This is the Yahoo t-shirt I wore today: LAUNCH soccer jersey

Running out of shirts, I asked Anne to go through her closet and see if there were any I gave her. She came out with this one, which I don’t remember ever seeing before. The shirt is black (1 strike), has retro styling (2 strikes) and is 50% polyester, making it rather itchy (3 strikes).

The tagline on the back is something either Todd or I thought of, though we don’t quite remember who. I think it’s rather witty. Later it was adapted by SBC for their DSL service – “Internet that Logs onto You”. That never made any sense to me.

Acquired: 2000?
Rating: 2/5

2 more shirts until I run out!

This is the Yahoo! t-shirt I wore today: Building F

In 2003, Yahoo got too big for its 4 big main campus buildings and started acquiring other real estate. The first buildings were two new ones right across the street. There was much consternation about being moved away from everyone else, even if it only was across Mathilda Ave. Someone thought it would be funny in a small bit of protest to name the conference rooms on the first floor after Gilligan’s Island characters (since we were “castaways” from the main buildings) and the 3rd floor after far away places like Siberia, Tatooine, and Timbuktu. I guess this shirt was some kind of consolation prize for moving and an attempt at building “pride”, though I’m not sure it could have been uglier. You don’t see many people wearing these around.

A couple of years later the Mission College buildings opened up and we felt pretty lucky to still be close to the main buildings.

Acquired: 11/24/2003
Rating: 1/5

This is the Yahoo! t-shirt I wore today: Tech Made Easy

This is the official shirt of the Yahoo! Tech launch. It certainly gets right to the point, doesn’t it?

Acquired: 6/2006
Rating: 3.5/5

Well, it appears that I’m a few short of the 21 Yahoo t-shirts needed to wear a different one every workday in June. I’m nine short to be exact. So if anyone reading this has some hanging around that I haven’t worn already, let me know so I can continue my quest. Medium or Large preferred.

This is the Yahoo! t-shirt I wore today: Kevin Sites in the Hotzone

Call it more bad counting in the marketing department, but were plenty of these to be had. Kevin Sites in the Hotzone was Yahoo! News’ first foray into original content and has been successful at telling interesting stories. The site was launched last summer very quickly, then completely redesigned 6 months later.

Acquired: 2006
Rating: 2/5 (Not a fan of black shirts and a little too much advertising for my tastes.)

This is the Yahoo! t-shirt I wore today: Yahoo! Tech TagCloud

This is the exclusive Tech Team shirt with a bunch of silly phrases that kept saying over and over again during development of the site. The tag cloud models the navigation you see at the top of the tech.yahoo.com pages. I will probably quickly forget what most of these phrases mean; there’s some of them I don’t even understand now. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to use Flickr’s notes feature.

Acquired: 6/2006
Rating: 4/5 (despite the tag cloud)

This is the Yahoo! t-shirt I wore today: PHP Retro

I believe we got these at a quarterly all-hands meeting last year sometime. The back has a mirror image of the Yahoo! logo, but with some PHP code behind it which is not mirrored. Perhaps PHP is obfuscated enough on its own. The code itself seems to be some caching code for Yahoo! RSS feeds.

Rating: 2/5 (I don’t like the retro look and I don’t wear code in public)
Acquired: 2005? (I’m sure someone will correct me here)

This is the Yahoo t-shirt I wore today: Musicmatch

Yahoo announced it was acquiring Musicmatch on September 14, 2004. I got this t-shirt way earlier than that, but since they’re now part of Yahoo, it counts. The shirt was part of the gift bag from the WebNoize conference in 1999 where LAUNCHcast was introduced.

Acquired: 11/1999
Rating: 3/5

This is the Yahoo t-shirt I wore today: Search and Marketplace Reloaded

One of the benefits of working at Yahoo is free movie tickets. Whenever a big movie comes out, some group will probably buy out an entire theater and give out the tickets. The most recent one was Mission Impossible III, but back in May of 2003, the Search and Marketplace Group (of which I’ve never been a part of) bought out a showing of The Matix: Reloaded. They had plenty of tickets left, so they gave them out to anybody they could find. When you walked in the door, you even got a free t-shirt.

Acquired: 5/2003
Rating: 4/5

This is the Yahoo t-shirt I wore today: I’m a Yahoo Tech Monkey

The Yahoo! Marketing Department does a lot of Amazing stuff, but counting does not seem to be their forte. Whenever we do some kind of promotion, there’s way more t-shirts left than were needed. But I appreciate it when there’s cool t-shirts to be had.

This one is from the recent Monkey Challenge event in New York City pitting man vs. chimp in a race to take and print a digital picture. Well, the chimps sometimes tried to eat the memory card and Katie Couric’s hair was apparently too distracting for the chimps, but it looked like a lot of fun anyway.

If you ever wonder if those buzz events on The Apprentice are realistic – they are. Except for the shortened timeline and some of the logisitics which are decided ahead of time, it’s just like that when we put on a event like the Monkey Challenge.

Acquired: 5/2006
Rating: 4/5