andrew dodson

I’d be in full support if Franklin County’s public school system wanted to go this route.

I started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University at Crestwood last night. Tim & Cari Chase are the facilitators, and there’s a fairly good crowd taking the class. I received my kit last night which included Ramsey’s book, a workbook, audio CDs of each week’s session, budget forms, and more. It already inspired me to cut up my Chase, Best Buy, Musician’s Friend, Gateway, and CompUSA credit cards. I’m pretty excited about what I’ll learn over the next thirteen weeks.

I had a fairly productive night…

1. Rearranged my apartment. I’m not entirely sure that I like the new layout, but it might grow on me. It at least gave me a chance to clean and get some things organized. If anything, it looks a little more neat and clean.

2. Updated a couple of clients’ websites.

3. Went to the gym and burned off 400 calories (estimate).

4. Fixed my camcorder. As it turns out, the playback was messed up because I’d recorded things in both SP (short play) and LP (long play) modes. I rewinded the tape and recorded over the first 45 minutes of the tape in LP mode. Everything seems to be fine now.

We made it home safely (thanks to Rick and Jeremy’s good driving).

The crowd that didn’t go skiing today went shopping in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. This was my purchase for the day:

The little numbers on the face aren’t there all the time. You can choose several different settings, but they all have “Matrix” effect. I’ve never owned a watch this nice (or this funky) before. It has an 11-year warranty, so I’m not worried about breaking it. I’m worried about losing it…

How about this? Our hotel has a wireless network installed.

Our plans for today: some people are going skiing, some people are just hanging out in Gatlinburg today. I’ll be a part of the “hanging out” crowd. We’ll grab dinner at some point tonight and head back home. See you in Frankfort!

Ok, I admit it. I’m addicted to the MP3 player shuffle craze. “Shuffling” (as it sounds) is when your MP3 player randomly cycles through a selected playlist, or your entire collection.

A couple of weeks ago, I created a “CLS” playlist on my Creative Zen. It’s named “CLS” because it includes music that I’ve deemed “work safe.” Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I listen to inappropriate music. However, some of my musical tastes can be classified as “weird” by a great majority.

In response, I created the CLS playlist that includes more of the upbeat, enjoyable portion of my music collection. I think it’s worked great so far. I’ve noticed several customers humming along to a recognizable tune, or even commenting on the music in the past couple of weeks. Not only that, but I’ve enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It’s like having your own personal radio station that plays nothing but music you enjoy.

This has led to spending more time “MP3-ing” some of the more popular music in my CD collection. Tonight, I dug up a collection of CDs from my days at Georgetown College. They are CDs I put together during the Napster craze. The days when a college student’s daily routine included at least two hours of browsing Napster and illegally downloading all of their favorite songs (I’m not joking about this – it was nuts). This led to the buying of my first CD burner. I went through a spindle of 50 CDs the first month I owned the burner. But, I digress….

Artists that are back in the rotation include Nine Days, Default, Evan & Jaron, Fastball, Shawn Mullins, Duncan Sheik, Silverchair, the Matthew Good Band, Jimmy Eat World and more.

I’ll be heading down to Gatlinburg this weekend. Be on the lookout for audio posts from my cell phone.

From the August 15th entry of Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost For His Highest:

To be born of God means that I have His supernatural power to stop sinning.

The challenge: put to use my supernatural powers.

I traveled to Lexington this afternoon and my Creative Zen Xtra is back in my possession. This is a good thing.

I stumbled across a “hack” driver for my Creative MP3 players that will make them work on my Mac. I’ve given the driver a try, and it seems to work like a charm. I’m able to transfer files between my MP3 players and Mac with no problems. I might be selling my PC after all…

I’ve given up on trying to make the iPod work. It’s too much of a hassle. I’m meeting up with the original owner sometime tomorrow to get my Creative Zen back.

In a strange twist…

I plugged my Creative MuVoTX FM (my 256MB MP3 player – what I take to the gym with me) into my iBook tonight. I was just taking a stab in the dark, not expecting the iBook to recognize it. To my surprise, it mounted in OSX as an external drive. Fully readable and writeable. How about that?