Well, for the past 2 years Memorial Day weekend has been insane. Each consisted of a two-city party tour. Cornell and Chicago in 2005, Dubuque and Iowa City in 2006. But this year, I think it may have happened a week early with a trip to Iowa City and Cornell.

But before I get into that, let me back track a few days to Wednesday when Zach, Minnis, and I went to the Code Brown show. Gaiden sounded amazing and Luke sounded one of the best I've heard. Either Vaudeville is finally figuring out how to run sound, or he's just getting a lot better - maybe both. The headliners from Deep Thinka records were good as well. I'm pretty sure they freestyled 3/4 of their set.

Ok. Back to the weekend.

Friday, Kari and I busted out to …

Mother's Day this year was pretty fun.

Friday Jeff came into town then we got sushi @ Taki, went to Court Avenue, etc. Pretty routine night. Definitely good.

Saturday, Teresa and Vic showed up, we cooked some homebrew, then we all went tailgating at the Iowa Cubs game. This time I didn't have a 102 degree fever!

The actual ballgame was pretty fun as well. It started off good with the cubs in the lead, then went about 7 innings without a single run, then all of a sudden syracuse jumped up to 11-3 in the 9th - so tons of people left. Then the cubs suddenly rallied it and brought in 5 runs for a final of 8-11. It was hilarious. And since we'd all had a few drinks, we screamed various obscenities at the blasted 3rd base …

Things are about to happen financially. I'm excited. As yall probably know, Kari got a new job with like a 40% pay increase and I got a ... not so big raise, but still a raise.

So, I'm going to be in the market for a new PC (and maybe even a new car) very soon and I'm stealing harper's post about asking what to get.

First and foremost, I need a desktop.
1. Because my current desktop is from 2002
2. I'm very inefficient on laptops and really never use them unless I'm traveling.
3. I just got 2 bitchin 22" widescreen monitors that my old PC is having a hard time running.

And really my only requirements are that it's gotta be fast, reliable, fairly inexpensive and have much storage for video prod and various other media.

So, …

Whoops, I forgot to blog again.

So yeah, last week I was in Orlando for an RFID Conference. It was really nice. The resort I was staying at (Disney's Coronado Springs) was much better than I thought it'd be. I was sorta worried because...

1. I don't like Disney
2. I don't like kids

But, there really wasn't much disney parafanilia and there weren't many kids. Just a really nice resort that served good drinks and held a pretty incredible conference.

As far as the actual conference goes, I learned a ton. I saw some really nice applications, and I met some cool peeps who knew what they were doing. It's going to be exciting to implement a solution at Pioneer - which leads to a funny story. Every time I was talking to a …

All in 1 weekend. Ahhh, this is nice.

Friday, Kari and I checked out waterfront deli, went to a party at Fry's for a bit, and then headed downtown to take part in some Drake relay festivities. Plus, Lindsey was in town, which always makes for a hilarious evening - when she calls us anyway...

So, Last night was Jody/Matt's wedding in Minneapolis. It was really a nice wedding. And the reception was also quite ridiculous.... Kari's friends are a blast. Pics coming soon...

And now, I'm currently sitting in the MSP airport waiting to go to Orlando for an RFID conference. I'm pretty excited.

Via hiptop...

So last week seemed super not productive. I really can't think of anything good that I got done aside from entertainment and such so I'm currently checking my Twitter just to figure out wtf I've done lately, hahaha.

OK...

Last Wednesday, I picked up Minnis and met Nick for a hip hop show at Vaudeville. It was a good time as always. I think Minnis had fun too. We saw some pretty amazing homemade lights for this instrumental band.

Then Friday, Zach and I got invited to this last minute Yakuza party. Yakuza is basically a Japanese mafia. They wear fancy suits and have ridiculous tattoos all over their upper bodies. Try to imagine the Crazy 88s from Kill Bill - except real and without masks. So the plan was to meet at Vertigo …

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.

I don't know if this is the best way, but it's the first way I've figured out to sync all of my calendars, so here it is...

I used to just put all of my appointments into Outlook at work, then use IntelliSync to sync it to my phone's Calendar. But then I realized that wifey and I had a really hard time keeping track of each other's schedules. I can't easily share my Outlook calendar with her... and I don't look at the paper calendar inside the closet door to find out what she's up to. So here's how we solved this...

1. We setup Google Calendars under our respective accounts and shared them with each other.
-My Calendar (my default)
-Kari's calendar (her default)
-Brooks Calendar (for things we're both up to, family visiting, …

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 …

Whoa buckets, this weekend ruled. I stayed home and really had a lot of fun with wifey.

It basically started Thursday afternoon when my internet died. Nick and I had just launched some new features at our alive sites (mainly user accounts and a mobile site); I'm pretty excited about it. Now we're starting a semi-secret project with a couple other dudes in Des Moines. I think they're gonna get rich... Hopefully they bring us with, haha.

So yeah, Thursday and Friday it Blizzard...ed, which caused Pioneer to give us a snow day on Friday. I think it's the first full snow day we've gotten since I started here. I spent most of it at home working on projects. I was finally able to start laying hardwood floor in the basement! After …

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!"

I might be saying something more along the lines of, "Dude, that was awesome," but other than that, I think it's right on. I really really love this quote. This is how I try to be. It's been the basis of many tattoo ideas I've had... if I could ever step up to the plate and quit preserving my body.

Last year I didn't really blog about bockfest because I came down with a bad cold directly afterwards. This year I'm not making that mistake. Instead, I got my cold the day before. With a little Zicam, Sleep, and Water, I prevailed and I am now blogging.

Friday around noon Nathan, Jeff, and Rico met up with Kari and I and we busted out to Redwood falls. The drive was decent... aside from riding 5 people in a Malibu, with a little bad weather along 90.

We showed up, hung out at Josh's for a minute, grabbed some food at Chumly's, then went to the VFW for some drinks, games, and mass nakedness. It was a good time. We then told old college stories and laughed about memories past.

Saturday we drove out to New Ulm (late, again) …

is quite a hilarious holiday - Especially when you know people that feel strongly about it.

The entire day is filled with little opinion slip-ins from people, which I love. It's fun to find out everyone's current stance on valentine's day (which is often reflective of their current bf/gf situation). It's either they love it, they hate it or they're middle ground... except it's not like regular middle ground. It's like the middle ground where they make it a point that you know how middle ground they are.

Personally, I've been on all sides of this spectrum.

There was a point in HS when I fell for the valentines day trap, ya know... cards, candy, flowers, stuffed animals, jewelry, dinner, etc. Then for a while I got all …

So, Nehru planned on driving to Chicago with some of his STI and EVO buddies last weekend. However, at the last minute someone canceled, which opened up a seat for me. Of course, I accepted.

The drive was definitely interesting. 4 pretty different people with really the only thing in common being our love for cars - and maybe beer. It was a good time, they were cool guys.

Once we got into Chicago we hung out at Nandy's Place for a second. It's pretty tiny, but she is on Wacker and Michigan, wtf. Seriously. So I decided I'd go hang out with some of my other buddies and find a more comfortable place to sleep.

Tag, Clock, and Mikey picked me up at Nandy's around midnight. They played a really good trick on me saying that Mikey …

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 …

Holy Freaking Weekend. Steph finally came to visit, which was awesome. We haven't seen her in over a year, wtf. Lindsey also stopped out for a minute or two, which was good while it lasted.

So, Friday was "girls night" or whatever. Which basically meant, the girls went to dinner while Nick and I got pizza. Afterwards it was just a few dudes outnumbered by girls for the rest of the night, yesssssss.

Saturday, we got lunch at a brewery, then drank beer at a non-brewery, haha. Later, we went to the Stars/Rivermen game. It was Shooter's birthday (the mascot). So in between one of the periods they had a broomball game with a bunch of mascots. It was pretty hilarious. Other than that though, great great game. I'd like to go to …

Ever since I have met Kevi we've been having conversations that usually go something like this:

keviatwork: i'm going to try to convince usa today to pay for our wedding
keviatwork: USA Today presents.... Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Switzer
keviatwork: haha
brooxatwork: i really wish i could administer punches over aim

Seriously, some friends and i have been talking about punching each other through the internet for years. I have always wanted to hook that old school AIM "warning" button up to physically harm them. And now that USB is becoming awesome... we may be getting close.

keviatwork: a usb attachment that punches you right in the face
brooxatwork: you are onto something

I think we could do something like this with one of …