Movember Update

Where is this mustache taking me?

Great news everyone. I have a mustache. Not just some barely-there, fly by night, wispy hair thing. Its a fuzzy caterpillar below my nose. And I've noticed two things carrying it around with me. People will stare and people will ask questions. So far my favorite question has come from my boss. She was gone for the first week of growth and when I walked into her office, she said "Now this (pointing to her upper lip)... Is this on purpose?"

Now most self-conscious people would take this as an insult... However, I took that opportunity to explain to her the whole Movember movement, about how men's health isn't just a magazine, and why the cause is important to me. Since then, I've had similar questions and it felt great to explain why I'm doing this have chosen to look like Tom Selleck.

So now that we are fully engaged in the month, I'm gonna do something I've never done to the blog audience, sign up online and make yourself aware of some of the issues that face today's man. You can join my "sub-team" under the mothership of the Midwest Mustache Alliance (more on them later). If you want to donate money, great. Please do, but just signing up means a lot. It means you care enough about men's health issues and want to do something about it.

Now, as mentioned before, go check out the boys over at the Midwest Mustache Alliance. they've teamed up with a couple of organizations that are offering some Movember goodness.

Giving Back

Been a pretty charitable couple of weeks here at HQ.

First, I was tagged in a work-related blog series that required I discuss what sort of charitable activities I typically support. My answer?

I'll support pretty much anything that means something to me and mine (and for charity, I typically cast my net pretty large for who counts as "mine"). My two big pushes this month (from people in our larger community) are the charity which gave their data to Developer Wars at SBOUC and SBOUC organizer Nicole's Diabetes Ride. Never to early to save money on your taxes by making a donation.

As an extension of that, I got pulled into a couple of different charity events this last weekend.

On Saturday morning I dragged the family out of bed to participate in a walk to support a friend of the family who is diabetic.Due to some procrastination on our part we only started gathering donations about a week before but were still able to help raise some money for the JDRF (some from as far away as England). In fact the larger team we were part of ended up raising over $2,500. Best part, aside, obviously, from the altruism? The event was collocated with an Oktoberfest so after the event we got to take in a parade and a couple of beers with some of our teammates.

You can't see it in the picture, but we're standing on a mountain of candy.
Leftover from the parade.
From right after the Diabetes Walk.

That evening the wife and I went to a Trivia Party to support some Micro-financing work going on in Africa. We didn't win the Trivia Contest, but I won the raffle for a tailgating kit which is probably better because I'd have no doubt gotten jobbed out of my fair share of any cash winnings from the team.

For those of you unfamiliar with a Trivia Party fundraiser, they are really common in St. Louis and typically involve buying a table for 8-10 people (usually around $200/table) and competing with other tables to get the best score out of 100 trivia questions. The beer is usually free because they have other cash-gobbling opportunities throughout the night for 50/50 drawings, raffles, heads-or-tails or dead-or-alive type games, and "just throw whatever money you've got left into a bucket at the end of the night" contests. Always a good time, especially when someone who has provided stupid answer after stupid answer all night get painfully upset that you didn't trust them the one time they knew the answer (didn't happen this night, but it isn't uncommon).

In the end it was a fun (albeit exhausting) day and one that really will help to make a difference in some people's lives. Even if that's because we don't have any money left to feed our kids.

March Basketball Tournament

I am pretty sure if I use the term "March Madness" I need to put one of those circle r's or "tm"s by it. So I will just use the most generic description possible for the title of this article.

So all the fun starts tomorrow with 64 or so teams playing basketball against each other. While some more foresight would have been good on this (and if my work didn't block "gambling" websites) we would have got a SFA Bracket put together where we would have showered the winner with copious amounts of praise and at least 3 mentions on Facebook & Twitter. Since that fell through though, you get nothing.

Then we thought more some. And since we can't offer you the most mediocre-at-best tournament experience, we would send over a link to a great one. Here's why its great:

1. It is put on by my favorite retailer of all-time... Bonobos. If you have followed us for any amount of time, you will know that I cannot get enough of their pants, customer service, and overall coolness. I want to be them.
2. The winners get free stuff. I am not going to explain this any further.
3. The more people they get to sign up, the more money they will donate to the Deron Williams Point of Hope Foundation

Sign up at www.bonobos.com/bracket-challenge

So its really a win/win for everyone. Just pick good teams.

Here is a link to the Bonobos Bracket Challenge. Sign up and tell them the Suburban Father Alliance sent you.

Oh and while I still barely have your attention. GO MIZZOU!!!

The Charity Episode

So I mentioned to my mom that I had a few blogs the other day (oh, you didn't know? I also blog internally at work, on the SAP Community Network, and for the Americas SAP User Group - membership required - and yes, I'm hilarious and good looking on all of them) and she asked me to share some easy charity links with all of you. So, as a Christmas gift to my mom, I strongly encourage you to go answer trivia questions (which is awesome anyway) and help raise food for people, dogs, cats, and little people. I don't even like cats. Merry Christmas, Mom. My other gift to her? Never giving her the link to this site.

As part of the thoroughly-exhaustive (and redundantly-restated) fact-checking that each of our posts goes through, I'll have you know that I snoped at least one of those links, and it was indeed legit. So clicking through any or all of those sites on a daily basis could, with no cost to you, help feed things. And things are hungry this time of year.

There are also lots of charities that are happy to take your money and not just your sweet trivia knowledge. The Missouri Attorney General has been kind enough to put together a list of those that are least likely to use your money for things you'd expect them to. If you are going to consider donating to those charities, might I recommend instead making my Christmas a little brighter? I promise that 100% of any donations given to us will be spent on us. Other good ways to waste your money? Burn it, flush it, or buy a Randy Moss jersey. From pretty much any team he goes to for a 3 or 4 month stint.

Really, though, most charities are upstanding corporate citizens who like to help people (or dogs or stupid cats). Like this one I built a dashboard for, the United Way which helps route money to reputable charities (but which has never once asked me to build them anything sweet), or Mid-America Transplant Services which helps people with organ donations. Do you have a favorite charity? Feel free to post it in the comments below.

Happy Holidays. Now go spread a little cheer, would ya?