The Mara! performance at Brown's Mart Theatre on Friday, 8 June, was wonderful.

Great music, great (though small) audience too.

 It would be worth hosting them again next time they plan to pass through Darwin.

 Need to pick a better time, though, and perhaps do a lot more marketing.

Yesterday, at the "Key Arts Organisations" meeting hosted by Arts NT at Frog Hollow, the importance of the NT arts sector lobbying Ministers and members of the Legislative Assembly was discussed. I mentioned that we only had to lobby 13 government members and that was a relatively easier task compared to our peers' who had to lobby many more members of Parliaments in the other jurisdictions.

I wasn't sure about the number "13" and said so at the meeting. I've since done more homework and realised that the "13" comes from my memory of the first Labor government in the NT which came to power in 2001; they had 13 members then.

Here are the numbers for the current Assembly:

25 members
4 CLP
2 Independent
19 ALP
9 Cabinet members

Yes, there are more members to lobby, but still a relatively small number compared to other jurisdictions.

Big Day today, I thought as I went to bed at 3:00 AM after more work preparing for the Board Meeting and other things at Brown's Mart.

Things were somewhat quiet at the Office this morning; installed printer drivers on Anna's computer, troubleshooted the old server; talked to Glen Chandler about restoring the wooden outdoor furniture in the courtyard (and many other things, including setting a Darwin Choir of Hard Knocks and possibly something to do with the Botanic Garden and an Enchanted Multicultural Garden at Manunda Terrace School in Karama).

I've set up Brown's Mart's web site using Drupal, a powerful and popular content management system (CMS). Drupal is a popular system used by many organisations around the world (see http://www.drupalsites.net/). I've used other content management systems previously, including Joomla for the Darwin Fringe web site, but Drupal has appealed to me recently because its possible to start with a clean, basic feature set then expand from there with many, many modules and add-ons.

Some of the modules available for Drupal will be very useful for Brown's Mart; CiviCRM, for example, is a powerful customer relations management system designed specifically for non-profit organisations. Drupal also has the Content Creation Kit (CCK) module that allows you to build your own content management interface to handle customised content management needs.