Anyone who's visited my personal website probably knows that it's pretty much just about telling my life story (filled with a ton of TMI, of course). Every thought I've had for the past 13 years is on here. Nearly every photo I've ever taken is here. Shit, if you want to know how much I slept, walked, or even what I weighed yesterday, it's all here.

But over the past couple years, I've been thinking a lot about experiences and contextual stories.

So, a lot of times after an event, I like to send around a link to the photos i took. But more and more, I'm finding that these photo albums don't capture everything. They're missing important thoughts, places visited, and many other things that tell the full story - at least from my perspective.

And now for a story about Josh and I geolocating a random YouTube video - and how I'm amazed by how easy it was.

So, this all starts with a conversation with my dad over the recent snowfall we've been having... He tells me about this Toro Power Shovel thing, which sorta looks like a vacuum sized, cheap snowblower. My dad said that he was super skeptical of this power shovel, but he tried it out and wound up being thoroughly impressed.

Soon after, I passed this info onto my buddy, Josh. He's gotten around 3 feet of snowfall this winter, so he was immediately interested. We discussed how dumb the power shovel looks but started reading reviews and looking for videos of it in action (such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJ8L…

About half of my readers are techie enough to share in this enthusiasm. If you're not in that group, just know that something awful is coming to an end. ...Like the end of of a war. The people - the big people, are killing all support of something horrendous. IE6.

Check out this wonderful email that I (and probably a lot of us) got.

Important Notice: Google Apps browser support

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for …

So for the past 8 years, the focus of this website has been on my blog.

Come to think of it, it seems like everyone's personal site basically follows that same model. We've all focused on our "blogs," however, after a few months/years, everyone seems to get bored with blogging. Don't get me wrong, I still like to blog - it's just something I don't do often...

So I started thinking about my web presence and where most of my online "footprint" lies these days. The answer is microblogging, photos, and geolocation. These are the things that my homepage should be reflecting.

So here it is... it's not the prettiest thing in the world, because as it turns out - I'm a horrible designer. But it's functional and seems to represent the …

I love maps. I've always loved maps. I love seeing the places I've been on a map, crossing places off, and planning where I'll go next.

When I was a little kid, my grandma always gave me a calendar/planner from my grandpa's company. It was one of those little yearly pocket calendar things the size of a checkbook, you know. Well every year, I immediately opened it up to the map page (in the back) and highlighted the states I had been to. I did the same with ski resort brochures - highlighting all the trails I'd conquered - wondering when I'd have the courage to highlight those black diamonds.

I really love the perspective that maps give you.

I've also always loved photos. When new people came to my house as a kid, I pulled …

Oh man, I love lists. I really do.

The "notes" section on my sidekick is always full of lists that I can add to while I'm out and about. One of those lists is always a "to buy" list... AKA, a "wish list"

It's really handy when I'm out with some money to spend and I think to myself, "which DVDs do I still need?" or "what was that random tool that I needed last week?" So, I quick whip out my... phone and BAM, I got it. Man I love notes.

But even though I love notes on my phone, they don't always stay up to date. Things like my Amazon wish list stay more up to date, because it's much easier to just click "add to wish list" or whatever. Man, I love wishlists. It makes giving and receiving so much easier. I don't have to buy …

I've been trying to get www.derekbrooks.com since I was in college. It's belonged to a canadian by the name of... wait for it - Derek Brooks since like 2001. I remember e-mailing a few times trying to get him to give it to me... but obviously that didn't work out.

At first derekbrooks.com was basically a resume for my like-named friend, then it became a wedding info site for family - and then - he apparently let it die. Maybe he took his wife's surname, ha.

So randomly last night, I was seeing how I did in search engine results by searching for broox, derek brooks, etc. I found some new broox sites, like kite aerial photography at brooxes.com and a sweet skateboard company at broox.it. So I then hopped over to joker.com to see …

Well, let me rephrase that. Mosso tries hard to be awesome - they just released a beta application without the beta label. Harper convinced me to join Mosso based primarily on the billing/user management system - which rules by the way... but it's really the only part that rules.

When I first joined Mosso, Harper and I got to have a conference with one of the founders of Mosso, Todd Morey. It went really well; we all liked each others input, and aside from a few minor provisioning bugs, it seemed like things would work out really nicely.

The fact of the matter is that my sites are not reliable. I know nothing about server management, but when I had my own box, I was down less in 2 years than I have been in 2 months with Mosso.

So, I haven't really blogged about life in over a month. It started out that I was overwhelmingly busy. It sucked. Then I became even busier.

So, now that I'm back down to semi-normal busy-ness again, let's bring everyone up to speed.

-Sometime back in March, Kari and I met some friends at a cabin in north eastern Iowa. It was a great time. No cell phone, no internet. I really want to do it again but with nicer weather... maybe summer, fall, even winter - just not muddy.
-I got kari's car all fixed up. New Tires, windshield, and fog light (she tailgates like none other).
-I "upgraded" to a Mosso account for my web sites, which I would slowly move off of my old server as time allowed. It was a dumb project to start in the …

Well, I was trying for a month without blogging, but this is an emergency blog which all began this morning with:

rich: so my outlook wont check my dick4d email
rich: anymore

Rich is a friend of mine whose websiteI host. I'm currently in the process of switching hosting companies from my dedicated box to a mosso account. However, half of my sites are still on the old server, which went down: reynoldsgrid.com, solidgrind.com, dick4d.com, aeongrey.com, desmoinesalive.com, qcalive.com, iowacityalive.com, cedarrapidsalive.com, victoreynolds.com, aylarexroth.com, n8than.net, dsmpaintball.com, and truespin-media.

A couple hours, calls, failed reboot attempts, and e-mails later, I get this e-mail: After running hardware tests on your …

omg. So I've been staying up past midnight every school night in the past couple weeks. It feels pretty good to be excited enough to work late again.

But that said... as soon as you see this article, you'll be looking at my site on a new server(s) at Mosso. I love/hate migrating sites. Everytime I do it I wind up fixing everything up to be nicer. So, if you notice anything broken, please let me know.

I completely changed the photos - urls, sizes, directories, etc. It was a mess, but now it's pretty. You should be able to browse them easier and I think google images will show me more love.

I'm pretty tired today. But... I've got much work to do.

Why do I do this to myself... I always get excited about too many things at once and try to take it all on.

So a couple months ago I started a book display for Kari. She had been wanting this one for her classroom that cost like $250, but I said we could easily build it for $50... So I did. Except, it's been sitting in Rico's shop for about a month. The only step left is to sand it, haha.

Instead of finishing it, I ripped up half the carpet in my basement to begin building a bar. It's still sitting there 1/4 finished and has already consumed a good chunk of my bonus check.

In the mean time, Nick and I started building a potentially large scale website - it's a huge project with a quick deadline. It's going to be pretty …

i have no idea what that means, but i think i'm the first person to ever say it. yesssss. Pron: zoh-my-gollerskates.

So anyway. Holy nuts. There are things going on in my heezy for sheezy.

Kari had her surgery last week. Lots of you saw the pics but didn't bother to read the article. And half of those that read the article but not Kari's didn't even understand what was going on... So to clarify, kari had a suspicious lump taken out of her neck last thursday. Surgery went well and initial inspection says that everything's kosher, but it's getting all biopsied up this week. We'll have the results next week.

At the same time, Kari's grandpa had some weird stuff going on. Irregular heartbeat, fluid in the chest, etc. It was …

Man, busy times... as usual.

Work has been insane lately, slightly annoying, but good... and insane. Outside of work has also been pretty nuts. I've got too many projects going on again. I'm building a book display for Kari, coding sites, planning for my next house project, etc.

Today, I wrote a pretty awesome plugin for laim aka aim lite (which is the best aim client ever). Anyway, my laim plugin just takes my twitter status and sets it as my away message at home. I hadn't been setting my aim away message in a really really long time. Now it'll be set, constantly accurate, and updateable from anywhere. I love this concept. Love it. Stalk me!

Besides that though, last weekend was nice. Kari and I went to Cedar Rapids …

Just so you guys know...

You are Iron Man Inventor. Businessman. Genius.
Iron Man 95% Green Lantern 70% The Flash 60% Superman 55% Spider-Man 50% Batman 50% Hulk 50% Catwoman 50% Supergirl 47% Robin 47% Wonder Woman 42%
Take the Superhero Personality Quiz

In the middle of cleaning/working on the house Sunday I decided that it'd be a good idea to start scanning all of my old photos. This kind of thing always happens to me when I start projects. However this time, my decision was retarded. It has completely consumed me ever since and now my house is a disaster. So I've scanned about 1,200 photos now...

Luckily half of my old pics were on advantix, because it was super easy to take them in to be turned digital. Thank you Advantix for your short/awesome life.

That said, you'll be seeing a bunch of old pics appear slowly on the site. Well, maybe you won't see them because I'm trying to backdate them accurately... but they'll be there for sure. Probably in one of these albums:
- /ph…

Remember back in college when you could find out what everyone was up to just by checking their AIM away message?

Like, "Ah, Kari's at Hilltop? Bet. I'm headin up town."

It was nice, real real nice. But now, if I wanna know where my peeps are, there are like 18 places to check. I got AIM, Google Talk, MySpace, Facebook, Web Sites, etc. So I have to result in sending 1000 text messages or phone calls. And at that, some of my friends would rather not even be found for hanging out, so then they may get annoyed by me asking, "what's up tonight?"

This all ruins one of the major strengths of the internet. There needs to be a way to tie all of this together. There needs to be a way to set a status for yourself for all of your …

Rico keeps telling me that he refreshes my homepage non-stop just to see what random photos will come up. So I decided to make it a little easier for him (and anyone else) to see random photos.

Just click on the blue "random bar" above the random photos on the right of the home page. Or go to /photos/random/

Also, I now display the number of comments for a given photo on the thumbnails... That way you know if there are comments before clicking.

wtf, are you speaking greece?

So this weekend was quick, fun, and productive.

Thursday we had a little wine tasting party, which was half lame, half fun. But regardless, it was interesting and I learned a few things. Hopefully some of my friends did too.

Friday my group at work checked out the Pioneer suite at Wells Fargo Arena to watch the Stars game. It was definitely fun. Somehow Pioneer made a rule where we're not allowed to drink in the suite, but when we got there, we were offered beer by a waitress. Then when we declined beer and ordered pop, we found that our fridge was full of beer... which was leftover from the last Pioneer party to have checked out the suite. Hmmm. Regardless, it was fun. Hopefully Truespin …

In July of 2005 i wanted to make my site nicer, more organized, and more fun. To do this I added Tagging. Tagging is this really nice feature used by popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Google, etc. Tags rule. They invoke a lot of coordination in a web site and are just fun.

I decided to use this to tag all my photos of people I have photos of. It was a huge task and took me a really long time, but in the end it turned out to be awesome. Everyone likes pictures of themselves, no matter how non-vain they claim to be. Also, everyone googles their name from time to time (no matter how non-vain you claim to be). So if I tag things nicely, my friends will probably find photos of themselves on my site.

Besides the advantages I've …