me - <random bitching>

mike - know what this is? <rubs three fingers together, signifying smallest violin in the world>

me - you whacking off?

Once upon a time, there was a little girl that tried. She tried to be pretty when everyone told her she was ugly. She tried to be smart when everyone told her she had potential. She tried to be a square peg for a square hole, because she didn't know she would never be anything but a circle.

She lived in a gray house in a small town where all the other houses were gray. She laughed at the jokes everyone told, even though she knew they were petty and cruel. She ate what everyone else ate. She read the books everyone else read. She watched the same TV shows everyone else watched. She tried to make her mind small. She tried to ignore herself.

Years passed. Everyone else got older, but the girl stayed the same. She was oblivious to the fact that she was different. She ate the words they fed her, and then she asked for more. She was dissatisfied with life, but she couldn't tell you this because she didn't know anything different.

One day, she was sitting quietly by herself, and she realized that something wasn't right. It was something she'd known deep inside for a long time, but lack of options prevented her from admitting it. She knew she couldn't pretend anymore. She didn't think the future could be anything different from the present, but she fought it, regardless.

She finally left this small town. She found out that not all houses were gray, but none of the other houses seemed to suit her, either. She met people that were different from the people she knew before, but she still couldn't make herself see eye to eye with them. She was trading one set of lies for another. She felt herself failing.

Eventually, she found people that told her everything would be alright. She started to believe them, and she tried to build a life for herself. She started a family, thinking "I will not tell my children to be square. I will let them decide for themselves what shape to be. They can decide what color their houses will be. They will think like me. I will have the family I have always lacked. I will be happy."

She built a family, but it fell. She despaired.

She still searches.

I'm picking Mike up from the airport in about 15 hours. I'm pretty excited about it, since we haven't seen each other since Saturday morning. I've had a lot more fun this week than I thought I would. It's been a while since I had to entertain myself.

I got tags for my truck today. This is the first time I have gotten tags for any truck/car/motorcycle of mine, evar. IK feel very accomplished, although somewhat disappointed. It was kind of neat skirting the legal system for this long. I'm finally a tool of the man, a victim of society, a person that follows rules.

My dad informed me tonight that he's a Republican. He's pro-life. He also supports the laws against stem cell research. Why am I not surprised?

Someone included a link to some of the FreeBSD party pictures in a Slashdot comment.

:(

I'm utterly exhausted. I haven't slept well all week, probably because Mike's been gone. I just don't sleep well by myself, anymore. He'll be back Friday. Yay! Counting the minutes.

I'm not sure if I should laugh or be angry. When I was driving home from work in the morning, I was probably going about 80mph on I-285. A gorgeous silver Audi S4 is driving beside me, but I forgot about it as I started getting into the music that was on the radio and smoking my morning clove. A few minutes later, I hear him honking, so I look over. It turns out he's been driving next to me and staring at me the entire time, and then he holds up a big yellow piece of paper in his window, upon which he has written in black marker "I LIKE THE WAY YOU SMOKE". I start laughing, because I don't know what else to do, and he continues driving next to me, gesturing through his window and trying to talk. At this point I was kind of getting freaked out, so I dropped down into 4th gear, popped the clutch, and took off at about 120mph.

What would Jesus do?

naked.freebsdgirl.com is still where authenticated users should go. It's the exact same site as freebsdgirl.com, but with a few changes. Instead of locking out unauthenticated users on freebsdgirl.com from entire entries, I've implimented tags so I can just mark part of an entry as private. RSS was getting annoying to manage when there's 2 different sites to manage. The exact same RSS feed will work for both sites now.

Put your clothes back on.

No no, just kidding. For all of you authenticated users that view the blog with naked.freebsdgirl.com, you've probably noticed by now that it's kinda uh...broken.

Yeah, well I'm fixing that right now. Please be patient. :)

Here's some pictures of some people I hung out with after I left the Globe. I'm still kind of sad that the Globe is shutting down. I have a lot of happy - and some not so happy - memories that tie into that place. I can't really explain it to anyone. I can't expect them to understand. The Globe represented a part of my life that I'm over with now, but I hate to see it shutting down.

I guess you can't stop progress.

Just to make things easier for ya'll, here's some step-by-step instructions for getting your Motorola V600 from T-Mobile working with OSX.

1. If you've paired your phone and laptop already, delete it from both. It's easier to start from scratch.
2. On the Mac, System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Settings.
3. Check Discoverable and Support Non-Conforming Phones.
4. Click on the Devices tab, and then Set Up New Device.
5. Click Continue.
6. On your Motorola, Main Menu -> Settings -> Connection -> Bluetooth Link -> Setup -> Find Me. This will make your cell phone discoverable for 60 seconds.
7. On the Mac, select Mobile Phone and click Continue.
8. The Mac will discover your cell phone. Highlight it, and click Continue.
9. A passkey will display on the screen.
10. Accept the dialog on the Motorola that offers to bond with the laptop, and input the passkey that the Mac wizard issued.
11. Before continuing with the Internet setup, you need to download the proper modem scripts. You can get them from here. Use Stuffit Expander to extract the Scripts, and put them in /Library/Modem Scripts/.
12. Back to the wizard. iSync and Address Book will be greyed out, because iSync doesn't yet support SyncML. However, it looks like the next release of iSync will. I wouldn't be surprised if this was released with Tiger, if not before. For now, select Access the Internet with your phone's data connection, and then select Use a direct, higher speed connection to reach your Internet Service Provider (GPRS, 1xRTT). Click Continue.
13. Leave the Username and Password fields blank. For GPRS CID String, enter internet2.voicestream.com. (Note: if this doesn't work, try internet3. If neither works, contact T-Mobile and tell them you want to be on the internet2 or internet3 ASN. Port blocking sucks.). Select Motorola GPRS CID1 in the dropdown for Modem Script. Click Continue.
14. Click Quit to exit the wizard.

That's it! If you run into any problems, let me know and I'd be happy to help you out as much as I can. Setting it all up is fairly straightforward, but there were absolutely no webpages I could find that would detail it for T-Mobile and the Motorola that worked (probably because T-Mobile just released this phone 4 days ago, hehe). Hopefully this will help out someone that was just as stressed and frustrated with it as I was.

On Friday when I got paid, I went to the T-Mobile store and bought Mike and I matching cell phones. I got us cute little Motorola bluetooth headsets as well. It was a lot of money, but totally worth it. I left thinking I got a kickass phone that I spent a lot of time researching before I bought it, and for the most part, this is true.

The Motorola V600 is probably one of the best phones I've owned. I just switched over from a Nokia 3650 with Cingular. Symbian OS is ass (in a bad way). That Nokia made me cry. It's just so ridiculous when you tell someone "I'll call you right back, my phone is crashing. I have to reboot it."

I've only found two problems with this phone thus far, which isn't bad at all. First, it doesn't support EDGE. Although this isn't a huge deal now because none of the US mobile providers have EDGE (except Cingular, that has it in areas but doesn't publicize it), but most of the major US GSM providers are scheduled to have it mostly implimented by Q2 2005. I have a plan that allows me unlimited GPRS data, because I wanted to pair my phone with my laptop over bluetooth and use it as a modem. Standard GPRS speeds are pretty slow, although I've noticed that T-Mobile is a lot faster than Cingular. I'm not sure why. I think GPRS is supposed to be about the equivelant of a 28.8k modem on an average day. It's fine for mail and SSH, but anything else is pretty annoying. I don't know how I survived on dialup when I was younger. Maybe it was because everyone had simpler webpages. Now everyone crams their sites with high res images, flash, java, whatever. The entire world isn't broadband yet, people. Conserve bandwidth!

The second problem had to do with using the V600 in conjunction with my Mac. I used to use my Nokia 3650 with my Mac with no problem, but Cingular has a slightly different setup than T-Mobile as far as authentication goes. It took me about 3 or 4 hours to get this working. Although google had a lot of information, none of it was very detailed, so I was going around in circles a lot until I started reading through the modem scripts from here. This was the first webpage I found, although it detailed connecting with Cingular. It also didn't say why some users had to use the Timeport scripts, and others used the GPRS CID1. I eventually figured this out after I read the GPRS CID1 script.

It's possible to dial up to your GPRS provider with either the ASN or a phone number that refers to the CID. Usually the phone number is in the format *99***[CID number]#. You can check your cell phone to figure out what the CID number is, but usually it's just 1. You can't use the *99 number if you use the GPRS CID1 script. I think the script was supposed to error out if you tried, but it doesn't appear to be working as it should. If you use the GPRS CID1 script, you have to specify your ASN. No where could I find anything that said you should use the ASN with T-Mobile. Everyone was using the *99 number, which I guess only works with the Timeport scripts, although I kept getting LCP timeouts and then getting disconnected. When I went on the T-Mobile developer forum, I found out about the 3 different ASN's for T-Mobile. internet.voicestream.com is used by most of the people that have the $5/month plans. It blocks high ports, and there's not much sense in using it. internet2.voicestream.com and internet3.voicestream.com are both valid ASN's and do not block ports. Something that I found that was kind of odd - if I used the Timeport script but put in an ASN instead of the *99, the script didn't know how to handle it, so it just sent it like a normal ATDT to the phone. internet2 caused my phone to dial 331-3, which somehow brought up my voicemail. Funky! internet2 made my phone dial 231-3, which didn't go to anything. I just thought it was kind of cool.

So, the moral of the story - use the ASN with the GPRS CID1 script, and if for some reason that doesn't work, you can try the *99 number with the Timeport script. I couldn't ever get the Timeport script to work, so I'd recommend sticking with the GPRS CID1 script.

Also, the Motorola V600 only uses SyncML to manage it's phone entries - which means at present time, it is incompatible with iSync. You can still copy a phonebook entry over manually, but it has to be done one by one.

Despite all these issues, this is still an awesome phone. I'd totally recommend it to anyone. The camera is pretty good quality, has 4x digital zoom and contrast settings. Probably the only downside to the software is the way it manages the phone book. I liked the way my Nokia would put all numbers under one name. The text completion far surpases anything I've ever seen before on a mobile phone. Unlike the Nokia, it learns words as you type, and predicts what word you are going to use fairly accurately. It's not your typical T9, which I always hated.

AIM also comes built in on the phone, and it has support for Java applications. I'm still trying to find some kind of ssh program that will work on it. I know there's a port of putty to Symbian OS, but it was shit. It crashed all the time, and I couldn't change the font, so it was this ugly italic thing that I couldn't read. Hate and Rage. I suppose I don't really need SSH on my phone since I can pair it with my laptop, but it would still be nice.

<junyer> RESUME OF RANDI HARPER
<junyer> CURRENT STATUS: FREEBSDGIRL
<junyer> "hire her!"

Today, someone on IRC said I had a big ego. I'm not sure what the proper response was, but it brings up an interesting point. Is it possible to have a blog and not have a big ego? I mean, people sit at their computers and log every inane action in their life (or in my case, random snippets of nothingness I find amusing or noteworthy), and they expect people to read it. I don't expect people to read my blog, but I appreciate that they do.

I love the little people!

LOTD: JibJab.