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Birmingham Restaurant Week, or How I learned to stop worrying and buy bigger pants

Ahh, Birmingham Restaurant Week. You came and went too quickly.

For 10 glorious days, restaurant-goers in one of the fattest states in America could gorge themselves on much better food.

We were still giving ourselves diabetes, but a much higher class of diabetes; the kind of diabetes that knows which fork to use first in restaurants like Bottega and makes snide remarks about English majors.

For $30, $20, or $10, average Joes could wander into the finest restaurants in Birmingham and walk out stuffed with three courses of goodness. Here's part one of the rundown on my extended week of gluttony:

The peaks and valleys of biking to work in Birmingham

In my own modest attempt to decrease my personal impact on the planet, I've taken to riding a bike to work instead of driving.

I figured, hey Alabama's among the top-50 most bicycle-friendly U.S. states, so why not pedal my way to work every day?

Like the city in which I live and work, there are a number of peaks and valleys associated with being a bicycle commuter. Here are but a few:

Peaks:

• Exercise, yo - Since I work online, and work out about 1/10 as often as I post on Twitter, most of my time is spent hollowing out the perfect indention in my chair at the office or the recliner in my living room. Riding the bike at least gets some blood circulating before and after my work day.

• It's a great way to wake up - It's like coffee, but on a bike. We all know that it's possible to get in your car and drive to work in a virtual stupor every day and rely on caffeinated beverages to jolt your heart into actively pumping blood through all your veins and arteries. It turns out, there's a better way to wake up. On days when I bike to work, I feel significantly more alert and can usually hold out until 10:30 or so before my first infusion of caffeine. That's progress.

Journalism ethics panel set for April 13 at The Birmingham News

The Alabama Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (of which I am currently president) is pleased to announce a panel discussion on journalism ethics to be held Tuesday, April 13 at The Birmingham News.

Organizing this panel was my first major effort as POTAPCOSPJ (President of the Alabama Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists), and the panel should be excellent if I do say so myself.

The participants will be:

John Archibald: Columnist for The Birmingham News, and he's on Twitter.

Chris Pollone: Reporter for NBC13, WVTM Birmingham, who also Tweets.

Tanya Ott: News director for WBHM Birmingham, 90.3 FM.

The moderator will be Chris Roberts, assistant professor in journalism at the University of Alabama.

Roberts is about to release a book on journalism ethics, so he should have a lot of thought-provoking questions for the panel.

I'll be there as well to make a brief opening statement, and if you're at all interested in the ethics of modern journalism, you should be there too.

Journalism serves an important role in any democracy, and if you want to speak to the people who make it happen, come out and let your voice be heard.

UPDATE: We made this an event on Facebook, so if you plan on attending, RSVP yes.

The future of Web video on al.com?

Maybe the headline is a little over dramatic, but we're changing the way we do sports videos at al.com. I've been shooting and editing video there for two years now, but now we're focusing more on telling complete stories with our videos, as opposed to just showing game highlights or post-game interviews.

For example, check out this UAB basketball video I shot earlier this week:

UAB beats Tulsa 65-55 for first place in C-USA

Yes, that overly nasal voice you hear in the background is mine. That's another change that's going to take some getting used to for me. I don't especially like going on-camera or doing voice-overs but it's easy to see how the finished product is more watchable than just highlights with no context added.

Keep an eye open, as I'll be putting together some National Signing Day videos as well as a preview of the state high school wrestling tournament this week.

Why is Kyle Whitmire leaving the Birmingham Weekly?

I'm sure many of you were as shocked as I was to read today that Birmingham's own snarky little news hound, Kyle Whitmire is "parting ways" with his employer of nine years, Birmingham Weekly.

After all, the Weekly gave Whitmire the platform on which he conducted his weekly War on Dumb, and the feature was one of the paper's most popular columns.

Whitmire was on the cover of B Metro Magazine just this month for his efforts, and while it's hardly like winning Time's Man of the Year, you would figure it to be a nice boost for a writer's ego or a free weekly paper's visibility. (Side note, I'm open to any magazine that wants to profile me. Seriously)

So what happened? Having no inside information myself, and having only bumped into Whitmire a few times around town, I'll get to what I do best: wild speculation.