One of the most-asked questions at Downtown bars is “What channel are the Grizzlies (or Tigers) on?” I’ve watched bartenders and managers spend 5 minutes or more flipping through channel guides, trying to find Memphis games.
Well, now there’s an easy way to get an answer to that question. Follow @MemphisOnTV on Twitter. They tweet the channel and time that local teams will appear on. It’s powered by MemphiSport, who you can follow on Twitter at @MemphiSport and who you can listen to live every Saturday from 11 AM-1 PM on AM 560. Very nice use of a niche Twitter account, and it reminds me of what I do with @firesale. Twitter is the Swiss Army knife of the Internet.
Speaking of sports on TV: Last night I went to the Flying Saucer, and they had the NFL playoffs on, with sound, on the big screen. They’ve been putting playoffs and Tiger games on with sound, and you know what? They’ve been drawing much bigger crowds than usual. I’m glad to see management is finally realizing that if you put the sound on for games, customers will come in and spend money. It’s very simple really. I hope they do it consistently. When the sound is on there’s no place better in the Downtown core to watch a game (if you’re on the South end of Downtown, Max’s is the place to watch).
While I was watching the game, an iPhone commercial came on – the one with the little girl with the umbrella. It caused me to discover a feature on my iPhone I never knew existed. If you open a photo in your Camera Roll on your iPhone 4S, there’s an Edit button. One of the options at the bottom of the screen in edit mode is a little magic wand called Auto-Enhance. I decided to play with it, and pulled up a photo I took of the new, clean, improved Bardog that I took two weeks ago. Here’s the photo as I took it:
Not a bad photo by any means, but I always felt it didn’t do justice to how clean and shiny Bardog looked when they re-opened after renovations. So I ran the photo through Auto-Enhance and this is what it looked like:
WOW. Quite a difference, and that’s how Bardog actually looked! Auto-enhance really improves photos that were taken in less than ideal light. I played around with other photos on my camera roll. It made them much better about 50% of the time, somewhat better 40% of the time, and about 10% of the time it made photos slightly worse and I had to undo the changes. Overall, though, this is a feature I will be using a lot, especially when I want to post a photo directly to my blog or social media account from my phone, without taking it home to run through image editing software first. Surprised I’ve had my iPhone 4S for two months and am just now discovering this. I guess this illustrates why it’s a good idea to read the manual!
We have another bar anniversary to celebrate this week. The Silly Goose has announced their third birthday party for this Thursday night, January 19. Party starts at 9 PM. Drinks, party favors.
Question for my readers: A number of months ago I posted about a service which would send you fake phone calls and text messages at your request. You could text it commands like “CALL 3” and it would call your phone 3 minutes later. Very useful when someone has you trapped in a boring conversation in a bar, and you need a way to escape without appearing outwardly rude. Someone asked about this last night, and I searched both my old posts and Lifehacker (where I heard about it) but couldn’t find it. Does anyone remember the info? Just the name of the service would be enough. I can find the rest from there. If you can help shoot me an email at paul@paulryburn.com.
Best Twitter quote of the day comes from @jesus: “Sorry, I wasn’t ready for some football.” I guess we’re done hearing about Tebow until fall.
My plan for today is as follows: Mimosas at the Majestic at 11, beer at the Saucer at 12, Hung Over Like a Bear brunch at the Blind Bear at 3. If Saucer does indeed do big screen/sound for NFL I’ll update Facebook and Twitter with that info. Heck, I guess I could put it on the blog too, since I have the WordPress app on my phone.