Bill Cammack

I’ve decided that I’m going to get married… Please have any attractive female billionaires with SOCOM skillz contact Bill Cammack regarding the tryout schedule.

ThxKBai! :D

A friend of mine once told me “The best way to cheat….. is NOT to cheat!”

This is true. In a perfect world, people would be monogamous and their word could be trusted when they say things like “I love you” and “You’re the only one I’m dating”. However, as you can read yourself in the New York Times, the buzz this week is about how Client 9 got caught cheating on his wife.

Now, I find this to be one of the “funny” things about this society. Guys are trained to go out there and get what they want. Make more money. Initiate Mergers & Acquisitions. Run for office. Play professional sports. Sell your startup… Guys are trained from birth to be the best and take what they want, and then they’re not supposed to apply that to women. Guys are expected to have just one chick and be satisfied with that, when they’re not expected to have just one company or play just one sport. Meanwhile, the more successful you are, the easier it gets for you to acquire and maintain chicks. I mean, think about it…. Why bother becoming Tony Soprano if you can’t enjoy it? What’s the point of acquiring wealth and power without the ability to do what *YOU* want with it?

Granted, the argument is “If you want to live the single lifestyle… BE single!” :D Again, this is true. However…. This doesn’t work for everyone. James Buchanan was the *ONLY* unmarried American President. In some professions, your opportunities for advancement are SEVERELY limited if you don’t have a wife. Similar to getting green cards, being married is just… necessary. It’s a part of the job description. Is this fair to the wife? No. Some know what they’re cosigning and some do not.

Anyway… If you juuuuust can’t help it, and you want to know how to cheat “right”, watch “The Sopranos”. :D

Yes. I’m aware “The Sopranos” is fiction! :D However, if Client 9 had used his time to watch the series instead of scrambling from ATM to ATM to “get his funds up”….. um….. Well, FIRST OF ALL, he wouldn’t have been scrambling from ATM to ATM to get his funds up! :D

Let’s see what else he wouldn’t have done, had he attended the Tony Soprano school for cheating:

Quotes are from the New York Times article.

“It was after 9 on the night before Valentine’s Day when she finally arrived, a young…”

WRONG! :( Actually… this is DOUBLE-WRONG, hahaha :D First of all, if you’re gonna cheat, you’re gonna have to pay some dues… such as being around the family at the right times, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day. Now, you may be thinking “but, it was the day before!”. The day before VD (hehe, ever notice that? The abbreviation for Valentine’s Day is VD? hehehe) is when you get to make your points by celebrating with your woman EARLY! Capisce? Let those other chumps start their celebrations ON Valentine’s Day. That’s actually *late*, especially if your woman works, because she’s sitting there all day, WONDERING if she’s got a nice surprise waiting for her when she gets home instead of BEAMING about what you already did for her the night before, and that morning. SO… “the night before a special event is NOT the time to rent a chick”.

This is ALSO wrong because Valentine’s Day in particular is when you’re supposed to be affectionate to chicks. This is going to be tough to do after you hook up with some chick you’re actually hot for, then, a couple of hours after that, you’re supposed to be all “Happy Valentine’s Day! :D” to your wife. SO… The correct order is to celebrate with your wife the night before and the morning *of* VD, then “get called away for business” later that evening. ;)

“This was at the Mayflower, one of Washington’s choicer hotels…”

WRONG! :( If you’re ballin’ like that, that you’re spending thousands of dollars to see one chick… you want to have an APARTMENT out of the way somewhere. You do NOT want to go to a hotel with CAMERAS, WORKERS and myriad OTHER PEOPLE that just might happen to be there. Also, it’s much easier to explain what you’re doing in an apartment complex than it is to explain what you’re doing by yourself on the eighth floor of a hotel with a big SMILE on your face. :D

“….an online prostitution ring, the affidavit said…”

ummmmmmm……. Online?…. Prostitution?……..

Was there a bar when you walked in? :D Did the chick suggest that you pour her a drink while she goes in another room and changes? :D

“There’s something that I need you need to know… I’m Chris Hanson….”

WHAAAAAAAT? :O Online Prostitution? wow. :/ Forget all that. What you want is a goomah, which is essentially an extra girlfriend.

Amy & JoeyThis is where the apartment comes in handy. You also get to avoid scrambling to the ATM to get more money, avoid cell phone calls between a hooker, her boss and her boss’ boss, avoid getting a call from some agency during “family time” and probably MOST IMPORTANTLY, you get to avoid ordering chicks online.

“In a prior conversation, Client 9 had already told her that he had booked a room and had paid for it in his own name; now he asked who was coming…”

I realized after I began this post that commenting on this ONE article could easily take me a full month, so I’m going to stop here. :D

Obviously, again, having a goomah enables you to AVOID conversations with hookers’ bosses. You also happen to know which girl you’re paying $,$$$ for. Being that I’m not a “trick” (a guy who pays chicks to have sex with him), I don’t know how that stuff works. I would assume you’d pick a particular chick and set up a time to see her instead of whatever chick happens to be available at the time? \o/ Maybe he was trying out different ones? Perhaps there was a special on certain chicks this month? Dunno. Anway…..

In the end, we circle back to the beginning. As you can see, “The best way to cheat….. is NOT to cheat!” :D …. Not because it’s “the right thing to do”, but because you’d either have to be a tactical genius or fictional television character to pull it off. If you’re considering cheating, mentally project yourself into the future of your getting caught. Then, look from there back into the past (which hasn’t happened yet), and ask yourself…..

Was it worth it?………

1993 ~ Amy & Joey ~ 2007


Client 9 Resigns ~ 2008

DatingGenius

Reader Helene writes (in response to Tip for the ladies: He doesn’t care!)

Let’s talk about this, from DatingGenius:

——
Yadda Yadda Yadda Blah Blah Blah EVERY.SINGLE.EFFIN’.DAY, some chick is confused about why a guy keeps trying to kick it to her. It’s very simple. He’s kicking it to you because HE.WANTS.TO.GET.WITH.YOU, *PERIOD*! He’s not interested in what you think about it. He’s not interested in what you have to say about it.
——-

I feel that. He doesn’t care if he wants sex. I’m going to look on DatingGenius to see if there is a guide on how to tell if a man wants sex or a relationship. I think the man that wants a relationship cares what the woman thinks, right?

There are a lot of interesting points here, Helene…. First of all, that post was written specifically to address the situation of women being clueless as to why a guy doesn’t stop kicking it to them when she indicates disinterest or even disgust. :D The fact of the matter is that he’s not approaching you to get your opinion on things or to discuss politics. He finds you physically attractive or there’s something else about you that he likes (you have money, good child-bearing hips, whatever…) that he’s approaching you for. What you think about it is of no consequence whatsoever. The bottom line is desire-fulfillment… HIS, not YOURS. :)

As an example, I was walking with a blabbermouth friend of mine the other week, and in the process of making a point to her, I mentioned that her homegirl was attractive. I wasn’t telling her that so she could go blab it to her girl like she BLABS everything else. I was trying to make a general point based on a specific situation my friend was privy to. Before I got to say what I really wanted to say, she goes “Oh… She wouldn’t hook up with you. You’re not her type.” :D Now…. First of all, I didn’t ask my friend what she thought about my ‘chances’ of hooking up with her girl. Second, all she knows about her girl’s “type” is what her girl is willing to TELL HER, so her idea of what her girl’s going to do and what she’s not going to do is completely irrelevant. Third, people are functions of combinations, meaning that how a chick reacts to me has *nothing* to do with how she reacts to anyone else on the planet, so until I kick my game and get on or not, speculation is worthless.

All these things ran through my mind in a split second, and I replied just about right when she finished speaking, “That doesn’t matter”. She looked at me surprised, and tried to protest, but I covered that up with another “That doesn’t matter”. We then went off on the tangent of how “what her girl wants” doesn’t factor in AT ALL to my initial attraction to her. Forget about the fact that she IS NOT her girl, so she has NO IDEA what her girl does behind closed doors. Even if she knew for sure that her girl didn’t like me for whatever reason, it’s of no consequence, because I’m talking about what motivates *ME*. I’m talking about what propels me to focus on HER and interact with HER instead of someone else.

This is why chicks would be better off if they recognized WHY a guy is talking to them in the first place. Without that knowledge, you’re grasping at straws when you try to figure out anything else about your relationship to that guy.

As another example, I was waiting for a bus with a crowd of people. This girl walks past at least eight other breathing, standing human beings to come up to me and ask me if I knew what time it was. I told her that I didn’t, and showed her that I don’t wear a watch, which I don’t, because I don’t *care* what time it is. :D The next thing that happened was…… She stayed right there and continued talking to me. Now… What happened to her desire to find out what time it was? *POOF* Gone, into thin air. Had she actually been interested in the time, she would have A) stopped at the FIRST person she saw to ask what time it was, and then made her way down the line, or B) if she DID walk all the way past them to ask me, she would have asked someone else right after I demonstrated the inability to tell her what time it was. She did neither, so the obvious inference is that she wanted to talk to me and used “Do you know what time it is” as the ice-breaker.

Now, let’s apply this to the club! :D When that guy buys you that drink, what do you think he’s trying to do? Do you think he thought you looked thirsty? Do you think he thought you looked *BROKE*, and he likes to hand out charity by buying drinks for destitute women? Did he buy any GUYS a drink? How about any UNATTRACTIVE WOMEN? ‘:) There are two reasons he’s offering to buy you a drink. He wants you to get more drunk than you already are, AND (drumroll) he’s trying to get on.

You can THINK whatever you want… He’s a nice guy. He’s generous. He respects you. He’s interested in what you have to say or what you think. He likes the same music you do… He doesn’t like the same music you do, he dresses poorly, he’s a creep, he can’t spell, he doesn’t pronounce consonants when he speaks, he’s a Cro-Mag……… NONE of that matters, pro or con. It matters as far as how tough or easy it is for him to get on, but your opinion of him is irrelevant and worthless when it comes to what he’s trying to do at that point.

As a matter of fact, a good rule of thumb is “If he didn’t ask you, he doesn’t care.”

Which brings us to your actual question, “Does the man who wants a relationship care what you think?”

The simple answer is YES, which is basically addressed in Only Date People Better Than YOU!. See the section on “Dummies”.

The guy who wants a relationship had better care what his woman thinks. However, first of all, he’d better care that she thinks AT ALL. There are lots of guys and gals running around this planet with ZERO common sense, or at least little enough common sense to land them on the Maury Povich show having paternity tests done on several guys. Considering that there are only about 10 days in a month when you can actually get a girl pregnant, and you can count backwards to the month she became pregnant, that means that every single guy she has on stage with her tapped it within a 10-day period. Considering some chicks’ in-da-club behaviors, if those 10 days spanned two weekends, we could expect four guys to be sitting on the stage, Friday Night (day 1), Saturday Night (day 2), Friday Night (day 8 ) and Saturday Night (day 9). Now, that’s bad enough, but if there are more than four guys on the stage…. smh.

This is why the guy who wants a relationship is hoping that his potential girlfrend/wife’s brain works at all. There’s *NOTHING* wrong with a chick getting her groove on as much as she wants to with whomever she wants to. :) However, if you’re going to be in a ‘committed’ relationship with her, you would like to believe that any kids that appear during that relationship are in fact… yours.

You also want to be able to take her places. When they have those couples get-togethers or business dinners, you want to be able to walk in with her on your arm and have people as impressed with her personality and mental faculties as with her looks. If you accept her without intelligence, you could be sabotaging your own career advancement while she talks some ignant ghetto ish to your COO. :/ Your girl is a reflection of YOU, so if you’re going for a relationship, aim as HIGH (mentally) as you possibly CAN! :D

Also, in a relationship situation, a guy needs to know what his girl thinks so he can strive to make HER happy while he makes HIMSELF happy. You would hope that’s a goal of his in hooking up with her long-term.

Having said that… Like I said above, if he doesn’t ask you, he doesn’t care. If he’s minding his business, like he loves to do, and watching the game or something, and you come in blabbing about gossip from the job, he might listen to you as a FAVOR to you or to make sure he can get on later this evening, but no, he doesn’t CARE about that. :D If he did, he would have said “How was work today, dear? Was that chick still gossiping?” This is a totally different issue, so I won’t get into it here, but basically, you should get a checklist of the things he actually CARES about so that if you want to talk to him about something and have him actually interested and ENGAGED in the conversation, you know the parameters. :)

How To Tell if he wants sex or a relationship? Well… First of all, it’s not *OR*. It’s *AND*. He either wants sex and for you to break north… or he wants sex and for you to stay around and hang out with him. The SEX part is a given, otherwise, similar to the girl that asked me for the time, he’d be kicking it with someone OTHER THAN YOU! :D

Think about it. The way relationships in the USA are set up, being BF/GF / Engaged / Married implies that you’re not having sex with anyone except your SO. Why in the world would someone attach themselves to someone they didn’t intend to have sex with? On top of that, lots of guys want to have kids. Sure they could go the test tube or adoption route, but MOST OF THE TIME, they’re going to want to have their kids the old fashioned way…
By mistake.

Anyway…

If it’s possible at all, I would say the way to tell that he wants a relationship is by how much he focuses on your PERSONALITY. How interested is he in getting to know YOU? What you’re about… What makes you tick… What makes you happy… What you don’t like… The intelligent guy is going to want to know A LOT about a chick he intends to make his S.O.

The problem with this personality-based theory is that, like Omar says, “It’s all in the game”. Guys already know what women are looking out for as cues that they’re interested in more than sex. Knowing the cues makes it easy to “Fake it ’till you make it”. :D

So… the best thing women can hope for is to meet guys through trusted friends that are willing to vouch for their character and keep your fingers crossed! :D

DatingGenius

A certain long, blonde, curly-haired friend of mine who will remain nameless doesn’t like it when I use the word “chick”.

I find this interesting, because “chick” is a generic middle-of-the-road term… like “dude”. Imagine guys running around town CRYING because chicks were calling them “dudes”! :D

The problem here is that you can’t please all of the chicks all of the time. When they’re young, they want to be called women, because that’s how they’d like to perceive themselves… as mature. When they’re older, they want to be called girls… because that’s how they’d like to perceive themselves… as young. Did you ever notice that? If you ask an older chick where she’s going… “Out with the girls!” “Girls’ Night Out!” But if you call a younger chick a girl, she’s all offended. :D

One time, I even had a chick get upset that I used the term “females”. I forgot what her argument was, but it was something like not acknowledging her as being human. :/ It’s like what would you like me to call you? You’re obviously human (or else I wouldn’t be talking to you). You’re apparently a female, unless you have something to tell me. So what would you like me to call you? “Male”? “Human”?

Of course, this problem is amplified when you do like DatingGenius and battle several chicks at a time. It sounds like a joke! :D “A single chick, a chick with a boyfriend and a lesbian walk into a bar…” Matter of fact, it’s probably worse than *that*! :D “A single Christian chick, a Jewish chick with a boyfriend and an Atheist lesbian walk into a bar….”

I don’t have the time, and CERTAINLY don’t have the interest to juggle all of these categories while I try to have a real-time discussion with people. I don’t have time to say women for the women and ladies for the ladies and chicks for the chicks and girls for the girls and females for the females.

Having said that…. :D

Knowing how easy it is to knock chicks emotionally off balance, what you want to do is MINIMIZE the chances of that by finding out which category your chick considers herself to be in and tailoring (read: manipulating) your language accordingly. Memorize her category so it seamlessly rolls off your tongue in conversation. :) If someone else complains about it, stick to your guns. Remember… “If she believes it… YOU believe it!” :D

You can also score points by defending against other terms when your chick is around. If you’re hanging out with the fellaz and one of them exclaims “Oh Man! Did you see that bitch’s ASS? :D”, jump in *quickly* with “Hey man… have some respect for the ladies!”. Chicks love that kind of stuff. :)

Also, learn your international etiquette if you’re going to travel. Just because you heard The Beatles talking about “birds” doesn’t mean that that lingo’s still in style over in Jolly Old! According to my friend Phil, “ladies” will get you by in England.

I find “ladies” to be a good, middle-of-the-road term of endearment here in NYC that’s currently widely accepted. For some reason “gals” works pretty well, too. Just pick something that gets you smiles instead of frowns and rock with that until the fad changes… kind of like how you tell a chick you’re going to make love to her, when in reality, you’re going to Tap That Azzzzzzzz! :D

DatingGenius

I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I’ll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. :)

If you don’t know what Seesmic is, it’s basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it’s like Twitter, except it’s video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the “public” timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose.

They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL :D but having held a several-hour-long conversation on it that was about actual intellectual concepts, not “what to name a dog” or “who’s going on a date tonight”, I got to experience the downsides of asynchronous video threading in Seesmic’s current format.

The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it’s not a real-time conversation. It’s more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone’s there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it.

Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn’t paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day’s use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it’s asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I “knew” this, but I hadn’t processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that.

At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people’s posts. It’s important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There’s a “public” timeline that catches everyone’s videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That’s still A LOT of people, and it’s not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a “friends” timeline. You get to choose to “follow” people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you’ve determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say… don’t “follow” them. They’ll still show up if you’re looking at a thread that they’ve contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual.

These abilities to select people to follow and people to “allow to speak” by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person’s perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of “an elephant”, and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants.

First of all, if you’re following certain people, their posts come up in your “friends” timeline. If you click on the member’s icon, you go straight to their opinion. That’s a good thing. However, you’re jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click “conversation” and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don’t have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you’re following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour’s worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see… thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you’ve determined that the person you’re following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles.

Another “problem” with this layout is that what you’re looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, “telephone game” situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a “friend” of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person’s post without watching all of the surrounding material.

My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I’ve seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there’s a time limit on individual videos, it’s NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you’d have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren’t going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn’t want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get “lost in the sauce”. People show up and want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the work to go back and experience each post.

Another reason it becomes circular is let’s say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble “left and right” (since it’s all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits “reply” and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR “friends” see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire… AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn’t want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent.

Like I said, this only comes into play if you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you’re just socializing via video, you don’t need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a “me too” post and you’re good… you feel like you’re a part of the conversation, whether people are “following” you or not.

Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations… the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the “public” timeline, the best way to try to get each other’s attention was to click “reply” so that it would show up in their “replies” folder (an alternative timeline to “public” or “friends”. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept “reply”ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread.

It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn’t bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that’s completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline.

Seesmic’s making tons of improvements, so I’m sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There’s no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I’ve been on the service.

Personally, I’m a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we’re talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. :D The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you only have to make your point ONCE, and everyone hears it and we can all move forward and explore greater depths of the conversation. The downside is that you have to actually BE THERE at the time it’s happening to be a part of it. If you show up hours later, all you can do is watch the archive, if there is one.

The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it’s convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

Jonny Goldstein interviewed me back in August 2007 on his show Jonny’s Par-Tay [link]. Looking at the countdown timer to the end of the show, around -18:00 he asks me “So… Did you feel a little lonely before you got into all the social media stuff?” to which my response was that I’m actually LESS social NOW than I was before…

Jonny’s response was that it CAN lead to socializing, and he mentioned an instance of an IRL event, Vloggercue, hosted by Wreck and Salvage’s Adam Quirk that he was going to attend BECAUSE of the people that he met and knew because of social media.

While I agree that it CAN… How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social inteaction, for YOU? My point was that I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL.

Everyone sitting at that table (Grace, Rachel, Charles, Obreahny, Sandra & Mike), I’m only *seconds* away from interacting with, via social media, wherever I am. Instant messaging, status updates, texting, email, sites, forums, groups. I did a shoot in Central Park with Obreahny and uploaded it to my server sitting out in Central Park, using the park’s wireless access. I get footage from clients overseas via FTP, talk to them on skype or iChat and send them quicktime files for approval/changes. I watched a live stream of PodCamp Philly from NYC and appeared on-screen @ PodCamp Boston while I was sitting in a living room in Maryland.

There’s no reason for me to physically go ANYWHERE unless physically interacting with that person is the reason I’m going. You can’t go snowboarding together unless you actually go snowboarding. Other than that, the current state of communications enables you to be AS in-touch with someone as you want to be. I talk to my friend @CaliNative all day, every day. We’re both MIT Graduates, but we live 3,000 miles apart from each other and never met each other IRL. Meanwhile, there are people that have given me business cards, right here in NYC, that I never spoke to again after that particular day that we met.

Social media allows you to define your enviroment. You can create and maintain relationships that transcend physical and territorial boundaries. You can hold 5 completely separate instant message conversations at a time, which is absolutely impossible on the phone. Does that make you MORE social?… or LESS social? Is “social” being re-defined by technology enabling us to envision new directions?

I also say I’m less social because my tolerance for idiocy has plummeted. :) I didn’t have a lot of that to BEGIN with, but when you get to pick and choose the people you interact with on the basis of their intelligence, common sense and relevance relative to what YOU find interesting or important, it becomes really tough to tolerate people talking about ‘nothing’, or their own agenda which has nothing to do with what you find to be valuable in life.

Anil, Mike, Justin, Debbie, Grace, Bill, Kenyatta, Eric

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

So, yes. Social media DEFINITELY leads to situations where we all get together and have a good time, IRL. I think that more often, social media allows us to FEIGN getting together, which is actually *less* social than more so.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

Are *you* a Tech Elitist? If so, how’s that workin’ for ya?

As it’s now Christmas, and we think of The Grinch sitting high on the hill, looking down on all the little people of the village with contempt… Let’s consider our own positions in our respective fields and how we’ve chosen social media sites & groups as well as whom we’ve chosen to affiliate ourselves with.

There was much change during 2007. More ways to communicate. More social sites to join. More video hosts with their own little gimmicks that made them slightly different from the rest. New video editing software. New storage solutions. New live streaming options….

As new opportunities arose, there was a lot of bandwagon-jumping. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn’t. When Twitter was initially unreliable, OFTEN, eventually, Jaiku came along, and there was a mass exodus. The backup plan for when Twitter would go down was for people to immediately start posting on Jaiku until the problem was resolved. Eventually, Twitter became stable, and I didn’t hear a peep about Jaiku for months until they got bought by Google. All of a sudden, here come the Jaiku friend requests.

Even within Twitter, there was bandwagon-jumping. Apps were created so you didn’t have to use the twitter web page with your browser. Some people stuck with them. Some people bailed back to the web site when they realized how many twitter posts the apps weren’t picking up. Eventually, people found found satisfaction in how they received twitter posts. At some point during ’07, Pownce became a player as well.

There was much debate about which status update application was better between the three of them. I ended up sticking with Twitter, and once every so often, I copy/paste redundant posts to Pownce & Jaiku for people that primarily (if not exclusively) use those sites. I’m also biased towards Twitter because I have 341 contacts there vs. 117 on Pownce and 50 on Jaiku, many of which are redundant for the reason I stated earlier. So, for the sake of this post, I’ll say I made the ‘elitist’ decision that Twitter was better for my purposes and essentially neglect the other two services.

On the social site front, I used to have a regular MySpace presence. I had somewhere around 500 “friends” that were rather randomly acquired. What I mean by that is that I had probably 100 contacts that I knew from some other site or forum or that I actually knew IRL and then another 400 or so people/companies that sent me a friends request and then essentially never talked to me “again”. :D … “Again” has to be in quotes, because they never TALKED to me the first time. All they did was click a button that sent me a friends request, and I accepted it. I enjoyed interacting with my actual friends on MySpace, but the vast majority of it I found to be utterly worthless. MySpace is fantastic if you’re a musician or an artist, but I didn’t make many new relationships on MySpace that were worth anything.

Eventually, Facebook stepped its game up, and I migrated to “the better site”. Similar to my Twitter bias for status updates, my MySpace dealings dwindled to ZERO. In fact, if someone didn’t have a facebook account, I wouldn’t even bother to look them up on MySpace. :) “Everybody who was anybody” was on Facebook, so there wasn’t any need to ‘waste’ time on other mass social sites. Recently, someone mentioned MySpace to me, and I inadvertently laughed and said something like “You *still* use your MySpace account?” She replied that she interacts with the people that she knows because of business on Facebook, but her IRL friends are all still on MySpace. I hadn’t thought about it before, but as I sit here on my Facebook hill with contempt… I’m now wondering how many of my ACTUAL friends are still down in the MySpace village, having never made the jump to “the better site”.

The reason Facebook is better for me is that I deal with social media every day of the week. Now that I’m thinking about it, for the average joe, MySpace is more than enough, and there’s no reason for them to look for better connectivity to more REAL people. So now I have to consider whether it’s more beneficial to me to move some of my Facebook-time back to MySpace instead of concentrating solely on the site that’s clearly superior for my purposes.

Next, you have video hosts. I use blip.tv because the options and functionalities serve my purposes as I maintain my own video blogs using WordPress, Show-In-A-Box and vPiP. Meanwhile, other people talk into their webcams and post videos to YouTube. I’ve posted a few videos to YouTube for test purposes, but I wasn’t impressed with the video compression quality at the time, I wasn’t impressed with the Terms of Service and I *CERTAINLY* wasn’t impressed with the dimwitted remarks people love to leave in the comments sections.

For those reasons and others, I’ve left YouTube just about completely alone… However, you can’t argue with the numbers of views that people get, assuming they get “featured”. YouTube has become the go-to for people looking for any kind of video under the sun, so just by having your video there, you have more of a chance of it going viral than if you oh-so-elitely plan, film, edit, compress, upload, post, tag and advertise your own videos like I do. :)

The question, again, is “How’s that workin’ for ya?”. Fortunately, another 2007 development is TubeMogul which enables you to upload a video once and have it distributed to multiple video sharing sites. TubeMogul also tracks statistics for you across several sites. So now, there’s less incentive to keep “all your eggs in one basket”.

I’m sure we can look forward to lots more fantastic developments in 2008. :) Personally, I’ll be paying more attention than I was this year as far as whether I’d like to consolidate or expand in the areas of status updates, social sites and video hosting sites. I didn’t even get to talk about live streaming options, like how I think Operator11 is infinitely better than BlogTV….. except Operator11 went completely offline for more than a week, so people like Jonny Goldstein had to retreat to other live streaming sites to keep their shows going. Of course, there’s no way to add a BlogTV archive to your Operator11 show archive, so c’est la vie. :/

Anyway… I think it’s in all of our best interests to pay attention not only to which new app or site has cool features or the elite people flocking to it, but also to whether we’re trading away communications with our core viewers, friends, contacts and followers. Just like The Grinch found out… it’s lonely at the top.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

Reader Derek writes:

There are people out in the public eye that grabs your attention.

Using the “Dating Genius” tried and proven methods, how can someone make any good of this? Generically and academically speaking, mind you.

Actually, this is a very good question, Derek.

Becoming enamored with public figures happens to people all day, every day. That’s why the tabloids make so much money. Everyone’s interested in what their favorite celebrities are doing and saying as well as whom they’re currently dating.

There are two ‘problems’ with this. The first one is that you’re not getting the full experience of a person by watching their show. The second is that you usually don’t have any local access to the person in question, so you never get to experience what they’re really like.

Because of this, what people ‘fall in love’ with is only 1% of the actual person at best… unless they’re doing a personal videoblog where they’re authentically telling you about themselves, their lives, what they think and feel.

For example… I have a friend that’s very PHYSICALLY attractive… very beautiful, but her personality is so *CRASS* that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to date her for who she is as a person. Guys put up with her shenanigans because she’s an easy lay. Other than that, she doesn’t have any wins… None of them are actually “WITH” her. You could take that chick and make her the host of a television show or internet show, and guys would be ‘falling in love’ with her too, but that’s because she’d be reading a script and her true personality wouldn’t be revealed at all by what she’s saying.

There’s actually a third ‘problem’ with celebrity crushes… You’re not the only one.

Depending on your level of taste in women, there could be easily 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 guys that ‘fell in love’ with her for the exact same reasons that you did, so even if she’s available and you have local access to her, it’s gonna be an uphill climb to get on.

DatingGenius

If you go out with the same chick for more than one week, the odds begin to increase exponentially that she’ll want to have a kid with you.

Biologically, that’s how women are built. If you consistently hang around them, they start to see you as a viable protector/provider for your pending family.

Meanwhile, the guy’s just happy to have a cute chick to look at and to ‘get on’ whenever he feels like it.

Sooner or later, she’s going to start testing you with questions about the future. SOONER is the time to act, rather than later, once you realize what’s going on. If that whole “family thing” wasn’t in your playbook, and you don’t want to break up with her ASAP and start over with a different chick that doesn’t like you as much (meaning you have more time until “the kid thing” rolls around again), there’s only ONE thing to do…..

…

Buy her a dog. :D Read the rest of this entry »

Fellaz…

If you actually intend to spend more than a couple of days with the same chick, check out her moms. ASAP. NOOOOWWW! :D TO-DAY! :O

This is vital. Make sure you see what her moms looks like so you know what you have to look forward to (or run away from) in the future. How do they say?… “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”? :D

Granted, styles of eating and ideas about working out, etc, have changed since her mother was in prime condition in her heyday, so you have to factor that in to her mother’s current condition. It’s much easier for women to stay in shape these days… now that they are allowed to join gymnasiums and work outside of the home.

If she looks better than her moms…. like, TODAY… that’s a good thing. If they look about the same, that could be good or bad. If her moms could be mistaken for her sister, that’s good. Props to her mom, and to good genes! :D If she could be mistaken for her moms, that’s bad. :(

In case you can’t judge for yourself, let the professionals decide. Take them both out to a bar that has a doorman. If the doorman lets your girlfriend in, but cards her mother, it’s time for a new girlfriend.

We can assume, here in NYC, that your girlfriend’s mother is at least 13 years older than she is. There is NO EXCUSE for her mother to be more attractive than her… NONE! :D

As usual, make sure you factor in your girlfriend’s personality and character before ditching her. If she’s into staying in shape because she likes the way she looks to herself when she’s in shape, there’s a good chance she won’t “fall off” anytime soon. If she’s one of those “stay in shape until she gets a man” chicks, you’ll be completely dependent upon genetics. Just keep an eye on the ratio between when she picks up a snack and when she picks up the entry card to her health club.

Also, pay careful attention when your girl gets depressed. Chicks love to eat when they’re feeling down. If you suspect foul play in the kitchen, find a way to trick her into getting on the scale on a regular basis. Make a game out of it. :) Play “I bet I ate more dinner than you” with her on the pretense of determining weight before and after a meal, then make sure you keep daily and weekly stats like blog metrics.

Also, pay attention to your girl’s mother’s work ethic. If she likes to spend money more than she likes to MAKE money, she probably passed that on to your girl as well. If she took your girl to department stores more than she took her to “bring your kid to work day” at her job, your girl’s priorities may be irretrievably skewed.

You get the picture. Make sure you compare your chick to her mother, giving her moms write-offs for the extra years she’s had to stay in shape to avoid becoming a has-been. On the off-chance that the moms REALLY SHINES compared to your girlfriend…

find out if her moms is single. :D

DatingGenius

Reader Derek writes:

Bill,

I just saw part of the movie “I think I love my Wife.” I’ve always like Chris Rock ’cause the man just tells the truth about stuff, the movie was right on the cusp of what breaks up marriages.

Kerry Washington’s character kept after Chris’s character, even though she knew he was married (and of course HE knew it also). I can understand the sexual attraction, but no fling is above any marriage. She just wanted to be a friend, but friends like that are deadly to a marriage – regardless of the platonic nature.

The grass is greener, but whose to say that green ain’t astroturf…

What’s the dating genius [ DG (tm) ] have to say about this situation?

It all depends on who you are.

If you can be friends with a chick without tapping it… feel free to hang out with her as much as you want.

… however… what’s the point of THAT? :D

It all comes down to willpower. Marriage is a decision… A choice to make a public statement to people that you’re with this chick, and she’s with you. That’s why chicks take guys’ last names in marriage… It’s like those shirts that say “PROPERTY OF The New York Yankees”. People need to know “whose chick that is”.

Many people fail to calculate that by choosing one female, you’re un-choosing all the rest of the females on this planet during the rest of your lifetime. You have to have CHARACTER to stand up to a committment like that. As you can see from the cheating and divorce statistics, there are a ton of people with ZERO CHARACTER.

Married Life <> Life Over. It’s a change in the game. Instead of focusing on whatever chick’s currently within arm’s reach of you, you focus on ONE chick that you determined deserves your time and energy.

I haven’t seen the clips from the movie, but what sense does it make to go bowling with some chick you’re not having sex with when you could go bowling with YOUR WIFE?

DatingGenius

I’m sitting here right now, in Manhattan, in my house, able to type this on my computer right now because of the dedication of my friend, homie, brother, etc… Lou.

We went for a ride this morning, and the mechanic had assured me a couple of weeks ago that they checked out the electronics on my old-ass 1993 GSXR sportbike. I don’t doubt that they did. I think today was a NEW problem. It was so hot today, and my engine was running so hot, I’m pretty sure it burned through my cable leading to my ignition fuse. When I took the tank off so I could check my cables, they were different from when I had sent them to the mechanic, so I’m sure they did SOMETHING, and I don’t doubt it was proper. However, the location of my wires is conducive to them getting burnt and essentially “shorting out”.

I had had this happen quite a while ago, and my good friend MK got me out of that jam. This time Lou made it happen, and I just plain wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for Lou helping me out. I’d still be in Chester, NY, or wherever we were when my bike shut off.

I had offered to Lou to continue on his trip and just pass back that way when he was done. I didn’t want to ruin his day, but he wouldn’t break out. I was really more upset that I had messed up his plans for the day than that I was stranded out in the sticks without enough bike-mechanic knowledge to get ANYWHERE NEAR my house, where I am right now.

Eventually, we got back on the road and came back home. Thanks, Lou.

……….

There really isn’t any more to say, but it’s still not enough. I’ve had people go the “well, I’ve done all I can for ya… now I have to go” route under similar circumstances, and it doesn’t feel good. That’s an incredible understatement. Similarly, “Thanks, Lou” doesn’t even begin to amount to anything near how appreciative I am that he stuck with me and helped me out of that situation. Not that I *EXPECTED* any less of him, because I met Lou more than half my life ago… But, it’s still nice to receive that gift of friendship…. of dedication. While I wasn’t thinking properly and couldn’t bring myself to find the proper solution, either because I was so upset or because I just didn’t possess the technical, mechanical knowledge to get myself out of that situation, Lou was on-point, and I’m getting to type this right now because of him. :D

I didn’t realize how blessed I was when I first got my bike a few years ago…. I mean, I did, but I never documented it. Another life-long friend, Jay, walked me through learning to ride and then rode with me for VERY VERY MANY of the 20,000-plus miles I put on my bike in two years. Fortunately for Jay, he met the woman of his dreams and got married! :D I hadn’t realized how much of what I considered to be fun in “riding” was actually the fun of “riding WITH Jay”. On top of that, I hadn’t realized how much I was ‘dependent’ on Jay’s technical knowledge of biking. I was *N.E.V.E.R*, *EVER*, ONCE… NEVER worried that I wasn’t going to make it home tonight if I went riding with Jay. NEVER. I knew that Jay took bikes (and cars) apart and put them back together again. This was in the back of my mind… along with his dedication to me as a friend, and my dedication to him. Again, though it doesn’t come close to expressing my heartfelt gratitude… Thanks, Jay. :D

Going riding is like going campaigning or going to war. You go out with a certain number of guys/gals, and you return with that same number. Similar to what’s said about war… It’s EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to trust whomever’s next to you in the bunker. That BELIEF carries you to your greatest potential in riding. This guy Todd went off what I consider to be a short cliff one time when we went on a group ride. We went back to find him and five of us literally LIFTED his bike out of the woods he fell into, maybe 30 feet below. His front rim was jacked, so I suggested that someone remove his front brakes, and he was able to ride with us all the way back to NYC, and to his home in either Queens or Long Island. The point is that we were going to FIGURE OUT how to get him home and get his bike squared away. PERIOD. Even though that was my first time meeting him, he was rolling with US, so MY goal was to get him home. PERIOD. That was the goal of the others too, and we made it happen, hoisting his bike with one hand each and grabbing onto trees with our other hands while digging our boots in to the soft dirt of the ledge we were climbing with Todd’s bike in tow. Todd got home. Mission accomplished.

There are some who will read this and discount my claim that riding is like going to war because nobody’s shooting at us. Well… When you go riding, you’re not SURE you’re going to make it back. I’m NEVER sure I’m going to make it back when I go performance-riding. Anything can happen, from mechanical failure to someone running you off the road to oil slicks or construction to someone rear-ending you. I always thank God when I make it back, because I know I didn’t have to. There are quite a few riding deaths every year. One of them was my friend “Avo”. I didn’t know him for a long time, relative to many other riders, but he was a great guy and a solid rider. When Avo died on the West Side Highway, that was REALLY the first time that I honestly felt like “if it happened to him, it could happen to me”.

Anyway… I wanted to get this stuff down while I’m still feeling the immense *GRATITUDE* to Lou for sticking with me and changing his plan for the day from “having a good time” to “getting Bill back home”. I realize this is all my fault, and even though I completely LOVE my bike, I may very well need to sell it, because I’ve allowed it to become unreliable. It’s my fault that the bike’s unreliable. I bought it @ 22,000 miles and put another 20,000 on it in the span of two years. I allowed the ignition electronics to get jacked up. Nobody else. I’m either going to commit to getting it fixed PROPERLY or selling it and getting another bike. I’ve had enough of people saving me from the DEPRESSION of being WAY out of town with NO WAY to get home. :(

The bottom line is that riding isn’t about the bike you’re on… It’s about the people you share your experiences with.

Beleedat! :D

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billcammack