Man, even though I hate to say it, Apple customer service is insanely awesome. I called them a couple weeks ago to see if it was still covered under warranty, and it was (with about 8 days to go). There were a few complications because I didn't have my receipt and part of their system said I was out of warranty, while the other said I was still in warranty. Anyway, they were awesome and got everything straightened out and were able to service my iPod. Every time I called Apple Care their was less than a 5 minute wait and the people were really cool... sorta like Microsoft.

So yeah, they overnighted me packaging to send the iPod back to them in. The package even had tape in it so I could tape the box back up, ha. I overnighted it …

Starting today Kari and I have been together 1 year!!! haha, actually today I have been at Pioneer for 1 year... wtf that went fast. I really have no idea how long Kari and I have been together... she has no idea either so we're straight.

Anyway yeah a year out of college... I have some nice furniture. I've been to Kansas City, Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago-twice, Saint Louis-twice, and Detroit. I got an Iowa License. My hair has grown about 8 inches. I have a goatee. I've gained about 10 pounds (stupid stupid desk job). I got really good at tech decks. I learned to ollie a skateboard and drop in on skates. I've gotten a salary increase. I started a company with Nick. I've gotten a lot of new electronics. My car is faster.

3 day weekends for life, yo. So Saturday was Cornell graduation. It was alright... the speaker was insanely boring. I didn't see any of my old CSC professors, which was sad. But I saw Lane Dunlop, Savody Phe, and a few others that I haven't seen in a long time. After graduation Kari's dad took us (my family, their family, and a couple friends) all out to eat at Vino's. We had a special menu that he and the chef picked out, awesome food.

Yesterday Kari and I went to the renaissance festival with my cousins. We saw Chris Meulners there, haha. (Owner of Hilltop Bar and Grill). There are a lot of weirdos at those fairs. But also a lot of funny people, good food, and good shows. I sort of want a samurai sword now.

Last night …

Yesterday after I got home from work and the cab, I decided to go skate at the church down the street for a while. The whole time I was there, I saw this helicopter just hovering about 100 yards down the road from me, wtf? I figured that the news must have been watching me...

Well, after a while, I went back to the apartment to get my car and go somewhere. Only, some cop was blocking me in. There were also a ton of people at the office, which had closed 2 hours earlier.

A long time later I found out that an apartment building burnt down in my complex.... which explains all the cops, the helicopter, and the busy office. How the hell does that slip by you when you're about 100 yards from it, haha. Where were the billowing …

I usually try not to write unless big things are happening... because blogs get annoying when people talk about every detail of their lives. But man so many things have already happened this week.

Yesterday the road to was flooded over on the way to work. Stupid water. It is seriously so high right now. When I finally got there, I look down at my front tire and saw a screw sticking right out of the middle of it. ...I was wondering wtf that clicking sound was sunday night when driving around, haha.

I also found out that the second half of the Dark Lotus - Black Rain tour has been cancelled which seriously seriously pisses me off. I was so pumped about it. Although I think Richie and Mitch are still going to come visit. We …

Well this was the last weekend of the school year for Cornell College. Everyone will be done Wednesday and moving out except for seniors - who have to stay until graduation on Saturday. So I guess Friday night will be the last night of 'going out' in Mount Vernon... but it'll be lame because only senior's will be there as will a lot of family.

So the weekend was decent. I bought Kari some K2 Fatty's so she can skate with me. I also bought her the Tiffany's mesh ring for graduation. Stupid graduation is so expensive.

Friday, Kari and I saw these young skaters in Marion. I walked in and the kids about pissed their pants, haha. "dude you look exactly like bam margera. that scared the crap out of me, i really thought you were …

So a while ago I made a "new design" for derek.broox.com, but I wasn't able to upload it because harper's server went wack on me. Anyway, everything is kosher now so I finished it up and uploaded it today. The only reason I really redesigned is because all my friends are starting to build sites and the list was too big for the header above... So I added a column on the right and put them there. The new links are Cedric and Aaron.

While I was at it, I decided to make the site a little more compliant. All of the javascript works in Mozilla now. (stupid mozilla). I also added random survival tips to the right side, which I've been collecting from my "Worst Case Scenario" calendar. The tips will change every day (well they're …

So, I just got back from Saint Louis with Aaron, Zach, and Jordan... It was so much fun.

Friday, I got on the tiny plane for my hour long flight to STL, haha. The plane was small enough to where we had to board from the tarmac, hehe. We stayed in Chesterfield, which is a lame lame town. There is nothing to do at night... at all. We ended up walking around the town, swimming, and by the end of the night we were beating the crap out of each other. We got into some pretty good punching, slapping, and kicking games. We all had huge bruises on our arms, welts on our backs, sore stomachs, and sore nutbags. I even got jacked in the face by Jordan, haha.

Saturday we showed up to the demo which was sooo much fun. Xtreme Nation is …

Today was Chad Kraus' last day at Pioneer... weird. So here's a little story of him and his time here...

He started the same day I did almost a year ago. The punk actually got the job I applied for, hehe whatever, I write web apps (roxor). Anyway, chad was fun because he always fell asleep in meetings. He also made lots of funny faces and was a big alcoholic.... haha, j/k.

For a few months we put random food (pickles, pepper bar, donuts, etc) in one of his drawers. It took him a few month's to find it and when he did, it was gross and he was mad. Kraus' family also has a big involvement with Dairy Queen; a lot of times kraus would go home to eat hamburgers for lunch. So Nehru started calling them Krausburgers... which caught …

KeviAtWork: i have to confess something to you that will piss you off for the rest of the day
KeviAtWork: i got a cat last night
Derek R Brooks: i dont even know what to say to that
KeviAtWork: :-(
Derek R Brooks: i am disappointed
Derek R Brooks: and sad
Derek R Brooks: :-(
KeviAtWork: dude
KeviAtWork: this cat rules
Derek R Brooks: that is the worst oxymoron i've ever heard
Derek R Brooks: you are a pussy
KeviAtWork: haha
KeviAtWork: man, i need the internet at my house so i can post I Against I
Derek R Brooks: you need a 22 at your house so you can shoot your cat
KeviAtWork: no

Eh, so I guess I should write something on my site. The weekend was decent... Friday night was another 9 player no-limit hold 'em tournament at Nehru's. I took 2nd place in the first game, got out early in the second, and took 4th place in the third. Nehru's garage makes me jealous... 3 car garage, refrigerator, 2004 M3, 2002 Prowler, etc.

Saturday I had to drive to Mount Vernon for Casey and Jay's wedding. Catholic weddings are weird. The reception was better than the last wedding... even though the DJ was a dorkface. Luckily Cassie saved us and took us home.

Nick and I have a big a site to get done this week... lots of work to do. My car will be very happy with my extra cash though, hehe. I can't wait to see my buddies on …

I got a new intake pipe from ebay yesterday. dsmtuners.com tells you that it's the first step you should take (along with a conical air filter) when modding your car. However, I'm finding out that most intake pipes don't really do anything for a turbo 2g DSM. The Injen intake (which is very similar to the intake I got) is dyno proven to not increase horsepower. The only thing that it does is look cool and make the turbo/BOV sound cooler.

There were also a lot of things wrong with this product from importblowoutsales. First I noticed that the inside is very very rough, but I guess this makes no difference. Even the Injen intakes look this way. Then I noticed that this might not seal very well. Also, only 1 of the hose clamps …

This year Theta Formal was in Dubuque on the Miss Dubuque dinner boat, which was nice... definitely something different than normal. It was funny because a few of the girls had just gotten back from a Carribean Cruise, so they thought that our small dinner boat was HILARIOUS.... it's a friggin dinner boat on the Mississippi and it costs $35 a person, what do you expect? It's sorta like how my car is really really funny to ride in after riding on a bus.... err... wait.

Anyway, while on the boat, I spilled a drink on myself and Kari spilled marinara sauce on her dress, we rule. After that we all went back to our hotel where we swam and hung out. It was fun and some of the thetas are 'slightly above average,' so that makes the 'not …

Wow, what a weird day. It looks like Kraus (aka krausburger aka santa kraus) is leaving Pioneer to join the family business. The punk already bought a house down there on the water with a jetski lift... wtf? That'll be friggin awesome.

In other sweet news, Soap is flying me to Saint Louis in a couple weeks to do a couple demos and hang out with Aaron and Jordan... hopefully Zach can come to.

Also, Nick and I just got 2 new web jobs for Truespin.

BIG THINGS goin on, BIG THINGS.

So, I'm starting to get a lot of friends with web sites, which kinda sucks because I've maxed out the space that I left for my friends' names above the friends link on the header. I added Dave Conger and Nehru Cheddie to the list, so check out their sites. Nehru is a guy I work with and fellow car enthusiast and Dave is a dude I know from my Soaping web sites and through short films, etc.

Also, if you actually click the friends link, you can see some news from my buddies' sites... that is, IF they have an RSS feed. (if you're on that list and you don't have a feed, you should get one. If you're using PHP/MySQL, I can hook you up with a script to generate one).

If I get anymore friends, I'll just start removing the less cool …

This weekend I went to Mount Vernon for Kari's friend's (Morgan) wedding. Kari made me go to the rehearsal which was sooooo lame. I left halfway through and went to the mall. Then on saturday we went to the wedding. Let me just say that I am definitely not ready to get married. Seriously, I can't believe how the people act at them. I just do not act the way that you're supposed to at a wedding. I don't let ladies go first, I don't grab a lady's hand when she's about to sit down or go up a step or something. I don't hold hands, and I especially don't look a girl in the eyes for 10 straight minutes while holding hands. If I ever get married, I'm gonna have like 50 groomsmen so that I can just hang out with them up front and not …

As most of you know (due to my mood and constant whining) I lost my 120gig Hard Drive 2 weeks ago (pictures, videos, professional work, etc). We tried everything that we could think of to get the data back. Minnis helped me a lot through the whole process. I'd pretty much lost all hope, nothing we tried would recover my files. Well yesterday we started this program called Clone Maxx to try to copy all data from one HD to another HD. It ran extremely slow, over night for 11 hours and 35 minutes.

Well, when I got to work this morning I went straight to the PC, and the monitor said, "PC Inspector Clone Maxx Complete." (This is about the time that my pants almost got soiled). So I mounted a hard drive with win2k on it, put my new …

This weekend Nathan and I went to Minneapolis for a couple Heely demos. For the most part it was pretty fun, but it was also sort of annoying. The roads around the Twin Cities suck... bad. Seriously, 35w does not mean 35 west, wtf. And it sucks even more that the people living there can't give you good directions to anything.

Friday night we decided to go to Mystic Lake (one of the biggest casinos in the midwest). The guy at the front desk of our hotel gave us directions that got us completely lost. It took us over an hour to get somewhere that was 15 minutes away... It made us both annoyed, frustrated, and pissed off. Once we got there we stayed for about 30 minutes... I've never really gone to a casino other than to eat... …

So I had this hard drive crash... here are the earlier details.

First of all, Minnis rules. He's been trying a bunch of things with my HD today that I haven't thought of. After being unsuccessful with Knoppix and the linux box, we dropped it into a win2k machine and ran powermax, which is some diagnostic software that maxtor put out. Anyway, they gave me a diagnostic code (de67a279) and told me to visit their site. So I visit it, check out the warranty services, enter my serial number and find that my drive is under warranty until 8/11/04, w00000000t.

So they are sending me a free 120 gig HD. We also ran a chkdsk and saw a pretty good list of files on the drive... So at least something is getting read from the disk. I still …

Apple put out this insanely awesome mp3 player called an "iPod." I bought this brilliant device last June. It is so handy because you can put hours and hours of music on it and take it anywhere. I took it skating, I took it to work, I plugged it into my stereo at home, etc.

It also rules when you start to come to the conclusion that this dope device is the reason for a sh*tload of data loss. For example, that HD of mine that crashed last week... I'm pretty sure that's due to my ipod. Also, when I backed all that stuff up on my ipod... I can't get it back off. It either locks up my computer, locks up the ipod, or a combination of both. The only way out of this is to hold down the power button on my PC. SWEET! so maybe it's my …