www.chrisdarbro.com - Chris Darbro

Yeah, I know, what a self-serving post. But I saw something really cool today, and this was the only way I could think to remember to get one later. So, there’s this pixel art group, called eboy, that does really cool looking pixelated art. Im sure you’ve seen their stuff in many places in various print,tv,and online media. They’ve recently created a new piece of artwork that kind of sums up a lot of Los Angeles, but into a 3 block radius. The link to check it out is here, and I’m hoping that either someday I’ll have some cash to spend on it and get it framed for my apartment, or that someone will be kind enough to do that for me as a gift I’m always told i’m a tough person to shop for, I decided this will start to help make it a little easier.

I’ve also oddly enough been a fan of those big Maneki Neko good luck cats for a while. The first time I really noticed one I was walking by a shop in Chinatown in Los Angeles, and saw one, waving his paw up and down. What caught my attention most was the music playing in the background, and how it appeared he was waving his hand up and down to the beat, rocking out. It was then that I thought to myself “I MUST HAVE ONE!” So, one of those would make a good gift too, probably one that closely resembles this one. I know, these are weird gifts. Last week I was ranting about how cool it would be to own a uGobe Pleo Dinosaur. They’re just awesome. and you can modify/program/hack them to do other stuff, it’s just a cool piece of tech in my opinion, that’d go well with the other gems on my bookshelf at home, such as my lincoln logs, my simpsons movie memorabilia, my magnetic structure toys, and more. What can I say, im a kid at heart.

To all of you out there in intarwebland, Keep on a rockin’.

I went to Metal Skool last night (now known as Steel Panther) at the Key Club on Sunset Strip. I cant even begin to tell you how kick-ass it was. Some great 80’s hair band tunes, and celebrities in the crowd such as a player from the Dodgers, Dave Navarro, Scott Ian from Anthrax (who got up and played a song with the band) and one of my idols, Dave Grohl. With the band cranking out covers of Def Leppard, Guns N Roses, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Journey, and many more including a couple tracks of their own, the rock and roll vibe of the place was cranked at 11 at all times. Great Time, Great vibe, I highly recommend it if you’ve never been.

This past weekend I also went down to San Diego with some friends to attend BarCamp San Diego 3. I think we all had a lot of fun, and many good times were had. I gave a presentation with a friend of mine, Justus Boatright, about the OSX86Project, as well as gave my “Culinary Engineering”/Sandwich Talk, which is always well recieved. People looove food, who would have thought, eh? I also was asked to sit in on someone’s home studio/home audio recording talk, and answered some questions for the audience. Evidence of all this fun has been of course now uploaded and put in the gallery, as well as somewhere else…

Flickr.

I originally caved enough to get a flickr account during Barcamp LA 5, for the main purpose of just putting my shots of everyone on the FlickrWall that was setup. Most of you know I really love Gallery, but admittedly, it doesnt have the same social tagging/sharing features that Flickr does. On trying to figure out a way to have the best of both worlds, I came across Gallery2Flickr, a tool that Integrates into your Gallery2 install, and let’s you export your albums to flickr as sets, and vice versa as well! It’s been quite easy to use. The only problem ive run into so far with this hole process is that a basic flickr account only lets you have 3 sets and upload 100mb / month. So after some debate this weekend, I finally caved and decided to buy a Flickr Pro account ($24.95/yr), which gives you unlimited upload, sets, photo hosting, etc.. Glad I did though, everything between both is now synced up, all the past 8 years of personal pictures are out in the flickr world now.

There’s some embarrassing ones for sure, but I’ve gained a sense of humility about these things and my embarrassing moments from my youth dont bother me as much anymore, they molded me into who I am today. Also, because I uploaded this weekends pics first, THEN decided to upload everything I had in gallery, the recent pics are buried, and old ones are up front. Oh well, guess I’ll have to take more pics to upload to get the old ones off the front page.

I’ve still been twittering up a storm on all the latest happenings with me a few times a day, which you can always find over at http://www.twitter.com/rocknrollgeek . For those of you still unfamiliar with twitter, it’s a fun way to broadcast messages to your friends, (micro-blogging, basically) whether it be online or by sms. You sign up, tell it what friends of yours who use twitter you want to follow, and you receive their messages whenever they update. It works the other way as well, when your friends follow you, they receive anything you post or update. You can also direct message friends that follow you using twitter, so that you dont have to broadcast your message to everyone. It’s neat, and it’s an easy fun way to update my friends and my ramblings and thoughts and sightings and doings through out the day, without having to hunt down a computer to shoot out a blog on.

Still wanting to give this site a facelift, I’ve got some ideas in mind, it’s just getting the time to implement them that is the trick. Still working on it though…

Peace Out!