Short-Term or PayD ay Loans By Stanley T. Crawford

Short-term loans, payday loans, and cash advances, these are often frowned upon by some people. Yet there is a large market for these loans. Most advice concerning these loans is not to obtain them, however fact remains that thousands of people obtain these loans every month. If they weren’t profitable, places like ACE, Cash America, and other businesses wouldn’t provide these loans.

Last weekend, while rest of Fort Wayne celebrated long-awaited onset of springtime temperatures, I stayed inside and did something I've never done before.

I burned my first CD.

Yep, I joined Pepsi generation and got me a real CD-RW drive. And I actually copied a music CD onto a blank CD (my wife's favorite Eric Clapton CD -- so now she's got one for home and one for van; guess I better burn another one so she can listen to it at work, too.)

But it wasn't easy, let me tell ya!

If fact, I didn't think it would ever happen.

Why? Because when it comes to computers, I ain't most proficient guy in world. I know how to use my accounting and tax software, and I can peck away at a word processor with best of them, but hardware? I'm clueless, man, absolutely clueless.

To me, RAM is an animal, mascot for a pro football team that used to play in L.A. and then moved to St. Louis.

But my wife and kids have been pestering me for months to get a CD-RW so we can make our own music CD's. So last week I finally gave in and ventured out to my local discount electronics store.

And there they were, lined up on shelf, all 28 different models.

I picked up one of boxes and looked at "specs". The first label that caught my eye was called "Disc Formats": CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM (mode 1 and mode 2), CD-ROM XA (mode2, form 1 and form2), CD-DA, Bootable CD, Photo CD (single and multi-sessions), Video CD, CD-Extra, Mixed mode CD, CD-text.

I suddenly felt beginnings of a headache.

I know enough about hardware to know that you've got to make sure a new piece of hardware is compatible with your existing hardware.

Ah, yes, "interface", gotta make sure that's right!

So I looked at box where is said "E-IDE/ATAPI".

Now my stomach didn't feel so good either.

Finally, I turned box over and found what I was looking for, "System Requirements": IBM PC Pentium 200MHz or higher; 64MB DRAM, 1 GB for image recording, 150MB free HD space for installing writing software.

I no longer had a headache. I had a migraine.