From the office of Banana and Associates

Good evening and welcome to a more button down and serious look at Banana Boy Productions. In light of recent financial developments in the fiscal world, I want to assure all stockholders in Banana Boy Productions, that we will not need a bailout from the federal government. You see folks Conservatives believe in a free market. This is why we need tort reform, stricter bankruptcy policies for individuals, and a need to let prime rate mortgage holders twist in the wind as they move into the 21st century versions of Hooverville's. Of course the free market does not apply to airlines or Bear Stearns, or anybody else who needs a little bit of government love. Now of course airline pilots and crew had to give back their pensions, and a whole bunch of Bear Stearn employees got the shaft, but don't worry top executives made sure to keep their comfortable salaries.

The moral of the story is that the government plays favorites. If you did not know that, well shame on you. Always be suspicious of the government when they are giving away free money. Last time they gave average people a $300 rebate, they gave the richest 1% a huge tax break. You can only think what other kind of borderline criminal activities the Bush administration is up to when they are trying to cover it up with a $600 check. What does it matter anyway, the currency itself will soon be worthless anyway. When Mexicans begin jumping the border to do cheap shopping, you know the end is nigh.

This is me!

The caption to this picture reads: L to R: Patrick, Me, Ben, Agata, Random -. This confirms what I have always known, that I am the combination of a black man and a drunken polish school girl.

Screwing around at work

Well when I am not the CEO of Banana Boy Productions, turning ideas into paradigms, then shifting that paradigm and turning them into innovations, I have a day job. Now I do work, sometimes even good work... but I must say I do tend to cause a bit of trouble. Mike or Hawkeye as I call him, antagonizes this type of havoc. Mikey Pine is the Dean of Engineering department and Culinary school that we have in the office, by making evil buttons and breaking things with a potato launcher.

This week I have been documenting this trouble making with pictures, as you see above. I get a kick out of sending these to Jen during the day and showing off how I can waste a full day just causing trouble. Wednesday was a little bit emotional since it was a going away party for our glorious leader Dr. Q. We all gave testimonials about how great she is, and I just had to let her know that I give her tremendous credit for not firing me in the past year that I have worked for her. I gave her credit for putting up with my shenanigans, which she so deserves.She gave us the present of word magnets, which Mike and I immediately exploited by putting up some great sentences as shown above. We then started printing out funny pictures and getting funny looks from people.

Also you can see a picture of our apple tree of staff. You have me as the cowboy, Chris as the skier, and Mike will soon have one as an outlaw biker, which will make us... the village people. It is hard to describe how much laughter flows through the office every day. It is truly a miracle that we get any work done

Shitty SXSW Report: Keeping Austin Weird

This post is dedicated to the great city of Austin, Tx and how much fun it was to be there during SXSW. I took the above picture in an alley by the UT campus. Austin has its own style to it. Lots of interesting places, lots of live music, great food, just a good time in general.

Friday kicked off with a trip to the Gingerman, which is a great bar with 90 different beers on tap. Believe me I made sure it wasn't just one beer going through a funnel. Great place, reminds me a lot of Stout in midtown. Played lots of pool with Jen and Josh. For the first time I won a game of 8 ball by sinking the 8 ball, yes I am patting myself on the back right now thinking about my greatness as I type this. There was a patio outside the bar, and there were some weird birds flying around. I swear that they were squawking at each other "I should shit on that guy".

Saturday night we kicked it up a notch. Jen and I attended the dorkbot event in the park across from the convention center and got some free beer. This becomes a theme for the weekend, lots of cheap domestic beer. Anyway, after the event Josh joins us and we start going from bar to bar on 6st street. At some point we wind up at a store called the Hatbox, and we buy hats... well Jen and I bought hats, Josh pointed and laughed. You will have to wait for pictures of that, well if my only reader is Jen, you should already know what it looks like. Anyway we go back to the Chuggin Monkey which was the first bar we went to that night, and danced the night away. I drank a bit more than I should have and remember a bit of a hangover the next day...

Now Sunday was the wildest. We go to the Web Awards hosted by the great Eugene Mirman, with a cameo by Ask A Ninja. Of course we get more free booze during the show, and this springboarded us to a night of SXSW official parties. We wait on line for the Etsy/Threadless party for a good half an hour. Once we get in, we get some free beer and then think hmm this sucks lets go somewhere else. We then go to the Gawker party at Emos. First person we see when we get there is the aforementioned Eugene Mirman. We politely say hi and he invites us to come back tomorrow and see him live. Then we go downstairs and just as we get there Jonathan Coultan is finishing his set... damnit! I snap a pic of him with Jen and he was very gracious to talk to us. We stick around another hour or so and then walk down to Club Deville for the Google party. This was the most fun of the night, maybe because we were buzzed by this point. We meet up with Cheeseburger and chatted with him for a few minutes. I then have a nice conversation with Kerry from www.passiveaggressivenotes.com.I actually passed out a card to her among others at the party, maybe I'll get 2-3 more hits, and you know get sponsors or a blank check from someone. But she was nice to talk to, she did mention she hasn't learned to ride a bike before. I still extend the invitation to her, for us to get on some training wheels and start rolling. We then ran into this guy named Jeremy and his friend who wanted to wear my hat. He had his own hat on, and we go on to trade hats for a moment, then he drew a map of Ireland for Jen... yeah random i know. We wind up the night at Pure Volume and get more free booze, insult a guy from Limewire, and was called Willie by someone.

Monday was our last night in Austin, and we did it right. We all went out to Emo's one last time, saw Eugene Mirman, Mike Birbiglia, and Michael Showalter. Well Showalter didn't make it because his flight was cancelled, but he did call in to say hi. I will say this first Mike Birbiglia almost made me throw up during his set. Ok just needed to check something there, on with the blog. Anyway I am just going to end this with Eugene Mirman's spoof of Tom Cruise so you get an idea of how funny this guy is.

Shitty SXSW Report: The Panels

While at SXSW, when I wasn't drinking like a fish, I attended some good, bad, and ugly panels and discussions. The following is a quick synopsis and analysis of what I saw. For those following at home, I will be categorizing the panels on a dog shit scale:

0 Dog Shit- Amusing and entertaining as well as informative
1 pile of Dog Shit- Missed the mark slightly on either criteria
2 piles of Dog Shit- Somewhat boring on both criteria
3 piles of Dog Shit- Starting to question my scheduling decision
4 piles or Complete Dog Shit- Time to set panelist(s) on fire and riot

0 Dog Shit:

Worst Website Ever from the Saturday session- This panel by far sucked the least out of anything I saw at SXSW. This was a fake competition made up of 7 teams, trying to come up with the worst idea for a website. Above is a picture of the eventual winner as well as one of my heroes, the great Merlin Mann. He had an idea for a social networking site called flockedup. Essentially he is ripping off my ideas for creating a powerful web 2.0 tool based on the ideas of diversion and slight of hand. Merlin gets a pass for his actions, but I now see that he will be my competition. He won a single dollar from the judge who happens to be a real VC.

10 Worst Ads also from Saturday Session- You can see the trend of preferring the darker panels here. This was a panel discussion on the most egregious marketing campaigns ever put out there by companies such as HP, Cisco, Agency.com, Walmart, and others. The panel headed up by the great Jeff Jarvis showed both mortifying and amusing videos of ad campaigns by these companies, with the sole intention of manipulating the customer. Many of these offenders, paid bloggers to hump their product or service, and hide so in doing it. I mean I will sell myself out for the right price, but at the same time some of these were rather low down. For example, the winner was an Hp ad that was made by a woman who made her children break a fuji digital camera and demand an Hp camera... now thats some low down shit.

1 Pile of Dog Shit:

I Can Has Cheeseburger from Sunday- If you haven't gone to www.icanhascheezeburger.com please do immediately. This is a very funny site run by Eric Nakagawa (Cheeseburger) and Ben Huh. Basically the two spoke about how they turned a site that discussed how they have made a business out of putting funny cat pictures with captions on the internet. Now that is some fucking achievement. Now my one gripe about this talk was that at the onset they promised cheeseburgers for members of the audience, and then while the talk was going on, people from outside of the room ate our cheeseburgers. Now that is a rip.

2 Piles of Dog Shit:

Saturday Keynote with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson-

This was an interesting if not highly optimistic discussion about the changing competencies of the next generation. Themes such as people socializing through video games instead of in person, the effort people will put into hobbies such as movies and books in comparison to the effort put into work. and other remarks that give this new generation a pass, due to some collaborative thinking concept. Honestly I don't think Mr. Jenkins sees the pure unadulterated stupidity that I have seen. It seems as though his ideals are too skewed towards the people he speaks to. Interesting talk, but full of some shit.


Browser Wars Monday- This was an interesting talk with representatives from Opera, Firefox, and IE. I really thought that all of these crazed programmers were going to hang the guy from Microsoft. I thought of the idea of putting up a dunk tank, putting the guy in there, and charging $10 a ball to get people to do it. I dont think they would have a problem. I did get bored with some of the discussion of standards, though there were some interesting discussion of how to implement these browsers on mobile devices.

Mom 2.0 Monday- This was a group discussion about ways in making computer use a better experience for mom's and dad's who do not have a background in technology. It was an interesting conversation since my mom is just now embracing using the internet on the iBook G3 that I gave her. The conversation was somewhat interesting, talking about how to educate older people, and making the UI experience easier to use. However, I felt it was a bit patronizing to older folks. Some of the people in the group felt the same way, and basically put it out there that there are a limited amount of uses that the older demographic have for a computer and just make those functions easier to use.

3 Piles of Dog Shit:

Human and Property Rights in the Virtual World- Ok now the title of this thing sounds interesting on paper, however essentially this panel was on whether or not you really own that condo you have on Second Life. The answer is NO damnit, you buy the game, you live in the universe created by the game publishers, how hard is that to understand? This panel could have taken 5 minutes, not an hour. What a pile of crap

Discussion of the Rational Voter with Brian Caplan- Now don't get me wrong Caplan is an interesting guy, an economist of all people at SXSW, but this one falls into the illogical hypotheticals department. Talking about the advantages to selling kidneys on the open market and such. He didn't even really talk about the topic very much.

4 piles of Dog Shit or COMPLETE DOG SHIT- Saturday Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Now this was just crap. Ok so this was a double trainwreck. The interviewer was some floozy by the name of Sara Lacy. Now mind you shes pretty hot, but unless shes stripping on stage, some cute airhead is not going to make a keynote good. So this chick had a short skirt on, laying back in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and just flirting with Zuckerberg on stage. "So you're not really worth $15 billion are you? hehehe" or "What are you doing tonight?" Meanwhile whenever Zuckerberg spoke, he either said efficient social network or platform. I proposed a drinking game to others sitting in our row. Somebody actually yelled you suck half way through. With 15 minutes to go Jen and I just walked. She said what if it really gets good, I said the only way that will happen is if she just starts to screw him on stage.What a waste of time. I am glad that this news has spread on valley wag and other sites.

Just wanted to make note that we also went to Screen Burn and the Trade show that were also in the building. Screen Burn gets 3 piles for being tiny and having almost nothing playable on the floor. The trade show gets 1 pile for having free beer everywhere and some interesting booths.

Shitty SXSW report: The food

Well I am home from SXSW and since I didn't have my laptop with me like the thousand people who brought their Macbook Pro's with them, I am catching up on my blogging now. In fact I wanted to play punch buggy iPhone and Macbook Pro with Jen, but she thought we would be dead in a pool of our own blood by the end of the conference if we had indeed done that. Even I felt like I had a become a corporate sheep jeez.

Anyway I thought I would start out with a full report on the food I experienced in Austin... so basically this is a pro-Biscuit, and Biscuit advocating blog, so if you have differing Biscuit views than myself, I think it is time for you to pull the parachute and jettison out of this blog entry. I must say that I just loved breakfast in Austin, it became a ritual, driving downtown with Josh and Jen and getting a hearty breakfast. I had some Migas, which is a combo of eggs, cheese, tortillas, beans, and assorted other splendid country goodness. I went to the promised land of tex-mex breakfast... and it was good. I also sampled a variety of pancakes, particularly enjoying cornmeal. Then of course there are biscuits. I believe I should start a chain in New York called Chicken Biscuit, where all foods are put into a biscuit sandwich, for thousands if not millions to enjoy. crab cake on a biscuit, hamburger on a biscuit, and of course chicken on a biscuit. Indeed a delight for us all to enjoy.

Dinner was a more hit or miss proposition. We had a good sampling on Friday, with Ruby's and Mangia's. Ruby's being a top notch bbq place with all the fixins you can ask for, and Mangia's being a kind of pizzeria Uno's type joint. On Saturday we insisted on going to spaghetti warehouse. I had abused baby cow or veal as they call it. It was alright, but I must say we only really went because the name just sounded so bizarre. It seemed as though we were shopping at Ikea for lasagna. Monday night we went to a tex-mex place called Oasis up in the hills. The view was quite splendid, but the food was rather average. All in all some good eats in Austin

Shitty sxsw report- Saturday

Well I am in Austin enjoying sxsw. Right now I am sitting back with
Jen waiting for a keynote to start.

Friday was a bit of an adventure. Leaving at 5am wasn't the most fun.
I was a bit punchy, even mentioning that life is a joke from God, and
we are the punchline.

Josh has been our host, though considering how much he is in the
library while in Austin, not the best tour guide. We have enjoyed
great food so far at Ruby's, Magnolia, and mangia. Oh a note about the
picture, this guy was blowing on a harmonica while driving through
town. Thats nuts. Anyway gotta get going. More coverage of the panels
to come, along with talks about birds, and chicken biscuits