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Last year I setup an account with Voicestream, now T-Mobile for wireless service, they didn’t have any local phone numbers, but I didn’t particularly see that as a problem because at the time I was planning the move back to Pittsburgh; either as Jon’s roommate or with Davey toward the end of the year. Neither of those things had happened, but I also sort of thought I’d still eventually find my way back there. Fastfoward to now and I still have that Pittsburgh phone number, which hasn’t ever really been a problem because either the people I’d talk to would be long distance anyway, or they have mobile phones with national access anyway; thus while I didn’t have any reason to change it, I also didn’t have any reason to keep it.

I started to see a hint of reason a couple of weeks ago, when I actually started phoning and receiving calls from someone local and apparently without the “advantage” of a mobile phone with national coverage. Again, pointing out that I hadn’t any reason to either keep the Pittsburgh number or change, this slight hint was enough to start me looking at options.

This area has rather poor representation when it comes to providers, I suppose that’s almost a national problem these days as most providers have been gobbled up by larger ones. The choices remaining are T-Mobile (without a local number, as they still don’t offer them), go back to SprintPCS (I’d rather be castrated I think [Remember, I had to file multiple FCC Complaints against them to get them to fix problems leading to lack of serivce]), Verizon… (shitty plans & ridiculously expensive crappy phone choices), or AT&T Wireless. My brothers and respective girlfriends all have AT&T, the plans seem to be alright and they ahve reasonable deals on featureful phones. The problem, they want an absolutely ridiculous $200 deposit for the privlege of giving them business. While one could see this as paying for the phone that would otherwise be free, I just don’t think it would be worth it.

So the choice, ultimately, is to stay with T-Mobile, they’ve surpassed all expectations and with the exception of two brief (just a matter of hours) service outages over the past year plus, they’ve been great. I’m also no longer under contract, so if I would ever find enough of a reason to give a large sum of money to AT&T I could, though that isn’t likely. The upside, even though I still have a non-local phone number, I also “upgraded” my plan to include an additional 100 anytime minutes & free nights (I already had free weekends), for the same price I’ve been paying.

I suppose the bluetooth enabled phone can wait, as can the local phone number… at this point I think I’d rather give that $200 to T-Mobile to get a BT phone, simply because they seem to be much lower on the “bastard corporation” rating scale.

Matthew and I finally met, had a drink in the afternoon, then he came by later in the evening. We had French Martinis and talked, it was quite enjoyable. After the rather rough start to things, including great periods of time without contact, rescheduling, and actually being stood up, lol, I think all that was worth it, sort of worked to an advantage oddly enough. I’m certainly looking forward to the next time we see each other.

So, yes, Matthew arrived lastnight at about a quarter until 11pm. There was some awkwardness initially, so I sort of gave a tour of the house, heh, it felt a little silly, but I guess it worked. Then we went upstairs and he made French Martinis for the two of us. Then somehow we managed to get onto the subject of computers and that sort of carried through onto the discussion of how they work, heh, where I drew some “visual aides” and then sort of took him on a tour of how the house was networked together. We wound up downstairs and chatted about a ton of different computer related things, like operating systems, file sharing, etc. I would have thought him to be bored to death, but apparently he was very interested. It was kind of funny how we sort of sat on the floor around the bed.

He stepped outside, but I didn’t have my shoes, so I went and put them on, and we sort of walked out together… at least a little bit, since there was a giant spider outside the door, heh. Again there was a bit of awkwardness, we hugged, and… it was quite nice actually, more… like a meaningful sort of hug, versus a brief “I’m leaving sort” — and then our hands drifted down each other’s arms and we held each other’s hands for a moment… I had this “uhmmm… what now?” sort of thought… because in a way I didn’t want him to go, heh.

So, yeah, he mentioned he would call today before work, but I don’t think he did, heh… which is almost typical, lol. Anyway, we may be seeing each other tomorrow, if not, then Monday seems likely… or, heh, maybe both.

It goes back to him giving me basically his complete schedule, I’m definitely eager to see him again, and it seems to be mutual. I guess in a way he was giving me the “what not to do” sort of list in the car yesterday afternoon, when telling me about his last date after meeting someone online. It apparently was fairly terrible, lol…

Anyway, so we’ll see… yesterday was good, I don’t think I’m imagining the mutual interest.

[meridian@escher meridian]$ uptime

8:22pm up 41 days, 13:21, 1 user, load average: 0.57, 0.22, 0.12