I’ve been poking fun at many of the number-goal groups on Facebook for sometime. It’s just seems so comical to me that there are a huge number of "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people for/against so-and-so" type groups there. They only get more entertaining the longer I’m on that site.

It’s so cute that there’s now a FB group which wants to sign up the entire US population (they even used an old number; about 3 million too low as of last year) against our new Healthcare Reform law. Never mind that these are the people who won a democratic election and did what they said they’d do. Or that current polls show support for the law solidly north of 50%¹.

What’s so cute about this? These are many of the same people who complain about the account problems with the law.

1. Actually 49% called it good vs. 40% called it bad, according to a Gallup Poll reported in the Christian Science Monitor.↵

You can watch the director’s cut (extended edition with DVD extras) of my presentation here.

Unfortunately, my small HD video camera gave out only 22 minutes into a 32 minute presentation. The above is from the still of the actual presentation at PodCamp. However, I have re-recorded the audio (and hopefully adding back in a bunch of the tips I forgot to tell the audience or ran our of time to include). You can watch the whole thing in the link above or head on over to SlideShare to watch.

My friend Trey was part of this online beard-growing contest a couple of years ago. In actual fact, it is really a photography contest with growing beards as a theme (and is thusly pretty much limited to male contestants, though females certainly jump in and contribute). For the past few years, I’ve been growing out a “winter beard” every year around November and shaving it off in again around the beginning of March, which just so happened to coincide with Whiskerino.

Unfortunately, Whiskerino only happens every couple of years so I had to wait until this season to participate. Sign-up was on the 1st of November and the response was so overwhelming I almost didn’t get in (my grandfather was visiting that day and I had waited until family left to try). Fortunately, an e-mail plea to the organizer got me signed up and I posted a photo of Angela kissing my beard good-bye.

I really did my best to be creative. I was pretty much constrained to what I could pull off by myself (I work at home, alone) during the time I was taking to eat some lunch or take a short break from writing. I had a few good photos and the photo constraints of the contest forced me to think about how to use my camera and limited resources (no post-processing allowed; i.e. – no Photoshop).

My Whiskerino 2009 Photos

However, between parenting and visiting family around the holidays, and all of being more sick this past winter than our entire lives, it put a strain on my time. Internet beard-growing & photo contests are unfortunately the sort of thing that has to get put aside first in these situations. I stand in awe of the guys who did this every last day with kids, jobs, and way more stuff going on than me. But it is important to note that many of these guys have been doing this for years and have become very close friends. This is the modern internet equivalent to a guy’s road trip.

And, in fact, there was even one of those! (though many women came along for the fun, too). Last weekend many participants came together here in Nashville for the Throwdown weekend. I was able to join for a taco lunch and got the chance to meet some people whose work I’ve been admiring for the past 3+ months. They were all the nicest, most interesting people from every background you can imagine.

Despite all the grumblings from Angela (who has never approved of my beard-growing activities and was not happy at all about Whiskerino), despite all the crazy one-upmans-ship that I had not way of competing in, despite all the discomfort that I get when my beard goes for a few weeks untrimmed, let alone four months!; I’d do again were it to happen in a couple of years.

Why? Because I started to see what all the people who’ve done it for the past few years see in it. It is way more than beards. Or photography. Or posting every day. It is about making friends with people whom you’d never would have had the chance to meet otherwise. It’s about taking the most individual, least competitive things in the whole world and turning it into some sort of team sport. One where the team consists of over four hundred other guys whom despite not knowing you and maybe having nothing else in common with you, encourage you and are your friend.

It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever done and it was so much more fun than I can begin to convey in a blog post. But don’t take my word for it. Go over there and look at the photos from today. Read how much this means to the guys involved. Then go and read some of the amazing stories they shared (babies, engagements, cancer, broken backs, swine flu, newspaper interviews, tattoos, even bigger tattoos, and so much more).

All that being said, I was more than ready to shave off the pile of wire and horse hair that was growing out of my face. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable (both physically and socially) and was never so glad to shave as I was today. I did try and have a little fun with that, too:

You can see all of my 2009 Whiskerino photos, as well.

To see what was truly the best of the best in these photos, please check out the King Beard section (each day’s favorite photos, as voted upon by the participants). Note, I only made into the top ten one time, and I’m proud to say it was by one of the most amazing photos I’ve ever scene.

I’m anxiously awaiting the release of Tweetie 2 by Atebits. I purchased Tweetie for my iPhone back in January and the desktop app in April. I think they are both amazing applications and I use them almost exclusively to interact with Twitter (particularly given the Twitter web interface’s scripting vulnerabilities). They are both simple and wonderful apps which deserve the design awards which they have been given. I was surprised to see some criticism of Atebit’s plan for charging for the new versions; mostly brought to my attention by following Gruber. One paragraph from this rather long post just floored me:

The whole ‘it’s a completely new app’ argument seems like utter bullshit to me. It is still a Twitter app for **** sake. A slew of new features and functionality does not, to me, make it a different app. I don’t see anything that says this is not just a very much beefed-up, improved version of an existing app – it has the exact same ultimate purpose of making it easy and effective to use Twitter on the iPhone.

Try re-reading that sentence replacing Twitter with your favorite desktop application’s name and iPhone with computer. It starts to hold a lot less water. He goes on to argue that there should be a upgrade price for existing users, which I agree would be great. However, I’m not sure that upgrade pricing is possible in the crazy world of Apple’s App store (certainly not straight-forward, at any rate, for either the developer or the consumer). Atebits feels that this represents enough work on their part to warrant full price for anyone who wishes to use the product. Though no examples come to mind, I doubt this is unprecedented in the world of computer applications and thinking that an iPhone is so different ignores the full-featured platform this device is (which is becoming true of all mobile devices, really).

Time will tell if charging full price for (what appears to be) a significant upgrade is the right choice. Further, we’d be kidding ourselves if we ignored the relative costs here. At a full price of $2.99, a reduced upgrade price couldn’t really save much. You’ve only got a few price points between $3 and free, none of which represent much of a different economic hurdle (though, it could be argued there is a large chasm between free and $0.01).

It appears to me that the author of this post really values Tweetie at nothing and, if that is the case, that is exactly what he should pay for it. Tweetie 1.x will continue to work just fine for the foreseeable future.

For my part — as you have already no doubt guessed — I’ll be happy to pay $2.99 for the upgrade. I’m amazed every time I view the list of apps on my phone which have new versions for downloading to see that none of them charge upgrade prices. I’m astounded that this is the case and it seems unsustainable for me, at least for indie developers. The app store has a lot of growing pains yet to be worked out and this will ripple into the larger, future market of mobile applications sales.

In the meantime, let’s be happy to reward months of hard work with the same amount we tip the waitstaff at a burger joint. Remember Mr. Pink’s diatribe about not wanting to spend a buck or two on that in Reservoir Dogs? He might have a point on principle, but he looked like a cheap jerk, too.