A lot of friends at work and I have been getting pretty into Tech Decks lately. Ollie-ing around the desk is a lot of fun. I even made some grind rails this week.

Anyway, today I was going for the highest ollie and landed one about a foot in the air. But then I wanted to go for a little higher... I popped it as hard as I could and followed it up about 1.5 feet. But the deck kept going up, all the way over the cube wall and into my partner's cube. The wall is about 4 feet higher than the desk that I ollied from. ... If I could have sprinted around the corner to land it... I bet I could have completed the trick. Regardless, it was the best ollie ever.

Cedric has a blister on his finger from working on his nollie... so he's out of …

Alright, so I was thinking today... How in the hell did miniature doberman's come about?

... and then i stopped thinking about that

A little later, I thought, "What if we could do the exact opposite and make small dogs really big!?" Like... Can you imagine a chihuahua the size of a great dane? wtf, that would be so scary. their eyes would be like softballs.

So, a long time ago I wrote this article to get a few things off my chest. My friend Zay really liked it and suggested that I should submit it to the school newspaper (The Cornellian). So I did, and it made a lot of people mad, especially a kid named Jonathan Levine. So he wrote an article in the Cornellian about my article... trying to bash me. It was funny cause he didn't really say much and really backed down when I approached him.
So... now that I'm out of school he decides to start talking about me again?

Mira824: dude
Mira824: youre in the cornellien
Mira824: did you hear?
Derek R Brooks: i am?
Mira824: jonathan levine says"there was no derek brooks insulting what it means to be an undergradute student at a four year …

This afternoon I installed new upper intercooler piping and a Greddy Type S Blow off valve on the car. It was actually a pretty easy install. I did it in about an hour and a half and it turned out really well. Here is the old version, and here is what it looks like now.

I also helped Nathan install some mirrors on his accord. It needed them pretty badly. The new ones are power and have turn signals in them, which is dope. It was interesting hooking the mirrors to his existing power controls, especially since the box that it came with was from another country and every word was spelled wrong... The turn signal lights were pretty easy once we got a wiring diagram from Grimes Automotive, but routing the wires into the car sucked sooo …

Last week sometime I started tracking how people are getting to derek.broox.com, which is pretty fun to watch. For some reason I get a lot of hits from people searching for "Chickety China the Chinese Chicken." And quite a few from ICP and Nextel searches.

The best ones, though, are the hits from people looking for Derrick Brooks of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It's funny because half of the American football fans that use the internet don't know how to spell his name. So they always search for "Derek Brooks" and "Buccaneers." This has been getting me hit hard because my name is, in fact, Derek Brooks. And I recently wrote an article about the Des Moines Buccaneers.

Even though we have these similarities, the main difference between …

I went to the MSI concert tonight with Cullen, Kevin, and Jenny (a girl from Cornell). It was awesome.

The show started off with a weird bluegrass/metal band from Brooklyn, NY called unkle ****er(but the violinist is hot). Then Tub Ring came on, a punk/metal band from Chicago, who was really really good... I wish I woulda bought one of their CDs. Shortly after, Mindless Self Indulgence came out....

Jimmy Urine is nuts and puts on a great show. Lyn Z is so hot. I wish she would live with me. Kitty is also above average and can definitely rock the drums. Steve Righ puked on stage for some reason.

So, Mindless Self Indulgence puts on an awesome show. We made it up to the front as always. Urine was standing on the railing right in …

So, today when we got to work we were in some sort of serious brown-out (we were getting a little power, but not quite enough).

The flourescent lights flickered, the PCs would boot until the harddrives started spinning, then it would start over again..

Some rooms/cubes got a little more power than others. Doug, a guy I work with took his PC into a conference room and plugged in, so me and a couple guys went in with our RC cars and Tech Decks and watched Office Space.

Now, it's 10:30 and the power is back on. suck.

So, if you didn't already know, Victoria's Secret has a series called "Very Sexy" which includes perfume and all that smell good stuff. Well, recently they released "Very Sexy For Him" .. cologne for the metrosexuals and for girls to buy their boyfriends or whatever. And even more recently they came out with "Very Sexy For Him 2." Only, this time when you buy the cologne you get the coolest umbrella EVER.

My girlfriend, Kari, likes the cologne a lot... and knew that I liked the umbrella. So she hooked me up, big time. Check it out: top, inside, closer.

Man I love rainy days.

Friday: Insane
We met Harper at Crobar, a new club in chicago charging like a $30 cover. The DJ there is a guy named 'Felix' who does work with Puffy and is definitely the best club DJ I've seen live.

Anyway, Chris (of the virgin tears) was hanging out with us also. He's friends with Felix, so we all walked in together on "the cool side of the rope" for free while some dude was taking pictures of us, ha. Inside, this place was so dope. It was 2 stories; the dance floor is on the bottom but there is also a balcony wrapping around the whole place and the DJ booth overlooked everything (this is where we hung out most of the night). It was so much fun.

More crazy stuff:
-They weren't letting people with tennis shoes in (luckily we …

On Friday, my friend Cedric had the day off, so we emptied his cube. We also moved boxes and a printer in and labeled everything with "Charles Brown" moving tags.

On Saturday, Kari and I went to a Des Moines Buccaneers Hockey game. They are in the same league as the Cedar Rapids Rough Riders... (First of all, I'm not one of the super cool fans for teams full of 18-20 year olds, but they are definitely fun). I have gone to quite a few Rough Riders games over the past 4 years, and had a lot of fun. The facility is really nice, the fans are nuts and always funny, the team is pretty decent and there are cool things in between periods. Since I moved to Des Moines, the state's capitol, I figured that the games would be just as cool, or …

I just got a good slap to the face as a reminder that November marks the 6 month anniversary of my graduation from Cornell. This isn't sad because I think I'm getting old, because I don't... It is sad because I got a friendly letter from the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation which is conveniently located 9 blocks from my apartment.

My debt to Cornell starts today... And the scariest part about this billing statement is that nowhere on it is the total amount that I owe or how many months/years this is supposed to take. I will probably pay forever...

Stupid, stupid Liberal Arts education. Why didn't I go to a state school??? Maybe I should make double or triple payments or something and put less money in the bank. Or I could …

This weekend I went to Detroit with Kevin, Ben Stockwell, Richie, and his friend Adam. ...Man, that city is ghetto, but also fun.

Thursday around 4 I drove to Mt Vernon to meet Kevin, then we drove to Richie's house to pick them up, then up to Detroit. After a lot of driving, we arrived at our hotel on 14 mile around 5 AM. We slept for 5 hours and then woke up to go sight seeing. While we were out we saw a lot of things referenced by ICP and other people under Psychopathic records. Here are some cool things we saw:
-The ghetto block that Violent J grew up on
-Old school ICP Graffiti
-Hot Hits (The record store that Alex Abbiss owns)
-Zug Island
-Burnt down houses
-Lots of other streets and places that get rapped about.

Later, …

I am writing this out of rage after placing my first order on half dot friggin com.... half.com sucks, and sucks hard. first of all they didn't give me a buy button next to the thing i wanted to buy.... so i got mad. and then, after i finally got through to the checkout and was ready to buy my ultra-cheap CD. I find out that they're ultra-stupid and don't accept bleeper bloppin paypal, wtf!?

I hate half.com

My dad sends me these pointless but funny emails every once in a while. Well today he sends me this one.

There's 22 peanut M&M's in a package. So, you could eat one for every year of your age and still have one left over for tomorrow!!!

so I reply...

Dad... I am 22.

My job includes a lot of challenging work, but it rules for several reasons.

a) people are cool here
b) my bosses are just as cool
c) we have drag races, both big and small
d) we have guns and shoot things
e) people that have been here over 20 years make donkeys out of cheese, and people, and people that pet the donkeys

A couple months ago some friends and I claimed the Sun. We were so happy when we obtained it... but we didn't know what to do with it. After breif discussion we decided that we should sell parts of it as real estate. And since there is so much surface on the Sun (6,069,871,166,000.84 square kilometers) we figured that we could sell it for an insanely low price! This plan would give our fellow land owners one of the best deals of their lifetime and make us ultra rich. In fact, if we sold the entire sun, we would each make a approximately $7,081,516,314,851.66. This is a lot of money...

Please check out our website and deeply consider purchasing your right to the hottest property you can buy! www.weownthesun.com

I'm not really a big fan of macs at all, but i will say that they make some incredibly attractive products. I just downloaded the new fimware for my ipod along with itunes for windows.

itunes is definitely the best download out there right now for mp3 management. It is so clean and so easy. Go download it! It is the best mp3 player, it's free, and you will be so happy.

So the first step to any serious engine modifications is to install a means of monitoring what's going on. This is simply to make sure anything you install doesn't cause you're car to die, blow up, etc and also so you can tune it to get the best performance possible. Last night I took the first step in ordering some new gauges.

After days of searching I decided to go with a set of Autometer Phantom gauges. They have a good rep and cost less than $180 per gauge (like Apexi and Greddy). The first gauge that I needed was a Boost/turbo gauge. Most of the time, if your car has a turbo, the stock turbo gauge is crap and doesn't give accurate readings. The second gauge that I wanted was oil pressure, which is a pretty common gauge to get for …

Yesterday my coworkers and I went to the dollar store after lunch. We bought toys that shoot rubber suction darts. While we were there, Nick and I found the hottest deal... NSync Bobble heads for 50 cents! These are the same bobble heads that sold at Best Buy for like $15 a long time ago (the package even said best buy). I got Justin (so he could chill with Dr Bob) but Nick got JC AND Justin! He's going for the whole set.

Anyway, Lots of cool things are coming up. This weekend I get to be on stage with Loki because my buddy, Zach rules and is building their website. Also on stage that night is Hatebreed and Slayer... I hope we don't get killed. Zach built Loki's website and suddenly they're getting noticed (rule), so Zach got …

Alright so I've got a new look for the site, it defintely needed a change. Anyway, a lot of the stuff is the same. The big changes are: new design/colors, links to friends, more cars, biography, and I will have audio/videos soon.

If you have a personal site and are my friend, be sure to send me a picture and a link, then I'll add you. What do you think?