Geeking Out at Memphis Taproom

Weyer­bach­er Fireside
Orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by J T. Ramsay

I met Kei­th Fitzger­ald at Mem­phis Tap­room last night to talk about blogs, apps, and all the oth­er fun geek stuff our wives tell us “sounds fun” as we walk out the door.

Our won­der­ful con­ver­sa­tion was aid­ed and abet­ted by some deli­cious beer as the No Repeat Beer Week rolls on! I start­ed the night with a smoky Weyer­bach­er Fire­side (pic­tured) before delv­ing into a bunch of beefy IPAs. Here’s last night’s list:

• Weyer­bach­er Fireside
• Ander­son Val­ley 20th Anniver­sary Dou­ble IPA
• Bal­last Point Big Eye IPA
• Moy­lan’s Moy­lan­der Dou­ble IPA
• Bel­l’s Pale Ale

I took it easy since it was a school night, but I can assure you I had no dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting up this morn­ing for a quick three-mile run.

Our con­ver­sa­tion end­ed with an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about how RSS is the blood cours­ing through the veins of the Inter­net, yet we still find our­selves join­ing every known social media plat­form that comes down the pike. Isn’t RSS sup­posed to make our lives real­ly simple?

Speak­ing of which, we also chat­ted about Pitch­fork’s head­scratch­er of a redesign. It remind­ed me of Paper Thin Walls after it was redesigned and made ready for a social net­work that nev­er took off. Ouch. I told Kei­th that Pitch­fork should’ve looked to ESPN.com’s redesign and focused on their video pro­duc­tion. Why they’re still mar­ried to the con­cept of a music webzine escapes me.

Kei­th also shared his pet project with me: a run­ning app for the 3G iPhone that should blow Map­MyRun and its ilk out of the water. I’m con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a new iPhone just to beta test it against my Garmin watch. It sounds great for begin­ners and advanced run­ners alike. There’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for an iPhone app like this to meet the needs of Garmin cus­tomers who’re still wait­ing for Garmin to roll out their Mac features.

It was a great night for geek­ing out on beer and the Inter­net. I’m look­ing for­ward to work­ing with Kei­th on tweak­ing and adding fea­tures to Kens­ing­ton Blues over the next few weeks. To that end, can any­one rec­om­mend a clean, free, 2‑column Word­Press theme?