www.chrisdarbro.com - Chris Darbro

yes ladies and gents, boys and girls, many years (im not disclosing how many )ago today, I was brought into this amazing, crazy world. (Thanks mom!) I feel truly blessed to have survived this long and be here today, and to have experienced some of the amazing things I’ve experienced, and meet and be part of the lives of those that mean the most to me, and even prouder of myself for anyone I’ve influenced or inspired to do something great in this world, one of my biggest daily goals.

I’m ever so thankful for my family, friends, and other acquaintences ive made over the years that I hold in high regard. But enough about me…         …or back to me in a way, more specifically, birthday gifts.

Im surely not expecting anything, but if anyone could, there is one gift that I ask you give if you can…

Donate to a children’s music charity. These have always been close to my heart, some of you have perhaps even seen me rocking my blue musicforall.org foundation wristband when im not wearing my winelibrary.tv ‘bringing the thunder’ wristband. Ive always been a big fan of children’s charities, and the idea of helping kids, kids who are brought into this world with little to nothing, or no way or possibility to chase after their hopes and dreams in life. But im big into children’s music charities specifically…

I’ve always been someone who’s a big believer in the power of music and what it can do for kids. It’s an escape from life’s troubles, it breeds creativity and fuels the imagination, engages the mind, which in turn makes for happier kids, and has also been shown to boost iq and receptiveness to new things, boost test scores, and more! And not just for kids persuing music related fields, but all around, math, science, etc. It increases the likelyhood to stay with school, and later persue college education.

The charities below do some amazing things in the area of music for kids. They create/start music programs in areas they dont exist or arent available for kids, and get instruments in the hands of kids in low-income families who cant afford them! They give kids lessons who cant afford them, and even provide music therapy for kids who have cancer and other rare diseases! How cool is that!?! Very cool!

So, without further ado, if you’re feeling kind and generous, in general or for my b-day, feel free to put it towards one of these amazing charities, so we can give amazing musical opportunities to kids!

The Guitar Center Music Foundation
https://www.guitarcentermusicfoundation.org/donate/index.cfm

Little Kids Rock Foundation
http://www.littlekidsrock.org/index.htm

The Harmony Project of Los Angeles
http://www.harmony-project.org/

The KEYS Program
http://www.keysprogram.org/

The Music For All Foundation
http://my.musicforall.org/donations/

MIMA Music
http://www.mimamusic.org/donate.htm

And if you’re not up for a children’s music charity, Any children’s charity of any sort is amazing too!!

-Chris

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!