I write, occasionally

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 …

It has taken me 4 days to build up the energy to blog about last weekend, seriously.

Friday, Josh and Jeff were supposed to meet up at my house at 6... 6:30 at the latest. However when Josh told me that he wanted to take a route that he had never been (while attempting to never touch an interstate), I knew it'd be bad. At one point he was talking to me after he'd crossed into Iowa, 15 minutes later he called again and was back in Minnesota. Later in the trip he got lost again, but his cell phone was dead so he called, while plugged into the ceiling of a gas station. He finally showed up around 7:30. Wingert is never on time, no matter what. He got there around 9 and was immediately greeted with a snowball to the ear.

So …

I haven't really done much framework stuff outside of my full-time job, so I decided to play around. (mainly so Harper would stop yelling at me).

Nearly all of my personal development is in PHP and JS, so I tried out some PHP and JS frameworks on a simple app.

After a few hours, my "funny quotes" site is all smartied and prototyped, which was a nice little learning experience.

The big thing I learned is that prototype RULES. Seriously, it makes life so easy - just ask JD (but refer to it as LAF instead of Prototype).

Smarty is also pretty decent. I can't really think of a huge advantage of using it, aside from the obvious fact that it separates logic from display. However, it was nice to play around with. There are …

Man, I am really beginning to love Amazon wish lists. Not only are they super nice for gifting, they're nice for finding new items and keeping track of things you need to buy. I often find myself looking through Amazon just to mark things that I already own. Why? Because then they recommend things similar, and their recommendations are usually pretty relevant.

However... Amazon sucks at a few things. The first being publishing their phone number. The second thing that has really annoyed me about their site is gift list printing. Nowhere on the site is there a "Print this list" button. You can "Create a new list," "Delete a list," "Tell people about a list," "Make a list private." But you cannot "Print this list." Give me a …

As if I even have to say it... Dog parties are stupid. Kari had this brilliant idea to have a dog party at our house for Ninja's 2nd birthday. I originally didn't like it for a few reasons, one being that it ties us a lot closer to being parents than I'm really comfortable with. But also, wtf? However I agreed to it for both of those same reasons. One, I like having a dong in place of a kid. and B, I thought it'd be pretty hilarious.

I dunno, once it started, I wasn't quite feeling it. Kari decorated our house for a dog party, which felt way lame on an over-the-top level. All the girl dogs fought and nearly killed a couple smaller dogs. And I got peed on - which actually was a highlight, haha. Pics.

Aside from that the …

Oh Yeah. So, we had a Halloween Party last weekend, which marked the biggest party held in my house to date - 40 people. I didn't realize how much fun that costume parties can be. It sort of makes an automatic ice breaker and then everyone ends up hanging out with everyone. I loved it. Check out my pics, Nicole's Pics, Zach's Pics.

And to continue the radness, Des Moines Alive got invited to the Friends and Family pre-opening party for Cabaret Night Club. We're also getting invites for the VIP party. I'm pretty excited. We have some good plans to make the site much better... Not to mention the new Mobile site that we just launched. We're totally going to rock it.

This weekend will be pretty ridiculous as well. Ninja turned …

Hmm, I don't think I can make my anniversary article as good as Kari's. Maybe I'll try to be more serious than her. wtf?

So yeah, this weekend was Kari and I's first anniversary. We were fairly confused about what to do because... well it's our first. And we were never the "today is our 14 month anniversary!!!" couple. You know the ones that not-married people celebrate... usually non-annually. I think kids get really confused about the reccurence of anniversaries. Anyway, off-topic. Again.

We basically celebrated Friday with some fondue, wedding cake, and St. Lucian rum. It was a good, laid back night. I was a little worried about the wedding cake being green and nasty, but it wasn't. And I'm pretty sure it tasted just as …

Weekends at home rule, for real. I can't wait for another weekend like this.

So Friday, I ended up going out with Nathan and Chuck. We started at Stix but quickly upgraded to DJ Skribble @ Crush... then we downgraded again to Drink, and then again to Vieux Carre. Weak. It was a fun night though. (more pics)

Saturday I basically got a ton of things done at home, Nick and I did some web dev, then we went to Moo's house for some sweet loins and scotch older than me. It was a nice night. Always good food and drink ad Doug's.

Then Nathan bought me a bottle of glenlivet 12 for helping me fix his car sunday, w00t. Working on his car always cracks me up because it's just as old and crappy as mine. Plus while we were going to buy …

Oh man. I'm really really scared again.

So I was just working on my home electrical system when I accidentally flipped breaker 8 - the one with all outlets for the top floor. It shut my computer off, etc. No big deal really.

Later I came upstairs to turn it back on and listen to music. I opened up itunes and hit play.

The song "Seein Thangs [feat. David Banner]" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?

wtf. so I tried another, and another, and another. none of my songs (which are all located on a slave drive) worked. I tried opening the drive directly.

"The disk in drive F is not formatted.
Do you want to format it now?"

No, and I want all my photos, music, and …

So, I apparently let my home network go to crap in the last few years, which is not conducive to my current project - to setup a virtual "whole house stereo system."

See, I have this stereo in my loft with some strategically placed speakers. These speakers use my vaulted ceiling to bounce music all over the top 2 floors. Plus it's all controlled via itunes on my primary computer. I love it, love it... which is why you'll always hear music playing in our house.

The only problem with this setup is that I can't hear the music when I'm in the basement. So usually I just throw in a CD or something, but it sucks to have different things playing in different parts of the house.

So here is what I need...
1. I need a way to get music …

Ahhh, another weekend well spent in my home away from home. I love how comfortable I'm getting with Chicago. It's quite nice.

This time we visited the city for 2 milestone events - Vic's college graduation and Kari's 25th birthday. Thursday was Vic's ceremony, which ruled. They had 30 graduates so it was only like 40 minutes, haha. Plus Vic gave me a rose. We celebrated with much Giordano's.

Friday, Kari's B-day - ridiculous. We started the day out right with some mad omelettes at ihop. Then we met up with Kari's dad to shop around Michigan Avenue, etc. Kari got lots of clothes, we all got new Levi's, I got this insane mashup by Girl Talk, etc. We then hung out at a Viand for a second before meeting everyone at Sushi Wabi. …

So last week I had C#.net training. It was pretty nice. I really like C#.net programming... except for all of the visual WYSIWYG influence that people put on it. It really bloats the code. Our instructor's site for example. He did it all with .net and it's super super bloated. His argument: "but i didn't have to write most of the code!" Mine: "but I'm a programmer." Anyway, aside from that we got breakfast every day, cookies at 2, and were taken care of by 3 hot girls, haha.

So Friday we left early for a dept steak "fry." It was a nice time, we hung out at a park for the afternoon, ate meat, rode scooters, etc. Then Kari and I took Ninja to the vet to find out that he has some pretty bad allergies and a staff infection, wtf, …

So, minnis is one of the biggest hotkey fanatics ever, which is starting to rub off on me. He's gotten me all excited about them in web apps... You know, Google uses them, flickr uses them poorly, etc.

That said, I added some super rad new hotkeys to my site. They use eventlisteners and all that so you don't have to use the accesskey and alt keys. Just use your left/right arrow keys to browse through photos, albums, and even pages. Weeeeeee.

I think I got everything updated on the site, but let me know if I missed anything. Also let me know if you find any errors... It seems to work for me in firefox and IE.

A-ha, the long awaited Brooks-Baby-Rant article.

First of all I want to say that I mean no offense to any of my friends who have children, I just don't want them. Also, I don't hate children - in moderation. I mean, I do have some pretty rad younger cousins. So, that said, ready?

A random happy/high-pitched person says, "Oh! you've been married almost a year now? That's so great! When are you expecting kids!?"
I reply, "Oh! The little dears! Never!" *smile*

So yeah, apparently there is some book somewhere that I haven't read (obviously), and nor has Kari (surprisingly). This book apparently has this awesome master plan with step 1 being marriage and step 1.2 being pregnancy. This book sucks. It's so ridiculous and has …

So I had just left the house this morning and got an IM from Zach:

zachsatwork: hey something is wrong with your website
zachsatwork: Network Error (dns_unresolved_hostname)
zachsatwork: Your requested host "derek.broox.com" could not be resolved by DNS. Please verify that you entered the URL correctly and try again.

At this point I freaked out a bit because I vaguely remembered a "1 month expiration reminder" from Joker.

zachsatwork: thats it though, all the other sites are up
brooxmobile: Is kari.broox?
zachsatwork: down

So I freaked out more, pulled off at this gas station and logged into Joker from my phone while pumping gas. That's when I found out that broox.com expired 9/24 - 2 days ago. I about died. I tried …

Ahhh, home. When I'm home, things get done.

So yeah, Friday was Rico's last day at Pioneer, which was a little weird, but was also quite nice. I really don't know many people that have the balls to up and quit a job after over 20 years of service. I'm pretty excited about it. I think it's going to rule for him.

After work he had a little "thanks for putting up with me" party, which was a good time: good beer, cigars, scotch, and big fires. We also played "wear derek's hat" for a bit.

Saturday was really nice, I got a lot done - mostly paperwork, money work, and office organizing. not cleaning, organizing... I really suck at actually cleaning my office for some reason. So I was doing my usual bill paying, when I noticed …

The question is not about where I want to live, because the answer would obviously be Chicago. However, that can't happen right now, so...

I want to make this piece of art that is basically a skyline sitting on a chunk of earth. The actual skyline would be black painted metal sitting on a piece of "earth" to give a sort of glacial effect. The earth would be made of plywood. It's a pretty simple piece representing 2 things I love, the city, and the underground. Plus it would be nice to put some sort of urbanization in my extremely suburban home, haha.

My Dilemma is that I don't know what skyline to use. I really like Chicago's skyline from the southeast side, over by the Aquarium and what not. I also really like the Des Moines …

Ahhhh, a laid back weekend with a hint of craziness, a nice change. Plus it was especially nice to get treated to a great meal and night of going out - much thanks to Jeff. So Friday Kari's fam showed up, we hung out, played video/board games, ate pizza, had homebrew, etc. My body was confused by the relaxation and wanted insanity, but it worked out.

Saturday we were lazy for the most part then did a little shopping. And by shopping I mean we just browsed, but it was nice - sort of. I mean, Jeff wanted to look at amps and stuff, so we checked out Guitar Center, which I'm vowing to never enter again. Seriously. I went in there and was really impressed with the amount of gear... then I found the studio equipment room... then I …

Man. This house is in so much need of tech upgrades, it's ridiculous.

My PC runs decently but it's now over 4 years old (9/2/2002). I started noticing the suckiness a lot lately because I am constantly running out of room on my secondary HD, which is primarily used for media (photos, videos, music, etc). I mean, I have an 80gig primary and a 120 gig secondary. When you take photos, collect music, and shoot video as much as myself, after a few years, that is not sufficient. Really what I need is like 3-4-500gb. Plus new apps are seeming to run crappier than they are probably designed for *cough*itunes 7*

I was browsing around in Best Buy the other day to find that most standard configs now come with more than what my PC is …