Today is Christina’s last day with b5media as Director of Network Content. (Booo!) CJ has been with us since the start but has decided to move on….apparently she’s got some fancy pants job testing out beauty gizmos and products (after they are deemed safe for use of course). She’s going to stay on a Channel Editor, so we’ll still hear from her from time to time. 

Things we know about CJ:

- She has pigs as pets

- She drinks Bud Light

- She likes girly things

- She drives a Suburban

- Blonde, Texan, Happy-Go-Lucky

- She still drinks Bud Light

We’re really sad to to CJ go, but we know you’ll be kicking around. I miss you already. Sniff.

I’ve got some official updates on our plans for BWE! Tons of great stuff going on and a great opportunity for our bloggers and the rest of the community to come out and meet us.

Friday September 19th:  Blogger Summit- this is held at the convention center (room number yet to be confirmed). It will be a full day of workshops/talks about all things blog related. We have some big names speaking…a schedule of all the topics and speakers can be found here. A great all-star lineup of speakers! It’d be great to just come out and meet everyone!

In the evening of September 19th, we’re having a blogger meet up at Fusia restaurant at the Luxor hotel from 7pm to 9pm. Space for the event is limited, so if you are interested in joining us, please rsvp to ed@b5media.com. The event is open to all our bloggers, partners, friends. Come on out!!

Saturday September 20th is the official first day of BWE. During the day, you can find us at our booth (#309). Pop by for some poker! Like last year, we will have a poker table set up in our booth and great prizes to win! We’ll have tons of fun ways to earn a spot at the table. The team plans on attending the BWE opening night party, and we look forward to mingling with you all there.

Sunday September 21st is the last day of the conference. We’ll be in full force during the day at the conference, and look forward to seeing you there. If you can’t make it out to play poker on the first day, come this day. We’ll still be pumping the gambling!

Please let me know if you plan on coming out so I can say hi!

I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas!! Blog World Expo is my favorite time of year. We’re all about getting involved in the blogging community and meeting up with everyone. We’ve got a bunch of our Bloggers and hard working Channel Editors coming out this year. With everyone working remotely, meeting up once a year at a place like Vegas is really awesome.

Out of the bloggers that are coming, I’m personally excited to hook up with my old pal Jon Rochetti from The DC Traveller. He really knows my style and we are going out on the town. Shea Sylvia from MTV Reality World is going to be there too. After all the time we spent together at SXSW in March, she’s gotta be missing me by now. Lara Kulpa from Dating Dames is meeting up with us. Hopefully she can offer me some advice on my love life (my blue complexion gets a lot of attention, but sometimes I think it’s all just superficial). Even Jason Bean from Microsoft Weblog is coming out! Like Shea, he probably misses all the fun times we shared at SXSW! And Kevin Palmer is coming. Big deal.

The Channel Editors that are making it out include Kelly from the Business Channel. Hopefully she’s not all business!! Of course Mary Jo from the travel channel is coming…she’d go to anything that she could travel to. And Arieanna from Entertainment is coming out…hopefully she can entertain us down there. I know she certainly did at SXSW!! b5’s new Training Manager, and Channel Editor for the Music Channel, Jeanne Dupuis,  is coming out. I wonder if she does music training? We’ll have to find out.

Should be a good time all around…can’t wait to see everyone!! We got some good stuff planned for the weekend we are there, so let us know if you are going to be around so we can include you!!!

Once again b5 is planning it’s sponsorship at Blog World Expo in Vegas (Sept 20th and 21st). This is my favorite time of the year and probably my favorite conference. They’ve got great speakers (some b5ers in there), great panels, great industry folk, great parties, great times.

Like last year, b5 is doing a blogger day the day before the full conference starts. It’s open to the public, but we’re really hoping to get a lot of b5 bloggers out this year. Being in the head office is cool, but we LOVE meeting the men and women who really make it happen for us….we realized this at SXSW in March when we got to meet Shea Sylvia, Jason Bean and Joe Ruiz.

We’ve got tons of fun b5 stuff planned for while we’re down there and a lot of the team is coming. (Finally, I get to meet some of the Channel Editors!) We’ll keep you posted on the fun stuff that’s planned…come out and meet us!

This week has been all about the bodies at b5. Director of Branded Content, Darren O, forgot his age for a brief intoxicated moment, and twisted his ankle in a football match on Friday night (see awesome photo).

In other news, in a recent Skype conversation about BWE, Gab said she could probably beat Darcie in an arm wrestling match. We’ll see….

Well, Brian and Mark just left and we all cried a little. Their days were mostly filled with tech meetings, but their evenings were full of fun and games. Tuesday night, the whole team had dinner at Jack Astors. Some memorable moments include Darren O arm wrestling Darcie and almost losing (no one was surprised). Once the team was done creating a mess and scaring away the other customers, they moved on to Grace O’Maley’s down the street where they were kicked out of shortly after. There were several expletives used. A retaliation was had that Ed will benefit from, but cannot be mentionned here for fear that a certain new employee could be jailed.

After the Gracies carnage was done, whoever was still standing headed out for some kareoke. Franca took one for the team and flirted with the kareoke guy so that we could get our songs played. Well, that’s what she said anyway. We were the only people in the bar, so her flitation was pretty needless.

Needless to say, Wednesday was a little slow for all of us.

We finished Wednesday off by playing Rock Band for 3 hours. Fun times.

Thursday was another day of meetings and chinese for lunch. Salim was really mean to Darcie and just about made her cry. Other than that, it was a preety quiet day.

Bye MarkJaquith and Brian! Please come again!

Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith are currently up in the Toronto office. Mark got here on time. Brian, well, not so much.

They are both still the same as they were when we all saw them at SXSW in March. Brian hasn’t shaved yet. Mark is still uber-cool. If I had to describe them in three adjectives, they would be:

Mark- Cool, tall, happy

Brian- Nice, tall, happy (even after his 215746331 hour flight here).

You may have heard in passing the comments about Salim and his “wife” and I thought I would explain that a little further. We’ve met most of the b5 spouses…either when they stop in to bring a forgetful husband some lunch, or they join their spouses on an away trip to a conference. We’ve met some of the spouses that don’t even live in the same city as us. However, Salim’s “wife” never seems to materialize. We ask questions about her all the time…and Salim keeps promising she’ll come by “next week”. Salim has been with us since the end of October…and still no wife.

It has become a long-standing theory that she does not exist outside of Salim’s mind.

Occasionally, Salim will come in with his good blazer on and will eat lunch out of the office, or will need to take an hour long coffee break. We’ve come to realize that this is when he interviews women to act as his wife at the next company function. Just so he can bring someone so he doesn’t look like a liar.

He claims he had a baby in March. On one of his first days with b5, he said “By the way, sometime in March, I’m going to need to take a few weeks off cause my wife is having a baby.” We all believe that he carefully thought this out…he was planning a 2 week vacation in the Caribbean, but didn’t want to seem like a slacker in his first year with the company, so he invented a wife and children.

To make us think differently, he made Jon drive him home after a late meeting the other day. Jon’s fatal mistake was not waiting to see if Salim actually went into the house he claimed as his own. I wonder if Salim would be able to pick the same house out again if Jon drove him “home” or if he plans on “moving” by the time someone has to drive him home again.

Does Salim himself really exist? I’m beginning to wonder. It seems that usually when Jeremy is here, Salim is not. I think they are the same person trying to get two paychecks. I should call a meeting with both of them and see if they both show up.

In Toronto, whenver Jeremy and Salim have a lunch meeting that the rest of us don’t get invited to, we retaliate by have a kick-ass lunch at a restaurant called Shanghai Cowgirl. We don’t tell them where we go, but we come back bragging of the delicious food we’ve had, and the awesome time we shared.

Yesterday was one of those days. Jeremy and Salim (and now Jon Prosser, the new VP Finance) had a lunch date. An e-mail was floated around to let all the new people know what the plan was, and that the others were not to know about it nor were they included.

Jeremy then sent out an e-mail saying that he, Salim and Jon had a lunch meeting the next day at Shanghai Cowgirl, indicating that someone had leaked the information. He then went on to blame Lee and Franca, going as far as saying that Franca had printed out a map for them.

Well, this was no good. Lee quickly defended himself saying that he would NEVER do anything like that, and he was beleived. Darcie went as far as to put together a list of those she suspected as ratting out the secret location. (Joey made top of the list).

Rachel piped up saying she knew for certain how the information was leaked. She bargained to get the much coveted “Coworker of the week” award for the entire MONTH. Anxious to find out who the mole was, Darcie let exchanged the award for the juicy information.

Turned out when Darcie innocently went to help Franca out with some work, Jeremy hacked into her securely locked computer and searched for the e-mail about the wonderfulness that is Shanghai Cowgirl.

b5media’s Toronto office is now on the lookout for a new secret spot. One that will never be described in an e-mail or any other form of new media.

Today was b5media’s first ever bring your pet to work day. It was a huge success.

Salim’s Siamese fighting fish, Baby Beluga, couldn’t make the subway trip downtown, so he sent Nemo in his place. Nemo ruined the jelly beans.

In keeping with the fish theme, Jon’s 546454134 year old goldfish, Bubbles didn’t make it down either, but Jon took these lovely photos so we could all meet Bubbles and his pal, Casper.

Darren brought in his pug, Portia. She was tons of fun. Apparently she get acne. No one fed her jelly beans.

Most of the other people in Toronto were lamewads and didn’t bring in anything. Jeremy has guinea pigs, but claims he no longer trusts anyone who says that a fun day is going to happen based on the tricks that were played on him in the past. You can read about those here and here. Rather disappointing Toronto representation. Even the girl who works down the hall let her dog Simba hang out with us.

Salvation to the Toronto office came when Will Pate and Beta stopped by to participate. I hope Will isn’t upset we use him for his dog.

The US folks represented really well. They all work from home, so bringing in pets was a huge deal for them.

Mark Jaquithhas 3 cats, Gavin, Beverly and Pixel. He’s trained Gavin to hate everyone but him. Beverly is male, despite the name. Apparently, it’s an aggressive cat and Mark thinks by giving it a female name, the cat will tone down a bit. Mark’s wife trained Pixel to be rude to everyone but her. Apparently, Mark spent all his money on computers and stuff so he feeds Pixel blind cords. He realised later on this was a bad idea and spent $1200 to have a vet fix the situation.

Tris’s female cat, Ben (Tris and Mark need to pick up one of those baby name books), enjoys tape. I don’t know what else to say about that except that cats are weird.

Tony has a really big New York apartment, and owns an elephant named T-Danza. He never ceases to amaze us.

CJ lives on a ranch. We were all expecting tons of pics and stories about her pets. Now, living in Canada, I may be naive to think that Texas ranches lots of animals. Apparently, CJ breeds cats and dogs. They are really cute though, so bonus points for that.

Gab swore she was going to send in pictures of her two dogs…I’m guessing that the lack of photos so far is a clear indication that dog is a code word she uses for her husband Coop because she doesn’t want people to know she is training him to shake hands.

So, whatever people say you can learn about a person based on their pet, learn it.