It’s that time of year again when men all over the country are sprouting mo’s. Most are in aid of Movember and the rest are just asked if it’s in aid of Movember. Either way, this can only mean one crucial fact; Tache of the Titans is back.

Movember is a great cause focussed on raising awareness of men’s health issues. Tache of the Titans aims to add even more benefit to the cause by allowing anyone who is taking part in the month long campaign to go head to head against other mo bro’s. One Tache to rule them all!

Tache of the Titans has had an upgrade for this years bouts. We have added ‘groups’, which basically means that you can once and for all prove who out of your family, friend or work colleagues has the ultimate mo on the go. The actual process is the same as before. All you need to do is simply upload a photo of your tache (Face tache only…!) and you will be entered into a head to head bout against another Titan. All of the votes cast go into a clever league table based on the percentage of bouts won.

The competition won’t actually take place until the last week of November, which allows an essential mo maturity time so that everyone can look like Tom Selleck by the time the ’bouting’ begins…in theory.

In the meantime we hope you can all push past the homeless looking stage as quickly as possible and upgrade to the prestigious “I need a tache comb” status.

Good luck gentlemen, we salute you.

Charlie, Andy and Paul have co-created Tache of the Titans as an out-of-hours hobby project.

It’s a fun site that will hopefully help to promote the cause of Movember, the month-long, mass-participation charity event in which people grow moustaches to help raise awareness of men’s health issues.

Anyone that is growing a moustache for Movember can upload a photgraph of their hairy pride and joy (upper lip based hairy pride and joys only!) and take part in the Tache of the Titans.

This involves an addictive series of head to head voting bouts with other taches.

These bouts are used to generate a tache league table, which is based on the percentage of bouts won.

We have also added a simple weighting system that acts to stop new entrants jumping straight to the top of the table after only a few bouts.

The launch of the site coincides with there being exactly one week of Movember left to run. Hopefully even the most hormonally challenged tache growers will have something vote-worthy to show for their efforts by now.

The site has a prominent link to Movember, and allows individual participants to promote their personal Movember charity links.

You can donate to men’s health charities here.

And watch this space to see which is the “One Tache To Rule Them All.”

Here are the results of a quick experiment conducted in our Edinburgh office whilst everyone was having tea and enjoying cakes made by our pals at Stripe for Comic Relief.

We’d been in a meeting talking about the design for an in-house portfolio project we’re working on. This involved one of the team attempting to sketch an outline of Scotland on a notepad. The scribble was so laughably bad that we decided to extend the task to the whole office. Everyone had 30 seconds and no Google-peeking.

What this says about our observation and spacial awareness skills we’re not sure. It probably won’t form part of our design credentials.

(Thanks to freezelight for the photo)

I’ve had a rewardingly unrewarding time skim-reading (skim re-reading) Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. I was looking for a quote to illustrate a point I’m making in a presentation. Alas to no avail.

However, I did stumble across the gems below in the process.

(The context for this is that the book is about a group of friends who are also geeky (and lowly) Microsoft employees. It was written in 1995 and the prescience of the author should be appreciated from that perspective).

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists – the people who were bored with high school – the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to.  Why don’t you just apply yourself?” Look for these people – the talented generalists. They’re good as project and product managers. They’re the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long term stability of the company.

“@” could become the “Mc” or “Mac” of the next millenium.

It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it’s a user interface problem. Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out – something more “user friendly.”

There’s an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.

Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don’t have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

In Lesson 1 we learned that most of Blonde hadn’t heard of Star wars kid and thus failed the internets.

Consequently Lesson 2 was the fact that the Internet is something that is either won or failed.

Lesson 3 is nsfw = ‘not safe for work’ as it may become relevant in the very near future if you start looking round xchan boards.

So commences Lesson 4.

What is the most important story on the tubes
(the tubes you say? don’t tell me … Lesson 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes )
today? Civilian casualties in Gaza, the election of the first black American president? No its whether you are pro or anti Boxxy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/20/internet

Why is any of this important? (I’m assuming you read the link). Not exactly sure but it does cover aspects such as privacy, truly viral memes, the kind of culture that actually exists on the internet (as opposed to one that passively accepts advertising or the initiatives of companies and organisations), and that if you piss off the right demographic they will DDOS (god! you people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack ) a site they consider to be their home on the web and hunt you down for your personal details to threaten and black mail you. I’m sure there are lessons in there that affect our business if we have the wit to spot them.

Next week Lesson 6: TLDR.

Further reading

http://boxxystory.blogspot.com/

and the offending videos

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VcydqSpYN00

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=80hx2FfWjow

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw

Code should be elegant and pure and in fact some believe it’s an art form. The following is an extract taken from the TOPLAP draft manifesto. TOPLAP are a conglomerate of interactive programmers better known as live coders…

We demand:

- Give us access to the performer’s mind, to the whole human instrument.

- Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens.

- Programs are instruments that can change themselves

- The program is to be transcended – Artificial language is the way.

- Code should be seen as well as heard, underlying algorithms viewed as well as their visual outcome.

- Live coding is not about tools. Algorithms are thoughts. Chainsaws are tools. That’s why algorithms are sometimes harder to notice than chainsaws.

Inspired.

Related:
Fluxus Live Coding Workshop

Company blogs, eh. What do you put on them? Forrester Research says no-one trusts them anyway. I buy that up to a point. If all you’re blogging about is your latest press release, or how cool your latest product / service / “viral” is, why should anyone care?

But you have to put something on a company blog. Don’t you? At the very least it should give readers a flavour of the people that work there and their attitude to their work.

With that in mind I have a number of blog titles that I can’t choose between. The one with the popular vote will get written. If you are sufficiently motivated to, please plop a comment in the box indicating your preference. While we’re rebuilding this site there’s no point adding a polling plugin right now.

The candidates are:

• STFU about Web 2.0
• It’s not a viral, it’s a video, n00btard
• What’s the point of blogging?
• TechGnosis – 10 years on
• Now where did I put that Singularity…
• Chillax, it’s just a website
• Twatter
• Wii Fat
• Social Art
• A squirrel eating some fried chicken

Over to you.

Q. What do a Grolsch glass, various sex toys and incontinence pads have in common?

A. They’re all items that have been sent to an unfortunate lady in Oldham as part of a distressing campaign of harrassment against her.

Apparently someone has been signing this poor person up for all sorts of offers and samples, the result being that she is being bombarded with unrequested stuff.

As a result of the inclusion of the Grolsch glass in this campaign, a promotion that was fulfilled from the Grolsch site, one of our producers found herself helping police with their inquiries. We’ve provided them with as much information as we can about the source of the sign-up and hopefully it will be of use in identifying the culprit(s).

What is or are “Thamls”? Predictive text obviously thinks it or they are very important because it prioritises it/them over the word “Thanks”. A cursory search in the usual places didn’t shed any light on this burning issue. Meanwhile it remains a right royal pain in the “appe”. Thamls a lot predictive text.