Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

As many of you know... the fact that I have a red leather #8 jacket and a life-sized cardboard cutout of a guy in a Sharpie uniform in my basement shows just how much I don't like racing. That's why it pains me so much to have to go to Irwin training this October. Yep... 2 days of training, a trip to Jack's place , being forced to watch the Busch series race on Friday night and then being tortured by being dragged to the inside of the track to watch the Cup series race. Oh, woes me. Whatever shall I do? I suppose I'll be forced to enjoy myself, grab some markers (one of Jamie's other sponsors), get as many autographs as I can and fill up a few gigs of SD cards with photographs. I think their mechanics may be better than what my son did for them, but I'll get a chance to see firsthand now. I suppose that's the price of selling a lot of Irwin Tools online. I'll just have to do what I can about enjoying the experience... since I wouldn't ever want to.....

Coming up in San Jose, I'll be speaking at 2 sessions at the annual Search Engine Strategies event. Yes, only 2 this time. It's sort of like a vacation compared to the past few times. Both of the sessions I'll be doing will be on Wednesday, August 9th. Shopping Search Tactics This was the original panel I started on in Feb of 2005. We're going to be making some big changes to the content, and we're even dropping one speaker entirely. (Ok, so she refused to work with us any more... or maybe it was just getting to be too far out of what she's involved with now... you make the call). We've been working on making the presentations more of one coherent thought among 3 speakers, so it should be a much more fluid panel than it's been the past few times. In any case, it's my 5th time on this panel and it's always fun... not to mention it makes me look at our stats again and see what changes have come out recently. Retailer SEM Tactics - 1:30 pm This on...