Author: paulryburn

Last Saturday the trivia team gathered for Rapscallion Party IX, the ninth in a series of parties to cash in our trivia winnings.  We started at Jillian’s, blew through most of our money there, then walked across the street to the Saucer.  Here are a few pics:

Our server Brooke joins the gang for a pic.  It’s so good to have Brooke back at the Saucer.

Possibly the best pic ever of the Nuh-Uh Girl eating.  As a bonus, the Nuh-Uh Sister is eating too.

Me with BFF/Best Pool Partner Ever Lauren, although I was not involved in this particular pool game.

Frank, BFF wannabe Stephanie, and former BFF Jenny.

Yeah I don’t know what was going on here.  This one was taken around the time our extremely large tab ran out.

After the Rapscallion party we went to a friend’s birthday party at Jack Robinson Gallery, where the Nuh-Uh Girl and Nuh-Uh Sister continued to eat.

Full photo album (46 pics) here. If anyone needs them on a different platform than Facebook, let me know.

This afternoon I have updated info on how you can help Annabelle, the 5-year-old girl with spina bfida whose wheelchair was stolen and dismantled by criminals.  You can go by any First Tennessee location and leave a donation for “Annabelle’s Wheelchair Fund,” or you can call First Tennessee to wire funds to “Annabelle’s Wheelchair Fund.”

The little girl had been asked to be a princess at the December 7 Jingle Bell Ball, the ball’s organizers told me this afternoon, but she’s been asking, “How can I do a ball if I don’t have my legs back by then?”  If you have extra money to spare, please consider donating to the fund so she can have a new wheelchair (her “legs”) by then.

I just wanted to alert people who don’t keep up with Memphis local news to this story: Girl’s wheelchair snagged by thief. A 5-year-old girl’s wheelchair was left unattended in a driveway for 5 minutes, and thieves came by and stole it.  The little girl has spina bfida and used the chair as an extension of herself – she cheered in it, danced in it, etc.  Needless to say, she was devastated and, according to the CA article, was crying all day long.  She’s now being pushed around in a stroller and her parents aren’t sure whether insurance will cover a replacement.  The chair was later recovered, completely dismantled, according to comments left on the CA story.  The thieves had apparently tried to sell it for parts, and dumped what they couldn’t use from it.

If there are any plans to raise funds to get the little girl a replacement chair, please keep me in the loop (paul@paulryburn.com) so that my blog’s 1000+ daily readers have the opportunity to give.  It’s not so much the money, it’s showing the little girl that most people in the community are the opposite of the pieces of garbage who stole her chair.  So far I haven’t heard of any organized effort – someone mentioned Rock 103 in the comments but I didn’t see anything on their site (although I did see an interesting article about Led Zep touring without Plant under a different name next year).  If anyone hears of a fund-raising drive for this let me know.

B.B. King will be in town December 10 to play at his club on Beale Street for one night only.  If you want to get tickets, you can call their gift shop at (901)524-5464 or e-mail jphil38111@aol.com.  They’re offering a VIP package for the show which includes a 4-course dinner at Itta Bena and a reserved seat for B.B. for $200.  A reserved seat without the dinner is $125.  Also, they’re doing a buy 9, get 1 free deal for the VIP and reserved tickets.

The holiday season is about to start Downtown.  At 5 PM this Friday, November 21, there will be a flip-the-switch ceremony for the Christmas lights in Court Square, so if you work Downtown, come by after you get off.  There will be caroling, and they will be serving hot chocolate.  Or, if you aren’t into hot chocolate, you can do as Court Square’s “residents” do and panhandle until you get enough change to go buy a 40-ounce single-serve beer at Jack’s Food Store.

Following the lighting ceremony, the judging of Downtown’s holiday storefront contest will begin at 6 PM.  Judges will look for the most creatively lit storefronts, and winners will be announced at the Downtown holiday parade next Friday, November 28.

The Memphis Business Journal reports that D. Canale will move their offices into part of the space above Huey’s that is being renovated into office space and apartments.  Plans are also being made for the space above Slim’s and some of the other buildings on that block.

The panhandler who approached me a couple of weeks ago, asking for my help finding him a job, saw me last night on Main Street and again seemed pretty sincere.  So far the only lead on a job for him I’ve received is Calvary Episcopal’s outreach program, which helps people get off the streets and into homes and jobs.  I told him to give that a try, but again, if anyone is willing to take a chance on this guy, e-mail me at paul@paulryburn.com and let me know how he can get in touch with you.

Congrats to the Tigers on their victory over UMass last night in ESPN’s 24 hours of basketball.  I watched it at the Saucer, and found that having been up since 4 AM (I decided to start on my websites early yesterday) plus about 7 Leinenkugel Sunset Wheats was not such a good idea.  I had planned to finish the night at Bardog, but I knew it was time to throw in the towel.

I’ll be out tonight for trivia.  Time for us to begin winning money for Rapscallion Party X.  I need to upload the pics from Rapscallion Party IX and post them today too.  May have a couple of websites to roll out later today as well.

The cheapest beer Downtown appears to be at Hooters, which has $1 domestic drafts all day.  It’s by no means my favorite place, but hey, cheap beer.  I was told that the Memphis Flyer received a personal visit from the Hooters girls to promote the beer special.  Hey, I’m media too, sort of!  Where’s my visit?

It’s time for the annual “who’s going to be open on Thanksgiving?” list.  I’m not so much concerned with who’s having a Thanksgiving buffet or dinner – you can read the paper or Flyer for those – but rather, which bars are going to be open Downtown, for when people have had their fill of dinner with the family and need a beer or drink?  E-mail me at paul@paulryburn.com if you know of a place that will be open.

So far the list is as follows… I know that Westy’s and Wang’s usually stay open for Thanksgiving.  The Flying Saucer has signs posted saying they’ll open at 5.  That’s what they did last year, and I learned that the people who work there were getting extremely worried about me when I didn’t show up until 5:03.

Hey, finally my long relationship with First Tennessee has paid off!  They e-mailed me to offer me two Grizzlies tickets as a form of customer appreciation.  And they’re club-level tickets!  Nice!

I found out some info on the construction taking place on the west side of Main and Jefferson.  It will be an 8-story Courtyard by Marriott hotel, owned by the same group that owns Sleep Inn and Springhill Suites next door.  The hotel will have 131 rooms, each equipped with a flat-panel TV and a “jack pack” that allows iPods, MP3 players, computers, DVD players, and other electronic media to be hooked up.  The hotel will open in December 2009.

The part of Jillian’s formerly known as Club Atlas is under construction right now, and will be re-opened as the Tiger Den.  It will be an open-air lounge, a comfy place to watch Tiger games.  Sounds like a much better use of the space than it was as Atlas.  But, what will I make fun of on Thursdays in the spring and summer now?

Tigers play UMass at 11 PM tonight.  I’m not attending the game, but since it’s Pint Nite I’ll watch it at the Saucer.  I think I’ll do an extra long workday until about 9:30 or 10 – I have plenty to do – then head up there for some $2.75 Dos Equis Lager, and I also want to try the Schlafly APA that just came in.  Right around halftime the clock will strike midnight, and it will be my birthday.  I’m going to try to make it all the way to close for Pint Nite.

Several times over the past few weeks I’ve had friends and blog readers question my decision to go back to a traditional ASP.NET or PHP Web programming job.  “You ought to be in marketing,” they’ve told me.  “I have no doubt you’re a good programmer, but your creativity, your communication, and your intuition are your strongest suits.”

Know what?  I kind of agree.  I’d love to get into marketing, where I could really apply my creativity.  It would be fun and I think it would be a great use of my talents, far more so than another programming job.  Not that there isn’t any creativity in programming, but “Find a way to import 10,000,000 records from a third party data provider while optimizing for speed and maintaining 99.99% accuracy” just isn’t a problem that excites me a lot.  However, I think my knowledge of what works on the Internet, from the lessons I’ve learned over the past 4 years as a successful blogger and the past year doing affiliate marketing websites, would be a huge plus in a marketing position.

The thing is, would anyone hire me?  I don’t have a business degree (I have an Master of Science in Computer Science), and in fact have never taken a business course in my life.  Honestly, I’m kind of proud of that fact, as I don’t believe a business degree is necessary for success in the business world.  However, those doing the hiring – those who have spent 4-6 years of their lives earning a business degree – may feel differently.

The other problem is, if I took a marketing position, I’d likely have to take a pay cut from the money I earned in my last two full-time positions as a senior developer.  I don’t mind a 20-30% pay cut if it’s more interesting work, and I’d still earn enough to maintain my lifestyle Downtown.  However, an entry-level position would likely be close to a 50% pay cut, and I couldn’t maintain the life I enjoy on that amount.  For that matter, I don’t think an entry-level position in marketing would be appropriate, anyway.  The lessons I’ve learned and the intuition I’ve gained over the past 15 years should vault me past entry-level, I believe.

Anyone out there got advice for me?  Hit me up at paul@paulryburn.com if you do.  I’ve announced that I’m on a hiatus from job hunting until December 1, but this is a field in which I’d be willing to come back prematurely.

Lots of stuff today.  Last night was Rapscallion Party IX, where we cashed in our trivia winnings at Jillian’s and the Flying Saucer.  On the walk down there, I noticed two parties worth posting about.  I also have some new beer and happy hour info for you today.

First of all, there will be a party with the Dos Equis Girls next Friday, November 21 at Rio Loco.  You’ll be able to mix and match buckets of Mexican beer.  Sounds like fun.  Rio Loco has Dos Equis Amber and my favorite, Dos Equis Lager, on tap.

Then there’s a party scheduled for Wednesday, November 26, or Thanksgiving Eve, at Big Foot Lodge.  There will be drink and food specials, although they haven’t posted specifics yet.  If you’re not going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving, just come to Big Foot and get drunk.  You can learn more about the Coors Light Super Cold Draft they serve at parties here.

Calhoun’s now has Blue Moon’s seasonal Full Moon Winter Ale on tap.  I’d attempt to describe its taste, but something prevented me from trying the Winter Ale yesterday (could be the $1.50 PBR).

BB King’s and Itta Bena just sent me some new specials.  Here’s the list:

Happy hour – Itta Bena and B.B. King’s
Mon-Fri 3pm to 7pm
$2.50 Domestic Bottles
$2 PBR
$4 Wells
$4 House Wine
$4 Sweet Tea Vodka Ice Picks and Sweet Tea Mojitos
The Dirty-Dirty – 4 PBR’s, 12 Hot Wings, and Fried Pickles $20  7 days a week

B.B. King’s Sunday specials – 12pm to 6pm
$4 Appletinis
$4 Mimosas
$4 Bloody Marys
$4 House Wine
$4 Well Drinks
$4 Sweet Tea Vodka Ice Picks and Sweet Tea Mojitos
$8 Buckets of Beer- Domestic
$2 PBR

Itta Bena specials
Sunday Night 1/2 off Steaks
Monday 1/2 Price Bottles of Wine
Wednesday Chefs Choice 1 glass of wine, 1 Entree,  and choice of Appetizer or Dessert for $25

All right… that should be enough info to hold you for a while.  I’ll post pics of Rapscallion Party IX soon.  Got some good ones of the Nuh-Uh Girl eating.  Right now, though, I have to get ready for Terry’s 50th birthday brunch at the Majestic Grille.

I was just now thinking about one of the other questions from Wednesday’s PR roundtable… “Do you make money from your blog?  Do you accept advertising?”  I’ll provide a detailed answer later, but the short answer is, right now, I don’t make money from advertising.  In the past I tried Google ads and non-targeted affiliate links, and found them to be a waste of time and web space.  Right now the only links on my blog that make money are to my targeted affiliate stores and websites.

However, there’s the question of what to do with the space on the right sidebar currently occupied by the Obama banner.  It’s time for that to come down… Barack has won.  I wouldn’t have a problem putting an ad there, as long as it was for a product or service relevant to Downtown Memphis, so that it added value to this blog rather than subtracted from it.

After doing a little thinking, it occurred to me that the best ad I could put there would likely be one for a real estate agent who sells condos and houses Downtown (and possibly in other parts of Memphis as well).  But how would I price it?  I can post details of my non-RSS traffic (those who use RSS feed readers wouldn’t see the ad), but I’m not sure how to convert those pageviews into a dollar amount that makes sense.  I’d also have to deal with the fact that I have several friends in that industry who might expect preferential treatment, treatment I can’t afford to give them since my goal is to maximize revenue from that space.

So here’s what I’m thinking… what if I were to let the market set its own price?  I could run an eBay auction for that ad space for the month of December.  I’d throw in an hour of my time designing an attractive ad, if needed (the winning real estate agent would have to supply their own website to link to).  I’d post my non-RSS pageview numbers for the past 20 days and let people figure out for themselves how much it’s worth to be the only real estate agent on my blog, with their name and contact info in a prominent place on a blog that averages better than 1,000 non-RSS pageviews on weekdays.

Not sure if I’ll do it yet, but am seriously considering the idea… if you have thoughts, shoot me an e-mail at paul@paulryburn.com.

Another question asked at the PR luncheon I attended last Wednesday was, “Do you allow people to post anonymous comments on your blog?” I didn’t get to answer that one in the interests of time, so I thought I’d answer it here.

I keep the comments feature on my blog turned off.  I’m in the minority of the bloggers who do this, although I’m by no means alone.  For example, Seth Godin, who writes what is possibly the most widely-read blog on the Web, keeps comments turned off too.  Here are the reasons I don’t enable the comments feature:

1) To protect the people I know. By continuing to write a blog that has gotten so popular, I’m consciously making the choice to put myself out there, to open myself up to public scrutiny.  However, even though this blog has kind of become an unofficial Downtown Memphis blog, it’s still my personal journal as well, and I write about people I know.  I feel it’s kind of my duty to protect them as I write about them.  Whether I write about good friends like Mikey the Camera Nazi or the Nuh-Uh Girl, or people I don’t always see eye to eye with like MegHanZilla from Big Foot or bartender Brittney from the Saucer, I don’t want to provide a public forum where people can post details of their lives that they’d prefer to remain private.  When I write about people, I know how far is too far and am careful not to cross that line, but I can’t be sure anonymous commenters will do the same.

2) Because I hate racism. Read the comments on Commercial Appeal stories or Thaddeus Matthews’ blog, and you’ll get an idea why I’m not fond of comments on my own blog.  In this polarized city, discussion of any controversial news story – be it crime or politics or whatever – inevitably turns to race.  People have the right under the First Amendment to express racism and prejudice, I suppose, but I’m under no obligation to provide space on the Web for them to do it.

Surely the discussion on panhandling would have drawn a lot of racist comments, if I had allowed them on my blog.  However, it became clear that discussion on that issue was needed, so a friend and I started a forum, separate from my blog, where discussion was carefully controlled in order to keep it constructive.  A lot has been done about the panhandling problem as a result.

3) I don’t have time to deal with comments. I haven’t checked my tracker in about a week, but the last time I did, I saw that a week ago Tuesday was an all-time high, with 1,795 views in one day, counting RSS readers.  I worry that if I turned comments on, it would take an hour of my day or more to moderate them, to get rid of the inevitable comment spam, and to respond to those that needed a response.  It’s just not the best use of my time, time that I could otherwise spend building websites or going out and finding new information to blog about.

4) I want to keep control over what events get mentioned. In the roundtable Wednesday I described the blog as a “clearinghouse for information about Downtown,” but I don’t want to mention everything.  I don’t want people getting on here and cluttering the blog with events in Cordova that aren’t relevant to Downtowners.  I don’t want people getting on here and promoting causes I don’t support (such as Young Republicans, or far worse, that awful white supremacist conference that was in town last weekend).  I don’t want businesses that are known for lousy customer service to get on here and promote themselves.  I put my e-mail address on the blog, and if people want events mentioned, they can get in touch with me and I’ll make the call whether or not to post them.

It’s true that many people (including my co-panelists Wednesday) see a blog as a conversation between the blogger and the readers.  To some extent, I lose that aspect of the blog by keeping comments turned off.  However, I don’t think I lose it entirely – many of my readers e-mail me, and I e-mail back, and have become good friends with many readers over the years.  They’ve provided a lot of useful information that has added value to the blog – it’s just that, as I stated above, I want to maintain control over what information actually goes on there.

In summary, it’s a personal decision.  It just feels right.  There are lots of local bloggers who do enable the comments feature, and even allow anonymous comments, and I have great respect for them for doing so.  It’s just my own personal decision that this blog will run more smoothly with the comments off.

More answers questions from the PR roundtable to come.

Still sitting here at the Second Street branch office, trying to sort out a consulting job I’m doing.  Word of advice for anyone looking to start a website:  Do not use Network Solutions as your webhost.  Good Lord, they are a pain in the butt compared to GoDaddy.

But anyway, let’s get to the point of this post:  They just installed Schlafly APA on tap here.  Here’s a description of the beer from Schlafly’s website:

An American Pale Ale with a hearty dose of hop bitterness, flavor and aroma. We add hops directly into the finished beer to boost the fresh, fruity flavor and aroma of American hops.

ABV:5.9%
IBU: 50

Schlafly is a St.Louis brewery.  Haven’t tried the APA yet, and won’t today, considering that my favorite beer is on Fire Sale.