The random utterances of David Arno

One of my weaknesses in life is a love of (well really a need for) a constant feed of tea throughout the day. As such, the mug from which I drink that tea is important to me: it needs to be big (saves on too many trips to the kitchen) and I like it to be personal to me in some way. Around a year ago, the Daily WTF website started selling a big mug carrying their logo. It was perfect and thus started my geek mug collection.  Soon after I received a free .NET Rocks mug in lieu of an email I’d sent to the show. It was the same large size as the Daily WTF mug. I don’t think the email every got read out, though I’ve missed some shows in the last year, so may have missed it. My mug collection stood at two, and there it remained for the next year.

Recently I came across the website of the company that I think makes both the the mugs I have: zazzle.com. They offer a great way of designing your own one-off mugs. For some time I’ve wanted a mug I’d seen with Cup<T> (which reads as “cup of T” – it’s a generics thing) and this seemed the ideal way of getting one. I could even “fix” it to a more pedantic Mug<T>. There was one problem: Zazzle UK charge a hefty fee in Britain for their mugs and worse, they charge a piss-taking amount for postage. They are great if you live in the USA, as they charge less than £10 if you don’t mind slow delivery. Here though, they wanted a minimum of £7 just to deliver the thing, on top of the £13 for the mug itself. £20 for a mug with a seriously geeky joke on it? I tried contacting Zazzle to point out how insane their postage charges were, and got a generic “thanks for your enquiry about our new P&P prices” response. I doubt a human had even bothered to read my email, so no joy there. So the idea died a death.

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned the matter on Twitter, and as a result, I got a recommendation for a cheaper – much much cheaper, ie nearly half Zazzle’s price – company here in Britain that could also do such mugs for just £11 including P&P. A special thanks to @Graham White for finding the company- Focus Prints – for me by the way, as I’d failed to find them myself. So I whipped up the simple graphic I needed:

Mug of <T> graphic

and emailed it off and parted with my cash. A week or so later, my new addition to my mug collection arrived:

Mug<T> Mug

The downside to this happy tale of geekiness is that there is another mug I’d now like:

The problem is, whoever came up with this idea gets money every time someone buys the mug from Zazzle. As zazzle are way too expensive, I’ll not use them. I have no way of paying the copyright owner if I get it made elsewhere. I’ve yet to resolve this ethical conundrum.