Yesterday, there was an horrible earthquake in Haiti that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale‎. We won’t know until the sun comes up how horrible it was, because electricity AND telephone service was knocked out.

My long time friend and college homeboy, Pascal Antoine is Haitian. He founded and has been maintaining a website called HaitiXchange.com for a lot of years now.

I normally don’t watch the news at all, but I’ve been fascinated by the recent trend of channels showing 3% news and 97% punditry (people giving their OPINIONS about what the news means instead of showing us a bunch more news stories). So I turn on the television around 8pm and flip to CNN, where the slot says “Campbell Brown”, so I’m like “*yawn* Here we go!”, and she has a different look on her face and the marquis below her reads something like “Hospital Collapses In Haiti”.

The fact that I randomly flipped to a channel and they were DELIVERING news instead of GIVING THEIR OPINIONS about the news told me this was something serious.. On top of the fact that there are only three news stories that any of the channels are talking about at any given time. ‘Matter of fact, they just brought back the White House party crashers! :/

So anyway, I was like “I need to make sure my homeboy Pascal heard about this! :O”. So I punch up his number on the cell, and he’s like “Hello?”. I’m like “Yo. It’s Bill”. He goes “My friend Bill just called me…” and I’m like WTF is he talking about??? :D

So I’m like “Listen man. I’m watching CNN and they said a hospital collapsed in Haiti..” and then I’m listening to what he’s saying and I realize he’s got to be broadcasting on the air, live. hahaha I thought I was offering him a SCOOP and here he was already broadcasting the latest information to his HaitiXchange viewers! :D

Realizing what time it was, I hustled off the phone with him and pulled up his site on my computer where he was using Livestream (formerly Mogulus) to embed live video & audio on his homepage like I do on http://billcammack.com/live/. I was like “SWEET!!!”….. until the embed informed me that he had already reached the maximum number of viewers on his stream…..

When I saw this, I first thought it was some kind of Fail Whale, like Twitter loves to do, so I refreshed the page and it gave me the exact same message. Now, I was like WHAT. THE. ****?!?!?!?!?!?! I couldn’t believe it. What the hell is a maximum amount of viewers to a ******* live stream? :/

I found the answer in the Livestream FAQ:

“My channel is limited to 50 viewers, why is this?”
When you create a new Livestream Free channel, it is by default unverified,which means that you can stream to a maximum of 50 concurrent viewers at a time, and that your channel is not listed in the Livestream Channel Guide. Verification is designed to give all of our best producers maximum exposure, and to ensure consistent quality and compliance, throughout the Livestream Network.
To apply for verification first, make sure your content complies with the Livestream Terms of Use
Next, log into the Livestream Account Center. In the channels tab you will see the Verification status of each of your Livestream Free channels. To Verify a channel, click on the link and fill out the Livestream Free Channel Verification Application.

So, at least this was Pascal’s fault and not an imposed limitation by Livestream (disclosure: I have friends that work for Livestream). I used to use the service lightly when it was called Mogulus, but I pretty much stick to Ustream because it’s simple, reliable, I can broadcast to it live from my g1 (google phone) at any time, and relevant to this topic, I’ve seen HUNDREDS of people able to simultaneously watch a stream.

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So anyway, I kept hitting ‘refresh’ until someone’s connection dropped and I got in. Pascal was sitting there on camera, laptop open, cell phone in hand, taking calls from people who had LITERALLY the latest information. A friend of his, Francois, I believe, was there in Pascal’s studio speaking to his sister in Haiti who suddenly reported that another aftershock was just starting. Another guy was calling from Peru, I believe, and he was in touch with ham radio operators who were broadcasting information from Haiti. I put in my two cents by typing hyperlinks into the meebo chat that was embedded under Pascal’s live video and letting people know via Twitter & Facebook that we were getting up-to-the-minute info over @ HaitiXchange.

I stayed tuned in because this was really fascinating. This was FOR the people, BY the people. No spin. No Executive Producers. Purely people that were concerned about the situation and trying to do whatever they could to get a handle on the situation. Telephone service was basically nonexistent. Some people were able to communicate because they were down @ the Red Cross where they were able to share an internet connection with potentially THOUSANDS of people looking for refuge or aid. The chat room was buzzing. People were calling in from all over the place with the exact same story that they weren’t able to contact their families in Haiti. Rumors went around that Hotel Montana had been destroyed and that a rapper associated with Wyclef Jean named “Jimmy O” had died in the earthquake. People were concerned about their friends from the HaitiXchange forums that currently live in Haiti and that they hadn’t heard from since the earthquake hit. Pascal’s pops called his cell phone to make sure he was ok and see whether Pascal was in Haiti or in the USA…

This was international community coming together, communicating, brainstorming & consoling each other when it really counts. Instead of people being absolutely alone wherever they were, they had a site where they could get information they didn’t have and share information they did have. To Me, that’s one of the best things about Social Media. Yeah, it’s all cute that people get to shill for their businesses and try to make some money *yawn* but way more importantly, you don’t have to sit around watching some television channel that has zero interest in a situation other than the fact that it’s “breaking news” and they know they’re going to get ratings by talking about it. You get to be there when the people that are being affected reach out to each other and come together for the common good.

The sun still isn’t up yet, so we’ll know more in a few hours about the extent of the devastation. Good Luck to everyone that has friends, family & loved ones in Haiti and especially in Port-au-Prince that they’re safe but just without the ability to communicate. I’m sure that cell phones were left inside houses when people fled, phones and computers have run out of batteries, electricity’s failed to modems & routers… Keep the faith that they may be minus some material possessions, but they’re hopefully alive and as well as they possibly could be in this extreme situation.

Good Luck to the people of Haiti…

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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So, a couple of days ago I’m hanging out with two female friends of mine in this bar that has an outdoor area with no regulation…

By no regulation, I mean we’re all dependent upon each other’s sense of decency and self-awareness not to end up invading someone else’s personal space.

The layout lends itself to people moving chairs around and reconfiguring the layout of the small tables. It’s not like a rigidly set up rank and file of seats and tables.

Setup

So I’m sitting in a corner spot. Nobody’s going to get my space unless they sit down right next to me, which isn’t going to happen. One of the gals is sitting to my right on a corner bench space 90 degrees to my right, so it’s the same deal for her. The other one’s sitting to my left in a chair which is perfectly lined up with our small table, so basically, we’re perfectly lining three of the four sides of a small square table.

There was space between us and the next table because a) the tables are so small that people would be IN your conversation if they were placed together, and b) people need to have space so they can get out to hit the bar or the bathroom.

The table next to us had a chair that was directly lined up with it and left space for a) the walkway between the tables, and b) the chick who was sitting in the chair lined up with our table to have a comfortable amount of space between her and whomever might have sat down at the next table.

Situation

So this group shows up, which I believe was two chicks and a dude, and they decide to populate that particular table. The gals sit on the bench, and there’s lots of space between them and my friend sitting on that side. Fine.

On the “chair side” of things… Right before these three had shown up, the gal to my left had gotten up to pick up the next round from the bar. The guy that sat at the next table over failed to account for the personal space of whomever might have been sitting in the chair at my table and naturally and effortlessly slid his chair over right next to her chair, sat down and started talking to his girlfriends…..

So I tell this guy “Excuse me. Someone’s sitting right there.”, pointing to the chair that was going to be re-occupied by my friend. He thought I meant HIS chair and said “sorry” and was getting up, but I told him “No, you’re fine there. I’m saying that she’s sitting in THIS chair right here.”, pointing to the chair at my table. He slides his chair over and makes the curious statement “Oh… I’m ok”. ????? This is when I knew this was going to be a problem in the near future. Nobody asked him if HE was ok. The point I was making was that he was encroaching on MY FRIEND’S personal space, and it was clear that he didn’t understand what I was saying, but I wanted to see how it played out.

So she comes back with the drinks, and I see her give a look like “How come this guy’s sitting so close to my position, but she doesn’t say anything, and there actually was space enough for her to comfortably sit where she had been this whole time before these people arrived. The three of us pick up our conversation and everything’s cool, but I’m keeping an eye on this dude, who hasn’t moved his chair, but his back is angled towards my friend…

Event

Maybe 30 minutes later, another guy shows up to hang out with that guy and the two girls. This turned out to be what I was waiting for this whole time, because there CLEARLY wasn’t enough space for him to fit between the guy sitting next to my friend and the people at the table on the other side of them. I KNEW, automatically, that the guy I already spoke to was going to have to move over. He had two ways to do it. He could have LOOKED, like an intelligent, aware person, or he could have decided to move without looking. Of course, this is what he did.

So, looking in the direction of his homeboy, AWAY from the direction of my table, he picks his chair up, scoots to his right, slams himself literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the chick that’s sitting at my table, and is smiling and talking to his friend that’s starting to sit down in the space he’s created as if everything’s lovely.

Since I had already known this was going to happen, I was ready to view my friend’s response, which was a look of horror, then a realization that he was perfectly comfortble being shoulder-to-shoulder with her, an assessment of what to do, and then she moves her chair towards me so she’s now taking up 3/4 of our table and he’s taking up 1/4 of OUR table, and she makes herself ok with that and continues our conversation.

Nope.

So I’m not really sure what I said to this dude, because I was really pretty HEATED at this point, but it was something to the effect of “HEY!!!” :D

At that point, it was like the record scratched and everything went dead silent. The two girls at his table had stopped running their mouths and were staring at me. He turned around and looked at me and his homeboy that had just showed up was looking at me. I don’t know what the chick to my left was doing, but my friend to my right was tapping away on her Blackberry, because she knows ‘how I do’.

So, these four people are now in suspended animation and I’m staring at this dude that I had already explained the situation to during the very SECOND that he sat down, and I go “See that?… I TOLD YOU she was sitting there!”

This is where it was completely silent again, because I was giving him the opportunity to recognize what I had said, recognize that he was now a member of *MY* table, and say something to the effect of “Sorry” or “My Bad” and move back over where HIS space was. Nothing. Suspended animation. So I had to continue…

“NOW, you’ve invaded her personal space!” I pause again, because I’ve relayed all the information he needs in order to make the right decision.

So now, dude looks at where he’s sitting, looks at the fact that my friend has had to MOVE in order to get away from his encroachment, says that kind of “sorry” that means “I’m sorry you’re SUCH A JERK” instead of “I’m sorry I lost track of my own personal space and disrespected your female friend”, and moves back over where he’s supposed to be so my friend can take her proper position at our table.

I tell him something like “Thank you. I appreciate it”, which I did, because he could have gone the “**** you! I’m gonna sit wherever I want” route, which isn’t what anybody wanted to happen. Also, his homegirls could have started running their mouths and started a beef FOR him as chicks are prone to do. That didn’t happen either.

There were no more issues that evening. The guy was aware of what was going on and when my friend on the bench got up to go to the bar, he moved from blocking the aisle to allow her through without having to squeeze by. When we were leaving, the guy and I said “Good Night” to each other and that was that.

The Issue

Now, I didn’t have a problem with this guy at all. The issue was that his lack of self-awareness became disrespectful to me, as I had told him as soon as he arrived that my friend was sitting there, and he ended up bumping into her, staying there and not apologizing to her at all for screwing up. My goal was to MAKE HIM AWARE that he was screwing up so he could do the right thing on his own.

I never told him what to do. I’m not his father. I’m not the bouncer at that bar. At the same time, if a female friend is hanging out with me, I take the responsibility upon myself to ensure she has the best time possible. In that capacity, as long as the chick is behaving herself (not acting like an ASS and causing problems), if someone encroaches upon her space, he’s encroaching on my space. This is why I informed him about the situation as soon as he arrived. If he had a problem (which this particular guy didn’t), he could have said so right off the bat, before she even came back with the drinks. If his stance was going to be “Screw you and your homegirls, I’m gonna do whatever I want”, I needed to know that sooner rather than later so the situation could play itself out…

Chivalry

“Chivalry[1] is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood. It is usually associated with ideals of knightly virtues, honor and courtly love. The word is derived from the French word chevalier, indicating one who rides a horse (Fr. cheval).

Today, the terms chivalry and chivalrous are used to describe courteous behavior, especially that of men towards women.”

Chivalry is Dead. You can either leave it that way or pick up the flag and represent it within your small corner of the universe.

I’ll tell you this much… If you don’t represent it, you’re gonna get lumped in with the vast majority of guys that have ZERO CLASS WHATSOEVER, and it’s gonna make it that much harder for you to distinguish yourself amongst the women in your life as well as the women you meet on the fly.

If it’s clear that valor isn’t a natural part of your genetic makeup, women are going to treat you accordingly. There’s nothing “wrong” with having no desire to make sure that women are comfortable when they spend time with you.. It’s just that you’re going to be regarded as one of the girls.

Decisions

Biologically, if you take it back to the caveman days, :) women subconsciously crave good genes, provision (food, shelter, etc.) and physical security. In 2009, you don’t have to provide the actual security yourself, because that’s what the cops and bouncers are for. They get paid to make sure people are civil towards each other. I guarantee you, however, that whether she consciously understands it or not, if a chick doesn’t feel safe when she spends time with you, it’s going to be incredibly detrimental to your rap.

OTOH… If you’re just not that type to do anything about it when you or a chick you’re with is disrespected, I suggest that you keep your mouth SHUT! :D Better than that, if you perceive a situation that you’re not willing to stand up for… Exit. Quickly. Check, Please! :D

Like I said before, there’s nothing wrong with feeling like if a chick’s with you, she’s on her own as far as whether guys want to step on her, push her around, harass her on the bathroom line and generally act like you don’t exist. Some women like that even better and would rather that you STFU while they handle their own physical business. I’m sure that guy got points from his speechless girlfriends for not saying something smart-assed when I told him what time it was. I’m not sure he was INTERESTED in what they thought, but my point is that how you carry yourself is on YOU.

You’re going to be judged by women on how you carry yourself. You’re going to gain or lose points by whether they see you as a barbarian, a troublemaker, a pacifist or a ***** and your ability to gain favor with them is going to depend on this. Meanwhile, and way more importantly… You’re gonna have to be comfortable and satisfied with *YOURSELF* when you look back on your own actions or lack thereof.

~Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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This is the end
Beautiful Friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never, look into your eyes, again…

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some… Stranger’s hand
In a… Desperate land…

Michael Jackson died today.
Thank You for everything.

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Comedian & actor Bernie Mac died this morning, reportedly from complications due to Pneumonia. He was 50 years old. Very talented and entertaining guy.

There’s a nice writeup about him on ChicagoTribune.com -> [Bernie Mac dies at 50]

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As you know if you’ve been following this column over the last 6 months, DatingGenius doesn’t “date”.

The term “dating” implies progression. It’s like something Richie Cunningham or Potsie Weber might do. You see a chick and you want her, but you’re not willing to let her know what time it is, so you beat around the bush taking her places in hopes that she’ll see you as the kind of guy she wants to give it up to. *yawn*

In fact, there *IS* no progression. A chick knows if she wants to mess with you off the bat. Depending on what you tell her after that, she either thinks more about giving you some or LESS about giving you some, hahaha :D … That’s all there is. You want to hook up with her, or else you wouldn’t be on a so-called “date” with her. Everybody knows it, so stop acting like you’re all sneaky and undercover and then try to surprise the chick with a “good-night kiss” when you drop her home, hoping that it works like in the movies, and all of a sudden, she’ll invite you in for…. a nightcap. :/

So, no. DatingGenius doesn’t “date”. He hangs out with chicks. Period. If they’re into DatingGenius like that, then CHA-CHINGGGG!!! :D If not, we have a good time anyway, then we go about our respective businesses.

Having said that, if you still insist on “dating”, like actually courting one person in a serial fashion with the intent of them eventually handing you a title that’s supposed to mean something, like “significant other”, then make sure you date someone BETTER. THAN. YOU! :D

Now, that might not seem to make sense, coming from the diabolical, empty-life-having (bookstore chick’s friend informed me of this a couple of weeks ago), sinister, evil, manipulating DatingGenius! :D You would think that he would advocate kicking it to the dumbest, low-brow character you can find in order to maximize your control over the situation. Dummies and lowlives are great if you’re just trying to get on ASAP and don’t intend to see them ever again in life. If you’re actually going to REPRESENT with this person, like as in let ANYONE ELSE know that you’re messing with them… That person needs to be a FANTASTIC individual. This is actually MORE IMPORTANT for the ladies than it is for the fellaz, so pay attention. :D

[Part 1: Dummies]

Let’s say the person you’re dating is a dummy. Like they’re just not intelligent. Maybe you’re on iChat with them and it takes them mad, crazy, stupid long to type a response to you, and then after all that waiting, it’s like a line and a half because they were only using their two pointer fingers to peck at the keyboard. Or maybe they can’t spell for JACK, and you’re wondering if they dropped out of school in the 5th grade to pack bags for change at the supermarket, then got hooked on drugs before making it back into the school system.

If you actually date this idiot, regardless of how good he or she looks or how good the sex is, don’t give yourself credit like you’ve pulled off some fantastic feat. In fact, anyone smarter than them will be able to manipulate them if they choose to, and you’ve “built your house on sand”… if not quicksand.

On top of that, you can’t TAKE this person ANYWHERE! :D Unless they happen to LOOK intelligent and you can convince them to not say ANYTHING around your peers, this person is an accident waiting to happen… Actually, an accident TRYING to happen, because it’s been my experience that the dumber someone is, the more they try to impress other people. Did you notice that? :D It’s like the smartest people, most of the time in a conversation, they’re listening and PROCESSING what people are saying. When they finally say something, it’s worth hearing and it’s the product of what they’ve absorbed from what’s been going on. Meanwhile, you see the dummies sitting there staring at the mouth of the person who’s talking… They seem to be trying to synchronize, like double dutch, getting ready to jump into the conversation when they perceive that the current speaker is about to finish his or her point.

The problem with this is that if you’re synchronizing, you’re not LISTENING, which becomes apparent when the dummy jumps in with something relevant to 10 minutes ago when they finally had ONE good idea, and they’ve been waiting until now to get a word in edgewise. That’s when the entire conversation stops and everyone tries to be polite. There’s this silent exchange that goes on between everyone. They’re not so much being polite to the dummy as they’re being polite TO *YOU* because it’s YOUR FAULT that this person’s in here $&%*ing up the program! :D Basically, people are embarrassed *for* you, and everyone’s trying not to mention that the emperor has no clothes on.

This is easily avoided, if you insist on dating dummies and bringing them out in public, by not giving them a title when you introduce them. We all have those friends… Every so often, they come around with a new…. person… and they introduce this person by name, but no title. Like, it’s clear that they’re out on a date, but by not declaring this person, you get to play it off down the line. Oh… That was a business partner from the Kentucky branch, my job asked me to show him around. Oh… That was my CEO’s daughter, visiting from San Diego. Who? When?… OH!… I was interviewing her for that intern position (at 11:30 pm). This only works, however, if you know you’re going to get rid of them eventually. If you end up eventually declaring them, you look like a chump for trying to play it off.

You also can’t leave people like this alone with your friends. Do NOT go to the bathroom. Do NOT go to the bar to order drinks. Do NOT pass “go” and Do NOT collect $200. Stick to this person LIKE GLUE. If you leave, and your friends ask your date “What do you think about Obama” and they reply “I think he’s still hiding in those mountains”, you’re *dead*. Laughing stock. You will NEVER live it down.

DatingGenius

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