July 2007

I am in debt with my credit cards. I mean the only good thing about them is that I got a season pass for Six Flags last year due to my credit card rewards. I am getting control of them though. Within a year, hopefully they will be paid off in full and then I can use them only for emergencies.

What a lot of people don’t know about credit cards, is that you can have one balance tansferred to another. These balance transfers usually mean lower interest rates for you and one less card to pay each month. Before you do a balance transfer, however, I highly suggest that you compare credit cards to make sure that you are getting a good deal on that card.

I believe that my ATI Radeon 9550 is dying, though I am not sure. See I have a dual monitor setup one with VGA and one with DVI. The DVI starts freaking out every so often, and I thought it might be the adapter I have, but after buying a new one it seems to be the card. I updated the drivers tonite and while last time that didn’t help, now it looks like it might have helped because I haven’t had any trouble, yet.

If it works great, if not, then it looks like I’ll be in the market for a new graphics card. It just sucks that my motherboard doesn’t support PCI-E , so I will need to find an AGP card. I will post when I know more about which one I am looking into.

I live in a resort town and the businesses down here seem to really struggle once the off season comes. I mean restaurants go from serving 30 things, to serving 15, that’s how bad it is. It seems like they really struggle to even stay open in the off season. Maybe if they went with AIM Factoring, they would be able to offer the same goods and services they do in the on season and not have to worry about the cost that much.

One of the big industries down here that suffers the most during the off season, aside from all the beach front industries, is the furniture stores.  They simply can’t afford to keep the lights on in the off season with all the tourists gone.  The tourists come in the summer buy furniture for their rental houses and then leave.  The same thing happens the next year.  Some stores even close up for winter completely.

I’ve had a website for the better part of my online experience.  I started back in 1998 and I have to say that things certainly have changed.  Blogs are much more prominent nowadays.  Those little counters people used to have on their pages are almost nonexistent now a days.  There are a lot more people with personal websites now.  Back when I started, I remember being the only one of my friends with a website, now everyone has one.

Another big change is the prominence of PHP.  Back then everyone hand coded everything.  And no one had their own domain name, now everyone does.  I guess things really do change.  I guess this time it was for the better, though.

A few years ago my mother bought the house that we are living in now. Before that we lived in a townhouse that she bought in 1999 for 150 thousand dollars. When she sold it, she sold it in not perfect condition, a lot of stuff needed to be repaired, but it still sold for 250 thousand dollars. She had to pay off her mortgage, which she had down to nearly nothing because she did bad credit remortgages so that she could have a lower payment each month.

When we moved down here she went through a debt consolidation program to get all her credit cards in order and make sure she could afford one low month payment each month. She also doesn’t have a mortgage down here so that is helping her out a lot.

My father, which this may be the only time you will ever hear me speak of him, has numerous mortgages on his house and I don’t even know how many credit cards.

Can you tell which one I am going to take note of while paying back my debts?

I find myself writing more and more on here and it is strange.  It is strange because when I started, I hardly ever wrote on here and I didn’t think I’d ever pay blog, and blog more than once a day.  Now there are days I post six to seven times a day, which I always thought was kind of dumb, but now I see that it will get people to come back to the site numerous times in one day.  Who knows what else will change in the future.  Now on to other things:

I returned a lot of comments, it was the last batch from the PHPBB forum comments.

I am behind in school work, I really need to get the ball rolling and write this essay and get on with other lessons.  Maybe I will do that today.  Hmmm.

I’ve always liked Chia Pets. I always wanted to put that stuff on different things, just to see if it would grow on its own, but mine never grew. I guess I diodn’t water it enough or something because everyone else’s grew, maybe I will buy a new one and put it on my desk after I get some more space on here.  I also want to get some other things for the desk, and the walls around the desk.  I’ll have to wait until I get these huge CRTs out of the way so I will have more room.

Krissy loves the Rush Hour movies, a few days ago we watched Rush Hour 1 and tonite we watched Rush Hour 2.  She wants to see Rush Hour 3 in the theaters, so I will take her to see that.  They are pretty good movies, but while I was watching I noticed that Brett Ratner directed them.  Now my first experience with knowing what movie he directed was X-Men 3.  And he did it very badly.  So I am completely shocked that he could direct great movies like the Rush Hour Trilogy.

It seems as though a lot of my friends are going and having kids. And with those comes the baby showers. It is odd seeing my friends get all crazy trying to find princess baby shower decorations. At least I know that if I ever have to shop for a baby shower (not any time soon), I know of a good baby shower party supplies store. Shopping early and not rushing around the last minute seems like the best thing to do with this, but I guess I won’t know until I have kids of my own one day. I love kids and everything, but don’t want one for a while yet, a long while if I have anything to say about it.

I’m going to throw this out there now, so if anyone wants to join me send me a message and let me know.  On September 25th, Halo 3 comes out and I was playing around with the idea of a 24 hour Halo 3 session.   That means ranked matches, unranked matches, custom games, or even campaign mode if you want to join me even for just a half hour or so send me a message.  If you’d like to join me for 24 hours straight send me a message and we’ll see if we can collaborate a time to do this.  What KI mean is even though it comes out on September 25th, it might not have midnight openings in most locations.  If EB Games where I preordered from has it at midnight I will do it from the time I get home on September 25th to 24 hours from then. Let me know.

In other news, I am very behind on commenting and I am sorry about that.  I’m trying to keep up with my Despair comments, but others are kind of behind for one reason or another.  I am going to make an attempt to comment everyone back this weekend.

I’m always looking for better ways to keep all my files together and more organized, especially now that I work from home. The problem is that I have a laptop and am sometimes away from the desktop computer, but I have found an easy solution to that little problem. There is an affordable and easy way to receive remote access from your main computer to other computers around the world. The solution is Remote PC. With a 30 day free trial and plans as low as 4.95 a month, I might consider doing this if I know I am going to be going away a lot.

The Sony and Nintendo Press conferences were earlier and I want to give my take on both of them.  First Nintendo.

First off, there has never been a time I’ve wanted a console more than I do right now.  The Wii hjas Mario Kart and Metroid Prime 3 plus a new Resident Evil game that is exclusive to it.  If only I could find one.  They also announced a Wii Zapper, which is a gun controller for the Wii.  That is going to be huge and playing Metroid Prime with will be killer.  They also announced a Wii fitness game called WiiFit.  Although it looks more like a Yoga tape than a game, the mat for the WiiFit and the game itself are really impressive.  I hope some FPS come out using the mat.

A lot of people are talking about how Sony really stepped it up this year with the announcement of some great looking games and the announcement of upgrades to Home.  I was dissappointed.  Yes the games do look impressive, but they also look like games that I’ve seen before on the 360, like Gears of War.  The only game that they showed that I was impressed with was Metal Gear Solid 4.  I really liked the second one, but I couldn’t get into the third one.  Metal Gear Solid 4 looks like it is going to be Playstation 3’s Halo.

Out of the three major press conferences, Sony was number 3 Microsoft came in second and Nintendo stole the show, much like it did last year