~5-7-98

Ever wonder about why you can’t get approved for that credit card / car loan / ect? Here is some basic credit / credit report info I put together a while back to answer some basic questions.

Credit Primer

Today you can get your credit report online instantly (instead via mail which took up to 8 days) after answering enough questions to prove your identity. I personally like equifax’s reports because you can your FICO score which is what most lenders use to determine if and how much to approve you for. I tend to laugh at most credit protection “services” (out loud at the people offering them) that charge $50-120 a year to protect your credit and give you a “free” copy of your credit report (sometimes more than 1!) “OR” I say “I can go get my credit report for $12 (ah remember the good old days when it was $8 — damn Euro devaluing the dollar!) and take myself out somewhere nice with my money saved…”

Checking your credit more than once a year is pretty much overkill… it often only updates every 3 or 4 months, but checking in every year or so is a good idea — just so any mistakes are taken care of in your free time and not when you really, really, really want to buy that new Porche 911 now, now, now! Not to mention the embarassment saved at your local Porche dealership. (ah the nouveau riche…)

~3-2-01

This is old but it still really irks me that some people in state government thought it was a good idea if they passed a law giving them the same control over privately built structures surrounding UT as the buildings funded and built by the government that are in UT.

I think I said it well here “It is sad that the same people that keep reducing funding for higher education are now trying to block private funding efforts to help UTC. If the government wants to control UTC’s growth they should FUND it! Controlling what happens with private funds goes against the wonderful free market economy that our country is built on.”

I keep this up lest anyone forget the lovely people that tried to pull this off in the coming election… Save UTC

Ah some of my work on the web that has survived…. mostly. Compassion Coalition is a noble organization that exists to unite/mobilize the churches in Knoxville, TN towards common goals such as the homeless, battered women, ect. I think it is a great idea because I love efficiency and this keeps churches from having to remaking the wheel and they can also have ecconomies of scale because multiple churches are working on one cause. It also helps members of churches find many more places to plug-in beyond what a single church could ever provide. Not to mention the added unity stuff that is all warm and fuzzy. They had done this primarily through a publication called the salt and light guide or S&LG which was great except for the fact that it was paper and only updated every few years due to the publishing expenses… then the web was invented (actually years previous to this but for the sake of the story)…

Anyway I was commissioned to translate the paper book into a php / mySQL interactive database wonder… which was moving along nicely until the ministry hired an in-house web designer that was really good…. w/ frontpage (if you haven’t done much advanced web design you won’t really get the irony here). So since my interactive fully online system didn’t plugin to frontpage it was pretty much labeled crap and I was dismissed from the project. Anyway, the web conversion of the S&LG was pretty much just moved over to the frontpage site so it is a gleam of my work on that project that still exists.

Online S&LG

~11-7-03

I promised a friend a long time ago to keep this up on the web for him. He probably doesn’t care anymore, but a promise is a promise… and since he has ghost written a popular christian book and is now working on his own book, I can say i knew him when ;)

This was originally put on the web around: 7-7-03

TRUE RIGHTEOUSNESS

IntroductionRighteousness is often misunderstood and incorrectly defined amongst Christians today. This extremely important characteristic of every Christian must of necessity be understood, or we face the consequences of living under a lie. Misconceptions of righteousness have caused many Christians to fall into legalism and others to misunderstand the gospel in its entirety. It is both vital and apparent that Christians need to stop overlooking this word and begin to grasp the truth about righteousness. To understand Biblical righteousness as it relates to the Christian, we must first know that righteousness has many different definitions. In this particular piece of literature, we will be discussing four specific types of righteousness:

Read more

~1-6-00

Some online bible references… again I appologize for the randomness of this initial content… I’m sure I’ll clean it up later… but if my office is any indication don’t expect it any time soon.

It never fails to amaze me how often experience is confused with talent. Just because someone has been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean that they are actually ANY good at it.

For instance Eldrick (Tiger) Woods, now 28 years of age, has had an unprecedented career since becoming a professional golfer in the late summer of 1996 (at the ripe old age of 20). He has won 53 tournaments, 40 of those on the PGA TOUR, including the 1997, 2001, and 2002 Masters Tournaments, 1999 and 2000 PGA Championships, 2000 and 2002 U.S. Open Championship, and 2000 British Open Championship. With his second Masters victory in 2001, Tiger became the first ever to hold all four professional major championships at the same time. He is the career victories leader among active players on the PGA TOUR, and is the career money list leader. Now THAT is TALENT.

Now let’s compare this young Tiger Woods to of male golfers over say 40… you know people with EXPERIENCE playing golf. 78% of whom can’t consistently break 90 out on the course. For those of you that aren’t avid golfers par is 72 (Incidently only 0.1% of golfers are par golfers - http://www.golfinsite.net/how_lousy_are_you.htm)

Think about that the next time you have a bright young lad (or lasse) up against an experienced old fart…. I mean really if the guy with experience was good at what they do; wouldn’t they have moved to the next level by now?

Wow, we’re finally back up after like two years being dark. So much to cover, that I’m not sure where to start… I will work on getting my reviews, rants, and raves pulled together from the far flung reaches of cyberspace where they landed without this place to keep them - at least somewhat - contained.

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