My car has been running horribly lately. The engine sounds horrible, it idles bad, etc. I mean, what can I really expect from an engine with 175,000 miles on it.

Well... Monday I pulled into the garage, shut the car off, and heard a new *CLUNK* noise. I thought, "great... something else is broken" However, I sort of just brushed it off for the evening.

The next morning, I tried to start it up and got an awful awful noise. Not like a dead battery or anything. Just this loud whine and the engine never turned over or anything. So I was basically stuck working from home.

Throughout my work day I made periodic trips down to my car to sort of mourn and gradually check things out as I thought of them. One of the first things I …

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 …

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 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 …

Hmm, so I've done enough extreme activities and hurt myself enough times that I keep a couple of those wrist/ankle/knee wraps around - and today I'm wearing one, haha. Stupid wrists.

See, Zach and I were skating last night for quite a while. I was finally starting to stick a couple grinds that felt super unnatural to me before. It was going well. So well in fact, that I started hitting them with more speed. And as some of you know, when grinding, especially with torqued grinds such as royales, it's easy to let your feet slip out from under you and fall hard, thus hurting your wrist or back or whatever.

Well, this didn't happen. Although it would maybe make for a better story. Actually, i didn't fall once. I hurt my wrist …

Welp, last week my site broke... so instead of fixing it, I decided to write a complete new design, ha. Actually, when I say "design" I really don't mean "design" at all. As you can see it's not much different than before. Lots of grays, same header, etc. However, I reprogrammed the entire site. That's right - I rewrote every bit of code, haha. I also changed the DB around a bit.

That may seem a bit dumb, but over the last 6 years, I've just been adding on and enhancing certain parts of the site. After a while the code started to get pretty sloppy. Plus, I've learned how to rule at programming since then so I decided to rewrite - completely. I'm super glad I did too because everything is much much lighter and the DB stuff is …

So desmoinesalive.com is almost 1 year old and is doing really well. Some pretty cool things are happening. First of all, we got myspace! haha. So now we can be friends with bars, restaurants, ballers, party people, etc. Hopefully it'll help everyone involved. I really like providing a good useable service - sorta like Google does. I bet Google must love life. I need to make more sites like this. I should make Google.

On another note, joker.com has been killing me lately. I'm getting so annoyed. Apparently there have been a bunch of DDOS attacks on their nameservers which has taken ALL my sites down for hours at a time this week. I have been so annoyed. So at one of the not-broken times I went to change my secondary DNS to …

One day Krissy and I decided to drive past my old house on Old Ranch Road in Port Byron. I was feeling pretty sick so I had her drive. In fact, I started to really feel like crap so I took my seat belt off so that the pressure wouldn't be on my belly.

Right when we passed my old house we came up on this car driving 40mph in the 55. Like any normal person, we got real annoyed. So she waited for the passing section, then passed. When we got right next to the car I looked over to realize that the people we were passing were my neighbors (really old farmers). And then I noticed that the car was turning into us to get into their driveway. They were totally oblivious that we were even there. So needless to say, the huge Continental …

One time back in 2001 I decided to go snowboarding with Jason Reiter. Prior to that, besides backyard snowboarding, I had only been snowboarding on a resort once.

Some extended family of mine own a small ski resort in Illinois (Snow Star). Every year the resort would be closed on Christmas Day, however, they'd invite a bunch of family and close friends out for a Christmas potluck and day of skiing/snowboarding/sledding. So needless to say, I got pretty decent at skiing as a kid. Then I tried snowboarding one year; the resort was pretty empty so I had plenty of room to learn. Regardless, I fell a lot, my butt hurt, my head hurt, etc - That was the only time I had gone prior to the invitation to go with Jason.

So we headed up to …

This weekend was pretty laid back, we had people and dogs visit Friday and Saturday night. I worked on the Rebel's Advocate video a bit. I started organizing some storage and found GOLD. I will soon scan what I found and post it. We also grilled out at Doug's, hung out with Nick and Nicole, etc.

Yesterday after we got home from Doug's, our house seemed a little warm. About 82 degrees warm. So I went and checked things out, it seems like the turbine that blows air into the house was broken which caused the A/C to overwork all day. I also learned that I'm supposed to change my furnace filter, hahaha.

So yeah, I slept in the basement last night, luckily our house is under warranty for 10 more days. Stupid houses.

This week …

I hate bodykits, badly. To recap, a few months after installing my original fiberglass body kit, I backed into a truck in a dark alley. Obviously cracked the fiberglass. Then last winter I didn't see this snow covered curb and clipped my bumper on it. Last fall, my old mechanic at Grimes Automotive hit a curb and broke my front bumper. Then a couple weeks later I got hit in a parking lot, breaking my fiberglass blitz bumper some more. I ordered a new urethane bumper from areo_designs on ebay. It came in broken so I called areo_designs and complained, they barely spoke english and laughed at me when I told them the bumper was busted. So I sent them pics and they just told me to collect insurance from DHL - which I did. Later I …

I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately. But I really don't think it's my fault. Crappy things are seriously happening to me. So, while I'm at it, let's talk about Grimes Automotive and how many times they've screwed me. The first few times I went in there, they were really honest, did a good job, etc.

Then, one time my car was acting weird. I went in there, he checked it out, told me the MAFS was bad. This is a $600+ part. He said that everytime he slapped the air box the car would almost die. I tried slapping it in my garage and couldn't get it to stutter once. So I asked my neighbor, he said it was spark plugs. I replaced them and the car was fixed. Instead of $600, I spent $8.

Another time I had an appointment …

Holy day. This AM I had to wake up early to take my car to the shop to get looked at. It has been idling really weird and cutting out. After talking to a few people I came to the conclusion that it was the Mass Airflow Sensor (MAFS). The shop called at 10 this morning and told me I was right. Then they told me that there were 3 problems.
1. They would have to order it from Mitsubishi/Eagle.
2. The part would take 2 weeks to arrive.
3. The part costs $680.

This is lame news... Jon, my mechanic, said that I should find one online or something and install it myself to save about $600. I agreed and went to pick my car... because it was time to go to the icubs game that Pioneer paid for today, w00t.

When I was leaving the shop …

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 …

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 …

Lately I've been really heavy into organizing and backing up all my pictures and video. I recently bought a fireproof safe to keep miniDV tapes and picture CDs in. I also have copies of most picture CDs at work. Last week I even went and had all of my old advantix film rolls converted to CDs (22 rolls - $120). Then, over the course of an evening I organized them all into folders in chronological order on my PC (just like all my other pics are organized). The next step was to buy a scanner this week and scan the rest of my pictures. Then I'd make a couple backups of everything and store them in different locations.

You always hear of people "losing all their memories in a fire" ... I don't want this to happen. So everything is …

This weekend was pretty laid back, booo. Friday night, Jason, Jodi, Nathan, Andy and I went to the Funny Bone. The comedian was pretty good... he offended a lot of people, which is awesome... "racism is gay" haha.

Saturday, kari came over for the Cornell 150th Anniversary Gala at the Des Moines Country Club. It wasn't a rockin party or anything but they didn't ask alumni for money once! ...I was surprised by that. Lots of good food, drinks, and a nice video. There were less than 10 people there that went to school with me (everyone else was old), but it was still decent.

My clie broke while trying to get a wi-fi signal there, which is sad. I can't figure out this error at all: DataMgr.c, Line:9524, Index out of range. I only …

Tuesday after work, Kari and I drove to Denver to visit her brother and go snowboarding. The original plans were for her and I to go snowboarding thursday at Winterpark Mountain, but she hurt her knee walking, so her brother and I went instead. We took a lesson in the morning because it was my first time on a mountain (aside from iowa), and it was Victor's first time ever. Toward the end of the lesson, Vic hit his head and wanted to take a break... I ended up snowboarding the rest of the day by myself... but whatever, it was still fun. I covered a good portion of the mountain and got up to the Mary Jane peak (11,200 feet), w00t!

The bad part of the day was when my digital camera broke... I was really mad. On the way back from the …