(Yes, I’m originally from North Dakota. And no, these are not exaggerations)

If ‘vacation’ to you means going shopping for the weekend in
Minot, Grand Forks, or Bismarck (while the kids swim at the Comfort Inn), you
might live in North Dakota.

If parking your car for the night involves an extension cord you might live in North Dakota.

If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 8 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, you might live in North Dakota.

If you’re proud that your state makes the national news primarily because it houses the coldest spot in the nation, you might live in North Dakota.

If you have ever refused to buy something because it’s ‘too spendy’, you might live in North Dakota.

If your local Dairy Queen is closed from November through March, you might live in North Dakota.

If someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don’t work there, you might live in North Dakota.

If your dad’s suntan stops at a line curving around the middle of his forehead, you might live in North Dakota.

If you have worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you might
live in North Dakota.

If your town has an equal number of bars and churches, you might live in North Dakota.

If you know how to correctly pronounce Minot , Bottineau, Ypsilanti, or Glen Ullin, you might live in North Dakota.

If you measure distance in hours, you might live in North Dakota

If your family vehicle is a crew cab pickup, you might live in North Dakota.

If you know several people who have hit deer more than once, you might live in North Dakota.

If you often switch from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ in the same day and back again, you might live in North Dakota.

If you can drive 65 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching, you might live in North Dakota.

If you see people wearing hunting clothes at social events, you might live in North Dakota.

If you’ve installed security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked, you might live in North Dakota.

If the largest traffic jam in your town centers around a high school basketball game, you might live in North Dakota.

If you carry jumper cables in your car and your girlfriend knows how to use them, you might live in North Dakota.

If your town’s Christmas lights parade is actually called the ‘Christmas Lights Parade’ rather than the ‘Holiday Lights Parade’, and everyone in the parade actually greets you with ‘Merry Christmas!’ You might live in North Dakota.

If there are 7 empty cars running in the parking lot at Wal-Mart at any given time, you might live in North Dakota.

If there are more people at work on Christmas Eve Day than on Opening Deer Season, you might live in North Dakota.

If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit, you might live in North Dakota.

If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow, you might live in North Dakota.

If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction, you might live in North Dakota.

If you can identify a southern or eastern accent, you might live in North Dakota.

If you consider Medora exotic, you might live in North Dakota.

If your idea of creative landscaping is a statue of a deer next to your cottonwood, you might live in North Dakota.

If the Sunbelt to you means Bismarck , you might live in North Dakota.

If you know where the ‘banana belt’ is, you might be from North Dakota.

If a brat is something you eat, you might live in North Dakota.

If finding your misplaced car keys involves looking in the ignition, you might live in North Dakota.

If you go out to a fish fry every Friday, you might live in North Dakota.

If you find 0 degrees ‘a little chilly,’ you might live in North Dakota.

If you actually understand these observations, and you forward them to all your North Dakota friends, you must be from North Dakota!

It’s amazing what technology has done in bringing worlds together. I was sorting through the mess of spam friend requests in my myspace account today (which i rarely use, btw, so just email me at if you want to hear back), and I had an invite from an old classmate and an old college friend. I also chatted on AIM with an old friend I met in spain who found me on MySpace, and it was kind of neat. She hooked me up with the email address of the other guy I met in Spain who’s now also in Chicago (I ran into him a couple weeks ago, but lost his number).

It’s a small world.

I spent some more time surfing around MySpace, and it’s crazy to see how some people have changed. Other outcomes were a little more predictable…

But anyways, it gets me to wondering if I’ve been faithful in speaking up about Christ enough in the past. He’s the only thing that can make sense of it all, and from the looks of things, there’s a lot of people that could use some direction. And so I pray that God would not only answer the questions in my heart, but also give me the courage and the wisdom to speak his truth appropriately.

So I got the results to my greek test…and lo and behold, I passed! Suprisingly, I did well enough that supposedly they put me in the top tier class of NT Exegesis I. Praise the Lord, this means 1 less class to take, at a savings of about $2400!

The temptation is to spend that money on a new MacBook Pro, right? Unfortunately, it can’t really work that way. Since I didn’t really earn anything, I won’t see a check for $2400, and that money that would have otherwise-been-spent will go to pay for sensible things like rent and food and other tuition.

I am, however, considering a MacBook yet again. The specs are good, the battery life good, noise—good, size: perfect. Unfortunately, I’d probably have to get parallels and run XP on it as well so I can use BibleWorks 7. Has anyone out there run XP in Parallels (or VMWare Fusion) on a Macbook (NOT a MacBook Pro) that could give me any word on performance?

Or, better yet, anyone want to buy me a MacBook Pro?

Update: It seems that Accordance Bible Software for OS X is pretty sweet, and comparable in price (at least for what I’ll be using it for) to BibleWorks. Maybe, just maybe, I won’t need windows after all…

Today has been a great day. Well, it has since I wooted my first Bag of Crap. I’ve been desiring one of these collections of pure trash ever since I started wooting a long time ago, and now that day has finally arrived. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!

Oh, yeah, and I watched “Stranger Than Fiction” tonight. It’s a really good show. No, really, it is. Not your typical Will Ferrell.

For Lisa’s birthday, I decided to take her around and buy her a “real” guitar. She started learning on an old, extremely low-end model that my dad bought back in his high school days and never used–needless to say, for someone with a music degree, not an entirely pleasant experience.

We wanted to find something that would sound good, tune well, and not fall apart in a year. Brand names were not a consideration, nor were fancy features. The highest priority was something that Lisa’s sensitive ears would enjoy listening to, that wouldn’t break the bank.

We got a little advice from a few sources before setting out, and armed with that knowledge made three stops:

At our first stop, we were looking specifically for a Seagull S6. While they didn’t have the S6, they did have the S6+, which is virtually identical except for the finish. All the hype seemed to be true–this guitar sounded really, really good. Lisa played a few other guitars there, but nothing really compared.

At the next stop, we tried out some Oscar Schmidt models, made by Washburn, who is known primarily for electric guitars. They sounded OK, but not great.

Finally, we made a trek across town to visit a bigger guitar shop, and tried out some low-end Takamines (ick), a cheap Taylor (cheaply made), and a Martin DX-1.

The Martin was $550, about $230 more than the Seagull we found, and although Lisa really loved the sound of it, the $230 difference proved to be too much, considering that the DX-1 is mostly synthetic materials, and the only piece of real wood on it is the top. We headed back to our starting place and bought the Seagull. I like it, I really do–for someone who doesn’t care about brand names and isn’t going to play professionally, this is a great guitar to have.

Dear Flixster.com,

I didn’t know who you were a week ago, and I suppose that’s what you were trying to overcome. I know you’re just lonely for friends, and I know that you just wanted to build a multi-million dollar domain so you can sell yourself and make your creators very, very rich.

But you didn’t have to resort to the level of a common, sleazy, spammer to do it.

You see, I write email marketing messages for a certain manufacturer, and we use a return address that all our mail comes from. We request that (genuine, opted-in) recipients add us to their address books so that they can continue to receive news about new products and special offers that we send without our messages being accidentally filtered.

Last week, this non-personal email address got an email, and the subject was:

Cindy T has sent you a personal message

Lo and behold, it wasn’t a personal message at all. Because this non-personal email address doesn’t know Cindy T, and Cindy T certainly didn’t send a personal note to this certain manufacturer. The “personal message”? (Yes, I clicked through for research’s sake) The message was this: ” Hey, this quiz was fun – do it so we can compare.” When a week later we got another “Personal Message” from another person, I did some research on the web. It seems that you’ve been a bad .com.

From what I understand, when people sign up with free web-based email addresses, you ask for their login information, and then you go and send emails to the people in their online address books. Please stop your scummy practices. If you want more people to visit your site, make a service worth using, ask people to tell their friends about it (or give them some incentive to), and quit sending junk mail to every email address you can get your hands on.

Rest assured, I will never use your site, nor trust you with any personal information of mine. I wil also never recommend you to my friends, and if the topic comes up, I will do quite the opposite: I will tell them to stay away.

Now, you may be in some legal gray area where you can’t technically get fined or sued for anything. I don’t know. I do know that you’re treading on thin ice here, and you’d be much more likely to gain a more loyal customer base if you treated them with a little respect.

Thanks for never sending another “Personal note” again,

Andy