Bill Cammack

So, check this out! :D haha Some dude hooked up with a maid behind his wife’s back, right…… No.. Not Arnold! :P This other guy, and then all he had to do to get over was label it a “Moral Failing”!!! :D

Check out what the Associated Press says he said:
(mind you.. dude was speaking French, so someone may have jacked up some of his intentions or meanings when they translated it to English, but I’m sure they caught the main gist of what he was saying)

DSK Article – Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke his silence four months after a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault, calling his encounter with the woman a “moral failing” he deeply regrets, but insisting in an interview on French television Sunday that no violence was involved.

Is this not the absolutely BEST THING since sliced bread? :D hahaha a “Moral Failing”??? :D .. What The Hell is a Moral Failing??? Read the rest of this entry »

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If you’re not from New York City, and specifically Manhattan, you’re not going to understand what this is a picture of. :)

Manhattan has garbage collection days. They don’t come get the garbage every day. This means that when stores know that the day is coming up, they bring all their garbage bags from the basement and pile them up out on the sidewalk.

Sometimes, it’s only three bags, but it could easily be 10-20 garbage bags making their own little mountain out in the street.

The point is that the garbagemen are going to come get the bags in the wee hours of the morning so that your customers never see a stack of garbage out in front of your restaurant or whatever.

Meanwhile, this is the exact same time that people go out to party here. A lot of times, people don’t even ARRIVE to bars before midnight, and since the bars close around 4:30am, there’s often a correlation between when drunk-ass-people stumble their asses out of a bar and when this mountain of garbage bags is chillin’ outside, waiting to get picked up. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a response to Tyme White‘s article: “Experienced vs. inexperienced ‘advice’”, which was a response to my article, “Personal Brand? No Crossover”.

@Tyme: Good points.

First of all, I was specifically talking about internet shows. Actually, FIRST OF ALL, no… I don’t have ANY experience with hiring ANYBODY to be the figurehead or “face” of a show. What I *DO* have experience with is watching a show and determining whether a) it’s good, b) it sucks because of the production (technical issues), c) it sucks because of the script-writing, d) it sucks because the face of the show is entirely talentless, or e) EVERYTHING about the show sucks.

Granted… That MAY be because I’m an editor AND a show producer.

I wouldn’t know what the average joe/josepine takes away from looking at a show that “fails” (whatever that means in the context of this discussion). All I can do is ‘project’ and believe that distinctions are made between whether the show a) wasn’t good, and it’s the talent’s fault, b) wasn’t good, and it’s NOT the talent’s fault, or c) WAS GOOD, but got shut down for other reasons (or didn’t make money or didn’t grow it’s audience… whatever you’re defining as a “failed” show).

For instance, we just received news that MobLogic was shut down. According to articles on the net, Lindsay Campbell is still an employee of CBS. Before MobLogic was cancelled, they were outputting sporadically compared to the regular schedule they were using when they first started.

Without “inside information” from “the horse’s mouth”, there’s no telling what the reason was for the shutdown. It just so happens that WallStrip was shut down on the same day, apparently. Let’s say the average person isn’t going to search for articles about WHY a show got cancelled, and all they know is that it was here today and gone tomorrow.

What that person’s going to take away from the show, as far as the “face” of the show, is the sum of their experiences from watching her. They either liked her style, didn’t like her style, or felt she was inconsistently good/bad. If she gets selected for a new show, that sentiment is going to drive whether that viewer goes “YAAY!” or “oh no. She got ANOTHER show? :/”. That’s what the talent has to carry forward, their own performance. Unless the public feels that the show “failed” because the talent sucked, the ending of a show, which as you mention, is the BUSINESS side of things has nothing to do with the ENTERTAINMENT VALUE they received from the talent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about failure.

I think there are two kinds of failures. There’s the kind where you could have done something about it and didn’t, and then there’s the kind where there was never anything you could have done about it at all.

It would seem like the failure involving a chance that you could have dealt with it would be the worse one. I think the other one is actually worse, because not only is it disappointing or depressing, but it comes with the knowledge that you have a limitation. At least with the first one, you could play it off to yourself that had you done something, the outcome would have been different. That sucks WAY LESS than admitting that no matter what you have in your arsenal or bag of tricks, you couldn’t have done JACK to stop the train from a-rollin’.

I’m thinking about this now, because I got a call earlier this evening from someone close to me who had/has a problem. As I was listening, my mind was calculating what I could do about it. How I could help. How I could be of assistance. As I kept drawing blanks, the odds started to stack up in the favor that I was NEVER going to figure out something I could do/say to help.

Once that understanding hit me, I started to project the future of my being of no assistance whatsoever. I knew that I was receiving….. I *HOPED* that I was receiving the call just so the person could vent. I didn’t LIKE the idea of the conversation ending without my having some sort of positive and changing effect. I didn’t like the idea of a potential negative outcome of the situation, regardless of what went on in this conversation I was having. Yes. I know that “being me” was of assistance. I know that “listening” was of assistance. I know that my past track record of my way of being was of assistance. I’m just not built to have ZERO EFFECT. I haven’t been groomed and trained and educated to be some hump on the subway that doesn’t have a life now, never did and never will. Ultimately, it’s not even the potential for failure that sparked this post. It’s more about how failures shed light on one’s personal limitations…. or perhaps how recognition of limitations sheds light on one’s self-image.

I used to edit a show for The History Channel called “Guts & Bolts”. One of my episodes was about aircraft carriers and how their catapult systems worked. The supervisor being interviewed mentioned that the catapults had to have a high 99% success rate, ESSENTIALLY that the failure rate rounded off to ZERO PERCENT. I thought that that was unreasonable for anything mechanical, but then he went on to mention how what they’re sending on every single launch is a plane that’s worth MILLIONS of dollars. If their success rate is closer to 99% than 100%, that means that out of every 100 launches, one of those million-dollar planes goes right in the water instead of flying away to handle the business. When you think about it that way, they literally can’t AFFORD to fail.

Can YOU afford to fail?

What happens if you fail? Do you really lose anything, or do you just take a hit to your self-esteem and self-image? Does you company fold? Does your family dissolve? Do you lose face amongst colleagues? Does your girl leave you? What exactly happens if the worst-case scenario you’ve been envisioning actually comes true?

I started out talking about failure in a conversation, but there was actually no way I could fail *myself*, because *I* wasn’t a central figure in the situation. I would have been failing the person who called me, but what did they expect from me to begin with? What did I expect from myself? I wouldn’t actually have been failing them eiher. I would have been failing myself, in my own consideration of how I would respond or deal with a situation if it was ever presented to me. I would have liked to believe I would have had the right thing to say. I would have liked to believe that I could turn whatever was a negative into a positive….

The fact of the matter is, there.are.some.things.I.can’t.do, and I need to get used to that and get over it. However, “getting over it” is a failure within itself, because I’m insulating myself against other people’s problems instead of learning how to help them out. I actually don’t even have to “get over it”, because this entire post is all about BEING over it… naturally. Unfortunately, Being Over It is a selfish insulation against other people’s issues, but I’m built that way, and that’s that. The LIMITATION, in this instance, is my own personal inability to suspend the restrictive state of “being over it” in order to be potentially more effective in the rare cases that something like this is brought to my attention. I’d like to be able to believe that I can dive deep inside their issue, figure out a positive outcome and present it to them, but it’s just not the truth.

This also happens in business. You want to help everyone, but you just.plain.CAN’T. There isn’t enough time in the day. You want to look at people’s websites that they send you links to and ask you to critique them. You want to consider people’s video project proposals, even though their budges completely SUCK and it’s not really even worth it to you to spend time and mental processing cycles considering what they’re telling you, because everything you’re thinking of doing for them costs more than they’re willing to spend on it.

Where do you draw the line? What does it mean to you when you draw that line? How does it feel to you as a person when you accept that project that you really hate, as a favor to someone else? How does it feel when you put someone’s business interests ahead of your own business, fun and personal interests? How much pressure do you put on yourself to avoid failure at all costs? How important IS IT to your business or to your self-esteem that you’re approaching 100% effectiveness/success rate?

Personally, I pride myself on being the best at everything and anything that I do. Even if I don’t succeed in that goal, that’s what I’m striving for and aiming at. Tonight, I wasn’t “the best” in this conversation, because I couldn’t find a win. I couldn’t find the thing to say to make it better. I couldn’t ROCK the situation. I won’t go to sleep tonight knowing that I made an incredible difference and everything’s going to be better tomorrow for them than it was tonight.

I suppose the moral of the story is that “I can’t do that” is a valid and healthy response to something that someone asks you for. Similarly, “I can’t help you” is valid as well. You might not like it, recognizing your own limitations, but ultimately, you’re better off. There’s no need to waste time, energy and resources on things that aren’t properly beneficial to you. It’s similarly fruitless to try to help people with things you can’t help them with.

I haven’t thought about this in a really long time. The first time it came to my attention was when a friend of mine criticized my response to a mutual friend telling me she got dumped after disclosing to her then-current boyfriend how many guys she had hooked up with before him. SHE was thinking that it was a necessary thing to say, in order to get things out in the open and have a completely honest relationship with him. He dumped her practically immediately. While I felt sorry for her that she was out of a relationship and would need to hit the bricks and cultivate a new one from scratch, my mentality and demeanor was “What did you expect?”. Even though what I was saying was sympathetic… like… the words themselves… my demeanor was completely nonchalant and matter-of-fact. I was stuck between the facts of the situation and wanting to make her feel better.

I guess the bottom line is that a person can listen to and understand another person’s situation and care about them and hope and pray for the best for them without actually empathizing with or being able to internalize or the situation and come up with fantastic solutions. There’s value in listening. There’s value in fellowship. Sometimes, however, the way the cards are dealt or the way the chips fall or the way the cookie crumbles, there isn’t much for you to do in a given situation other than recognize your own limitations and teach yourself to live with them.

A lot of shows and sites have been receiving the Fail Whale recently.

There’s nothing wrong with failing. Happens all the time. “Happens to the best of us”. Sometimes, it’s not actually a failure so much as an inability to meet requirements for continuation. You could have a perfectly successful show as far as getting the job done and delivering on time, but you’re just not getting the numbers of views or members or whatever your sponsors asked you for and your authorization to continue the show (or your funding) gets pulled, and that’s that.

More important than failing is what happens AFTER you fail… What happens to your media? What happens to your site? Did you think about this before you started your show?

I’m thinking about this today because I read Liz Burr’s post “Do Social Media Strategies Go To Heaven?”, where she talks about her WIRED SCIENCE Facebook app and the fact that the show itself was canceled and will not be coming back to PBS. She writes:

“The show’s cancellation has me asking myself, where do social media strategies go when they’re no longer needed? So far, the results of our most significant strategies are:

• a blog with over 200 entries and 600 comments
• a twitter account with 1200+ followers
• a facebook fan page with almost 600+ fans
• a facebook application with 12,000 installs

The Facebook application is especially interesting to me because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Since launch, the application has been averaging 100 new installs per day. This is with no paid promotional activity whatsoever. I don’t expect this to stop anytime soon, because I don’t think we will reach a ceiling going at this (slow but) steady rate of installation (considering the number of users on Facebook). I designed the application to be viral enough for it to self promote. I suppose I could turn those activities off if I wanted to.

For the blog, we have decided to stop all posting, write our goodbyes and leave commenting open for a few weeks. We will then shut down all comments, and leave the blog up for the sake of Google and reference.  I am not sure what to do with the Twitter account. It essentially was a machine for the blog and site updates, but with no more site updates, what else is there? I suppose the Facebook fan page can stay in place, however we’ll probably put up a notice about the show and site saying farewell.”

So that project is ending, because the show it was supporting wasn’t picked up for a new season. However… The work that was done will remain and fans of the show will have access to it. Basically, it becomes “what it is”. A project that used to be active and is now inactive. C’est la vie. :D

There’s a Next New Networks show called Bride-O-Rama that went “on hiatus”. :)

I can’t find on the page when the episode I embedded was uploaded, but a) I happen to know this particular show was cancelled a long-ass time ago, and b) the first comment is from October 29 so let’s assume it was canceled in late October, 2007 which was 8 months ago. Similar to the pending status of the Wired Science blog, this show remains in suspended animation. The shows are there to watch. The comments are there to read. As a matter of fact, NNN’s still serving recent ads on those pages, so anybody who happens by to check out some of the Wedisodes is helping out NNN’s bottom line.

OTOH… We have FastCompany.TV’s former offering “Global Neighbourhoods”, which as far as I know was canceled this very month, and immediately disappeared off the face of the earth as if it never happened.

Here’s what the “Global Neighbourhoods” creator, producer and host, Shel Israel had to say about it in his post Several Changes:

“That brings us to GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV (GNTV), my other online video program. Unlike WorkFast, GNTV is my baby, is an extension of not just the Global Survey, but Naked Conversations as well. As many of you know, GNTV was launched in March at FastCompany.TV, and–shall we say–had an inauspicious start.

When GNTV launched, I was not quite ready for prime time. If I was an actor, I would say I was prepared for a summer stock script reading. When the curtain went up, I found myself instead at center stage of an opening night on Broadway with some determined hecklers in the audience who managed for a while to distract me.

Most people seem to agree that I got better. After 14 episodes, I think GNTV has proved its value and professionals hungry for insights into how they can use social media in their businesses have found GNTV to have more than a little value.

A few weeks back, however, FastCompany granted my request to take back GNTV, to remove it from their site and to eventually relaunched it o a smaller scale on this site. Primarily, with FastCompany as a partner, the cost of sponsorship was too high for a new program. Here, I can charge a sponsor significantly less dollars and have great flexibility in the sort of deal I can offer. Here, I am the sole decision maker.

GNTV will go on a brief hiatus, until perhaps mid-August. I need to deal with the complexities of AV, production, storing, hosting, compressing, measuring, etc. Because some of these costs can be quite significant, I also need to have sponsorship before I restart.”

To be fair, Shel has posted a set of links to his 14 GNTV episodes he produced for FastCompany.TV on his blog. This means that assuming you knew he had a blog at all and assuming you saw that one post, you know how you can view his videos. I would guess that he Twittered the information and used whatever other publicity outlets he has at his disposal. However… Someone returning to FastCompany.TV will find that his show’s tab has been replaced with a photography show, and short of putting “Shel Israel” or “Global Neighbourhoods” in the search box, there’s no evidence that his show ever existed.

As far as his plan to relaunch his show on his own site… there goes his google juice. His videos will be available in the future at a completely different address on redcouch.typepad.com instead of fastcompany.tv. What’s the point? The point is that people are still hitting my Cory Lidle plane crash video from October, 2006, because they know where to find it from people’s bookmarks, forum posts and blog links.

If I had been moving that video all over creation, from domain name to domain name, people would hit dead links from the google searches and IME, *NOT* do more creative searches to try to find the same content… They just move on to other content that comes up easily under the google search for the same topic.

Similarly, maybe you have the same site… except your video host fell into the Dead Pool. Recently, VideoEgg discontinued its consumer video service and sent out a notice to people that had videos hosted by them that they were going to cease to host them shortly. Also, DivX’s Stage 6 streaming video site folded. The problem with this is that A LOT OF PEOPLE had videos on their sites which were actually embedded FROM VideoEgg or Stage 6. This means that they had to scramble to a) pull all their videos from those hosts, b) find a new host for all of their now-homeless videos, c) upload all their videos to the new host and d) go to every single post and change the embed code from the Videoegg or Stage 6 location to the new host location. If you happen to have over 300 episodes online, that could be a MAAAAAAAJOR DRAG! :(

So, that’s another thing to consider when you’re ready to make a show on the internet. While you worry about content and worry about being interesting and worry about being entertaining, and worry about getting sponsored and worry about your show being sustainable and worry about growing your audience and worry about creating surrounding social sites… you ALSO have to worry about what happens when your show lands in the Dead Pool. Do you have ownership of your own content after the fact? Do you have ownership of the site that it’s on? Are you going to have to uproot everything and start all over? If you get a new sponsor, can you easily swap the old one out and continue seamlessly creating content?

Believe me, you want to figure out / negotiate all these things UP. FRONT. and NOT when you realize your show that you thought was going to run forever is going down the tubes.

Welcome to the Dead Pool.

Oh, Thank GOD for the future!!!!!! :D

It’s about to be ON and POPPIN!!! :D

According to MSNBC’s Article, a male birth control pill may be right around the corner! :D BOO-YAH! :D

Why is this a big deal? Because we all know that regardless of death and destruction, people STILL, to this day, in 2008 AD, don’t like to use condoms. I’m not just talking about the fellaz… It’s the chicks too. That’s a whole post by itself, but basically… By the time a chick’s throwin’ it at you, she thinks you’re special. This is because they like to add all this extra relationship stuff on top of the sex. So, while all YOU were thinking is “She’s hawt… She could get it”, she’s put a lot more thought into it, including feeling like you’re “clean” and that she wouldn’t mind having kids with you. This isn’t necessarily right off the bat, but if you tap it proppah one time for the people, be on the lookout for the relaxation of the condom requirements.

Anyway…

More importantly, condoms are “only” something like 97% effective. I know that seems like a high percentage, but you have to consider that number realistically, and not statistically. It’s not that every time you put on a condom, there’s only a 3% chance that it’s not going to hook you up. It’s that out of 100 times, 3 DUDES are DEFINITELY going to catch a bad one! :D The obvious problem with that is that if you have a steady chick and you hit it only once a week (?????) you TTL is 2 years, if you’re lucky. Basically, hit it 100 times, and you have 3 chances to end up with a kid.

This is because the numbers aren’t based on the failure of the material… It’s based on HUMAN ERROR. I figure the main error is not putting it on properly in the first place, so that you find out it rolled off during the act, hahahahaha = baby. The second error is not leaving space at the top. This means that all the way up until “the end”, the condom’s perfectly intact. When you do your thing, however, too much pressure is built up, and it breaks right where you need it NOT to break! hahahahaha = baby. So it’s not that out of every 100 condoms you buy, that three of them don’t work. It’s that in every 100 applications, there’s the prospect of incorrect application, et voila. :D

So anyway… This ultimately traumatic situation is about to be a thing of the past! :D With a male birth control pill, the intelligent guy will FINALLY be in control of his destiny! :D

We’re about to experience many conversations like this:

Her: I think I’m pregnant
Him: I think you’re…….. NOT! :D
Her: Remember a couple of weeks ago, when we XYZ?
Him: Barely… So what?
Her: I felt myself get pregnant
Him: Oh yeah? :/
Her: Yeah, so I took this test, and it’s positive. I’m pregnant.
Him: ……
Her: So I was thinking we should get married, and
Him: *PSYCH*!!! :D
Her: …
Him: I’ve been taking THESE! :D [producing male birth control pills]
Her: …
Him: Uh huh. So… You’d Betta Ca-Hall TyRone!!! (Call Him!)
Her: …
Him: Say… I know a producer on “Maury”. I could get you on next month.

Ahhhhhhhh, YES! :D FREEDOM!!! :D

Not that I give a damn how it works, IF it works, but if YOU want to read up on it, check out http://health.howstuffworks.com/male-bc-pill.htm.

There are lots of guys that have already dealt with this issue by getting vasectomies. I think a pill is a much better idea, as long as the effects aren’t neutralized by the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol. As long as you remember to take it, you’re cool. However, if you happen to meet a genetically superior chick that you actually want to have kids with, you can stop taking it and I assume your production returns to normal, eventually, hahaha.

This will be great for those guys that get into situations where they’re living with a chick or married to her or whatever, and according to her, there’s no reason for him to still be using condoms. The way she sees it, since they’re in a committed relationship, they don’t need it. This is especially true if she’s on the pill. However, there are chicks that forget to take the pill and chicks that “forget” to take the pill, so this is STILL a traumatic experience for the thinking man that isn’t interested in “starting a family” yet (or ever)(or with this particular chick)(or that already has enough kids for his liking)(or thinks this chick is crazy, so he’s not trying to have any genetically-crazy kids).

Yes, Yes! :D If they’re smart, the male birth control pill will cost a gazillion dollars, because it’ll be worth it for the peace of mind that it brings. :) A friend of mine, literally, EVERY SINGLE MONTH would tell me he was ‘afraid’ that his chick was pregnant. EVERY Month! :D The problem with this is that, basically, chicks can get pregnant on the opposite side of the month from when they miss their periods. So if you THINK you got her pregnant, either you’re a fool and you don’t have your girl’s period timed… or you know you spilled right around ovulation and you have a good 15 days to sweat about potentially being BROKE for the next 18 years.

So, the smart guy will avoid this when male birth control finally arrives on the shelves. It’s a brand new day, gentlemen! Thank God for technology! :D

DatingGenius