Sorry for the lack of updates, I just haven’t had much to say.

We Are The Underground X Reaper Records Issue 1.5 coming soon…

One love, no peace.

I really haven’t had much to talk about lately.

I turned 22 the other week, and it kind of put me in a rut. I haven’t felt like doing anything productive at all. Young ‘Til I Die!

Been up all night / morning and most of today research printers. Somehow the idea of opening a print shop got thrown into the mix and now I can’t stop thinking about it. It doesn’t seem like an easy or cheap operation to set up, so a lot more planning and thinking will have to go into this idea. If you have any advice for me, please hit me up on AIM : onyourwayout !

Backtrack is playing Florida this upcoming week, so you should check them out for sure. I think the dates are something like Tallahassee, Orlando, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville? Something like that. I’ll be at the Jacksonville show on Monday, and hopefully will have some issues of We Are The Underground with me!

Oh yeah, the new Steel Nation record is out! You can stream it at http://doubleornothingrecords.bandcamp.com, and you can also buy the digital download from the site as well!

Not much else left to say.

Birthday has come and gone, and I am having a hard time getting out of this rut.

Steel Nation / Death Before Dishonor show tomorrow in Jacksonville, riding out solo. I’ll have copies of We Are The Underground Issue #1 with me, and I think some of the cassette tapes.

We finally got copies of our zine, We Are The Underground, online! You can buy it at our Big Cartel Store.

This issue has interviews with Foundation, MBER, GSouth, Brick, and Bracewar as well as a few vegan recipes, how-to’s, a top 5 from Dwid Helion, tons of graff flicks, and a ton of free items from Double Or Nothing Records, Ghetto Josh Records, and Hexed Clothing!

The zine also comes with We Are The Underground Comp Vol. 1, a cassette tape mix of the best hardcore bands Florida has to offer! Pick up the zine for $5 at our store and let us know what you think!

Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer will be receiving the Congressional Gold Medal from President Barack Obama tomorrow.

The medals are Congress’ highest expression of national appreciation “for distinguished achievements and contributions,” according to the House of Representatives Web site. “Each medal honors a particular individual, institution or event.”

Fuck that – let’s be real. It’s because the man is the mastermind behind the best drink known to mankind. For that, we salute you Mr. Palmer. May your legacy (and drink) live on forever.

A few months ago I read on my facebook friend feed that a person I used to hang with down in South Florida was going to volunteer with Sea Shepherd. For those who don’t know, the Sea Shepherd is part of the tv show Whale Wars, where a fleet of ships go out and try to stop illegal whaling in international waters. The show is pretty good, and it’s pretty cool that Chad is out there giving his time to help a good cause. The last time I saw Chad was randomly at Burning Fight in Chicago back in May.

Chad also posted a blog on the Sea Shepherd site – http://www.seashepherd.org/matilda/crew-blog/ - so make sure to read up kiddies.

Good luck Chad, have fun.

In Columbus, GA for the weekend. Gators game tonight at 6PM. Catch you guys on the flip-side.

22nd birthday in a few days…

Over at Contempt.me, the recent flavor of posts have been focused on automation, and why everyone should utilize automation to their fullest potential. In the latest post, Contempt has listed several ways to implement automation that had never even crossed my mind, including:

• Check your server load and send a SMS message to your cellphone alerting you if it goes above your specified threshold
• Send an SMS message to your cell-phone whenever a page of yours gets de-indexed
• Analyze your top 50 competitors and send you daily reports including where their links are coming from, what sites have snuck up into the top 50, what sites have made their way to the top 10 ranking, etc.

The possibilities when it comes to automation are endless. He even went over a situation where a woman he knew decided to use being implementing automation and wound up not needing the work of 2 employees anymore. In the end, she was saving $500 per month on employees she didn’t need anymore – she just turned over the tedious (yet important) tasks to macros / scripts.

Automation really is necessary if you want to stay at the top of the game, which leads me to my next point – programming skills are almost necessary. I say almost necessary because if you have enough cash laying around, you could just outsource whatever automation jobs you have in mind. My only qualm with this scenario is that in the future if you want to make any chances to the code, you might have a hard time doing it yourself and lets face it, the majority of the people who do outsource work these days aren’t quite reliable. The whole point in automation is to be able to set up scripts to take care of the tedious work, and what’s the point if you can’t quickly make changes on the fly to keep your business on the up and up?

Since reading Contempt’s latest blog post, I decided to bust out my old PHP / MySQL books and start refreshing. I haven’t really used PHP to my advantages the past few years, and a refresher course is what I need to start messing around again. I highly suggest everyone do the same. Come up with a good automation process, and if it’s good enough, start selling it off as a service (link building, “manual” directory submissions, etc.).

My BlackBerry calendar just reminded me that It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season 5 premiers tonight at 10PM. I got giddy like a 5 year old – no shame.