Paul Ryburn's Journal

I just read Kerry’s I Love Memphis Blog and saw that the Majestic Grille has set the date for their annual half-price gift card sale. It will be Wednesday, December 1, and they’ll start selling at 9 AM and continue until they run out of cards.

Note that these cards do have a couple of minor restrictions you need to know about. You can’t buy alcohol with them (that’s a major ABC no-no), and you can’t use them until after the first of the year.

These things tend to sell out pretty quickly. If you work far from Downtown, you’d do well to arrange to show up late so you can hit the restaurant right at 9. If you want to buy gift cards on your lunch break, I’d look to take that lunch break closer to 11 than to 1:30.

Can’t recommend these highly enough… there are so many good things on the Majestic’s menu. The filet is at the top of my list, of course, but the whole chicken, the flatbreads, the salads, the brunch menu… you pretty much can’t go wrong.

People have been reading about my trip to Geekend last weekend, and I’ve received a couple of “wish I were there” comments. Well, there’s an event coming up this Saturday which will have some of the same flavor and content. There won’t be bands playing Wii instruments or huge after-parties like I experienced, but there will be a lot of discussion of social media and web 2.0 topics.

That event will be BarCamp Memphis, which will happen this Saturday, November 13 at EmergeMemphis on Tennessee Street. BarCamp is a little different from the event that I attended in that topics are not determined in advance. Rather, it’s an un-conference where a list of topics are proposed at the beginning of the day – topics that may be of interest and which have someone ready to present. All the attendees then vote on which presentations they’d most like to hear. After that, the group breaks up into smaller groups for 30-minute presentations. Usually several of these run simultaneously, so for each period you can pick the presentation that appeals to you most. A list of possible topics can be found here.

There’s also time built in for networking and breaks. Last year they did “PowerPoint Karaoke” at lunch.

Here’s a link to a MemphisConnect post with more info about BarCamp.

One other conclusion I drew while listening to the presentations at Geekend last weekend… audience behavior during presentations has changed. Presenters much recognize that it has and change with their audiences.

Five years ago, if you were giving a presentation, and you looked up and saw many in the audience typing away on their phones, you had a right to be upset. It would be safe to assume that they were being rude, that they were bored with your presentation and were texting their friends to entertain themselves.

However, in 2010, if you see many people typing on their phones as you talk, it’s a good thing. It’s a sign not that they’re bored, but that they’re engaged. They’re taking notes, they’re tweeting, they’re Facebooking, they’re blogging to share what they learned in your presentation. Embrace that. The best presenters at Geekend did. In fact, they encouraged it.

Let your audience tell the world about the great things you have to say, and next time you find yourself speaking, you’ll probably have a bigger audience.

This morning, a new iPhone app was recommended to me. I downloaded it from the App Store and can’t wait to try it out tonight. It’s called Beerby.

With it you can track what beers you’re drinking and share with your Beerby friends. You can take notes on beer, and find good beer to drink near your current location. You can discover bars that have your favorite beers. You can also compete with your friends to win “Badgers,” similar to Foursquare badges.

Oh, speaking of Foursquare… you can connect it to Foursquare, and if you choose Beerby will check you in at a bar when you let it know you’re drinking a beer there. Beerby can also be integrated with Facebook and Twitter. May leave those turned off… I doubt my friends/followers want to see 9 “Paul is drinking a Dos Equis Lager” notifications in one night.

Beerby has a database of over 40,000 beers with ratings.

Can’t wait to try it tonight for Pint Nite, as I work on beers for my 5th plate!

If you don’t know what to do with this…

 

…you better learn. These things are going to be all over the place in 2011.

Hint: If you have an iPhone, download QRReader from the App Store. It’s free. Other smartphones, look for an app with a similar name.

I’ve been busy with my conference and have been forgetting to remind people about this fantastic event Wednesday night… I will be there and hope to see many of my neighbors. The Grizzlies are offering us an excellent deal!

Downtown Night with the Grizzlies

Grizzlies vs. Mavericks

DATE: Wednesday, November 10
TIME: 6:00pm
LOCATION: Opus Restaurant/FedEx Forum

Pre-Game Mixer at Opus Restaurant 6-7:30pm
$50 per person package includes:

Food & Beverages
First Tennessee Club Level tickets valued at $99 each
Music, Grizz, Grizz Girls & a representative of the Grizzlies Basketball Operations Staff in attendance.

For More Information contact Carl Rosen
(901)205-1445 or
crosen@grizzlies.com

At 7:30 I was at the lobby of the hotel in Savannah. I checked out and asked them to call me a cab.

They called Yellow. By 8:05 the cab had not arrived. They called a second cab company, Big Mike’s, who picked me up. Two blocks on the trip, we saw two Yellow Cabs parked, their drivers talking on their cell phones. It’s a 25-minute drive to the airport, so I got there less than the recommended two hours before departure time of 10:10, but it’s a small town and the airport wasn’t that busy.

Boarded the plane at 9:55. At 10:40 we were still on the runway.

And at 11:10.

And at 11:40. We’d had something called a “bird hit” which left a 1/10 inch dent in the side of the plane, and required repair.

At 11:50 we finally got going. We taxi’d to the runway, then had to wait 15 more minutes because ground control in Atlanta didn’t think we were coming and had to reschedule us into the flow.

We arrived at 12:45. Needless to say, I missed my 12:35 connection. Delta re-booked me on a 2:35 flight. I was pleased to see that I’d been upgraded to first class. I ate a Whopper at Burger King and waited.

Oops, it wasn’t really a confirmed seat. It was a first-class seat on standby. So I had to wait while all the other passengers boarded, not knowing if I was getting on or getting bumped to the 4:35 flight. Fortunately Delta’s shitty record getting other planes to Atlanta on time paid off. Someone missed their connection to the 2:35 plane and I got the first-class seat. At least I got a couple of free Coronas for my troubles. Wish they’d had lime slices.

The plane landed at 3:25, only 25 minutes after the scheduled arrival time, which for Delta is an outstanding performance. I got my luggage, hopped a cab, and was home.

7:30 to 3:50. No, wait. 7:30 to 4:50 Eastern Time. 9 hours 20 minutes.  I could’ve driven from Savannah in 10. It would’ve taken slightly longer, but I’d have been in control. No waiting, I could leave whenever I want, stop wherever I want. I’ve long had a rule that any destination within a 6-hour drive, I’ll drive rather than fly. May extend that rule a few more hours.

I am never, ever flying any connection involving Atlanta Hartsfield Airport again. That place is an air traffic control nightmare. I don’t care what I have to do. Hopefully Southwest will be here in a couple of years, taking over the AirTran spots, and air travel from Memphis as we know it will change forever.

I need a beer.

Just got home. Since I live on Main Street which is a pedestrian mall, I can’t have cabs pull right up to the front door. I always tell them, “Madison and Main, just find anyplace to drop me off near there that you can.”

So today, the closest place my cab driver could find was outside the Madison Hotel. The valet started to unload my bags and I said, “No worries, I’ll get it, I’m not a guest. I live in the apartments around the corner.”

He unloaded them anyway and said, “Now you know what kind of service you get at the Madison.”

Nice move.

Geekend 2010 has wrapped up. Well, the after-party is happening right now, a block party outside SEED Eco Lounge. However, it’s 42 outside, dropping into the mid-thirties later. I hate cold weather and the Arkansas-South Carolina game is on. My flight is not until 10:18, but that means I need to be at the airport by 8:18, which means I need to get a cab out of here by 7:48 (the airport is far from the city), which means I need to be up no later than 7. I think I’ll stay in. Here’s a recap of things I learned today and random thoughts.

If you want your audience to retain text you show them, attach an image to it. Studies show 65% retention with an image.

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug was recommended as a good book on Web usability.

Be careful if you use public Wi-Fi networks. There’s a tool that can be used to steal your cookies, and therefore your identity on social networks. The scary thing is, this thing has been out three years, and Facebook has known about it and has not bothered to secure their system. Gmail has secured theirs.

If you want to get into smartphone app development, this book is a good place to start: Pro Smartphone Cross-Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android Development and Distribution

I attended a really good seminar about testing for the Web. I honestly expected to be bored out of my mind in this one, but found it very interesting and useful. The presenter discussed a language called Cucumber that can be used to make sure developers and customers are on the same page, and to verify that web applications do what they’re supposed to during both the testing and production phases. Go to cukes.info for more information. Examples are written in Ruby but could easily be applied to PHP or other languages.

Keynote on TwitPic was good as well. The guy founded it while holding a full-time job in January ’08, but retained his job until February ’09. He still only has four employees, two of whom are his parents. He’s only 26. The Hudson River plane crash in early ’09 was the first event that really spiked the use of TwitPic, as well as the Iranian protests several months later.

Organizers did little things all weekend to keep the event fun. They kicked it off Thursday with a marching band. People were tweeting stuff like, “Holy sweet mother of moses they have a marching band!” I have to admit, having seen so many of them at parades and festivals in Downtown Memphis, I was like, “Meh, it’s a marching band, no big deal.” They did their job of getting people fired up though. Throughout the weekend, prizes were hidden around the conference center – MailChimp hats, T-shirts, and games. If you found a MailChimp hat, the deal was that you had to wear it for the rest of the day. The hats were knit caps that looked like monkeys. I have to admit, I didn’t try very hard to find those hats. I wish I’d found a T-shirt though.

A lot of my fellow Geekend attendees followed me on Twitter – I think I gained something like 30 followers in 3 days. I wonder what they’re going to think when I get back to Memphis and my tweets revert to their usual crappy material. “Wow he sure does spend a lot of time in bars,” they’ll be thinking. “And what’s the deal with tube tops? Who is this Nuh-Uh person who eats all the time?” I bet I get a lot of unfollows over the next 7 days once my fellow attendees get a sense of my crap-to-quality ratio on Twitter.

Aw, that’s nice… someone just checked in at the Saucer and shouted that the place is not the same without me. Good to be missed. I’ll be back there tomorrow, although a couple of hours late to Sunday Fun Day (probably more than a couple, since I’m flying Delta which seems completely incapable of ever arriving on time).

Arkansas is whooping South Carolina. The Gamecocks will likely drop out of the top 25 after this. Hopefully we’ll move up to at least 15.

All right, laptop battery is running down, time to hit Publish. Memphis, see you tomorrow.

If you’re hunting for a job, you’ll want to read this. Quite by accident, I stumbled across a number of good job hunting tips at the Geekend conference this morning.

I say “quite by accident” because I didn’t even mean to attend that presentation. I went to the one called “Using the Desktop Database to Simply Your Creative Life,” which I thought would be the one most relevant for work. Turns out it was about Access and similar, stuff I already know. Not that it wasn’t a fine presentation, but I could see I wasn’t going to get anything relevant out of it that I could use at my job. So after about 15 minutes, I snuck out and popped in the room next door to see what was going on. It was a panel discussion with people from Monster.com, BFG Communications, and Memorial University Medical Center. They offered a lot of job hunting tips using social media, and while I’m not looking for a job, I took notes for the benefit of my blog readers who are. Here’s what I got:

– What are the best networks for job hunting? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. You need to find out which networks the recruiters in your industry use, and join those.

– Example of building a relationship: You find out that a hiring manager is on Twitter. You follow her. She tweets that she likes Diet Coke. Later she tweets that she’ll be at a conference. You attend that conference and bring her a Diet Coke.

– Have profiles that are COMPLETELY filled out. Especially on LinkedIn. Recruiters often say, “Well, this person looks like they might be a fit, but we can’t tell because their profile is only 20% filled out.” Then they discard that person as a prospect.

– Make sure your contact info is 100% up to date on all networks you use to job search, whether social networks like LinkedIn or job search sites like Monster or CareerBuilder. You wouldn’t believe how many people seem to be qualified but the recruiters can’t reach them because their info is out of date.

– Update your profile on job search sites and LinkedIn every 30 days. If nothing else, delete your resume and re-upload, even if it’s unchanged. Recruiters will often limit searches to those with activity in the last 30 days, to avoid getting a lot of people who have already found jobs but have not deleted their profile.

– Search Twitter for conversations about your industry using the keywords that are a best fit for you, then follow and join in the conversations.

– To get the attention of people at the company you want to work for, be creative.

One guy bought Google AdWords the company would see when they searched.

Another sent teaser postcards to Disney saying “It’s coming…” and after several of those sent a paint can. Inside the can was her resume, in paper and electronic format.

– It’s all about standing out in that search.

– Absolute most wrong thing to do: Have one resume that you send out for all positions you apply for, without any customizing.

– The new generation of recruiting software scans your resume and creates a word cloud. Then it searches for you on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to develop a more complete picture of who you are. Therefore, get a consistent image of who you are, your goals, etc. on all these sites.

– Ask yourself: What’s the kind of job that I REALLY want? Not the job you need, to pay the bills. Look for specific companies, even if there’s no current opening. Leave comments on their company blogs. Follow them on Twitter. See what they’re interested in. Educate yourself.

– Start a blog. The great thing is, with blogs anyone can have a platform to talk about what’s going on in their industry. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 reader or 10,000. The point is, when you find a job and interview for it, there’s proof that you’re genuinely interested in what’s happening in your industry, because by then you will have been blogging for a while. It will prove that you’re not just saying the right things on your resume and in the interview; you really have a passion for what you do.

– Look for conferences to attend. Can’t attend them? Follow presenters and attendees on Twitter. For example, if you couldn’t make it to Geekend, search for the #Geekend hashtag and follow everyone who is using it. It’s not as good as being there but you’ll get some feeling for what’s going on, and you’ll have people you can contact and ask questions.

– Take an hour a day to read blogs and tweets in your industry.

– Question: Are introverts just screwed job-hunting with the advent of social media? Answer: Not at all. In fact, introverts have an advantage because they think carefully before they say anything.

– Recommended strategy for the “big three” of social media:

LinkedIn – connect with everyone you meet professionally. Think of it as your Rolodex full of business cards.

Twitter – follow people of interest in your industry. Talk to them. If they become uninteresting, you can always unfollow.

Facebook – think of it as “third base” – not everyone gets to go there on the first date. Keep it more private, only let people in you trust. One of the presenters follows 700 people on Twitter but only has 89 Facebook friends.

– Someone asked about having multiple accounts, and I (me, Paul, not one of the presenters) want to chime in. It’s fine on Twitter if you want to tailor accounts to particular interests, or if you want to separate “Professional You” from “Personal You.” On Facebook – don’t do it. This violates their terms of service, to have multiple accounts, and Facebook can suspend both of them. Trying to get an account reinstated on Facebook is like trying to herd cats. They are completely unprofessional and customer service-unfriendly about reinstatements.

On lunch break right now. They served us a catered lunch of chicken fingers and club sandwiches, and punched our badges to make sure that no one pulled The Nuh-Uh Move and tried to go through the food line twice. Back this afternoon for three more small conferences, the TwitPic keynote, and the after-party at SEED.

(Sorry if this contains any typos – on a tight schedule, don’t have time to proofread as thoroughly as usual)