For those of you who missed it in the paid post, I’ve got a new phone on the way. I bought a T-Mobile Dash on eBay. I’ve been underwhelmed by my Sidekick for a while, and the Helio Ocean doesn’t have certain capabilities I need, so I looked around and decided on the Dash. I just called T-Mobile and asked about switching plans; because the new data plan requires a few days for setup, I’ve already activated it so it’ll be ready when the Dash arrives. I’m a little annoyed that the wifi will only work with their hotspots, it costs $20/month for “Hotspots at Home” which lets you use any wifi network. Switching to the Dash will cost $15 more per month, because that’s how much unlimited SMS costs - the Sidekick plan has it built in, but the Total Internet does not.

I’m planning to try the Dash for up to a month. The keyboard is much smaller than the Sidekick’s, so I want time to get used to it and decide if I like the phone before I sell my Sidekick 3. The Dash cost me $181 including shipping; if I decide to keep it, I will post my SK3 on eBay for buy-it-now $181 with free shipping, and it will get snapped up fast, I think. I’ll probably do the same thing with the Dash if I don’t like it, too. So we’ll see how it goes - I am looking forward to trying it!

I have been looking around lately for T-Mobile phones, because I discovered that the Helio Ocean is not all cracked it’s cracked up to be. (No ssh? No thanks!) I was looking at the MDA instead, and I glanced at the Wing and some Blackberries. But I really ended up with my heart set on the T-Mobile Dash. I read dozens of reviews and the pros seem to outweigh the cons. Plus I would have had to transfer my contract to someone else if I had bought a Helio, this way I don’t! I was really amazed to see that A1 Wireless has the Dash for free if you’ve never been a T-Mobile customer before. (I’ve been a customer since 2002, so the lowest Dash price I could possibly have qualified for was $150, but I bought the Sidekick 3 in May.) A1 also offers one-year contracts, so you can get a reduced price on any phone without locking yourself in for two years. But since I’ve already done that, I ended up buying the Dash on eBay for $181 including shipping. I’m not committing myself to it yet. Once it arrives, I will have T-Mobile switch my plan to the Dash plan and then I will try it for 2-4 weeks. If I like it, I’ll make a Buy-It-Now auction for $181 for my Sidekick 3 (free shipping) and it’ll get snapped up right away. Same for the Dash if I don’t like it!

I’m writing this blog post by email, but I don’t think it’s going to work so I’ll end up posting it later. Today was soooo laid back, it was excellent. We watched Candyman and The Omen, which I’d never seen before; last night we watched Stephen King’s It which I hadn’t seen before either. I had to do a little bit of homework today; I finally figured out that Word’s comments are equivalent to OpenOffice’s notes and I was able to revise my paper according to the teacher’s instructions. Other than that I have taken it pretty easy…we are over at my in-laws right now having wine and watching Dexter. It’s a little confusing because we don’t get this channel normally, so we have no idea what’s going on…but my mother-in-law likes it, so watching it we are.

I took another dNeero survey. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I guess I’ll post it. Oddly enough my actual survey answers don’t seem to get posted…you have to click through to see them! This survey was about Twitter. I really wish more of my friends would use Twitter. It’s a way to keep up with people without feeling obligated to respond to them. I usually Twitter a few times a day, and I follow maybe a dozen or so Twitter users. Most of them are friends from elsewhere but a few were people who added me and so I added them back. Like most people, I like the fact that you have to condense yourself into 140 characters each time…it’s really a lot of fun and more people should use it. (Only if you have unlimited SMS though…or if you don’t mind just reading on the web.)

This morning we went to dim sum. It was my idea, but there’s not a lot I can eat there - I mostly got vegetarian noodles and the greens. I’ve had the Notorious MSG song “Dim Sum Girl” in my head for days so I decided I wanted dim sum myself. A really likes it but never asks to go because there’s nothing I can eat there, so she was happy to go. We also did some shopping - I got new black sneakers because my old ones were dead. I’ve played a lot of Sims 2 today, and I finally got my first character engaged to somebody. She had really bad luck with men for many days; advancing in her career in medicine but not ever starting a family. So hopefully that’s good now; my Sims blog is here but so far it mostly covers the families I had while I was playing Life Stories. I revised my history paper and sent that in, and I played some Guitar Hero. That’s about it for the day!

I am posting in response to this press release regarding the connection between Jane Fernandes and Joseph Mesa.

People, repeat after me. Jane Fernandes is not the devil. Jane Fernandes is not the devil.

JANE FERNANDES IS NOT THE DEVIL.

Seriously. Ever since it was announced that she is returning to teach at Gallaudet, the GallyProtest mailing list has been full of hate mail about her and why she shouldn’t come back. (She will be teaching Intro to Deaf Studies, and I. King Jordan will be teaching advanced psychology classes.) Oddly, there has been much less about IKJ than about JKF. There’s been the occasional “his legacy is tarnished, he destroyed himself” bit, but nothing like what JKF has been put through.

This thing about her connection to Mesa - the kid who committed the 2001 murders, which I remember well because I was taking night classes there at the time - is just ridiculous. Lots and lots of teens are troubled, and they don’t grow up to kill people. Mesa obviously had something pathologically wrong with him that Fernandes - not a trained clinical psychiatrist herself - could not have diagnosed. I’m sure she felt at the time that she was trying to give a troubled kid from another culture, Guam, a better education. She had him brought to MSSD for his education, not so he could grow up to kill two boys later.

I’m tired of everybody claiming that JKF ruined Gallaudet. I’m tired of the claims that she has no business coming back to campus. The fact is, she is coming back to teach. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell she will get back into an administrative position anytime soon. She taught sign communication long before she became VP of the Clerc center (in 1995) or provost (in 2000). There are basically zero students left at Gallaudet who took her sign communications class. She might very well be a highly skilled teacher, but the GallyProtest people continue to vilify her at every chance they get.

Jane Fernandes was not the right person for the presidency of Gallaudet University. That much is obvious now - she would have been a continuation of the administration that led the college into its current accreditation crisis. But that does NOT make her the devil, and it does NOT mean she will be a bad teacher. I’m just so fucking tired of all this bullshit about her. Pretty much everybody I ask on campus - all of my peers - don’t even care that she’s coming back.

I took this survey at dNeero because apparently I can make $1.87 by posting it to my blog. I have no idea what this is going to come out looking like. I found out about it from pao who commented over on PinkBlog. I kind of like the way she did it, embedding it in a post. I might try to do that with my quicklinks, or something. But first let’s see what it looks like.