Paul Ryburn's Journal

I have more information about the proposed panhandling ordinance.  It will be voted on by the full City Council at 3:30 PM today at City Hall.  It is very important that those who support the ordinance, and who can get off work, show up outside City Hall around 2 PM today to visually/verbally show their support.  Signs have been created and will be handed out, or you can make your own.  A group that opposes the ordinance will be outside demonstrating at 2:30.  It’s important that Council members see plenty of people who support the ordinance, as well.

Enough is enough!

The final reading of the panhandling and single beer ordinances is tomorrow at 3:30 PM at City Hall, 125 N. Main. If you support these proposed ordinances and can get off work or are off work, please show up. The City Council needs to know that large numbers of its constituents support these measures. Enough is enough! We’re fed up aggressive panhandling projecting a bad image of our neighborhood.

Lifehacker had an article this morning on GoodReader, an iPhone app that can handle large PDFs without crashing. I own this app and have used it many times. It’s 99 cents and is one of the few times I’ve paid for an iPhone app. Worth the money if you need to read PDFs on the go.

Trivia with Will is at Local Gastropub tonight at 8 PM. If you’ve been staying away because they didn’t have liquor and wine, stay away no longer… they now do.

Good Groupon Memphis deal today – $20 for a Family Four-Pack of Field Box Tickets to a Memphis Redbirds Game, up to a $52 value. Good idea for an affordable family night out.

If you’ve been voting in the Google Fiber poll, you may have noticed that the Carolinas were doing extremely well, with two cities leading the others by far. They’ve now determined that bogus votes were cast and they are considering restarting the poll. The GoogleFiber.com site, by the way, is not a property of Google. It’s registered to a company in India. So, while it’s worthwhile to vote, because Google may consider the results, don’t think you’re communicating directly to Google when you do.

In any case, don’t forget to click on the link in the upper right sidebar of my blog to vote for the Binghampton skate park.

Back to work… I’ll be late but I’ll be at Pint Nite at some point this evening.

This isn’t Downtown-related… in fact, it concerns a restaurant pretty far away.  However, since PBR is frequently mentioned in this blog, I figured I’d pass on the info.

One of my friends on Facebook messaged me to say that her mom’s restaurant, Cajun Catfish Company on Sycamore View, has 2 for 1 PBRs for $2.50 all day, every day.  $2.50 for two 12 oz. PBRs has to be one of the best deals in town.  So if you’re out in that neighborhood, check it out.

Off to work.  Probably another post at lunch.  Will be late to Pint Nite tonight because I have GOT to get my taxes filed.

This morning I plugged in the camera and downloaded some random pics from this weekend.  Let’s see what we’ve got.

Friday afternoon: Band playing at Handy Park for the Spirit of Memphis pep rally

Friday night: Fire pit at Robert & Gloria’s cookout

Saturday afternoon: I tried Miss Polly’s Soul City Cafe on Beale for the first time.  I had the 3-piece white chicken meal with taters & gravy and white beans & ham.  Very good!  Kudos also to doorman Mark, who got me from “hmmm it’s an option” to “I’m going to try this today.”  Mark is the talkative guy who used to be at Frank’s Deli on South Main.

Saturday evening:  Hannah models the Saucer’s newest beer, created by brewmaster Bicycle Bobby.  Hang on, let’s zoom in on that label and see what it says…

“Brittney Ale.  Poison.”  It will probably be the Fire Sale today.

Saturday night: Mikey drinks beer from the trophy Calhoun’s gave him for being at the bar 90-some-odd consecutive days.

There was one more pic I wanted to post, but couldn’t get it to turn out right.  Christy (previously seen on this blog chowing down on cheese fries) was getting down with her bad self at Calhoun’s.  Sensing a photo opp, I whipped out the camera from across the bar, set the zoom to 6x, and snapped a pic.  Unfortunately the camera focused on the bar’s tap handles and there was no way I could edit the photo to anything decent.  So Christy escaped the blog this time.  There will be other opportunities, I’m sure.

Forecast is sunny and around 80 all week… looking good.  Going to take a shower and then head to Sunday Fun Day.

The fountain of knowledge known as Brick celebrates a birthday today.  Happy birthday Brick!

I’m sure someone will ask me, how old is Brick?  I honestly don’t know.  She stopped counting when she turned 20.  Not because she’s afraid of getting older, but because she ran out of fingers and toes.

If you’re a fan of menu website MarksMenus, there’s now a MarksMenus app available for the iPhone.  Check out this Commercial Appeal story for details.

I mentioned earlier that @jameshutto is a good person to follow on Twitter for social media tips.  He posted a good one yesterday – a link to an article about 52 social media sites that every marketer should know.  Great article and there were several sites I was not even aware of.  Thanks!

Prediction:  In the next year, companies that serve the public will start banning employees from checking in on Foursquare.  I mean, it’s one thing when people check in at Medtronic or FedEx World HQ – those are office buildings.  But it seems like bars and restaurants lose a valuable chance to get to know who their best customers are when employees check in every day and claim the mayorship.  Wouldn’t you want to know who keeps coming to your bat/restaurant because they want to, not because they’re required to?

(And no, I didn’t lose my mayorship of the Saucer, in case anyone’s wondering.  Not even the managers are there enough to steal my mayorship.  It’s other places where I check in Downtown where I see it being an issue.)

Have you voted for Google Fiber and the skate park today? Links at the top of my right sidebar.

Great Groupon deal today:  One night at the Inn at Hunt Phelan for $99. It’s up to a $299 value.  Folks who live in other parts of Memphis, this would be a great way to experience Downtown as a local for one night, at one of the neighborhood’s finest places to stay.

Fun night last night.  I attended the “Spirit of Memphis” rally at Handy Park, where I heard some great music and got to see two musicians inducted into the Beale Street Walk of Fame.  I really am thrilled about the Spirit of Memphis rallies.  For years it’s been perceived as cool to put Memphis down because the person next to you does too… it’s time people started getting together and speaking up and saying that Memphis is GREAT!  The Downtown Download blog has a new post about the rally.

After that I stopped by the Saucer for a beer… I managed to choke down Schlafly Coffee Stout, one of the nastiest beers on the menu, because it was on Fire Sale and I needed it for my plate.  The repulsiveness of the stout was enhanced even further by Otto sitting next to me and running his mouth about what a great beer it is.  Yuk!  Better than Turbo Dog though.

After that I headed south to Robert & Gloria’s for their cookout.  They were testing wing recipes for Hot Wing Fest next weekend, and we were happy to provide feedback.  The 24 oz. PBRs never materialized but the 12 oz. cans were just fine with me.  Thanks for a great evening.

Speaking of Hot Wing Fest… the wing/BBQ team I’m on, The Ques Brothers, will be competing as well.  We’ve got an awesome sponsor lined up and it should be a great day.  It starts at 10 AM, which means I’m gonna have to go to bed at a reasonable hour next Friday night so I can be there.

Time to set up some more affiliate marketing stuff, so I’ll hit Publish now.  Hmmm this is work that could be done at the Second Street Branch Office, perhaps I should pack up a computer in the backpack.

Have you voted for Google Fiber and an inner-city skate park for Memphis today? Use the links at the top of my blog’s right sidebar.

In the news: One of the greatest Supreme Court Justices of modern times, John Paul Stevens, is retiring. More here.

Downtown Memphis is participating in national Bike to Work Day Friday, May 21. Those who live and work Downtown are invited to rediscover the bike as a means of transportation on that day. More details here.

A helicopter will be placing AC units on the top of One Commerce Square tomorrow at 7 AM. So I guess I can forget about sleeping late on a Saturday. Well, either that or I need to get so wasted tonight that I don’t even hear the helicopter, which is what happened the last time it showed up.

After work tonight I’m attending the Spirit of Memphis pep rally in Handy Park from 5:30 to 7. Speeches by Roby Williams and Kevin Kane, footage of old and new Beale, and a ceremony inducting R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough onto Beale’s Brass Note Walk of Fame. Come out and celebrate Memphis!

After that I gotta head to the Saucer for one beer… I’ve got to keep checking in, now that I know Venus is trying to steal the mayorship from me on Foursquare.

After that I’m heading to South Main for a party in friends’ parking lot. They told me about it last week. “Yeah we’re going to have a big cookout and maybe even live music,” they said. “You should come down.”

“Sounds like fun, I may have to swing by,” I thought.

“We’re cooking a bunch of wings,” they told me. “We have a team in Hot Wing Fest on the 17th, and we need to get feedback on wing recipes.”

“Sounds good, maybe I’ll head down to South Main,” I thought. (I also thought, “Free food? Wonder if the Nuh-Uh Girl will show up.”)

Then they told me, “We’re going to have PBR. 24 ounce tallboys from the cash & carry.”

I thought, “PBR TALLBOYS? I’M THERE!!!!”

So that’s the plan for the evening. Probably an additional stop after the cookout… not sure where.

I’ve discovered that Gmail is very helpful getting my taxes done. Since I own over 40 domains, I have domains and hosting accounts auto-renewing all throughout the year. It can be hard to round all those up, which of course I want to do, since they’re business expenses.

Here’s what I do… my domain e-mail account (paul@paulryburn.com) is forwarded to my Gmail address, simply because I find Gmail’s web interface superior to that of any standalone e-mail client I’ve tried. In Gmail you can apply labels to e-mails. So as Godaddy order confirmations come in, I simply label them “tax” with the current year (“tax09,” “tax10,” etc.) Then, when it comes time to compute business expenses related to hosting, I just pull up everything with that label. This saves me hours of digging through mail.

The second season of Jersey Shore has started filming. I hate to report on anything those morons do, but US Magazine ran a pic of JWoww on a treadmill, in a tube top. Gotta link to that. The article said she really didn’t want to do a second season, and was crying when she found out it had been picked up. So why didn’t she just quit then? I find it hard to believe they had multi-year contracts, and even if they did, I find it hard to believe a good lawyer couldn’t get her out of it.

The Red Rooster’s grand opening has been moved back to April 28th, according to their Facebook page.

I’ve added “vote” links to the “announcements” section in the upper right corner of my blog.  There you can vote once a day for Memphis in a poll for which city should get Google Fiber (until May 5); and for funding for an inner-city skate park that will benefit the kids and community in Binghampton.  I’ve had a couple of people ask me to ask people to vote for those every day – this way, I can do it without repeating myself in 30 blog posts.  I’ve also updated the countdown timer for Tube Top Month 2010 and put it back on the blog’s right sidebar.

Gonna get some cleaning done around the apartment, then decide whether I feel like going out… last non-rooftop Thursday for 4 1/2 months, so perhaps I should stay home and rest.

The Memphis Business Journal is reporting that the Center City Commission has narrowed its search for a new president to 20 candidates. The CCC has asked consulting firm HRS Inc. to proceed with round two of testing and interviewing. They hope to have the position filled, replacing the retiring Jeff Sanford, in June.

There are some names Downtowners will definitely recognize among the applicants who made the cut. They include

• Andy Kitsinger, current CCC director of planning and development
• Myron Lowery, City Council member and former Mayor Pro Tem of Memphis
• Paul Morris, shareholder at Martin, Tate, Morrow & Marston PC, and past chair of the CCC board of directors (as well as my across-the-hall neighbor at Number 10 for five years)
• Eric Robertson, current CCC chief administrative officer
• Jerome Rubin, former City Council member and current CCC VP of Operations
• “That Other Downtown Guy” Lee Warren, owner and principal of Around Downtown Consulting – you know him from the “Definitely Downtown!” TV show

There are also numerous candidates from economic development agencies in other major US cities. I can’t help rooting for one of the hometowners to get the job, but in the end, may the best candidate win. They’re going to have big shoes to walk in, given the job Jeff has done all these years.

Staying home tonight, probably.  I don’t feel like dealing with the storms that are headed this way.

Now that the application for Google Fiber has been submitted, Google is inviting everyone to go to the Google Fiber website and vote in the poll. Everyone please go there and vote for Memphis! You can vote once a day for the next 30 days – well, next 29 actually, because the poll started yesterday.

I received the Circa e-mail newsletter this morning, and in it was a note that the Main-Peabody Place monthly block parties will return Thursday, April 15! There are many award-winning restaurants and businesses on that block, and they team up to throw a party the third Thursday of the month when the weather’s nice. Parties are early (5:30-7:30) so you have plenty of time to hit the Peabody or Madison rooftop parties as well.

If you’re into wine, you’ll definitely want to stop by Circa at the block party. Select Reserve List wines, normally $80-120, will be 50% off. The 15th is the only night this special will be available. Chef John Bragg will be grilling on the patio with complimentary appetizers (free food? Wonder if the Nuh-Uh Girl will show up), and they’ll have $4 French Ice Picks in souvenir Circa stadium cups.

The e-mail newsletter also listed new additions to the menu, including Pan Roasted Halibut with Potato-Crab “Crush” and Roasted Pepper Coulis. Hey Air Traffic Mike, the halibut made it! If you’re not on their e-mail list, you also missed out on several more menu announcements, a wine dinner announcement, and a chance to win dinner for 2. Go to their website to sign up.

If you’re into Memphis history, set the DVR to record WKNO-TV Thursday night, April 22, at 9 PM. A new film called Citizens Not Subjects will discuss Boss Crump’s rule of Memphis, and how three people dared challenge him.

That’s all for now… not sure if I’ll go out tonight or not… I’ll see how the weather’s looking when I get home.