? Maybe some neat travel pictures. Anyhoo . . . way to go!

Posts and plugs

A couple of days ago I started a blog about my father. It started with a post on the Tapir Preservation Fund blog about the sad and untimely death of Nico van Strien. You can read the post. While writing it, I began thinking of my father. My dad's birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and the anniversary of his death is coming soon. The one post led into the other thought, and then I wanted to make a blog in honor of my father. After his death, I intended to collect some material about his life and put it into notebooks for some of the family. I bought the notebooks, collected a couple of things, and got sidetracked. Then I moved. At the moment, I can't find the original collection of things. They aren't gone, they just haven't been found yet.

It's been a busy couple of years. It's time to find my other creative side again (the more personal art, writing, and synthesizing) and play with some of the less-work-related projects I enjoy. I can't really say non-work related, because for the past 11 years tapirs have been my work. They are still a passion and part of my fun, but I need to approach them again from another angle. Ideas are beginning to flow again. That's good.

Oh, and here are the plugs. One of the things I was thinking about was using CafePress for some of my art ideas (and for the tapirs). This came about after a discussion of using that site to sell tapir items for World Tapir Day. Anthony from Australia and Kendra from the US brought up the idea, I checked it out and liked what I saw - for myself as well as for the tapirs. So I was talking with my brother (Gary Todd), who was also needing to find an outlet in something besides work, and he put up a couple of products while I was still noodling around with research and thinking. I especially love his "Corporate Helpers" slogan. It's subtle. One of the jokes is, he IS from Corporate and he has been travelling to the satellite companies. But he gets it. He's got a few more, too, and I hope they sell. That would be fun. [Edited March 2, 2008: Another favorite is Buzzword Bingo. Follow the same link to his store.]