Hi. My name is Ben Markus, and I am a master's journalism student at the University of Florida. This is my first semester at UF, and so far, I really like Gainesville. This is also my first Web site so, please, bear with me.

If you couldn't tell already, my first and foremost passion is music, hence the music staff and treble clef logos at the top of my page. I intend for this site to be a place where folks who are unfamiliar with the majesty of music, well, live music anyways, can come and learn about what I think makes live music so darn awesome. I'm also going to include some stuff about me in here, for vanity's sake =)

First a little more about me. I love to play the guitar. In fact, I love playing the guitar so much that it can make doing homework, and other such important things difficult. I don't see this as a bad thing, though, it's just who I am. What else? I am from Miami and I am a life-long Miami Dolphins fan. That's football, for those of you who weren't sure. I love surfing, but have only surfed once; I took a lesson in Maui, Hawaii.

Union College, where I attended undergrad, is beautiful in the spring and absurdley cold in the winter. Temperatures below 0 are not uncommon. Winters are long too, lasting the better part of the year. However, New York springs and summers are always worth waiting for. It never gets uncomfortably hot in the summer, like it would in Arizona or Florida.

Here's a picture of my alma-mater, Union College, in Schenectady, NY. The building pictured is the Nott Memorial, the only 16-sided building in the western hemisphere.

This picture is courtesy of www.vu.union.edu/~greeks/index.html