Bill Cammack

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

I just became aware of a video blog that is geared towards dating tips for females. I thought I’d take this opportunity to give the ladies the only dating advice they need… and here it is……

Go outside.

That’s all. Go outside. Females are always going to be in demand, well… ATTRACTIVE females… because guys are always going to want to have sex with attractive girls/women. Regardless of the latest fads of metrosexuals and all this other weird stuff going on these days, a good-looking girl will NEVER go out of style.

Having said that… There are certain people you should NOT listen to when they hand out advice for women. One of these people is Oprah….

DO NOT LISTEN when Oprah says you are attractive no matter what you look like. Don’t listen. It’s not true. Nope. :D Go ahead and take your chances, but unless you have some kind of mental edge on the rest of the female population, you will be passed up for better-looking girls 98% of the time. It’s a fact. Live with it. :)

If it were actually the truth that Oprah believed women were aiiite in whatever state of disrepair they allowed themselves to descend to, she wouldn’t keep dieting every so often. YA HEARD? :D

If it’s REALLY all cool for y’all to look like “whatever’s clever”, then Oprah would weigh about 800 lbs by now and be on stage eating bon bons during the commercial breaks. It’s not the truth. Don’t go for the “okey-doke”. :D Stay in shape. Period.

DO NOT LISTEN when your hairdresser tells you you would look better with some form of crew-cut or weirdo hairstyle from out of a 1960s magazine about The Rolling Stones. Having the same haircut as Charlie Watts is NOT cute for a chick. Don’t do it. :/ Don’t go for the “okey-doke”.

If you want to know what looks good on a female, ask someone that likes females. Just because some magazine did an article on some artistic thing that someone did to some woman’s head, that doesn’t mean it’s going to look good on YOU, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get ANY RAPS until your hair grows back. :)

DO NOT DATE *ANYONE* THAT CALLS YOU “WIFEY MATERIAL”. Don’t do it. Don’t go for the “okey-doke”. “Wifey Material” is an anomaly. It’s a term used by guys that are very familiar with NON-WIFEY MATERIAL. It means I would treat her differently than all the other chicks I run into. It does NOT mean that you’re special. It means you are perceived to be on a certain plateau. It’s YOU and the other chicks that are “wifey material”.

Material is a substance. They may as well call you “ice cream”. I like ice cream. I think ice cream is delicious. That doesn’t mean I’m going to devote myself to ONE BOX OF ICE CREAM. If I like Vanilla, for instance, that means that I’m going to like everything that qualifies to me as well-made Vanilla ice cream. I might treat that ice cream differently, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to eat Chocolate ice cream. Get it?

“Wifey Material” means you’re going to try YOUR DAMNEDEST not to get caught coming out of the next chick’s apartment. It means you’re going to hide your true nature from this chick in order to keep her around as long as possible. It’s almost better for you NOT to be “wifey material”, because you might get a more realistic representation of how the guy really is and what he thinks of you and his relationship to you.

So… To recap….. DO NOT let yourself get out of shape. DO NOT let hairstylists do weirdo things to your hair. DO NOT listen when the guy at the club @ 2am trying do do some ‘parking lot pimping’ tells you you’re the ONLY special girl he’s ever met in his try-to-get-laid-two-days-out-of-every-seven-’cause-he’s-broke-the-other-five-days dating career and that he’d like to “wife you up”.

DatingGenius

Tomorrow night, (Friday, July 13th, 7pm EST) Cruxy will host a one-of-a-kind event as Suzanne Vega returns to her avatar form for a special virtual listening party in Second Life. Vega will be celebrating the upcoming release of her new album BEAUTY & CRIME, out July 17 on Blue Note. I caught up with Jon Oakes to get the inside story. :)

What is Cruxy?

Cruxy is a media platform that allows any digital content creator (mostly emerging filmmakers and musicians) to promote and sell their works. Here’s a simple example: You’ve shot a short film. You put it in Mp4 format and upload it to Cruxy. We create all of the thumbnails, previews and promotional widgets for you. You set a price of $1 for others to buy a download of the film. We handle taking the money from the buyers and delivering cash to you (less a small fee that we charge).

Here’s a real world example of Cruxy in action. Some folks in the Midwest have a company called ShortTrackWorld. They go (in their cool van) to lots of small car races all over the Midwest where regular folks race their super modified race cars around… you guessed it, short tracks. ShortTrackWorld films the car races and then uses a satellite link to upload the videos from the event to their Cruxy page. They sell the videos of the race event to the drivers and fans and the videos are available just hours after the race. It’s pretty cool in action. You can check out the ShortTrackWorld page on Cruxy here: www.cruxy.com/stw

Recently we’ve been more focused on helping creators get their work into virtual world environments like Second Life. We see that as the next phase and our main focus moving forward.

What is the status of Cruxy as a startup, and who is team?

We are two full timers with a coterie of supporters, contractors, advisors and well-wishers. We are financed by our personal savings accounts, some paying engagements, anxiety and sweat.

Nathan Freitas and myself, Jon Oakes, have been working together for over eight years through three different (successful!) startups. We have built a ton of different technology, products, and solutions for people ranging from the government, to major corporations, and other technology businesses, but are most excited now to be applying our skills and inspiration towards creating new economic and marketing models for creative people, as well as the entertainment industry. Through Cruxy.com, we get to work with true indie talent and give them access to our entire platform. Working with a major artist and label such as Blue Note allows us to customize aspects of our platform, and create unique solutions, which also happen to help pay the bills. Its a good setup, and allows us to see the radical changes that are happening in this business from multiple standpoints.

What’s some of the interesting technology behind Cruxy.com?

As a startup, we need to be smart about how we spend our money so we use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services for all of our server and data delivery needs. We pay on a variable basis (we did not have to go plunk down $25k for a bunch of servers and commit to a high monthly data service fee). This is really “on demand” computing and it allows us to scale in a pay that is precisely correlated ith our traffic and demand… rather than investing everything in infrastructure and hoping to fill up the pipe.

We’ve built a pretty robust system for syndicating media content. We built our syndication system to use the XSPF format which gives us unlimited dynamic playlisting capabilities.

We’ve also built a “virtual world widget” which allows people to distribute their music to their avatar in Second Life. They can then stream their music into their land or venue in Second Life so others can experience their music in a totally new and social way. Rather than just have a bunch of people anonymously visit a web page and listen to your stuff, with the virtual world widgets, you can hang out in your virtual environment in Second Life while a group of people check out and discuss your work.

Besides Second Life, are there other places where creators can syndicate their media?

Cruxy supports a variety of technologies that allow any media upload to our system to be republished and indexed by almost any standards-based service on the web. We’ve got flash widgets, RSS feeds, XSPF feeds, and even some microformats support. We also recently announced our deep integration with FaceBook so creators can get their work out to their FaceBook network more easily. We expect to launch this feature in August.

Looking towards the future, we see the growth of gaming and virtual worlds as online social environments to be a huge opportunity for creative artists to gain exposure and income. We fully intend to extend the Cruxy platform into these types of spaces and economic models.

What’s the story behind tomorrow’s Second Life event with Suzanne Vega?

We have built a virtual lower east side “Ludlow Street” circa 1990 environment to promote Suzanne Vega’s new album “Beauty and Crime”, which is full of songs about various aspects of New York. Suzanne will join us (in avatar form) for a live interview and take questions from her fans. Avatars who attend will also be able to watch video of some of her recent live performances and sample her new album.

Each attendee to the event will receive a Virtual World Widget that allows them to host their own listening parties and share the music with friends in their own land or club within Second Life.

What makes this event with Suzanne Vega different from her first appearance in Second Life?

We used the new Second Life voice beta software for this event. We also built the lower east side environment where avatars can come to hang out, drive taxi cabs, talk on pay phones and spray paint on walls long after the event. This event is about more than just the event… it’s about the environment where people can come whenever they want and sample the album while experiencing the New York that so inspires the album. We’ve got graffiti by Zephyr, the prolific graffiti artist of that era and guitars by Robbie Dingo, the renowwnded Second Life designer, at a LES guitar shop.

One other thing to note is that the MTV virtual lower east side is designed for the 18 to 25 crowd that might not remember New York pre-Guiliani. We wanted to recreate more of the grunge aesthetic that we so enjoyed in our 20′s in NYC.

How big is the market for what you are doing? Breakdancers and indie musicians don’t really make much money, right?

What everyone is realizing is that there is a growing appetite for independently created media content.

Cruxy is also one of those UGC filter sites. The higher end of the UGC market puts their stuff in Cruxy. We don’t get much of the teenage car surfing or flatulence type stuff (nothing against it as a… social… expression, but it’s not what Cruxy is about)

Thanks Jon. Good luck with Cruxy and Suzanne Vega’s event tomorrow! :D

“Graf art building on Virtual Ludlow Street New York”
Photo Credit: Nathan Freitas

Jonathan Oakes founded and managed his first start-up, a systems integration consultancy, at 24 years old. In 1998 Oakes co-founded ThinAirApps, where he served as CEO and Chairman leading the company to a successful acquisition by Palm Inc. in 2001. Oakes spent over two years at Palm, as Senior Director managing corporate and product strategy. Oakes earned a BA in American Studies from Skidmore College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Over the last ten years, Nathan Freitas’ career has spanned the academic, corporate, and non-profit worlds, solving difficult problems through the thoughtful application of technology. His work has been built into Palm handhelds, on display at JavaONE and SIGGRAPH, included in Wikipedia, and covered in media ranging from Boing Boing and Slashdot, to the New York Times and Howard Rheingold’s book “Smart Mobs”. He also plays a mean double bass.

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack