UPDATES:
-I believe I mentioned that the church, as a parting gift, gave me a generous gift card to Best Buy. Well, I used it to buy an ipod photo...that's right, 30 GB of space for all my music and photos. I have tried out the slide shows, and it is really cool. I like to open a folder that has all pictures of me and then play some soft music...it brings a tear to my eye.

-I went to the world aquarium in downtown St. Louis and pet a shark. Cool, but it gave me chills.

-today I did something that I haven't done in a long time (since college). I didn't go to church. It felt great. Although considering that I didn't work all week it actually just felt like a regular day.

-today on the clearance table at Walmart, I noticed HDTV tuners were only 10,000 credits. I bought one. It totally rocks. I only get about 8 channels with it. All local, but they look like they do in Best Buy. I haven't decided if I'm going to keep it or not...I have 30 days to return it. John will be surprised tonight when he turns on the TV and watches Austin City Limits in true 16:9 1080i HD.

-today, I decided to stop saying 'dollars' and start saying 'credits.' So, one dollar is actually 100 credits. I assume this will catch on quick and be huge in the near future. I am single handedly causing a word to become extinct.

-My brother is being ordained next Sunday. This means he gets good tax breaks.

-upon buying my ipod and making several visits to the apple store, I have decided that my fate is to save up and buy an apple computer. Julie is going to get an ibook, John's probably going to get a powerbook, I REALLY like the powermac (but not the price), I'm diggin the mac mini but I need more power, so I'll probably settle on the G5 imac. Anybody have any suggestions here?

-here is a positive and negative plug for Napster. (+) When you sign up with Napster, you can download your songs on up to 3 computers. Imagine my surprise that when I logged in on Julie's computer the program prompted me to start downloading all my previous downloads...for free. (-) Napster's music is fully, digitally protected. If you download the music in Napster, you can play it in any music player, but the file must remain in a WMA format, so if you have a player (say, itunes) that doesn't play WMAs, you cannot load any Napster songs onto your newly purchased ipod. The way around is to burn the Napster songs onto CD, then re-rip the music into itunes (into mp3 format). Unfortunately, you'll lose all the album info...annoying. So what's the big deal? Napster is actually cheaper if you buy albums. Most albums are only 900 or 1000 credits no matter how many tracks are on it. If, however, you only are downloading individual songs, it is 99 credits...just like itunes. On itunes, you'll pay for each individual track on a whole album (i think). Oh, and if you are one of the ones who just downloads music using a program like kazaa or morpheus or whatever, that's stealing so stop it!

-I've loaded up some new photos.