This afternoon my friends and I are heading off to northern Florida, to visit Tallahassee. My friend Shannon was admitted to Florida State University (woohoo! Congrats!) earlier this year and one of the mandatory steps the college requires of its freshmen is that they attend a (non-free, of course ) two-day orientation “thingy,” wherein they cram all their new students into uncomfortably small dormitories, push all sorts of unnecessary (and revenue-generating) products and services, give a tour of the campus, and finally help the students figure out what classes they want to register for their first semester.

Since I can work from pretty much everywhere, we decided it’d smartest/cheapest for me to move up there to Tallahassee with her — we can rent a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment (which really won’t change my expenses much at all anyway since rent is about the same there as it is where I am now) and she can live off campus for much less (and in much greater comfort) than if she’d moved into a dorm room.

It took half an hour in the car (her father is driving — relax, folks, I wasn’t screwing around with a laptop, a GPS receiver, and a cell phone while behind the wheel) to get this crap working, but it does work finally. I was amused to discover that the wired (USB-to-PC) internet sharing option on my phone (which runs Windows Mobile 6.1, “unofficially” flashed onto my T-Mobile Dash, which now calls itself by its proper name of “HTC Excalibur”) doesn’t work with Vista at all. Heh. There’s a shocker. Because the unofficial ROM (it’s only “unofficial” because it’s not sanctioned by T-Mobile, but this ROM is the real one that HTC ships on the unbranded version of my device) implements a full Bluetooth stack, though, the “Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network)” option does work. That means it works in Linux, too; woohoo!

Shannon and her father both have to go to the orientation stuff. Technically he doesn’t, but he wants to While they’re off doing that, I’ll be romping around Tallahassee looking at different apartments and applying at the ones that actually impress me enough to be worth living in. This should be a fun trip

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