brooke maury

Evidently my blog has been down for 3 months. Nobody, including me, even noticed! As my friend Luke pointed out, “blogs are so 2005!” This place will likely be replaced with something less self-involved – maybe even a blog about YOU!

Oh! Wow. I was wondering when the next *awesome* dj evening @ olive was, and then I looked at my calendar, and guess what? It’s TONIGHT. So get your game face on, gather your pals and get on down to Olive. We get on at 8:30 or so. Don’t be confused by the new DJ names. Jeannie will still rock you, and I’ll throw down some valid distractions while she rests between sets. Don’t front. You know you want to show up.

If you absolutely *can’t* make it, we’ll be streaming our set live. Stay tuned for details.

Get up for the down stroke

We have a new sound system and fresh sounds to pump through them. Get up and get down to Olive this Friday, 6/19!

Because it's like that.

Becaue it's like that.

This Friday at Olive is a special one. Stitcher won a Webby People’s Choice award, and we are throwing down at Olive to celebrate. Add to that the usual fun @ Olive on the 3rd Friday of the month, and you have a perfect storm of fun! Come on down, meet the Stitcher team, have a drink, eat some pizza, listen to some music and generally enjoy yourself!

My wordpress software was updated a week or so ago, and evidently it resulted in some downtime on the blog. I’ve been traveling and on the move the last couple of weeks so I wasn’t able to attend to this problem. Now that I’m settled I’ve had some time to deal with the blog. It’s fixed and running again. Stay tuned for updates on my new Brooklyn digs and life and times as a PhD student in NY!

This weekend I did some housekeeping on the blog. I modified my theme to make it widget aware, and in the process made some other modifications. I’ve been using this theme (Connected) for years and I like it a lot. Now that I’ve made a lot of mods on the theme, I decided to rename it to Reconnected.

After making the theme widget aware, I removed all the hacked up content on the sidebar and rewrote all sidebar modules to be widgets that I can easily manage from the admin dashboard. I also added a few fun modules: the pretty recent listening widget from Last.FM replaces my hacked recent listening plugin; a cool album cloud from Last.FM; and a Google calendar that shows how I’m doing in my 30-day yoga challenge. I also fixed the search box so that it actually works.

In the process of this housecleaning project, I learned a little bit about writing widgets for WordPress, knowledge that may come in handy as I build tools for exploring and organizing music collections.

UPDATE 6/1/2008 Now that the yoga challenge is over, I’m no longer updating the calendar below. Thanks to everyone who contributed! We raised at least $223 for Larkin Street Youth Services. I’ll be sending out an email detailing how to make your donation.

On May 1st, I started a 30-day yoga challenge at my local Bikram yoga studio. The challenge is to try to improve one’s practice in some capacity and reach previously unmet goals. Some people will practice every day for 30 days, some will do a double session in the month, others will try not to look at the clock during practice for the entire month. I will try to practice 5+ times per week, which is already proving to be very challenging indeed. I went on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th, and had planned to go today, except when the time came around I had a headache and was pretty exhausted, so I took a nap instead. I woke up and was so hungry that I couldn’t resist eating, which means that I’m missing the 6:15 class as I write this.

I’ll skip today and try to move some stuff around tomorrow so that I can keep the challenge going. Doing a lot of yoga is of course very good for me, but the other reason I’m doing this is that it’s very good for others as well. As part of the challenge, we can raise money for a non-profit called Larkin Street Youth Services, which is dedicated to getting young people off the streets of San Francisco, getting them cleaned up and back in school or a vocational program.

I’m asking the reader(s) of this blog to donate as much as they want per yoga session that I complete. You can donate $1, $5, 50 cents, whatever you wish. Just send me an email or comment here to make a commitment, and I’ll keep track of what you owe.

Alternatively, if you choose to just donate a lump sum, that’s fine also. Checks should be made payable to Larkin Street Youth Services, and if you enclose a self-addressed envelope with your check, I’ll send back a receipt for tax purposes.

If you have any questions about the program, visit the website, or ask me directly. And if you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine too. I’ll be keeping the above calendar up to date, so check back to monitor my progress!

Wikio Badge

Wikio recently ranked this blog as number #291 for Music blogs! Yay! Thanks to my loyal readership (Jeannie) for all of your dedicated work. C’mon Jeannie, let’s get this bad boy up to 289!

Today (4/16/2008), I’ll be posting over on my favorite community blog, The Great Whatsit. The post will be available at 8:00AM EST, so way before you west coast suckers wake up.

Enjoy!

Happy Tax Day kids! Who feels like this?