BBQ – Nothing to See Here

How WP affected me

Since everybody else is doing a blog post about how they got started with WordPress, figured I might as well give up my story too. Hey, a blogger’s gotta blog. 😉

Originally, this was a story about WordPress. But I’m not posting it on my WordPress blog, because as I wrote it, I found that this isn’t a story about how I use WordPress, as such. It’s a story about how using and working with and on WordPress has impacted my own life. So it’s on my personal blog. This may reduce the number of readers, but whatever. 🙂

This is long. So, click through the more link to read it.

Continue reading “How WP affected me”

Memphis BBQ Map

Paul posted a link to a damn useful map he found today, showing all the BBQ places in Memphis. Since I know some of my out of town friends would appreciate this information, I figured I’d copy it over to here:

View Larger Map

The creator of this map even color coded it. In his words: “Green I recommend without hesitation, Yellow I recommend but have at one time or another had less-than-stellar experiences or food, Red I don’t recommend at all, and Blue I’ve not visited…”

So there you go. I agree with his recommendations for the pitifully few places on that map that I know well. Hey, I don’t get out of downtown much. 🙂

BBQ Festival

So I haven’t gotten around to writing in a while, but I have an excuse. I’ve been extremely busy.

Last week was the Memphis in May World Championship BBQ Festival. This year, I joined the Ques Brothers team instead of just going to their tent and mooching off them. What this meant was a fair amount of work building the booth/tent/location, eating a lot of BBQ, drinking a lot of frosty beverage, and even bartending for a night.

While I didn’t manage to get the quality of pictures that Paul did, I did manage to snap a few shots on my cell phone here and there. You can find them on my Facebook page. For Paul’s large, large number of pictures, check his PicasaWeb page. You’ll find several of me drinking, dancing, and debauching the nights away.

The important news is that the team won third place in the shoulder competition. I tasted a bit of this prize winning shoulder, and it was easily the best pork I’ve ever had. Amazing stuff. Our head cook, Willie, got 12th last year in his first year in the festival, and then moved it on up to 3rd in only his second year. This is basically unheard of. Many teams go for 10 or more years without breaking into the top ten. So, major props to the cook. And if you’re in Chicago, go try his restaurant and tell him the Ques Brothers sent you, and congratulate him on his victory.

Whole body pain

Is this some sort of consequence of being 30 again? This post-drinking weekend whole body pain thing? Because if it is, then I’m going to have to start researching high quality medications again. My ankle is hurt, the muscles in my back are strained, I can’t turn my neck… all because of the music festival.

To make it even more fun, my A/C and icemaker both chose this weekend to stop working for no appearant reason. So it was like 85 in my apartment all weekend. That tended to drive us outside and drink, though, so in that respect it wasn’t so bad. I’ve fixed the icemaker now, they’re fixing the A/C today.

Anyway, it was a good show. I enjoyed Cake and Blues Traveller a lot. Yellowcard was surprisingly good when they did a Weezer cover. I sat around the Blues Tent for a few hours on Sunday and enjoyed some beer and blues from several artists as well. Also ate a lot of BBQ. So it was good weekend in that respect. Beale Street was fun and had a lot of interesting characters. One dude we saw walking around dressed up as Gene Simmons ended up on the front page of the Sunday paper.

So it was fun. But I still need to find drugs.

30boxes Widget

Narendra Rocherolle asked me to convert the Google Calendar widget into a 30boxes capable widget. No problem, it only took like 10 minutes.

So if you use 30boxes and want a nice and simple WordPress Widget for displaying events on your calendar, well, here you go: 30boxes Widget

This is, of course, a first stab at it only. I can and probably will add more functionality to it (like start and end dates). But that can wait until later. Right now I need BBQ!