Scoble and I will be on a panel together next week, so I was happy to learn that his blogging is a father-and-son thing: Scoble’s son Patrick blogs as Mini Scobleizer. So far, I’ve learned that Patrick prefers Apple to Wintel machines. Among the questions Patrick poses is whether to sticker up your laptop. My answer? Well, here’s my laptop:
Go for it. Sticker that baby up. Also, I’m a firm supporter of writing in books. If you bought the book, you own it! Go ahead and write in the margins, read it in the bath tub, dog-ear the corners to mark a favorite passage, whatever you want.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
I have two apple stickers I got with ipods that’d look great on your laptop Matt. NFW I’d dirty my Compaq with them though!
That’s a great idea. An Apple sticker on the Thinkpad would make it look like a retro Apple laptop. I think I have some Apple stickers lying around somewhere..
What does the skull mean?
Hum
“dog-ear the corners to mark a favorite passage”
Yeah – but you wouldn’t, would you?
S
As an ex library employee, I’d say it’s ok to mark your own books, but it gets rather old quickly if you get a novel that’s been scribbled on with notes hired from a library.
Yes, indeed the little old ladies (and a few of the scary old guys) used to get out the romance novels, marking their signature on certain pages of the books so they knew if they had read them or not. (These would be particularly big on the large print books)
We used to go through some of them and try to remove the remarks. Most of the old dears would still forget they had read the book by the end anyway.
yay Guitar Hero!
Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should… actually, that’s a very self-centered, egotistical way to treat books… let me show you an alternative:
Once you finish reading the book, DONATE it to someone else who might enjoy it. It can be your local library, church (if any), third-world country, etc, etc… There are so many people around the world, heck, probably around you, that could very well benefit from that book you are writing on, coloring, picturing… RUINING!
Regards,
Putting stickers on your laptop is so yesterday
|)
Well, that was supposed to be a monkey — : ( | ) — not a frown
Sorry Luis, but I’m with Matt on this.
I have a very nice shelf of pristine books purchased or given to me on the suspicion they may be of use someday. I’ve even read most of them to one degree or another, but they remain in mint condition. Also unremembered and unapplied in my life.
And then I have the piles next to my desk and recliner with coffee stains, dog ears, and torn pages. Those are the ones I’ve lived with and absorbed.
Although I agree that books are precious and not to be wasted, how can you call it wasteful to really grab a book and shake every bit of meaning out of it? That will probably mean some rough handling. Maybe you’ll get excited and spike the book and do a little dance when all the pieces finally come together. Maybe it will inspire daydreams which send you off into a nap when you get drool all over it. The best is when the author is so obviously wrong that you are forced to pick up a pen and scribble counter arguments beside his words.
If I do read a book and it finishes the process in good condition, I always suspect that I didn’t try hard enough to understand its message. I’ll either go back and re-read it, take it to my local used bookstore to recycle into Frank Herbert sf, or put it up on that reference shelf where it will sit untouched and in good condition.
However, charity is a wonderful human quality and maybe I’ll forgo Chapterhouse: Dune and donate my next duffle bag of used books. The recipients probably won’t mind a dog-ear or three…
Darryl.
Anything that sets you apart from others is cool
Hey Jon Henshaw, maybe you follow others, which is why you say it’s so yesterday but I am willing to bet that Matt probably did it yesterday and will continue tomorrow. Me personally, if everyone was putting stickers on their laptop I probably wouldn’t because I wouln’t want to look like everyone else.
Looks like an IBM T42 similar to what is sitting on my desk (?)
alexk is right its a T42 !!.
Umm… Matt… The skull and cross bones symbol is my bit. You shouldn’t steal from the pirate!
I’m just disturbed by the fact that it’s a Stinkpad. If there were ever an argument for a sticker, covering up that logo is it.
You could always do what the poser street racers do up here in Toronto and put Type R stickers all over everything (“Type R adds 5 HP, brah!” “Dood, dat’s so SOLID, eh?”)
I’m not a firm supporter of writing in books, mostly because I’m not a firm supporter of reading them either. There is way too much filler in books these days, especially educational materials. Just read the blue and the bold parts and ignore the rest.
SEO Pirate: AAaaarrrrgh! See you on Sept. 19th, matey!
Luis, turning down the corners on a book doesn’t ruin the book. If I give the book away, someone else can still enjoy it. Heck, they can even see what passages I liked.
Stickering is the diet-coke of case-modding. It’s all good though, those thinkpads aren’t exactly the most astheticly pleasing bricks out there so a bit of extra colour won’t go amiss.
There is in fact quite a market for old bibles, that have family histories written in them. So they mark the passage they’ve read at a wedding, the birth or death of a child. 500 year old bibles get sold mostly for the extra text.
I personally still can’t bring myself to abusing a book in that way, but I only see good reason to abuse it.
I love my ThinkPad. I purchased one a few weeks after my brother in law did, because I was going to buy a laptop and it was awesome. I haven’t stickered it up, but maybe I will some day.
Do you have the official laptop case with the ThinkPad logo on it? It’s got some nice cushioning in there
Hey that sticker makes laptop very hard
Why the sticker had to be a skull ? Was there a particular reason ?
I think it’s all personal preference but I did sticker mine up lol..created some of my own stickers…hey it makes the generic laptop look like a one of a kind…consider it personalisation!!! If a person can have their own dress style why can’t a laptop?