Here's a funny story that happened to me yesterday. I live tweeted a cookie run to Walgreens.

Making a cookie run to the walgreens.

Chips Ahoy cookies are 4 boxes for $5. #walgreens #deal

Okay, so I bought FOUR boxes of cookies. I'll walk up the 14 flights of stairs at Tribune Tower to make up for it.

Security guard at Tribune Tower denies cookie offer. Oh well. More for the peeps on 14. Now it's stair climbing time!

At floor 7. This is much harder than I thought. Half way there!

Floor 14, I'm so happy to see you! +huffing and puffing+

Can you beat 3 minutes 14 seconds for 14 flights of stairs? It's very possible. I wasn't going fast at all.

In my desperation for water, I sit down at my desk with a full bottle and spill it all over! Classic! Thankfully none on my laptop.

Water is cleaned up. 14 flights of stairs are climbed. I finally sit down to enjoy some tasty cookie goodness! Mmmmm mmmmm

Guess what? The cookies are STALE. Shudda known. Typically when Walgreens has food on mega-sale, there tends to be something wrong.

Here's a growing collection of the funniest Facebook status messages I have seen. Feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment with hilarious facebook status messages you have read.

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Erik M. Transformers 2 comes out Wednesday. Too bad Michael Jackson didn't live long enough to see tformers2. He would have loved it. So sad.

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Erik M. I just opened the memory card slot on the company digital camera and seriously thought, "oh no I just spoiled the film".

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Juan D. WHY RANDY JACKSON!!! WHY!!! A FRICKEN HEART ATTACK!!! HE WAS GETTING SO HEALTHY!!! ITS NOT FAIR!!! WE LOVE YOU RANDY JACKSON FROM T.V'S AMERIAN IDOL!!!!!

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Marco B. My dog must've been on an Old Style and White Castle bender earlier in the week, judging by the little gifts she keeps leaving in the yard and the basement.

(and classic comment) Matt Maldre at 9:12pm June 27
I ate a bunch of Post® grape-nuts yessterday and I know what you mean.

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Erik M. my brother started to collect Roy Smalley, Jr baseball cards (he found a great deal on an autographed card...50 cents or sumthin'). He couldn't figure out why he felt intrinsic value for this player. Then I figured out that his son, Roy Smalley III is on the lengendary R.B.I. Baseball game. So he started to subconsciously collect baseball cards because a player's son was on a video game from the 1980s.

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I copied 161gb of files from one external USB drive to another. The process took three hours. I figured that once it was done copying, my computer should behave normally, right?

No.

The computer actually went slower AFTER the copying was done. I opened the "Activity Monitor" (found in Hard Drive > Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) and it told me that an application called "mdworker" was using around 40% of my CPU power. WHOA!

Someone on insanelymac.com explained, "It is the new and improved Meta Data importer. Don't worry, after some time you'll see its CPU usage drop. It kicks in when there's any kind of file activity, especially documents."

I want to go around and shake people's hand at work and say, "Congratulations, today is National Handshake Day." Actually what would be more fun is to go around with a hand buzzer and do that.

A selected sampling of factoids on handshaking from wikipedia:

• In some Oriental countries (like Turkey or the Arabic-speaking Middle East), handshakes aren't as 'strong' as in America and Europe. Consequently a grip which is too firm will be considered as rude.
• Especially firm handshakes are sometimes called "Manshakes"
• President Theodore Roosevelt, who set the world record with 8,513 handshakes at a White House reception on January 1, 1907. (i'm not bothering to mention the Atlantic City Mayor who broke the record in 1977).

Other handshake stuff:

• Wikihow wrote an article about how to be a jerk and manipulate people with your handshake, "How to Have a Persuasive Handshake."
• Batman and Superman shaking hands

What do the following 15 items have in common?
* Eastern Tiger Salamander
* Northern Cardinal
* Monarch Butterfly
* Square dance
* Bluegill
* Violet flower
* Popcorn
* Gold Rush Apple
* Tully Monster
* Big Bluestem
* White-tailed deer
* Fluorite
* Painted Turtle
* Drummer silty clay loam
* White oak

These are all OFFICIAL symbols of Illinois. What fun and odd conglomeration of things. I'm sure there's meaning behind each of these choices, but it's funny that together they should really say Illlinois, but I'm not sure I'd look at this list and say, "Wow! That's Illinois"

It would be fun to have a game where there are 50 lists like this, and you have to try to match them up with each state. I'd play that game on Facebook.

You just accidentally sent invites to EVERYONE in your address book to a book cataloging service. What do you do?
1) Laugh it off. "People get these every day."
2) Freak out and immediately send an email to everyone in your address book apologizing?
3) Freak out and ignore it.
4) Send an email to only the business contacts in your address book explaining your error.

What I did:
Yesterday I did a little bit of 2 and 3. I freaked out and posted an apology on twitter, facebook, and my blog on spudart.org. There's a level of freaking out, because my address book is a collection of EVERYONE I've ever met and have their email address. This includes anyone I meet in business and anyone I meet online. If you added me as a contact on flickr, I add you in my address book. If I meet someone through a personal, I add that person in my address book. I want to make sure that if someone tries to email me, the spam blockers don't block your email. Plus, I just like to have one central location where I have everyone I know. Networking is very important, and I've learned it's essential to have a complete address book of people that I get in touch with for helping each other.

When I send out a willy nilly accidental email like this, there's an element of losing control that is very unsettling, because I just did something I didn't mean to do. The flip side is that it's still a nice email. No harm done. And that's what I realize now. (I should note that it was not goodreads fault. I clicked on a button I should not have clicked on in their site. Goodreads does NOT do "contact scraping")

The result:
What then resulted from my online posts is people were disappointed that I was disingenuous with my invite. "Oh you didn't really want to be my friend." Which I'm sure is said in a joking manner. But there is some sort of truth behind that. In all reality, YES, I would love to be your friend. I just don't send invites out to my ENTIRE address book. But really, people don't care if your whole address book got sent an email, especially if it was for a service that is legit. Now if it was a spam site, then yes, I would probably email my entire address book telling them to ignore it. But goodreads.com is a nice site. I ended up with 16 new friends on goodreads.

What I should have done: (maybe)
Part of me wonders if I should have just emailed the business contacts to explain. But instead I went the passive way and posted a message online. Of course the business people don't see those messages online, but my friends do see them. It's my friends that should see it as completely normal for me to add them as a friend on goodreads.com. But I posted those messages online, because I want to at least try to be up front with people and let them know what I was thinking. I don't like to pretend or be fakey. Plus, I'm very willing to admit when I make an error. So, hence posting a messages to let people know a bit of the history behind the invite.

Once I saw all the people add me as a friend, I was really happy. Now I have 16 new friends on goodreads, and that's TOTALLY cool. I welcome Alice, Clorissa, Crissy, Cyndi, Erik, Frederic, Heidi, Jason, John, Julia, Pd, Steve, Tammy, Tracy, Wendy, Yoshinari as my new friends on goodreads.com!

The ultimate result:
Let's share some good books!

if you got a goodreads invite from me, you can ignore it. That was a total mistake on my part. I thought I was adding friends that were on goodreads already. I didn't mean to send it out to my entire address book. I accidentally clicked on a link to send it to my whole address book. This is not goodreads.com's fault, it's mine.

I'm actually not even a huge fan of goodreads.com, I much prefer librarything.com. Here's a comparison review of the two services.

But yeah... oops. I thought I was adding a couple people that were on the service. But then there was an alert that came up on goodreads saying, "message sent to 515 people." WHAT!? I'm very sorry for this. At least it's not leading to a spam site. Goodreads is legit.

If you do choose to join, I'd love to be your friend on goodreads.

Take advantage of the day with the most sunlight, Summer Solstice on June 21.

Some suggestions:
Pull an all-nighter: I once did this when I locked myself out of my apartment on Summer Solstice a couple years ago. It was around midnight, so I felt bad calling my sister or my landlord who have the keys. I walked down to the 24-hour Golden Nugget and hung out until 7pm. It was interesting walking around and seeing all the activity going on late at night. Other people must have been celebrating the night as well.

Walk home from work: Now this I can see being a National Holiday. Can you imagine a day where nobody drives to work. Nobody takes the train. Nobody bikes. Just everyone walking. Wow! I live 6.8 miles from work. That's totally doable. Maybe I'll do a photo sequence of my walk. Yay! New traditions!

amehzing

Definition:
Combination of "meh" and "amazing." The situation where one person finds something amazing and the other person finds it meh. In order to come to a conclusion about the situation, both parties can agree to call it amehzing.

Usage:
Person 1: Dude, Star Wars is so amazing!
Person 2: meh
Person 3: I think you mean "meh" as in "amehzing"

Satisfied.

Let's delete all the 50 states and use counties instead. We could have 3,033 states. Here's what the map would look like. (take a look at the full hi-res version)

There would be a problem that many of the states have the same last name. Washington is used 31 times. What would we do there? Put a number after it? Washington1, Washington2? How about a descriptor. Coolest Washington. Super Lame Washington. Or they could just rename those counties... i mean, states. There are 24 President's names that are not being used. I'll even offer up my last name for one of the 3,033 states. Welcome to the state of Maldre. I'll even make the highway signs to welcome people to my state.

What would the United States flag look like with 3,033 stars?

The U.S. Census Bureau offers free pdf map downloads. Fantastic!
I downloaded the county map with the intention of making the county lines thicker than the state lines just to see what would happen if instead of states, we had counties.

Imagine that. Instead of 50 states, we could have 3,000 states.

But the free pdf map from the U.S. Census Bureau didn't allow me to open it up in Illustrator. Password protected. Lame!

But the pdf did allow me to copy all the text and run it through a frequency program. The most popular county name is Washington.

The word "Saint" is also used a lot. But ignoring saint for a moment and focusing on the names. The most popular president names used by counties are Washington, Jefferson, Franklin (oops not a president), Jackson, Lincoln.

WHOA. Jackson outranked Lincoln! You go Andrew!

Here's the top 30 most-used words in county names:

Unique words:2029 Total words:3569
Freq. Word
31 WASHINGTON
29 SAINT
28 JEFFERSON
25 FRANKLIN
24 JACKSON
23 LINCOLN
21 SAN
20 MADISON
18 UNION
18 CLAY
18 MONTGOMERY
18 LAKE
17 MONROE
17 MARION
16 WAYNE
15 CARROLL
15 GRANT
14 WARREN
14 GREENE
12 JOHNSON
12 MARSHALL
12 DOUGLAS
12 LAWRENCE
12 POLK
11 CALHOUN
11 LEE
11 SCOTT
11 FAYETTE
11 CLARK
11 MORGAN
11 ADAMS

We have two holes in the front of our head filled with goop. They are for seeing. These holes with goop are called eyes.

We have two holes in the side of our head for hearing. They are called ears.

We have two holes for smelling, but they are called nose (singular). If eyes are plural and ears are plural, nose should be plural too. From now on i'm calling my nose to be noses. I smell the roses with my noses.

Based in Chicago Half Letter Press publishes and distributes booklets about collaborative and experimental artwork. I recently discovered their shop at halfletterpress.com and ordered a bunch of books--for cheap!

Here's the message I wrote in part of my online order:

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I'm so excited about my order. I did a search on Chicago and then sorted by price. What a great deal on these fun booklets! btw, i found out about you through AREA Chicago. I was asking them if I could buy some of their issues and they said that soon they will be available on your site. So i went to see what your site was about, and it's very cool! You have a very happy customer! Sincerely, matt maldre of spudart.org
=================

My order:


Why The Exhibit Was Canceled: $2.00
This booklet presents actual 'behind the scenes' correspondence between an artist and a curator (both made anonymous) as they attempt to negotiate the details of the artist's upcoming exhibition. The institution raises late concerns about the artist's work a month before the show is to open. The artist is asked to change his work and make unusual concessions so that the institution can cover its ass and this leads to the artist canceling the show.

This booklet salvages a difficult experience and makes public the kind of internal dialog between artists and institutions that is extremely hard to access. A booklet that has been much loved, debated and discussed by teachers, students and arts administrators. So heavily read and downloaded that it has surely been seen by more people than would have attended the exhibit had it not been canceled!


Drawn Out: $2.00
This booklet (#19)accompanied the exhibition Drawn Out and documents some of the work from the show. A drawn out project is one that persists with little regard for those who stopped paying attention ages ago. For the people who were in this show, there is always something more to be said, always another idea to share, always another angle to consider, always another example to archive, and always another question to ask. But to draw something out is not only to prolong it, but to induce a person to speak freely.

Speaking freely is the critical component that binds all of the work in this show. Included in Drawn Out were over 40 anonymous street flyers by "The Ancient Order Guy," soap products and labels by Dr. Bronner's, collected booklets of letters to corporations by Rich Mackin, blueprint drawings by Krista Peel and Tim Donahue, 200 drawings and doodles left behind by hotel guests from the collection of Chris Ritter, and over 200 public stickers by graffiti artist Shy Girl.


Business Replies: $1.50
This booklet culls together various strategies for using business reply cards to minimize junk mail, entertain yourself at a boring job, creatively protest the very companies that over produce these things, and more. This is booklet #18. Still a relevant way to address this problem after all these years!


11 People 16 Spaces / How-To Guerilla Art: $4.50
Temporary Services booklet #73, This double-booklet was made in a two-day workshop with students from Columbia College in Chicago. 11 People 16 Spaces shows a variety of configurations of people bodily occupying urban spaces.

How to Guerilla Art presents 16 pages of illustrated tactics for presenting art and ideas in publicly trafficked space.


Public Phenomena - Informal Modifications of Shared Spaces: $4.75
Booklet #68. This booklet was our first publication focusing on documentation of Public Phenomena. It includes 44 color photos, none of which were repeated in our later book, that go right to the edge of the page.

For our later book we wrote: "From roadside memorials to makeshift barriers, people consistently alter shared common spaces to suit their needs, or let both man-made and natural aberrations run wild. The result is a new kind of public space – with creative and inspiring moments that push past the original planned design of cities." All of these photos were taken in Chicago and the Midwest. The themes this time around are: roadside memorials, parking place savers, block club signs, homemade basketball hoops, and an anomalous image of a truck rebuilt inside a tree. The variety of photos of the myriad amusing ways that Chicagoans block off space for their car in the winter after a snowstorm is particularly rich in this booklet.

This publication was created in conjunction with the project "Construction Site" that we executed in Los Angeles at the invitation of Outpost for Contemporary Art. These are the very last copies of this popular booklet that we have to sell so don't delay if you want one!

Matt’s resume tip #34: Spice up the text version of your resume on Careerbuilder with some FIREWORKS:
.·: * :·.
Everyone loves fireworks. Tell me someone who does not like fireworks. Therefore, you should put fireworks into your text-version of your resume. Employers will JUMP at the chance to interview you.

C’mon fireworks ASCII art. Who can resist?

.·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·.
matt
.·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·. .·: * :·.

P.S. Using ASCII art fireworks in the signature of your email is like the fireworks grand finale. Everyone will ooo and aahh.

I'd love to have a penny from every currency on planet Earth. I'd pay $10 for that. Someone should sell a collection that has every possible type of current penny. That would just be so cool.

If someone sells the world penny collection, they could have people subscribe and get the collection every year. That would be fun. I'd totally fork over ten bucks every year to get the worldwide penny collection.

It would be a great way to introduce a person like me into collecting coins. Personally, I wouldn’t really care if they are uncirculated, in fact, I’d rather have them be circulated, so it would make it cheaper for me to buy the collection.

Last year I subscribed to all the U.S. presidential candidates to see what types of email I would get. Now I am unsubscribing. Here's my message to Ron Paul.

==========================
To: Congressman_Ron_Paul_eswaq_lnabpp@cp20.com

Your unsubscribe link is broken. Please fix and drop me off this list faster than a water balloon dropped off a building.

Thank you,
Matt Maldre
mmaldre@******.com
==========================

Whenever I sign up to get something in the mail for free, I like make up a middle name that is related to the product. For instance, Oscar Meyer is giving away coupons for free hot dogs. I used the name "Matt Hotdiggity Maldre" to register.

And then it's fun getting mail addressed to the goofy middle name.

Another trick is to eliminate the space between the middle name and the first name. When i signed up for the free hot dogs, I should have used "Matthotdiggity Maldre." I've found that sometimes people delete the middle name.

A selection of photos from various flickr groups on LEGO steampunk, tanks, and war. Some of these creations are just so COOOOOOOOL.

Oh the days of Scrabulous. Playing the super-duper fun game of Scrabble online. See what fun words my friends would come up with. Oh yes.

After IMing my brother about how I miss Scrabulous, I did a google search for it, just outta kicks. The first result was the wikipedia entry for Scrabulous. And lo and behold! SCRABULOUS IS BACK!!!! It's now called Lexulous. Who knew!? I didn't! How did this slip by? What happened? Wasn't Hasbro's undies all tied up in a knot?

The Wikipedia entry explains that the Indian high court ruled that they were allowed to make the game as long as they don't call it a name close to Scrabble. So they just renamed it Lexulous. On September 27, 2008 www.lexulous.com was launched with all the previous stats! In fact on January 1, 2009, Lexulous was back on facebook! Crazy!

Oh so what about Hasbro? They withdrew their lawsuit on December 20, 2008. Hahaha. SWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEET.

AND THERE'S A LEXULOUS IPHONE APP. Yeah, it's $3.99. But i'll drop that for LEXULOUS ANYDAY! Oh and the here's the link to the Lexulous on facebook: apps.facebook.com/lexulous. Come challenge me!

i think i burnt my water
for my tea

it tastes burnt
like all the oxygen is missing

i'm drinking pure hydrogen
this tea tastes extra hydrogeny