As a small business owner, I get solicited for a lot of “Link Exchange” services. I don’t respond to these emails, but I was feeling pretty good this morning and thought I might give “Steve” a few pointers for the next guy he tries to bother.

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Here’s the email “Steve” sent me…
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Hi,

We have brochure,icon and Logo related sites with more Unique visitors per month and less than 80k alexa kindly let me know would you be interested to getting text ad space from us. Which will be very useful for your sites to rank better in search engines.

Regards,
Steve

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And here is my reply…
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Steve,

Thanks for getting in touch with us! Unfortunately, due to your terrible grammar and punctuation (along with the service you provide being worthless to us), we’ll have to forgo any business doings with you.

Tell Alexa that she doesn’t know us and to stop wasting (y)our time.

Till You Bother Us Again,
Always Creative

WeAreAlways.com
979.446.0578 (office)

Back in the winter, I took a road trip with a few friends (Dave, Eric, Donald) from Seattle to San Diego. I recorded quite a bit of footage along the way and slowly started to edit it together. My friends made me premiere it a little prematurely on my birthday, we all huddled around the computer at my house and watched the unfinished product.

Eventually I got the video to place that I could consider it done, but the work didn’t stop there. I spent a few hours in iDVD setting up the scene selection menu. After the DVD was finalized, I enlisted the help of Roby to design the DVD packaging.

With everything done, I burned 4 copies (one for each of us that went on the trip) and headed to Humble for the real premiere. We watched the final movie at Donald and Greg’s house during a crawfish boil they threw a few weekends ago.

Now that the dust has settled, I’m putting the video up on the internet in small chunks. This is the first Webisode and it takes you through the first night of the trip in Seattle and across a ferry the next day. I’m going to try to upload one a week until I get through the whole movie (maybe 6 or 7 weeks). So keep checking back for the next one.

A few weekends ago, Greg Power (in celebration of his brother Donald being in town from Canada) threw a crawfish boil in his backyard. We played a little football between sessions of eating spicy food.

Grace managed to snap a pretty sweet action shot of Eric running with the football. Roby and I doubled teamed the image to make it look like a vintage Topps trading card. You can see the card we mimicked to the right. You may notice Eric plays for Crescent City, a very small town we slept in while on our road trip last winter.

One of the many benefits of being friends with engineers is when a good idea pops up, implementing that idea is literally easier done than said. What? We decided a few weeks ago that we were going to build a lake jump. To clear up any confusion about what a lake jump is, please refer to the video below.

Last Saturday, we had some guests come and visit from out of town. Donald wins the prize for coming from the furthest away (Canada). Along with Donald was Greg, Eric and Elizabeth. After a quick stop at Home Depot for plywood and 2×4s, we headed to Cliff’s house to put the ramp together.

We woke up early Sunday morning and headed out to the lake to put the ramp to the test. I didn’t quite have the nerve to try it (note: I could have been easily peer pressured into doing it). But, I did have the nerve to hold a video camera while everyone else jumped it.

The song I used is called “Little Secrets” by the band Passion Pit.

This cover was shot in our house. After I imported all the video into Final Cut Express, I exported out an image sequence (basically 7,000 still images). I then applied some effects using Photoshop using a batch process (I tell Photoshop to perform the same actions to each image in a folder). After that, I brought it back into Final Cut and stitched it back together.

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We shot this video back on Earth Day (whenever that was). We took a trip out to Matt’s (majority owner of Desired Hearts) lake house in Madisonville to do some fishing. Before the fishing began, we figured we’d use some good light and a nice dock to record this video. The sound definitely suffers because we didn’t have any microphones and the wind was blowing a bit. But we had fun doing it.

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This is an original song that Corben wrote for the band. It’s one of the few songs we play where I get to use the acoustic bass. Definitely a fun song to play and and sing harmonies.

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I haven’t been posting these videos to my blog, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been happening. Here’s a sweet little number from the mid-nineties.

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So, we’re paying money to promote ourselves on YouTube. We’re starting off small and gonna see what happens. We’ve set a limit of $2 per day ($60 per month) and we’re paying around $0.10 per click (sometimes less). This evens out to somewhere around 720 plays for $60. Do you think it’s worth it?

Here’s the video we’re promoting, it’s an original called “The Estate”

::::::::::::::: The Estate :::::::::::::::

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We Finally got a major kink worked out of our home studio. The kink was major buzzing on the tracks that we couldn’t figure out. As it turns out, our Presonus Firestudio (a FireWire recording device with 8 amazing preamps) shipped out with the wrong software DVD (A.K.A. - NOT OUR FAULT / VERY FRUSTRATING!).

We’re still doing some tests to get everything figured out, so we decided to redo a cover we’ve done in the past. This is an acoustic cover of Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” Enjoy.

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