Week In Review

There have been many big and small things over the past 7 days that normally would be individual blog posts, but will be smushed together in this one catch all blog.

Non-Sports:
Personal Finance -
Another great article from Jessica Grose on personal finance and specifically the budget talk. In the article she writes about a breakdown of categories of expenses. One thing she uses is a link to a Washington Post budget worksheet that I found really interesting. That budget worksheet has 21 categories, which sounds like a good number (I like to use 18) until I looked at what was considered. When I tried to fill in our numbers I didn't know where to put the money we spent on gifts or travel. Is the Washington Post really saying that a normal budget doesn't include those two things? I can't imagine not having a budget with those two categories.

Anyway, I commented in on her post (with something similiar to what I wrote above) and she was nice enough to comment back to me. That type of interaction is something that is really great about the internet compared to newspapers or magazines. Of course there is the flipside when comments can be especially mean or vulgar, but I think certain sites (like slate.com) do a great job of limiting those comments by making people sign in. Not that surprisngly the extremly negative comments decrease when you have to attach your name to them.

Miami University -
Miami University's Dean of the School of Business, Roger Jenkins is a personable guy, who has really helped Miami out since he joined our school. I have had the joy of traveling with him in China and also had the pleasure of being his guest at a dinner he hosted for our Pacfic Rim traveling group. However, he has had a problem in the past with forwarding emails to his entire listserv as opposed to just his friends. One of those mistakes happened this week, when I received an email forward about a personal ad, where a guy describes pulling a gun on a potential knife-wielding robber. If you want to read the ad feel free to click on this link.

The only issue is that the ad is fake. I did a quick search on snopes.com and found out that there was never an ad like that, and that the person who wrote the text really was just frustrated because he had been robbed. It seemed obvious when I got the email that it was a fake and couldn't believe that someone like the Dean of the School of Business would A) believe that or B) forward that along. It made me kind of upset because I didn't feel like the inaccurate forward reflected well on Miami University. I sent him an email back telling just that and he wrote me back within a few hours with an apology. Give Dean Jenkins credit for that even if he didn't acknoledge the fact that the "funny" (as he called it) wasn't true. Maybe I guess it didn't matter that it wasn't true and rather he found humor in the piece of fiction.

Sports
Duke > UNC
Duke beat UNC after overcoming a 16 point deficit. I wish I could write that it was a great team effort, but really Seth Curry and Nolan Smith were the difference between winning and losing by double digits. That isn't to say that the Plumlees, Singler or others didn't help, but considering the non-Smith/Curry team shot 21% (7-33) and Smith/Curry shot 60% (21-35) it is hard to argue the game wasn't decided by those two players. My one big fear is that UNC is going to some day soon realize that they have a really good team.

Carlos Boozer
Carlos Boozer returned to Utah, so I wrote a post about it. This post was randomly linked on twitter by cnnsi.com's NBA guy Zach Lowe. It is really pretty cool to have one of your favorite writers link to your post with words of praise. I did not expect that at all.

Jerry Sloan
Coach Jerry Sloan resigned abruptly, which is pretty amazing considering he has been coaching the Jazz since I was 5 years old. I wrote a post charting certain life events of mine with Coach Sloan's career as a coach of the Jazz. The reports I have read about what happened with Deron Williams does not inspire confidence in the future of the Jazz.