Here is an interesting story from Forbes magazine that appeared on Yahoo!Finance. It’s about the peer-to-peer lending site, Prosper.com.

The article is very balanced, I feel, noting that unsecured lending is dangerous, and also noting that Prosper has an older rival in England. Among the positive things the article has to say:

• Lenders can make more money on Prosper than they could with a CD at their bank.
• Borrowers can pay less for a Prosper loan than they would with a credit card loan.
• Lenders enjoy the personal satisfaction of helping out someone in need.

Personally, I invested $500 in Prosper seven months ago, and now my account is worth $540. Not stellar performance, to be sure, but a good bit better than a CD.

Taking off out of Los Angeles airport, I heard the guy behind me ask, in an unusually loud voice for an airplane, “Does anybody know what that body of water is?”

I was checking out blogs at random yesterday, when I ran across the British Bull Dog. He raises an interesting question.

Often we dream of winning a lottery or inheriting a gigantic pile of money. (Yes you do; admit it.) Most of us are so far from ever falling into a pile of money that daydreaming about it is a complete waste of time. But what if you didn’t dream about a pile of money? What if you dreamt, instead, of just enough money to change your life? Obviously, $1 won’t change your life, and $1 million is probably a daydream. So where is the line? What is the magic amount that, if it was given you, would have the power to change your life?

This type of thinking isn’t daydreaming. An amount that could change your life is probably attainable within your lifetime. And if that amount is attainable, maybe you’d start trying to attain it, instead of just dreaming about it?

I’d have to say the amount that would change my life would be the sum of all my debts. If I didn’t have any debt payments to make, I’d have an extra $2000 per month. And I can think of a whole lot of things I’d rather do with that money than service my debt. Support a missionary, for example, or take an annual vacation.

I recently joined a new small group for men at our church. The primary goal is groom in ourselves the kind of qualities that make good elders. We hope to achieve this goal by two main means: reading copious amounts of scripture, and holding each other accountable for godly living.

Believing that “all scripture is God-breathed and is useful…”, we are going to pour large amounts of it into our heads. In the two weeks until our next meeting, for example, we’ll each read the book of Matthew twice. The emphasis here is not to meditate for long periods on a single verse or sentence, but to have in our minds a large store of scripture on which to call when necessary.

In order to hold each other accountable, we are each going to answer, out loud, several questions at each meeting. The questions are too numerous to enumerate in their entirety, but here are a couple examples:

• Have you been exposed to sexually alluring material or allowed your mind to entertain inappropriate sexual thoughts about another this week?
• Have you lacked integrity in your financial dealings or coveted something that does not belong to you?
• Have you given in to an addictive behavior this past week? Explain.
• Have you secretly wished for another’s misfortune?

I expect this small group to be a painful, but beneficial, period of growth. I expect to draw closer to God, and to better understand my fellow would-be elders.

I discovered a new site call LendingStats that keeps track of your Prosper performance. (Prosper, of course, being a peer-to-peer lending community.) I was amazed at the amount of money some people have invested at Prosper. Be sure to check out Biggest Lenders link in the sidebar. Just in case you care, here is the link to my performance data.

Please, before you skip over this post, hear me out.

The appeal of romance novels is largely limited to women, obviously. But I have read one romance novel, and it was pretty good. Pride and Prejudice is a surprisingly good book. It describes a budding romance between an upper-middle class man and woman in regency England. Its one downfall is that it is written by a woman. Therefore the major characters are women, and when ever there is a man in the story, we don’t experience the struggles he faces the way we experience the women’s struggles.

The fact is, I see something of myself in each of the main male characters in P&P. And every time I relate to a situation, I’m left wondering how the character deals with it. I’d really like to know what he’s thinking, so I can compare it to what I actually thought when I was in a similar situation.

Before I lose both my readers, let me point out that I’m not about to get in touch with my feminine side. But any honest man who is dating, or has ever dated, a woman, will tell you that men have a very unique perspective on romance - it’s just very different from women’s perspective. And if the point of reading is to learn something, I’d like to be able to learn something about myself by delving into the brains of characters I identify with.

Is there a man out there who is man enough to write a romance novel about men, where women are the minor characters? Would anybody read it?

Shortly after the planes hit the World Trade Center towers, many people jumped out of windows, plummeting hundreds of feet to their deaths.

Why?

I can only think they must have preferred it to burning to death.

Think about that for a moment. The agony of burning alive is so great that people will jump out of the eightieth story of a skyscraper to avoid it. If that’s true, what does it tell us about the agony of burning for an eternity in hell?

About a month ago I tried to reconfigure some setting or another in MS Excel. I ended up hosing something so that I always got an error message when starting Excel and when closing it. The program worked just fine, other than the error message, so I didn’t bother trying to fix it right away. Finally, the annoyance got to be too much. So I stuck the CD in and ran the repair option in the install program. That seemed to run just fine, and it told me I had successfully repaired MS Office 2003. Fired up Excel, and… bummer, still get the error message.

The only option left to me was to uninstall Office and reinstall it. But wait, why did I have to reinstall? Haven’t I been wanting to try OpenOffice.org for a long time now? The only reason I never tried it before was that I had a perfectly good copy of MS Office. I jumped at the chance, uninstalled MS Office, installed OpenOffice, and haven’t looked back!

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. It has an application to match each application in MS Office; complete with a word processor (Word), a spreadsheet application (Excel), a database application (Access), and a presentation program (Powerpoint). Also included are a vector drawing tool (Visio) and a mathematical function creator.

Have you ever been in a tall building, on a bridge, in the arch in St. Louis? It sways a little bit and you’re not quite sure if the thing is gonna hold. It always does, of course, but you don’t have that secure feeling until you’re back on the ground.

So it is with office suites. MS Office never did anything worse than annoy me a little, but OpenOffice feels like terra firma. It doesn’t feel like several applications bundled together, it feels like one application. It feels solid; I no longer fear that I’m going to flip some switch somewhere and hose the whole thing up. The interface is identical between all the applications, so you only have to learn where something is once.

Like anything new, it does take a little getting used to, of course. It’s not MS Office, and some things don’t work like they do in MS Office, but in most cases the differences are actual improvements, not annoyances. If you can adjust to different toothbrushes every six months, you can adjust to the differences in office suites.

Micah (6) just walked in and said, “Daddy, we were playing ping-pong with Caleb’s head, and I accidentally poked my finger in his eye.”

See my old blog at http://weiszguy.blogspot.com