All this can be yours.

Movember is almost here. It’s my third year participating and my third year as team captain of The Movemberists. Last year we raised $6900 for prostate cancer research—that’s awesome. This year I’ve been training hard and you can see the fruits of my efforts in the picture above.

Movember rules mandate that I start Movember 1st clean shaven. That seems like a waste of a lot of awesome curly moustachery. So to kick Movember off I’m giving everyone a chance to own this fine piece of tonsorial work and do what you want with my mug: call it Fantasy Barber.

That’s right: you control the destiny of my moustache and choose how I shave on October 31st.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.  Make a Movember donation before noon (12pmEST) on October 31st.
2. Note the style or pattern you’d like me to shave my moustache into in your donation comment. The sky is the limit. Be creative.
3. If you’re the largest donation I will shave my moustache in the manner of your choosing, photograph it, and wear it as such as I conduct my daily business until Movember 1st when I shear everything off.
4. In the event of a tie bid: Moustache Thunderdome!!

Have fun and happy bidding!

Your humble moustache servant I remain,

Dave
Team Captain
The Movemberists

ps. There’s still time to join the team!

UPDATE!

12pm has arrived  and after a final tally Kim Horne is my moustache benefactor. Much to my relief she has requested the curly, Belgian stylings of Hercule Poirot rather than a more embarrassing Hitler or Passed-out-at-a-party-and-had-half-his-moustache-shaved-off-guy. I’ll will do my best to make both Kim and the esteemed detective proud. Off to shave. Pics to follow!

A big thanks to everybody who helped spread the word and donated—we raised $180 to get Movember started with style. The best part: we’ve got a whole month to raise even more.

AFTER PICS

I did my best with what I had and frankly, I am lacking in Mr. Suchet’s tonsorial prowess. The amount of moustache wax holding this together is truly terrifying and I can’t say I’m looking forward to picking up my son while done up as such.

Thanks again to Kim and everyone else who donated! Olde timey photoeffect to disguise lo-res camera phone snap.

Inspector Poirot?

I am sure that for a large number of users the sudden Klout haircut was little more than a trivial speedbump that has little effect on their online activity or network; at worst, perhaps, some might have felt a vague sense diminished self-worth as Klout’s external validation of their social media efforts evaporated. For those people the world still turns and maybe the ribbing about the stereotypical narcissism and self-absorption in social media is justified. People like to feel appreciated and Klout helped them feel that their online presence meant something to someone. However, there is a whole other class of social media users who use Klout for professional reasons. And those people were hung out to dry.

Like it or not social media has been infiltrated by the usual cohort of marketing, communications, and PR people that grease the wheels of the media machine [disclosure: I count myself as one of those weasely-weasels]. They buy ads, they promote brands, they increase awareness, and they foster communities that work both directly and indirectly towards corporate goals. This should come as no surprise to anybody. Like pretty much everything else in a business environment, the corporate bean counters need to measure things and to this end, many companies have flourished in the sunlight of social media, nourished by marketing budget dollars that need to demonstrate results. These companies have one thing in common: they all attempt to measure online activities and provide some quantitative basis for calculating the elusive Return On Investment (or, ROI in the acronym-heavy argot of business where words are time.)

Out of this field of companies that produce charts and graphs emerged one company that offered to explain social media success with single, easy number: Klout. People in social media like numbers—the bigger the better: how many friends, how many followers, how many likes, how many checkins, and how many +1′s you had became a way to assert your savvy. Klout was a great yardstick for hyper-social, type-A, extroverts who range over Twitter and Facebook: while gauche to directly discuss or compare numbers, a subtle sense of social media strata slowly formed, no doubt aided by tools like Seesmic that displayed a person’s Klout next to their profile (presumably to help determine if they were worthy of your attention).

Under the umbrella of influence [peddling?], Klout was able to co-opt brands to use Klout to promote their wares through people deemed influential enough to spread the word [and, in the spirit of disclosure, I've received plane tickets, hotels, a few meals, and movie tickets through said programs]. So Klout flourished and for a while, everyone was happy: the marketers got an easy number to demonstrate to brand bosses that social media spending was justified, the social media mavens got free stuff and bragging rights, and those who criticized such practices had a convenient target for their invective about the commercialization of social media.

But Klout was not content.

Their system has limits, the main one being that Klout’s scoring system is bounded by a top score of 100. As more people joined, more liquidity was created in the influence market. Scores floated upwards requiring occasional adjustments to relieve inflation-like pressures. Not everyone can be a top-tier tweeter and the Klout system requires scarcity: if everyone is highly-influential then nobody is influential.

Furthermore, that Klout’s methods and algorithm was unknown was troubling and cause for debate, demonstrably so after many revisions and seemingly arbitrary reassignment of Klout. Making the algorithm public would make it easier for spammers to game the system; or maybe it would expose the flimsiness of the premise and the small man behind the curtain furiously working the levers. We looked away not wanting to contemplate…for a while. Klout rejigged the scores of their black box algorithm several times without much incident, but maybe because previous tweaks largely kept scores the same (or lofted them even higher!) people remained complicit in a system we all felt iffy about.

However, this week’s round of changes saw most scores drop 10-12 points, triggering loud and immediate Sturm und Drang, with, ironically, the loudest wails hailing from the most influential quarter. And rightfully so.

Klout put itself in the position as the arbiter of influence, and the marketers, advertising, PR, and communications people latched onto its promise like Titanic survivors clinging to life preservers. They needed Klout to explain what happened to the bags of client cash stoking the hungry furnaces of social media campaigns. They needed graphs with trendlines showing incremental improvement, increased reach, and growing customer awareness. They needed a hero of social media metrics to help them fight against skeptical CEO’s and flinty accountants.

For a while Klout was that hero, but like the Pied Piper, that reliance carried an unexpected price. With the hooting and hollering today, maybe influencers (and the people who want to influence influencers) are realizing that maybe social media is more nuanced than a single number on a slide. And I think that realization is a good thing.

Social media is about relationships and the value of a relationship is not just about a quick flash and grabbing someone’s attention, it’s about building trust and assuring mutual benefit. Speaking to a well-connected friend a few years ago he told me he “didn’t get paid to make phone calls, he got paid because people would pick up the phone.” Social media is not about phone calls, it’s about the conversation. Maybe we need to rethink how (or if) it’s even possible to put a number on that.

Its million dollar price tag caused the usual kerfuffle over arts spending and the inevitable debate over what is art (apparently anything beyond Old Masters and Renaissance portraits doesn’t make the cut). I think it’s an amazing piece that creates tension: it appears unbelievably fragile as it reaches skyward searching for something like tree root searching for water.

The day was threatening rain and thunderstorms (not the best time to be standing at the base of a stainless-steel tower) and the angry sky worked as a nice backdrop and provided some interesting reflections and relief on what is normally a blinding reflection of the sun on its polished skin.

More info on One Hundred Foot Line by Roxy Paine.

Full picture on Flickr.

The following is excerpted from an email discussion between Stephanie Coleridge and I on the topic shortly after the announcement.

SC: I will not ascribe to the idea that Jobs’ departure spells the end of Apple. I’m concerned that from this point on if there’s a dud-product, people will point to Jobs’ resignation as the reason for the dud. But there were dud-products from Apple while Jobs was CEO [e.g. the G4 Cube]. There are exceedingly bright and visionary people all over the place; Jobs is not the only person who can be CEO of Apple.

After Alexander McQueen committed suicide, people wondered what would happen to the label he founded; 18 months later, Sarah Burton has taken over the design house and has more than adequately filled his shoes.

DH: Jobs’ main contribution to Apple’s success has been a vision of what computing should be and an unrelenting drive to produce amazing shit. I honestly think that any decently-sized tech company could do the same things that Apple does; the difference is no other company would go through the rigour of actually making products like Apple without a megalomaniac at the helm. I have worked for companies where engineers shrug and say “that’s impossible” or accountants claim “costs are too high”: companies that sacrifice excellence for expediency. These companies make banal devices with designs based on series of compromises rather than something that starts and finishes with what first seems like an unachievable idea.

The best comparison I can draw to Apple in the last decade is that of  NASA in the 60′s developing the tech for the Moonshot: smart people working in uncompromising ways. I’m not saying that Apple building consumer computing devices compares to the hard science and national prestige of the Apollo program, but both have a singular vision (whether Jobs or Kennedy) backed by near zealous goals and significant resources.

There are no committees at Apple—there is Jobs, who no doubt pores over things like an angry god before approving designs. Jobs cared deeply about some things, and more importantly, didn’t give a fuck about many other things (e.g. paying out dividends) which allowed Apple to rise from a nearly bankrupt company in the mid-90′s to supremacy today.

Tim Cook is a good business manager, and Jonathan Ives is a great designer. As long as there is some good tension between them Apple will survive, albeit they may lose some of the fierceness and singularity of direction. Apple may lose its way over time without a strong visionary at the reigns but things are safe for now: I suspect Apple’s roadmap and product development is well defined for the next 3-5 years and projects underway will continue relatively unabated. No plastic iPhones or MacBook Pros with multimedia buttons for a while.

The Gentleman's Margarita

If you’re like most people your notion of a Margarita is some sort of overly sweet blender concoction being shotgunned by a half-naked co-ed on Spring Break in Cancun prior to receiving a regrettable tattoo. And it is in these things that Tequila, that swarthy, no-good, cactus-based liquor associated with poor life choices, mystery bruises, embarrassing Facebook photos, and merciless hangovers gets its bad name.

However, there is another side to Señor Tequila, clothed in a rumpled linen suit and Montecristi superfino hat so fine it can pass unimpeded through the circle of a wedding band. In this tequila lies a margarita crisp, refined, and elegant.

So skip the cheap stuff and enjoy yourself. But don’t enjoy too much: it may look calm, cool and collected, but this drink kicks like a mule and will pummel your liver like César Chávez if you drop your guard. Go slow, my friends. Dulcimo.

The Gentleman’s Margarita aka The Large Marg

• 3oz premium añejo tequila
• 1oz Triple Sec (or Cointreau)
• 1 teaspoon turbinado sugar
• 1 lime
• Crushed ice
• pinch kosher salt
• carbonated mineral water

In a rocks glass:

Add sugar. Juice lime over sugar and stir until most of the sugar is dissolved. Fill glass with crushed ice. Add tequila and Triple Sec. Top with mineral water. Add a pinch of kosher salt to taste. Rim glass with oil from lime rind–real men don’t need fruit garnish.

Of late there have been a spate of embarrassing gaffes on behalf of politicians in the social media realm. And by ‘gaffes’, let’s be blunt: posting penis pictures publicly on Twitter, specifically the penises of the painfully apropos New York Democrat Anthony Weiner and lesser known Canadian Conservative candidate George Lepp.

There was much jocularity and mirth at the time: after all, politicians are public figures, and rightly or wrongly they are somehow expected to behave in overly virtuous ways (and in the case of Conservative politicians, impose strict virtue upon us). I personally think this is unnecessary and unfair, but that is not the subject of this piece.

At the time of the transgressions, the penis owners in question reacted as expect: denial. Allegations of hacking, pranking, and other online malfeasance were bandied around initially but soon these tall tales crumbled and apologies were issued. In the case of Weiner, who was married and apparently a pathologically profligate penis poster, the matter came to a head with his resignation. Again, whether this is a right or fair climax to the matter is debatable, but I digress.

Now, myself, I have a fair bit of experience in the communications and PR realm, and have taken part in more than a few flop-sweat soaked Crisis Planning meetings. Often these events are attended to by PR heavy hitters who help to craft strategy, tactics, messages and coach on talking points to soften the impact or ameliorate the damage to brand, name, or reputation. And perhaps these expensive consultants are worthwhile and even valuable; I know if you were to ask me to do so I would prefer you think that way.

After some thought myself on how to best manage such a situation if one of my clients came calling in a penis panic at 2am on a Sunday (statistically, the time when the largest number of penis pictures are tweeted) I think this is entirely the wrong approach. I considered keeping this strategy to myself, to become somewhat of a Fixer of such things—a penis picture cleanup man in the Karl Rove sense—because I am confident that such events will surely occur again. After all, penises, whether that of a plumber, professor, or politician, want to be free, photographed, and shared on the Internet.

Upon further reflection I realized that this approach, while potentially lucrative, was not truly in the spirit of social media where sharing is paramount. Additionally, why bury or obfuscate when the opportunity¹ presented  by the errantly-publicized penis could be used to foster better community, direct engagement with constituents, and maybe turn an awkward and embarrassing situation into something to be celebrated.

The best part is it is easy.

So without further pomp or fanfare, I present the Hicks 4-Step Penis Picture Post Solution™.

Upon realizing you have accidentally published a picture of your penis to the Internet or social media site (e.g. Facebook or Twitter)…

1. Stop everything. Say nothing.
2. Locate the picture(s) in question. Do not delete it.
3. Link to or send the picture to EVERYONE you know along with a light, humorous message. e.g. “Hey, check this out! penisLOL!!!” [if it is a Twitter penis faux pas, I recommend using the #penisLOL hashtag]
4. As replies pour in shrug them off like you meant to do it. I mean, there’s no law against an adult male exhibiting his physique to his friends and followers; revel in the sure-to-follow debate about the pros/cons of circumcision. Within hours everyone will have forgotten as they move on to discuss a dead celebrity or something stupid Kanye West said.  Breathe easy: crisis averted, big guy!

I know this seems counter-intuitive and risky, but trust me it works. If you want proof look no further than Aesop’s seminal tale The Miller, the Son, and the Donkey, which you may have read in grade school, or most certainly in Ethics class some years later: He who penises everybody penises nobody.

¹ Remember, the Chinese symbol for “penis tweet” means opportunity and laughter.

Dear Malcolm,

You turn today six today. Six is a number that amazes me.

Six years ago I could carry you in one arm and you looked at me with eyes that could barely focus. Now I can only lift you if you cooperate and you can read these words I write by yourself.

In you I see parts of myself, but I also see parts of everyone else who loves you: your mother, your grandparents, uncles, aunts, family, friends, schoolmates. Together, with you, we weave the fabric of your life into an ever-longer ribbon.

It is easy to say that time flies—and it does—but within 6 years so much has happened. You were once an infant, then a baby, a toddler, and now a boy. In 6 more years you will be on the cusp of teenhood, and six more after that you will be 18 and a man in your own right. This all seems so impossibly soon—it seems like just yesterday you were born so by only tomorrow you will be grown up.

On the day you were born your world was as small as your tiny body, and as I held you in my arms, I never felt so big. Now your world is a galaxy of possibilities as infinite as your imagination and I marvel at all that you are and all the things you can be: hold my hand and show me the way.

Love,

Dad

Complex Numbers = No pants

You know when the writer and producer of a theatre production hands you a condom before the show that you’re not in for a run-of-the-mill Rom-com.

And certainly Nadine Thornhill’s Complex Numbers is anything but run-of-the-mill. It’s smart, funny, sexy, and geeky and has no fear treading deep into the confusing and taboo world of open relationships. Polyamory: check. Intraoffice romance: check. Analingus: check.

But it’s not all about sex, it’s about the people. And here Thornhill as Writer & Producer and Ken Godmere as Director deliver a piece that’s remarkably human whereas others may have been tempted to indulge in prurient exhibition. We watch mathematician/software developer Fiona (Stephanie Halin) and English academic Alex (J.P Chartier) navigate the dark, deep waters of an open relationship (with a little help from a course on the subject as voiced by Jenn Keay.) There are many rules but sometimes rules are broken. Sometimes with consequences.

The script is quick and clever, rapidly switching between intimate discussions about the fine mechanics of relationships to the minutia of mathematical algorithms with ease (and technical accuracy!) Staging is spare and simple and music provides a surprisingly effective means of setting the scene. Tim Anderson is excellent as Dan with great timing and delivery and Ellen Manchee as a female PHB (that’s Pointy-Headed Boss for non-Dilbert readers) gets some of the best laughs as Maggie.

The rapid-fire delivery could be a little smoother at times, and some of the scene cuts, while clever, could have benefited from a better timing. I saw Complex Numbers on its second of six nights so these quibbles can only improve as the cast and production gets into it’s groove.

Complex Numbers is never heavy but nor is it frothy. It’s a frank (perhaps explicit) exploration of couples and coupling and the irregular intersect between love, desire, and commitment. Like it’s namesake mathematical construct, Complex Numbers is comprised of multiple parts and dimensions that make it work.

Complex Numbers
60 minutes
Ottawa Fringe—Academic Hall
$12

Sunday June 19, 1:30pm
Monday June 20 9:30pm
Wed June 22 8:00pm
Thursday June 23 11:00pm
Saturday June 25 12pm
Sunday June 26 6:30pm

For information and tickets ottawafringe.com/complex-numbers

Luckily, one of the best—if not the best—things you can do in life is quick, cheap, and so easy, so self-evident in retrospect, that you’ll never look at things the same way again.

Allow me introduce the Shower Beer.

No fuss, no muss, no tricks. Just a beer in the shower. But the whole is much, much greater than the sum of its sundry parts.

Here’s how:

1. Select your favourite brew. It must be in a bottle. If you’re still drinking beer in cans, stop reading this now and never come back here. Pick something nice: you deserve the best. Open the beer, let that beer breathe. No cheating and taking a sip yet. Bring it into the bathroom and set it on a counter within reach.
2. Go hit the shower. If you’re needing a shower beer, chances are it’s pretty hot (it was 35C when I wrote this) so maybe you want it a little cooler. Whatever, you’re a grown up, you can figure it out. Do all your shower shit: wash your hair, shave, wash your ass, just get all that washing and cleaning done. Rinse off. Now you are ready.
3. Grab that beer. It will be sparkling like a crown jewel at this point, covered in a thick layer of condensation. Raise it to you lips while standing in the warm stream of the shower. Drink deeply. It will be the coldest, sweetest, smoothest beer ever; I guarantee it or I’ll give you your money back.

Now you’ve been shower beered. Things just got a whole lot better.