I typically stay away from politically charged topics on my blog…

I went vegetarian in 1999, 10 years ago. In that time I have basically become vegan for all intensive purposes, but I have never labeled myself anything other then a strict vegetarian. I chose to stop eating meat as a symbol of my allegiance with animal rights, and as an economic protest against the factory farming industry.

Just because I don’t eat meat, it doesn’t mean that I’m a Hippy. Hippies are pacifists, I enjoy fighting and I support direct action. Direct action is not protesting, it’s actually doing something about the problem, physically going out and getting involved. The A.L.F. (Animal Liberation Front), E.L.F (Earth Liberation Front) and Sea Shepherds are organizations that you may have heard about in the news. Often these groups are referred to as Eco-Terrorists by those who don’t agree with their actions.

Recently the Sea Shepherd’s have been in the public spotlight with the reality television series, “Whale Wars“. The series chronicles the Sea Shepard’s as they travel into Antarctic waters to do battle with Japanese whalers. Some of the Sea Shepherds actions include tangling whaling boats propellers with cords and rope to immortalize them in the water, throwing stink bombs onto whalers decks, and ramming whaling ships with their own. The show has received criticism from both sides of the debate on commercial whaling, but regardless of the stance, it has raised awareness of what is taking place in the southern ocean, and that there are people who really are willing to risk their life’s to make a change. Even if you aren’t a fan of animal rights, it’s hard to watch a whale that’s running away, get a giant metal spike slammed through it’s body and slowly bleed to death. Because of video like this being shown on “Whale Wars”, the Sea Shepherds are getting a lot of momentum and support behind them.

Last Saturday, in Riverside California there was an art show / fund raiser to support Sea Shepperd. I was expecting there to be some people there, but I was completely blown away by the volume of people that turned out to support the cause. It was great to see what a little positive media exposure could do for a group of outlaw “eco-terrorists”. I wish I had some money to drop on some of the awesome art work that was on display.

I first became aware of Sea Shepherd in the 90′s through the Hardcore music scene and a band Ignite. The singer, Zoli, was very active with the group and wrote a few songs about direct action

In Defense – “Education without action does nothing, Bulldozers broken down, destruction takes the day off, the tank is filled with dirt. Land locked and monkeywrenched…”.

I was happy to see that Zoli was at the event. I got to catch up with him for a moment. Hanging out with him unlocked a flood of memories that I had locked away.

The highlight of the evening was listening to the founder of Sea Shepherd, Captain Paul Watson, speak. He was on stage for about 30 minutes and spoke very frankly about the groups intentions and what they are doing to ramp up their efforts to defend the creatures of the sea. It was inspiring. I’m really looking forward to the next season of Whale Wars.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think its fitting to end this blog post with a portion of a song from one of my favorite bands, “Earth Crisis”

Ultramilitance

Legal channels have been exhausted.
Uncruel alternatives rejected.
Awareness created and ignored.
Direct action is the last recourse.
Ultramilitance, Ultramilitants.

Salvation of innocents.
Intensified resistance.
Flooded by sabotage, disabled whaling ships sink beneath the waves.
Strikes against roving murderers.
Through destruction, innocents persists…

…NOW THIS WAR HAS TWO SIDES!

I know that I don’t typically blog about my personal experiences anymore. for the last few years I have have turned this into a very tech oriented blog. I’m going to start breaking that mold and start posting about a wider subject matter. I think it will to help increase the frequency that I update this site, and because, well… I make the rules around here.

Last Saturday was something that I didn’t think would ever happen. I got to see the band Disembodied play a reunion show. It was the first time in 10 years that Disembodied had played California, and possibly one of the best shows I have ever seen.

Who is Disembodied?
Disembodied formed in 1995 in Minneapolis, MN. Disembodied had a devastating effect on the sound of hardcore. Introducing themselves as simply the heaviest band in hardcore and going way beyond. Disembodied disbanded in the late 90′s, later moving on to form the band Martyr AD. Disembodied was instrumental in creating the distinct metal/hardcore sound so prominent todays heavy music.

Seeing Disembodied play had been a dream of mine for a long time.I sang in the hardcore band xDEATHSTARx for several years, Disembodied was always sighted as one of our major influences. The brutal honesty and raw emotion pumped into their music was something that always attracted me to them. I’ll be the first to admit that their music isn’t for everyone, but for some reason is strikes a chord deep inside of me.

My friend Jav put a lot of work in getting Disembodied to play 2 nights at Chain Reaction in Anaheim Ca. I bought my tickets 6 months ahead of time and patiently waited for June 5th 2009.

Now I regularly go to shows (concerts), and I have literally seen thousands of bands play, and heard tens of thousands of songs performed. Most of the time it not memorable and blurs together. On June 5th, Disembodied played a set that I would rate as one of the best I have ever seen (top 5 easily), and is something that I wont seen forget. This show renewed my faith in the hardcore scene and brought out emotions in me that I thought were dead.

After being in retirement for 10 years they didn’t miss a beat. The vocals were just as sharp, and still emotion packed. The music was delivered perfectly and with the impact of a bomb. “Heavy” is a term thrown a lot in this genre of music. Disembodied defines what heavy is.

Here’s a video to gove you a sample of what the of the show was like.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I got this shirt at the show. Yes, it’s a goats head. Yes, I’m ok with that. Yes I have worn it to church.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All of these guys are really good friends of mine. I love my friends, I love music, I love the redlands music scene.

LoudSon.gs is a website that I recently threw together in my attempt to tighten my strangle hold on teh interwebz (by the way, I’m losing)

LoudSon.gs is a lyrics website that focuses on hard to find album artwork and lyrics, mostly for punk, hardcore and emo bands, but the door is open for all types of music.

On the technical site, the site is built using PHP, MySQL, and is the first site that I have built using the codeIgniter framework. There is also some code integration with amazon for the album art, along with some other code wizardry.

But isn’t the internet full of lyric sites already?

Yeah, it is, but none of them specialize in the kind of music that speaks to me, so I built one.

The project started out as something personal for myself in 2004, then became part of notpopular.com in 2005. The original version lived for years at notPopular.com/lyrics, and was build out of some really bad php code and used a really sketch database. Instead of taking it down, I allow it to live on, but all new additions get added to LoudSon.gs.

I also decided to do some different things with this site. In an attempt to make the domain name a bit more memorable, I bought a non .com domain, sort of like del.icio.us. For easy, and for n00bz, you can also get to the site from LoudSongs.com. I also used some SES (search engine safe) URLS. The CodeIgniter framwork made that really easy to do.

Overall, this was probably one if the funnest projects I have worked on in a while. It’s a real labor of love on my part. The site takes time every day to maintain, the only way I will ever mak money from the site is throught the google ads.

Music is a huge part of my life. You can see the “about section” of LoudSon.gs to read more about that. LoudSon.gs sums up a lot about me, code, the internet and music.

It finally happened after I added the new Anniversary album, I have over 100 Gigs of music in my iTunes!

I’m very strict when it comes to my music. Minimum 192 kbps. I’ve made posts before about how to create good mp3 files through iTunes.

I’m just excited to break the 100 gig mark. My iPhone only holds 16 gig, but it’s nice to know I can listen to music for over 45 days and never hear the same song twice!

Excess, what’s that!

My very good friend Steve Berg, challenged me to find a pre-release of Judas Priest’s new album,  Nostradamus, in under an hour.  The wager was simple, a 300 word or more post on the losers blog in honor of the winner. After searching high and low on the underside of the web, my usual music download locations were fruitless. I accept my lose Steve. Epic records has thwarted my efforts… this time.

Steve, we both agree that pictures are worth more then words, so I present the following picture in your honor.

LOLz!

If you use iTunes while your computer is hooked to a network (work, dorms, and coffee shops are good examples), you can share your iTunes with other people. This feature has been around for a long time in iTunes. Something that isn’t included is the ability to see how many, and who is listening to your music.

I did a little bit of searching an found that iTunes uses port 3689 to share music on. Reaching back into my DOS days, I came up with this:

press the windows key + r
enter “cmd” and press enter
at the prompt type:
netstat | find “:3689″

you will get a listing of all the computers connected to your iTunes. A useless but interesting trick.

If you are running a mac, I’m sure you can do the same thing but with grep.

My friend “Florida” came up with an awesome idea for haloween, Super Mario Bros.! sure we arnt the first ones to ever do it but it would be a cheap costume and fun to wear.

We got the overalls the shirts, some hats, gloves, mustaches, and paint. The hardest part was painting the hats, but even that wasnt to hard to pull off.

What would Halloween be without a hardcore Halloween show? We went as the Super Mario Bros. to see our friends bands play, Blood stands still, hammerfist, I am Strong, Impending doom, Sleeping Giant, and xDEATHSTARx.

The show was awesome. We had a great time as the Mario Brothers…

Being Mario was by far the funnest Halloween costume I have ever had in my life. I cant wait for the Nintendo WII!

UPDATED (11/03/08):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.