Welcome to dKurzius.com: Home of Dan K, DJ and Web Developer based in Atlanta Georgia

Bright Futures Needs Your Help
February 28, 2006

Tim and friends over at Reformation are hosting a special Benefit this Thursday to help raise money for Bright Futures Atlanta (site is slow to load, please be patient). Through art, music and other creative outlets, Bright Futures has done a lot to present positive activities to children often influenced by the dark side of inner city life.

The Organization:
Bright Futures Atlanta founded in 2002, provides unique educational, social and spiritual opportunities for adolescents and their families of the Grove Park neighborhood, an inner-city community in Atlanta, Georgia.

As a way to break the cycle of too-early parenthood, glorification of criminality, and criticism of academic achievement, a year-round program of activities, including an after-school program, summer day camps, a youth-led community outreach program, and other spiritual and physical activities, offer an environment conducive to learning for the physical as well as spiritual growth of approximately 30 of the community's middle school-aged children. Through these activities, Bright Futures hopes to achieve its goal of helping to end the cycle of poverty, violence, and low self-esteem of its community.

The Event:

For this month's "Paint In the Pods^TM" Paint installation, we are offering pieces from this student population in a wonderful "Price Pods". Each pod will offer different pricing categories ranging from $5 - $200. All proceeds will go directly to benefit Bright Future’s day to day operations, which include daily meals, transportation home, art materials and field trips.

The Location:
"Paint In the Pods^TM"
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
7 to 10 p.m.
The Sun Dial Restaurant, Bar & View

This is a great cause, so if you're in and around the Atlanta area this week, I highly recommend you check this out! If you're not in the area, donantions to Bright Futures can always be submitted through their website.

Slip, Sliding, Oh My Gosh!
February 22, 2006

Slip
I just got back in town from a relaxing snowboarding trip in the mountains of North Carolina, the Sugar/Beech area to be exact. What a great time that was, the weather was awesome and we managed to get 6 inches of fresh powder while up there. Pictures coming soon...

Sliding
On the music front, Meegy and I caught the She Wants Revenge show last night at The Earl in East Atlanta. Another very memorable show! Concerts lately have been a blast, Block Party last summer was jamming, Depeche Mode in the fall took me back and now I can't get She Wants Revenge out of my iTunes rotation.

The SWR vocals remind me of Joy Division's front man Ian Curtis (R.I.P.), then on stage, the leader singer exhibits some of Prince's mannerisms. The music itself is deep/dark/funky/dramatic/moody and draws from all kinds of 80's and 90's influences. Everything from Public Enemy, to Italo Disco producers such as Giorgio Moroder, to Chicago House, to modern electronic artists. Very interesting stuff, they are coming back through Atlanta end of March, so I'll have to catch them again.

Oh My Gosh!
It was announced the other day that dB Software Giant Oracle recently tried to acquire open source super hero MySQL. Holy cow would that have been a bummer had that gone through. I'm sure Oracle wouldn't have killed off MySQL and it's open source nature, but still. While on the topic of MySQL, here's a great article that gives insight into MySQL's market share philosophy.

Tools of the trade
February 03, 2006

Everyone else seems to be blogging about it lately, so hey what the heck, you only live once right. Here's a list of all the web applications and software I couldn't live without.

When in the studio making tracks or recording DJ sets, Ableton, Audacity, Logic Audio, TRAKTOR, etc. Even though I mention software in regards to DJing, you still can't beat the feel and sound of real vinyl.
Playing music while working, iTunes. That was a tough one to guess eh.
Editing code, Homesite when on PC, Vi or TextWrangler when on Mac. Homesite is pretty much unsupported these days, which is a shame in my opinion.
Working with creative files/general graphics, Fireworks.
Access to a terminal/Shell, when not on my PowerBook, SecureCRT or PuTTY.
Managing server files via SFTP, CuteFTP Professional on PC and Transmit on Mac.
Kicking around on the Internet, Fire "I love Tab Browsing" Fox.
Making sure the lights don't get turned off, Quickbooks.
When I do have to chat with folks, Gaim.
Sending email newsletters, MailChimp, of course :)
Knowledgebase and/or customer service ticketing, Timpani.
Reading RSS feeds, Bloglines.
Tracking development tickets/bugs, Bugzy.
Time tracking, PunchyTime.

Hmm, that's about all that I can think of at the moment, I'll update this post if anythig else comes to mind.

At some point I'll have to post a list of tools/software I wish I could find. Already I could use a good to-do list manager. I've tried a couple of tools that would be considered popular and I honestly wasn't impressed. Atleast I didn't find them any more helpful then having stacks of post it notes around my desk. Anyone out there have anything they could suggest?