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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 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.

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.

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

Wow just wow.  Two years ago Microsoft was in second place with the Playstation 2 leading the game, my how the tables have turned.  Not only is Microsoft leading the way with games like Halo 3, Resident Evil 5 and Grand Theft Auto 4 with exclusive downloadable content, but they also have the Games for Windows set to have some awesome games out soon.  The best one looking to be Gears of War with 5 new levels.  On the market place front, Marathon and Sonic along with Golden Axe seems to be leading the way.  Along with a new partnership with Disney allowing Disney movies to be available on XBox Live.

I’m sorry if this post didn’t make much sense to you nongamers, but I will try and have non E3 posts in the next four days, but I am not promising anything.

In America there seems to be more and more teenagers that need help. Schools can’t deal with these kids because the schools have 2000 students or more and they can’t keep track of one student whose in trouble, so that student may fall through the cracks. The fact is though that kids nowadays have more problems than can be fixed, or even recognized by schools. That’s where parents have to step in and know how and when to recognize when their child, or one of their friends have a problem.

There is a website called Teen Help that will help you to identify when a child is in need of help. They are professionals with over twenty years of experience with troubled teenagers. Nowadays far too many teenagers fall through the cracks and end up living on the street, or worse.

As a society if a teenager does something bad, we usually blame a form of media. In 1999, after the Columbine shooting occurred, there was an uproar that placed the blame on the music the kids listened to and to the video games they played. The truth is that while that may have played some factor in it, there were warning signs that went unnoticed by their parents and teachers. If someone had taken noticed and attempted to get those students help, thenmaybe we would have never heard of Columbine High School.

If you suspect one of your children is in trouble, or their friends, then please, don’t hesitate to get help. We don’t want to one day hear of Nowhereville Iowa High School because of a tragedy that could have been prevented had someone stepped up and recognized a problem before it was too late.

Thanks to Michael, there is now a version of the Leprakhauns Word Count WordPress Plugin, you can get it here. It is the same plugin, it just adds it to the sidebar and adds functionality to be used with pages as well.

[Edit] 11/8/2007 I am happy to announce that it works in WordPress 2.3.1.[/Edit]

[Edit] 7/18/2007 I have updated it so that it will work whether or not you are in the visual editor.[/Edit]

[Edit]There’s an updated version up now. It should work on most if not all versions of WordPress 2.0. Sorry if it didn’t work before.[/Edit]

I created aWordpress plugin that will allow you to write a post and hit calculate and it will tell you how many words you’ve written. It only works in the visual editor, though. I created it because every other word count script I could find was having you save, or post your entry before telling you how many words. Mine will tell you without reloading the page. All you do is upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder.

You can get it here.

I like WordPress.  I put off doing it for so long because I had everything integrated into the forums, but now I can see why people flock to this program.  If you want to be a member of the forums, the registration is still available, with it you can play games and compete for the high score against other people.  You also get your own photo albums, for the time being.   Anything is subject to change now though, because I am no longer using them as a blog.

In other news I haven’t heard anyone blowing off their finger so that is good.  I brought back Spiderman 3 yesterday.  I liked the game, but I beat it and there isn’t much to do after you beat it, so I am retracting my previous statement and not buying it at this time.    I will be looking into Spiderman Friend or Foe when it comes out this fall though.

Can anyone suggest some WordPress plugins?  Preferably some that adds content without much effort?  Or suggest things you’d like to see in general, not having to do with WordPress.