I have found my graceland, and guess where…

Check out the new “Gateway of Champions” at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. It honors all the past gator football greats while I think it will seriously help in recruiting for the future. I smell a road trip!

The sexiest blog on the web!

Alaina, my beautiful bride-to-be, has finally joined the blogosphere. Check her out at alainafaith.wordpress.com

My Visit to the Good People Brewery

So at the Magic City Brewfest this year, I met some good people. Specifically, I met THE Good People from the aptly titled Good People Brewing Company. They are Alabama’s newest beer brewing outfit, and they are setup right in downtown Birmingham. Their brown ale was at the festival, and Stuart Carter (Free the Hops President) called it the best he had had of that style. In passing, one of the Good People told me I should stop by the brewery sometime. There was an email waiting for him the next morning to take him up on it. Careful what you offer me, folks. I will come-a collectin.

Anyway, GP’s Michael met us downtown and walked us into their 5 Points Brewery setup. For those who don’t know, if you walk just past the 5 Points Grill, there is a sign with their name on it over a giant window looking into the second story of their brewing equipment. Read more after the jump….

My next car

GM announced today that it is sending the volt into production and will release it in 2010. The volt is a snazzy looking car that runs on electricity. That’s right, electricity. I have to admit, in reading the above linked article, I was like a kid reading a comic book. I couldn’t get enough.

I have often said I wanted to get the new camaro when in comes out (whenever that is), but I think this may override that as my new dream car.

Here is the breakdown:

The engine is electric, and can drive 40 miles on it’s own with no gas. A gas generator kicks in after that, and can take you aprox 400 more miles. News reports say this equates to giving you 150 miles per gallon of gas. Yeah.

Think of how much of a middle finger this is to the status quo… While everyone else gripes but doesn’t do anything about gas prices, you are sitting here beating the system. Wanna go on a long trip? A 600 mile drive will cost you 4 gallons of gas. Most people live than 40 miles from work, meaning your daily commute can be gasless. And according to gm-volt.com, it will only cost an approximate 85 cents to $1.35 to charge up.

Wow.

Free The Hops: The Documentary

Finally, the Free The Hops Documentary is online. I enjoyed watching this at the IMAX last month, and now we can all enjoy it on youtube. To the talented UAB students who put it on: a hundred beers to you, sirs.

This is a great summary on what Free The Hops is about, and where it came from. Enjoy!

Oh, and see you at the BREWFEST THIS WEEKEND!! MagicCityBrewfest.com

Festival Season is upon us!

My favorite time of year is upon us.. (ok so, fall is awesome for football, summer is awesome for beaches, and winter is awesome for Christmas but…) Spring is festival season in Birmingham, so here are a few things I am looking forward to doing over the next few months…

First off, my favorite: THE MAGIC CITY BREWFEST – May 31 & June 1 at Sloss. – Over 250 beers and all the food you can grab, set to the tune of some great music. Last years festival was a blast… check out www.magiccitybrewfest.com … As a proud member of Free The Hops, I hope you can come out and enjoy this while helping us fund the fight against outdated beer laws in Alabama.

Next: Do Dah Day. – Dogs take over Caldwell Park in downtown Bham. Chloe had a blast last year. www.dodahday.org

The Buck Creek Festival in Helena. A very laid back affair around the creek in old town, complete with a rubber ducky race down the water fall. Too chill to miss. www.buckcreekfestival.com

City Stages – A pretty cool lineup this year… www.citystages.org

The Crawfish Boil – An AWESOME music lineup… Candlebox, 3 Doors Down, Seether, Flo Rida, T Pain, Gavin Degraw, and Fergie. Wow! www.schaeffercrawfishboil.com

And, although it isn’t a festival, the Farmer’s Market on Saturday’s at Pepper Place. So cool.. homemade ice cream, Okafes Coffee!!!, fresh produce, tastey baked goods, and a really cool atmosphere. www.pepperplacemarket.com

Did I miss any? I know there are others….

Death Love and Beer

Haven’t posted in a week or two (dang you, life! Getting in the way of me blogging!) but I thought I would feed you a quick update.

Free The Hops had an awesome write up in the Montgomery Advertiser last weekend. If you are not aware of Free The Hops or where the gourmet beer movement in Alabama stands, here is your chance to catch up.

I am walking in the March of Dimes’ March for Babies this weekend… if you would like to donate to, you know, save freakin babies… that would be awesome… Donate here!

Also, Slamwire did the Magic City Brewfest website this year. Check it out. I am also working with the festival, so if you don’t know about it, check out the website and come out for the best beer and food Alabama has to offer.

And on a personal note, poison oak sucks… if you see the dreaded leaves of three… run like hell. I’m serious.

Finally, enjoy my new favorite song of the moment… Ludo – Love Me Dead

Pandora is the best web 2.0 application yet.

Most of you have probably heard of Pandora, the radio-ish music site based on “the music genome” project that lets you stream music over the web for free. Many other sites let you do that (grooveshark!!) , but none as easily, or as ACCURATE as pandora.

The genome project game them a great way to classify music as if it was DNA, allowing them to predict what songs you will like based on songs you have gave the thumbs up to. Yahoo Music did this also, but it is no where NEAR as accurate as Pandora. And yahoo has ads if you don’t pay.

The thing I like most about Pandora is the fact that it appeals to EVERYONE. No one will look at this and go “what good is that?” Almost everyone loves some type of music, and the prospect of finding more that you will like is a universal appeal. Facebook is great, myspace is huge, people love blogs and twitter… but no web 2.0 development is as universally appealing as pandora.

Check out some of my stations that it created me, based on songs I like:

Freeing the Hops

I have been involved with the Free the Hops organization for a year now. For those who don’t know what Free The Hops is about (from our FTH website):

Free The Hops | Alabamians For Specialty Beer (FTH) is a
grassroots, non-profit organization whose mission is to help bring the
highest quality beers in the world to Alabama. Commonly referred to as
craft beers due to the skill and artistry required to brew them, they
are also appropriately classified as specialty or gourmet.
….

The world’s finest and most expensive beers are prohibited in Alabama
as result of the state’s current alcohol by volume (ABV) and container
size limits for beer. Beverages defined as beer under Alabama law
can contain no more than 6% alcohol by volume (ABV) and can be sold in
containers no larger than 16 ounces.

Meanwhile beverages defined as
wine can contain up to 24% ABV and have no container size restrictions.

(Note: Under Alabama law, wine is further divided into “table wine” which has a limit of

14.9% ABV and “fortified wine” which has a limit of 24% ABV.)

Likewise, liquor can contain up to 100% ABV and can be sold in any size
container under Alabama law.

Well,

just a few weeks ago, the first step in HB195 (the Gourmet Beer Bill in the House of Rep’s in Alabama) passed. The next step is to pass the other house, then be signed by the Governor. But we didn’t pass without a spirited debate. I am not going to say anything about the video below other than this:

1. It’s highlights of this years debates

2. it contains serious “jumping to conclusion” by bible thumpers who want us to return to prohibition

3. And at exactly 5:33 into the clip, Rep. Alvin Holmes of Montgomery is un-freakin-believable. How someone like that can get elected to the State house is beyond me. It’s an embarrassment to the state of Alabama.

enjoy…

Finally, a use for twitter.

Ok, I admit it. I have been a serious hater on twitter. All the geeks love it, but I just didn’t get it. Even techcrunch, which rarely becomes fanboys of anything, has PAGES of posts on the twitter, tweets and twittering. But or me, I just didn’t see the value in it. I mean, its just the latest evolution of the AIM away message. Its a short blurb that you spit out of your mind so that others can see it. It could be your mood, where you’re going, what you’re doing… anything.

And don’t get me wrong, I loved the AIM away message back in college, and I have been an avid facebook status updater for a while now. But I didn’t see the value in twitter, which was basically facebook-type status updates that sat in a stand alone site with no connection to the network of people I had built on other social networks. Why would I use that when I can just use status updates on facebook and people would actually see them?

But I finally found a use for twitter (at least for me). Twitter has taken the world by storm because of it’s ease of use with mobile devices. Thanks to twitter, I can now post simultaneous updates to my facebook status, to my blog, on my myspace page, and on my twitter page. How? Lemme show ya…

I send all of my updates (or tweets, to twitter addicts) to twitter. That updates my twitter page.

Then, my facebook status is updated using the twittersync facebook app. Blamo. Now, my friends see what I just said.

Next, I have a twitter badge on my blog and myspace page. Now its updated there too!

And best yet, you can tweet using google talk, but IMing twitter@twitter.com. G talk has a rocking good app for my blackberry, so I can now update twitter, facebook, my blog, and myspace, all with 3 clicks.

So for those who follow my updates, this is why you will see some strange ones, such as the ones last Friday night that I sent out, updating everyone on each of the great beers I was drinking at Hop Jacks in Pensacola. It wasn’t like I snuck away to a computer, I simply typed the update in 5 seconds while I stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to come back..

Its mobile applications like this that will be the next big wave of innovation on the internet. And this type of thing is catching on too. Robert Scoble blogged about how a huge party broke out at SXSW just because one guy twittered that he was going to start a party at a certain bar. He walks in a bar, whips out his phone, tweets that “the party is right here”, and people start flocking in. That, my friends, is the future.