Downtown Memphis Blog

Shot with my MinoHD.

www.twitter.com/downtownsig

I’ll try and update it often, though I’m not sure I see the point of twitter really.

A few things have been pissing me off, so I’ll just consolidate it into one big bitching, whining post. If you own a business downtown, read this over and over and over until it makes sense.

Hours of Operation

For the love of god, set some hours you can deal with and stick to them. It helps if they make sense. This isn’t a huge deal in the suburbs, but nothing makes me want to stomp a bag of kittens to death like walking a few blocks to a store to find they’re closed, despite their “Hours” sign saying they should be open. It’s not a matter of driving to the next store when you live downtown, it’s a matter of walking another half mile.

It helps if your hours make sense. Second Street Shopper, which is otherwise a great store, is trying to push the food from their deli, yet they were still locked up tight at 10:30 this morning. Good luck selling breakfast when you open at noon.

Maybe I’m a lunatic; scratch that, I’m certainly a lunatic, but knowing that nearly every restaurant downtown has first shift come in at 10-10:30, I’d probably open at 9 every day. Call me fucking crazy.

Website

Kinda ties in with the first one. There’s no excuse for not having a basic website. Fucking contact me and I’ll do it. It costs nothing for basic domain registration, web hosting, and maybe a wordpress blog or joomla front end. There’s no reason to not have a page with your contact info and hours of operation.

Yes, you can call and find this info, but it does fuckall if they’re closed.

Hello, endlessly ringing phone? Yes, I’d like to know when you open. Oh, what’s that? Ring ring? Well mighty fine! I’ll see you then!

With a basic, nearly free website, you can bang it into google and say “Oh, 9am, cool”.

PDF Menus

Jesus tittyfucking christ, please make your menu available in html form, or at the very least scan or photograph the physical menu and link to the jpg/png/gif/etc. I don’t want to download your menu and deal with acrobat reader to see your soup of the day. PDF is for sharing printable files. I’m not going to print your menu. I have no need to save it for posterity. At no point, after the zombie apocolypse, when the interwebtubes are forever gone and your website is no longer available, will I find myself going “Well if only they had made their menu available in PDF form, I would order from the remaining zombie staff”. Every time I do a clean install, it’s assholes like you that make me endure a 35MB download and post-install reboot to see your fucking menu. It enrages me. I want to throw a small child into a wood chipper whenever I encounter this dreaded format.  PDF is the worst thing since AIDS. Please stop. Please.

I’m sure I’ll have more to bitch about soon, but this covers the high notes for today. Fix your shit, you lazy fucks.

Added reviews of the Timbuk2 Classic Messenger bag, Arrested Development Box Set, and SwitchEasy Rebel iPhone case to my review site at SigSays.com.

You may now carry on.

And it’s damn cool, especially the iPhone app. Here’s some screens from my phone.

You can check out the desktop version for yourself at Google Maps.

Collected on the internet, otherwise I would give credit…

I could go on forever, but I assume you get the point.

So my questions is: What in the hell fuck? I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and assume that skittles, cheetos, McD’s, etc didn’t go to their nearest ghetto, find the goofiest looking motherfucker present, and say, “Soup dawg! I herd u lyke being tacky, so here’s some money to donk out yo ride with our product!”. This is where my confusion sets in.

I’ve no choice but to assume that these people did this to their automobile without compensation or persuasion. What exactly would motivate a person contemplating a new paint job to say “Hmmm, can you do a cheetos motiff? That would fucking pwn!”

Can anyone shed any light on this? I just refuse to believe that any major corporation would see this is a sound marketing strategy. I fail to even begin to understand the thought process involved in doing this to your car on your own free will. Help me. I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge, and there are very few things I can’t work out if given the facts. This utterly baffles me.

If you can help, email me.

Buck @ buck’s blog was talking about google getting serious about the social networking thing. They already have Orkut, I even made a Downtown Memphis Community, but they haven’t done much with it. That’s allegedly about to change.

Enough, seriously. Has the local news never seen the interwebs? Someone send them goatse.cx, so they aren’t so goddamn shocked by some chick’s titties.

www.mesh.com

Free service from Microsoft that allows you to remote desktop to any of your computers from anywhere and use it as if you were sitting in front of it.

Useful for playing loud music while I’m at work to annoying my girlfriend who’s sleeping at my apartment.

Also useful as you can copy and paste files from the remote computer to your 5GB of online storage, or to the computer you’re on now. In other words, you can never forget a file again, as long as it’s on a PC with Mesh and an internet connection.

Here’s a screenshot of “My computer” on my home computer, as seen from the Mesh interface on my EeePC. That’s my home desktop. I even used the snipping tool on my home PC to take the screenshot, then saved it to my home desktop, clicked “copy” and pasted it to the desktop. Pretty cool stuff, especially for free.

It gives you free 2 day shipping and $3.99 overnight on anything with no minimum order. I might check it out, can’t hurt to take advantage of the free month. Amazon Prime Offer