Reading Valleyschwag‘s blog, (vote for Jonathan & Matt!) realized I could do a little schwag report. So if you are your schwag, I would be a very geekie jock. It’s a sick day, I’m high on sudaphedrine, so endless myopic navel-gazing is permitted, no?

1. When my dot-com closed the doors, I raced through the kitchen one day and grabbed these small Ikea bowls. Super fucking useful, and not branded, which I appreciate. In the background: mug with the words “coffee” taken from Wheelhouse kitchen, and a Chinese mug with top and filter from brother-in-law’s Taiwanese vendors. Kitchen supplied by free stuff.



2. I’m one of those “pen stealers” who ask for a pen and never give it back. So I got a few of these Apache Con ’05 pens from Cliff, who was one of the creators of Apacheness. Pens can backfire as marketing schwag: if they fail in meeting everyone makes cracks about the durability/scalability/etc of the product. These are durable, though, and have a pleasant transparent look. I would never go to this conference, yet I sport the schwag!



3. Geeky t-shirts: WordCamp‘s WordPress t-shirt, was worth all the drama because the quality of the t-shirt is grade-A soft, and a nice off-black. The Linux t-shirt was poached from a co-worker. I do like Linux, have done some linux stuff, but honestly, far too geeky for me. Shirt gets points for cute penguin- translates well with the non-geek crowd. Negative points for being very, very large.



4. This red, boiled wool jacket from a Toyota/Schwinn bikes co-marketing scheme. Executive friend of mine passed this on. Proves that besides the huge salaries, they get ridiculously nice quality schwag.



5. Non-geeky shirts, aka, marketing shirts. At ESPN there was the usual free-for-all t-shirt plundering when they got a new batch of t-shirts and the old ones had to go. I adore one of my ESPN t-shirts because it is small. At ESPN every man is a giant, I guess, because the smallest size they have is XL. And of course no women read/watch ESPN, oh no.
   The Yelp t-shirt, while black, which is usually a good thing, has a strange scrawly image and is very hard to read where it says “Yelp.” Subtle to the point of being pointless, imho. Reflect.com didn’t learn that putting “dot-com” in the name is very over. Funny, company doesn’t exist anymore either. But points for being black, the most versatile t-shirt color.



6. Technically schwag is marketing items you get for free, but in this case I paid for the privilege of wearing the logo. Dorky! True. Spoon band t-shirt, Nanowrimo (to support the cause, that’s right). Brown nano shirt gets extra points for being a nice fit, and having a pleasing color scheme of blue and brown.