Some Blog Site

I saw a sweepstakes from Pure Michigan, an organization devoted to promoting Michigan. You could win a trip to a waterpark. The reason the advertisement was noteworthy is that you were to mail the form to Minnesota.

If Michigan is so great, which I do think it is, then why is Pure Michigan not in Michigan?   I know – they just contracted with an existing letter-opening and sweepstakes-handling firm.  But isn’t that the point of Pure Michigan – to get people to do things in Michigan?  I would expect that at least one company in Michigan would be capable of handling their contest needs.

“He changes a wilderness into a pool of water And a dry land into springs of water; And there He makes the hungry to dwell, So that they may establish an inhabited city”
– Psalm 107:35-36

This falls into the category of “You know you’re old when…” :

My normal schedule is to go to the YMCA to work out about once or twice a week – usually once a week. Due to one reason or another, I haven’t been for the past couple of weeks until tonight. The first machine was the back extension, where you push against the weights by leaning back.

I knew it was going to be a long night when I thought the machine was stuck because it wasn’t moving when I tried to lean back. It turns out that it wasn’t broken – the problem was that my back wasn’t used to moving weights. It was the same amount of weight I’ve been using for the past few sessions.  How quickly the body degrades…

The tip? – Don’t take too long of a break between workouts.

The best way to get rid of debt is to pay it off. The best way I’ve found to pay it off faster is to round up your payments to a nice number. In my case, I round to the next hundreds place, but you could round to the next tens place or thousands place, depending on your situation.

To see the effects of paying more than the minimum amount each month, try the loan acceleration calculator, which I added to this site this past weekend.

“Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.”
– Matthew 5:41

Recent news articles have mentioned that recent stock prices have been volatile. Or you’ll hear about the stock market’s being volatile. I always understood that to mean that the prices changed rapidly.

One example of that is Virgin Mobile (ticker symbol VM). I bought that stock upon a recommendation from a previously reliable person. I bought at $5.something on 3/27/08 and the stock is now at $2.13 (4/3/08) . Now that I have owned VM, I recall hearing my high school chemistry teacher tell me that volatile means “evaporates readily.” And that is a fitting description of my VM stock.

“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.”
– James 4:14

Recent news reports mentioned that no college seniors are on the all-American team for basketball. This highlights the existing trend of players leaving college early to go to the NBA. The NBA no longer accepts athletes right out of high school, so they have to put in at least some time in college. But those who are good enough to play in the NBA go there as soon as they can.

This means that the seniors who are left on the roster are not good enough for the all-American team. I get the feeling that this could mess up the leadership position of captain. What if all the leadership has left the college team for the NBA? With only youngsters who are looking to the NBA, how is a team going to work as a team?

If you want to play sports and graduate, basketball is the worst option. If you don’t even make it to your senior year, how are you going to graduate?  All other major sports (18 of them) have better graduation rates. The fact that basketball players have the smallest chance of going pro, compared to other sports, only compounds the problem. If you want to compete in college athletics and are deciding between basketball and something else, choose something else.

“Wisdom is with aged men, {With} long life is understanding.”
– Job 12:12

I was having problems viewing certain websites in Firefox. They were pages I viewed often, so it was very annoying that the sites would not work. They would appear to ignore any CSS. I could still use the web pages because the HTML was there, but the pages were less effective than usual. Opera displayed the pages correctly, so I knew that the page source itself was fine.

After days of searching, I finally found the solution: force a full reload. Read the MozillaZine article about it, and look for the text about “Bypass the cache and reload the current page, by holding down the Shift key as you click the “Reload” button on the toolbar.”

I was almost amazed that it was that simple. I figured something had happened with the recent upgrade that Firefox had downloaded for itself. But it made sense, somewhat. Only the most-used pages looked bad because Firefox was using the cache for the style sheets. Most other pages did not have the CSS in my Firefox cache already, so it had to download a fresh copy.