Jasper Jones

Lately there have been so many natural disasters in the news. We had several bad hurricanes, especially Hurricane Ike that hit Galveston and Houston last month. There have been huge raging fires in California and other western states. And there have been several strong earthquakes, like the one in china that hit just a month or so before the Olympics.

I found a site that the US Government maintains about hurricanes. The USGS site has interactive maps of different regions that show a week’s worth of earthquake activity.

Just chatting with Kelly over a couple sandwiches from Subway and taking a break between classes, we were discussing the fact that a lot of public information is now available over the internet and in many cases the challenge is just to find the right URL or right links to get what you want. For example, the names and addresses of landowners of record are available through the state of Tennessee, but you can’t Google anything to come up with the right URL for the information.

The same thing goes for other public records, like marriage licenses, divorce records and other Court Records. You have to know where to look. Some sites are free and other charge a nominal fee. In my opinion, I don’t mind paying a fee if the information is fast and reliable.

For my economics class I have to do an analysis of an existing business and try to change it’s business model to an alternative form. The Professor used the example of a Subway Sandwich shop, which is a franchise. So if you look at what makes a Subway Sandwich shop successful and identify the advantages of it being a franchise, can you theoretically operate the same business under a different business model and have it be comparably successful?

He handed out slips of paper with actual businesses to be assigned and examined by each student. By the luck of the draw, I got a Wilmington NC auto repair shop. The business is a family owned and operated, single location repair shop. At least the subject is interesting to me and they have a web site, so I can do a lot of research from my computer in my room. I might also make a couple of telephone calls during the day and see if the owner would be willing to talk to me.

The shop is named Atlantic Car Care and their web site is pretty nice. It has the hours open and their street address on the sidebar, which is probably what most people will be looking for. They also list all the credit cards that they accept for payment. One cool feature they have is that you can schedule your car repair or maintenance on the internet from their site. It’s got enough informaiton on the site to know that this is a successful business and I can start my analysis with this.

College kids are constantly bombarded with offers of credit and loans. Let’s face it, these are the people most likely to need a little boost with money. If taking a heavy course load, most student can only deal with a part time job at minimum wage to keep some spending money coming in. It’s a time of great sacrifice and limitation for a lot of people, but unfortunately, life happens and sometimes we need to raise cash quick to take care of unplanned expenses.

One solution to covering small emergencies is to take out a short term personal loan. An easy way to apply for Personal Loans is to use the internet to apply for the loan. But kids need to use this resource sparingly and responsibly. There’s no sense getting off to a bad start with a lot of debt right out of college, but if you need help to get through this difficult time, its good to know what resources are available to you and sometimes a short term personal loan is really the best solution to the problem.

Alex has a younger brother back in California. I met him last year when the whole family came out here for spring break to pick up Alex and then they all went on down to Orlando and spent the week at Universal Studios. His brother is a senior this year and called tonight about getting some help with his college applications.

Alex had a great high school counselor who helped him with most of his applications and although this school was not his first pick, he liked this one the best of which ones accepted him. But Lil Bro isn’t getting much help from his school counselor and Alex is trying to help him get things moving by talking on the phone and sending him instant messages, texting, emails, etc. The boy is not dumb but I don’t see why he needs so much help from Alex. It’s not that hard, especially if you go to the web site called Collegezaps and get help with the college application process from CollegeZapps.

There’s a link for students, a different links for parents and a third link for counselors. The link for students is totally easy to work through. You choose your schools, you fill in their online questionnaire, print the documents and proof them for spelling and grammar, and then you send them in. I mean, how hard is THAT?

I told Alex to make sure his brother applies to multiple schools and gets a new email address to use with just his name and not a silly gamer or hiphop name that he uses in the chat rooms. Other than that, the rest is just common sense and getting help from the right people or places.