Laura

Texas state Rep. Jason Villalba of Dallas has written an official invitation to Huy Fong to relocate production of the much-loved spicy condiment to Texas. [ more › ]

The live, onstage event will stream online and include appearances from badass women like Amy Schumer, Alexa Chung, Emily Mortimer, the ladies of Orange Is The New Black and many others. [ more › ]

It’s that time of the month again…

Bitch Beer’s “Time of the Month” at Hi Hat Public House, that is.

And for our August celebration, we’ve got something pretty wild in store for you all.

That’s because we’re teaming up with the guys from Real Ale Brewing Company for a 2013 release of the spectacular Scots Gone Wild.  And as an homage to our wonderful hosts/ collaborators Hi Hat Public House, we’re turning the whole thing into a Wild Hat Party…See what we did there?

It’s all going down Thursday, August 22 at 8pm.

So come on out, sport your wildest fedora, fez, sombrero or stetson (or, ya know, a boring baseball cap) and receive 10% off your tab for the night.

The guys from Real Ale will be in the house to help us celebrate, and we’ll have special prizes for the wildest hats of the night!

RSVP on Facebook to let your friends know you’ll be there.

Hope to see you all there!

-Bitch Beer

UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

I have attended this event for the last two years, and it is always a blast!  This year, I’m on a team.  Get your tickets now and come to the event this Sunday!  Great food, drinks, raffle items and a really fun time.  From the Slow Food Website:

General admission includes our ‘Grub Crawl’ of tastings from more than twenty of Austin’s finest restaurants, happy hour-priced drinks at the bar, and the opportunity to see who wins our Grub Trivia competition. Slow Food members will receive five raffle tickets at the door, and raffle tickets will be available for all attendees for $1 each. Grub Trivia teams can be registered here: http://sfagrubtriviateams.eventbee.com (Team registration includes General admission for team members.)

Mark your calendars and make room in your bellies! Join Slow Food Austin for its annual event – the first Slow Food Austin Grub Trivia. Test your culinary chops and nom nom knowledge, enjoy a “grub crawl” of tastings from more than a dozen of Austin’s finest restaurants, find some local favorites on the bar menu where drinks will be happy hour-priced, win raffle prizes from local favorites and artisans, and watch a raucous halftime show with a hog butchering demo and live auction of the cuts.

We’ll also present our inaugural Snailblazer Award to a member of our food community who has made a significant impact for the cause of “Good, Clean, and Fair Food.”

Our Grub Crawl will include tastings from: Trace, Eden East, Benji’s Cantina, Lick, Easy Tiger, The Bonneville, Epicerie, Antonelli’s, Say laV, Pate Letelier, Noble Sandwich Co., Flour Bakery, Amity Bakery, Confituras, Blackbird Bakery, Max’s Wine Dive, Bootleg Coffee, Zhi Tea, Pogue Mahone Pickles, Princess & Moose’s Sister Bakery, The Red Wattle and Barton Springs Soda Company. 

Do you love our  Austin Urban Farms? They need our support right now and there is now an easy way to show your support.  Www.austinurbanfarms.org is now live and explains what the farms need to stay in business, and provides a way for you to sign up as a supporter.

For the second year in a row, I’ve planted tomatoes in February, and covered them on cold nights.  I don’t believe it ever froze at my house this winter, and the practice has paid off again, with lots of early tomatoes.  I have eaten lots of tomatoes, canned lots of crushed tomatoes, and made lots of salsa.  My larder is more than full with enough to last until next tomato season.  I will also freeze some before the season is over.

Fortunately, my anti-squirrel, anti-bird contraption worked, and I didn’t lose a single tomato to either.  I simply wrapped bird netting around a makeshift fence made from the foldable tomato cages.

So, today is June 16, 2013, and the summer heat has set in, and the stink bugs are just starting to appear in one of my tomato beds.   I’m good on tomatoes, so I’ve begun pulling up those plants that weren’t good producers, and those who appear to be done for the season.  It isn’t cost effective for me to continue to water, more than a couple of plants that will bear fruit for another month.  And, its hot, and gardening isn’t fun in this heat.   By the end of today, I’ll only have 2 -3 tomato plants in the ground; 2 hybrids that will march through this heat, seemingly unaffected, and one hearty heirloom that is still producing new fruit.  I’ve  come to the conclusion that planting early is the only way to go.

The tomatillos grew into hearty plants, formed their lanterns, then made very few tomatillos.  I will baby these through summer, and expect to be greatly rewarded in the fall.

The pepper bed is happy as can be and has given me lots of wonderful peppers.

I used some of these in salsa I canned yesterday, but will need to get creative to eat them all.  I will start pickling some next week.

The cucumber and watermelon beds are wild right now, and probably over crowded.  I’m literally tripping over cucumbers, that are well hidden under the big leaves.  Cucumber plants never stay in the bed, they creep over the sides and into the lawn/pathways.  It’s pretty fun finding cucumbers that I didn’t even know were there.

So far there is just one watermelon with any size.  I’m really crossing my fingers for Moon and Stars melons, because I’ve never seen one in person.

That’s the state of my garden as we head into the dog days of summer.  I learn something new every season, and its nice to have this blog to look back and compare from season to season.  Remember, if you want pumpkins for Halloween, you’ll need to plant seeds around July 4, which is quickly approaching.

Happy Gardening!