because a Reverend can't be wrong.
It looks as though I will not be getting a new cell phone any time soon. My old cell phone service is scheduled to be turned off on September 9th.
Those of you who do not know my home phone number should contact me soon via email or by calling my cell phone in order to obtain the new number.
Unless, of course, one of you has some clout at VoiceStream and you want to tell them that I’ll be sure to pay my bill and therefore they need not bother collecting $1000 in deposit money from me.
VoiceStream called me today to give me more information about the deposit they are requiring in order for me to get a cell phone from them. So that you can fully understand their request, I’ve recorded the voicemail message they left for your listening pleasure.
Voicestream: Both of Them? | mp3 format | 21 secs | 332kb
I apologize for the poor audio quality. I recorded this by hooking a headset up to my cordless phone and holding the ear piece near a studio microphone with the levels as high as they would go.
Brad, my dad, and I put new brakes on my truck this afternoon. Only took about an hour, not couting driving to the auto parts store to see if the bad rotor could be machined. They said it couldn’t so I was out $70 for that plus $20 for the brake pads. Not bad all around. It certainly beats the $200+ Just Brakes would have charged me and definately beats the $295+ that Toyota would have charged me.
Thanks for the help, Brad.
I make good money. I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination. I can’t afford a 5000 sqft house in University Park, I can’t buy a shiny new 2002 BMW M5, and I don’t have a lawn boy or a butler. But I make good money. By all American standards, I should be able to afford a house, a wife, 2 kids, 2 cars and a dog. But I can’t.
I push bills off past their due dates waiting for another pay check because I don’t have enough money to pay it now. I scrape the bottom of my checking account from time to time waiting until I get paid again so that I can buy groceries. Sometimes I cash in the bucket of change I keep in my room just so that I can buy food for the next week and still pay my bills.
I don’t have a lavish lifestyle. I don’t have a nice car, I don’t pay high rent, I don’t own nice clothes, and I don’t constantly purchase expensive electronics. I don’t have a drug habit. I don’t visit strip clubs. I don’t go out drinking. I don’t purchase prostitutes or escorts. I don’t even have cable TV. However, I spend too much money and the money that I do have is not managed well. This gets me into a lot of trouble.
Regardless of how much money I’ve made, from the $9.13/hr I used to make doing Technical Support up until now, I spend every penny that I make and see very little increase in my standard of living to account for it. Sometimes, like now, it’s because the world just gangs up on me and unseen expenses come flooding in leaving me no choice but to pay for them.
In the past two months I had to buy new front tires, a new battery, get a front-end alignment, and get a brake job on my truck. That’s $620 that I spent, and didn’t want to. Add another $300 for a power-supply and hard-drive that went out simultaneously and another $300 for Jess’ ticket here, and we’re up to $1220. Then add the $1300 I paid in deposits for my new apartment, the $200 in deposits I lost for not moving into the first place I was going to live in, and the extra $598 I paid in order to have two apartments at once and that amount jumps to $3318. Couple that with my cable modem charging me $300 for my unreturned cable modem (which I didn’t know had to be returned) and $300 in service charges since they didn’t cancel my service when I asked them to and we’re up to $3918. Now I’ll get some of that money back, but I don’t have it right now. That almost $4000 in unexpected expenses in the last 2 months. And I’m not even accounting for everything (like higher than usual cell phone bills, the realization that I had a few accounts in collection and had to pay them off, miscellaneous expenses from my brother’s wedding and many others).
I expect to have unexpected things creep up (So I guess that means they aren’t unexpected). But I just don’t expect them to be this high. And when they come, they hurt. But, even if they weren’t hitting me now, I’d still be hurting, because I’d find some way to dig myself deeper into a hole.
My life has always been this way. I dig myself into a hole spending too much money, and then I have to pay extra money and heartache to dig myself back out. It’s a vicious cycle. I borrow from Peter to pay Paul and, in the end, everything just sucks.
Which brings me to now. I’m broke. I have unpaid bills. And because I’ve been in this same situation for so long (which is my own fault) I have HORRIBLE credit. It resembles that of a heroin addict, ditching his bills to buy more smack. And I’m not a heroin addict.
Yesterday, I canceled my cell phone service because it’s too expensive and, because of changes in the services of those in my friends group, no longer works to my advantage. I went down to VoiceStream to sign up for new service for Jess and I. Everything seemed happy and fine until the lady told me she wanted a $500 deposit per line. $1000 in deposits for a cell phone?! That’s outrageous. But it’s my own fault. My credit is so bad from being late on so many bills, and paying so little attention to my finances that things get turned over to collection left and right. Can I afford $1000 for cell phone deposits? Yes. Do I want to? Hell no. So what do I do? I don’t know.
I can’t even describe how horrible it felt to hear her tell me that she wanted $1000 from me. I can’t even begin to tell you how low my heart sunk in my chest. I felt like such a loser; like such a failure. It isn’t so bad when it’s my life. It isn’t so bad when I’m all I have to worry about. But bringing Jess into this mess just scares me. It makes me feel like I’m not good enough. It makes me feel worthless. It makes me feel like less of a human being.
It’s no big deal to not have a cell phone. I can live without it and could really stand to save the $80/month. But it’s the principal behind it that makes me feel so bad. It’s not that I don’t want a cell phone, or that I’ve chosen to not have a cell phone, or that I don’t make enough money to afford a cell phone. It’s that I’m so incredibly stupid and worthless that they wont give me one.
I know this self-defeating speech doesn’t get me anywhere. I know that self-pity doesn’t do anyone any good. I know that I need to shape up, fix the situation, and move on with life. And believe me, I’ve been trying. As far as I know (though there could be a few out there) I don’t owe any collection agencies money. The only debt I have is my car loan. The only credit card I have is my Target card, and it has a 0 balance. I only have two outstanding bills, and they aren’t more than a few days late. I have over $2500 in outstanding money that is owed to me (security deposits, refunds, etc). I’m doing okay in that respect. Better than I have been since everything started going downhill at age 18. The problem is, my credit is still bad, I’m still broke, I still owe people money, and I’m not expecting $100 bills or a clean credit report to fall out of the air any time soon.
The one thing I have to be thankful for is Jess. Despite all of this, she still loves me. She tells me that she doesn’t care, and that, together, we’ll get all this straightened out. She tells me that she’ll help me control my spending, that she’ll help me keep track of things, and that, in the end, everything will be okay. When I can do nothing but beat myself into the ground because of the situation I’ve gotten myself into, she tells me that she loves me, that everything will be okay, and then willingly places herself in this situation with me, despite all the problems she is walking in to.
All of this will get straightened out. I just have to remember to keep my chin up. I have to remember to keep trying. And I have to continue to be thankful that I have what I do have: a good life, the things I need, some of the things I want, and the most wonderful person in the world to stand by me through it all.
I have an interesting, yet common, problem at work. I like to have the luxury of checking my personal e-mail without the disadvantage of having my incoming and outgoing email sent clearly across my work’s network. Here’s what I did to work around it.
I made an SSH connection to another machine on the Internet using corkscrew through our proxy servers. With this connection I forwarded an IMAP port and an SMTP port. For most people, that would be enough.
However, I wanted to be able to use mutt to check my email, which doesn’t speak SMTP. This meant I could do one of two things. One of those options was to use ssmtp instead of my local mailer on my machine and have it set to use my encrypted connection as its smarthost. The problem with this is that ssmtpisn’t smart enough to queue mail in the event that my encrypted connection isn’t open. So I opeted to use another method.
I decided to configure my local mailer, exim, to decide which type of mail is being sent and either deliver it normally or via my encrypted connection, based on the from address of the email message being sent.
This was a fairly easy accomplishment, once I understood exim. I don’t intend on going into detail regarding how exim works. That is best left to the manual. However, here are my configuration changes and an explanation for them.
I added a transport to handle the new connection on a new port.
smtp2525: driver = smtp service = 2525
This creates a new transport using the SMTP method and connecting on port 2525. This has to be done because on my machine, my encrypted connection is on port 2525 and not on port 25 which houses the local mailer. Setting up a transport like this is the only way to use multiple port numbers for SMTP in exim.
I also had to modify my routers to use this new transport.
lookuphost: driver = lookuphost senders = myworkdomain.com transport = remote_smtp literal: driver = ipliteral senders = myworkdomain.com transport = remote_smtp external: driver = domainlist transport = smtp2525 self = send route_list = "* localhost byname"
In the literal and lookuphost routers, I added the senders configuration option which restricts that router from being activating unless the sender of the email comes from the domain listed. Then I added the external router which, because it is at the end of the list, serves as a catch all. The self = send option tells exim to allow sending mail to the same hostname that it receives mail for. This is required since both connections sit on the same machine. You’ll also notice that my external router uses the new smtp2525 transport created in the last step, which effectively alters the port number to 2525. The route_list configuration option is nothing new to anyone who has configured exim before. It tells exim how to decide where to send the mail; in this case, send everything to localhost.
One final option is required. Because mutt doesn’t speak SMTP, it calls the sendmail binary directly. When accessing exim this way, it will rewrite the Sender: header to reflect your username on the machine you are sending from. If exim does this, then my senders configuration directives above are useless, because the Sender: header will always be the same. In order to allow the altering of this, the user that runs mutt must be a trusted user.
trusted_users = mail:myusername:root
This allows the “mail” user (which exim runs as), “myusername”, and “root” to alter their Sender: headers as they see fit.
I’ve been watching my mail logs as I send mail, and it hasn’t missed a beat yet.
Although I’ve been in the business of creating web sites and web applications for almost 7 years now, today I learned something new. Alex pointed out that my Index page wasn’t validating, so I started to research it to find out why.
It makes perfect sense that they should be, it just never crossed my mind before now. When you include an ampersand (&) in HTML it is proper to encode it as an entity: &. This is common knowledge. However, when you include them in the href attribute of an a tag (or in any attribute or any tag, for that matter), they should also be HTML entity encoded. For some reason, my mind has overlooked this for the past 7 years. So, just in case you’re overlooking it too, now you know.
A 16-year-old student is being questioned in connection with an attack and attempted abduction of a fellow student at Keller High School. I know this kind of thing happens. I try not to lose my head about it while still not becoming desensitized. But this is my home town. This is my high school. This is where I played as a kid. The road in that picture is a road I know. That scares me.
Keller is my home town. It’s the place my family came to to get away from the horror and the violence of the Los Angeles suburbs. It’s where things are quiet and safe. Keller is still listed as one of America’s top rated smaller cities. I still feel safe when I am there, driving through its streets.
Now I know Keller is growing. I can see the face of it change every time I return. And I guess more criminal activity is expected with population increases. But for some reason, that doesn’t make me feel any better. I miss my safe little home-town of Keller.
Pascale Soleil of both2and.com pointed out in a comment to my review of a few RSS readers that it wasn’t very clear whether my site had an RSS feed of its own.
Indeed it does. It is syndicated in both RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.91. I altered revjim.net to include the required link tags as specified here by Mark Pilgrim.
I added a section on the main index page to clearly indicate the many ways that this site is syndicated. As additional methods of syndication are added, that section will reflect those changes.
I’m considering going to the dfwblogs.com cocktail event this evening at the XPO Lounge.
It’s good to meet new people. It’s good to have a good time, especially on a weekday. It’ll be nice to meet some of the faces that write some of the things that I read on a almost daily basis.
On the other hand, it’s a long drive… in traffic… on bad brakes… alone.
I’ll have a good time. I know I will. I can make a good time of even the worst of situations, and this actually looks like it’ll be a good situation, so that makes it even easier. It’s just mustering the motivation to go home, swallow something quick to eat, change clothes, feed the cat, and get in my truck and go.
Talk me into it. Talk me out of it.