Apr252010

Financial Tip: Check Your Statements

For the most part, I'm in no real position to offer anyone financial advice. Almost everything I live by financially has come from "common sense" point-of-view, or from learning from other people's mistakes. However, I do have a tip to share: check your statements; credit card or bank, checking your statements can be vital to your financial security. Thanks to this fast and simple rule, I saved myself from some possibly-large financial trouble.

Last week, I received one of my credit card bills; it was for a student card that only incurs interest if the balance is over $250 (very handy, I might add). I was going through my statement, and saw that there was a charge to HP for $150 or so. After doing some deep research, checking my e-mail for any transactions around that date, I panicked. I had no clue why that charge was there.

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Apr202010

Quiero Aprender el Idioma: Spanish Learning Resources

I want to learn Spanish.

For my bachelor's degree, FSU requires two "cultural enrichment" classes. For mine, I chose Spanish 101 and 102. There were a few reasons why I chose Spanish: I've taken Spanish classes in High School, two years actually, but I never retained as much information as I would have liked, I'd like to understand a new culture and how they communicate, and I'd like to retain some of my family's culture.

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Apr192010

Concerts

[gallery link="file" orderby="title"]

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Apr192010

It’s Been One of Those Days…

I've had every chance to be productive today. Instead, I decided to take a break. I've been really busy over this last semester: trying to finish up my bachelor's degree, keep up with work, friends, and family, along with other side project. In today's break, two fun Photoshop projects came out of it.

A photo of Kyle beating on Jimmy Clouds:

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Apr172010

The Game

I think you just lost it…

For those of you that don't know: The Game on Wikipedia.

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Apr112010

Grammar Tip: Who vs. Whom

Of all the rules in the English language, the battle between "who vs. whom" is the one I dislike the most. These two words are so similar, and normally I would just fall back on who, hoping no one would call me out or notice. Well, it's time to put an end to that!

After a quick Google search, I found this interesting excerpt at Dictionary.com:

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Apr102010

Gem Tip: Unpack RJB into a Rails App

The RJB gem has been insanely useful to me over the past few weeks. I've been developing with it on my local machine and things have been going well (that is, after finally figuring out how to get it properly installed). However, I've run into an issue when packaging the gem for remote deployment.

To prevent missing gems, I will normally run rake rails:freeze:gems and rake gem:unpack:dependencies (and in this case, rake spree:freeze:gems as well). This will copy the gems from my local installation into the vendor/rails and vendor/gems directories (respectively). However, when I ran this command on an app that uses RJB, I was getting an RJBCore missing error. After some investigation, the fix was easy.

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Apr072010

Twist, Tangle and Dread: The Path to Dreadlocks (Pt 3)

Joy finished all of the initial backcombing. Continue reading for all of the pics.

[gallery link="file" orderby="title"]

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Apr062010

Twist, Tangle and Dread: The Path to Dreadlocks (Pt 2)

It's been a couple of weeks since the dreadlock-project has started. In that time, I've had a chance to see how my hair will tolerate the "twist" method of dreadlocking. Sadly, things haven't been going to plan.

Some of the twists just wouldn't stay together. They kept fraying and falling apart, especially those on the sides of my head. After messing around in front of a mirror for a while, Joy and I found a method that appears to be working (so far at least).

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Mar302010

Twist, Tangle and Dread: The Path to Dreadlocks (Pt 1)

Since June, I've been letting my hair grow freely with one intent in mind: get dreadlocks. I've always wanted them, at least to try for a while, and now I have a great opportunity to try them out.

A couple of weeks ago, Joy and I attempted to backcomb my hair (with some advice from Ami). We sectioned off all of the hair, and she attempted to backcomb the bottom-back of my hair. Well, that didn't work out too well. Joy had a hard time with the actual combing, and it wasn't looking right. A ton of conditioner later, I had reversed what was done.

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