babbling blue

I do not like this time of year.

First there’s the weather. Winter is still trying to hang on and Spring is trying to take over, resulting in alternating warm and cold weather and lots of dampness. It fucks with your mind (and sinuses). Just get on with the full-blown Spring weather already (which is not really very desirable either, but it’s better than Winter).

Then there’s fucking March Madness. It’s well named, because it’s insane. Suddenly everyone gives a shit about all these college basketball teams and everyone is filling out their fucking brackets and bragging about being in the lead or correctly predicting some upset. Who the fuck cares? It’s basketball, one of the most boring sports to watch on God’s green earth. Dribble dribble pass dribble dribble shoot miss rebound pass shoot SCORE rebound dribble dribble pass dribble dribble dribble oops foul! free throw SCORE rebound dribble dribble. . . .at this point saliva is dribbling down my chin, since I’m comatose with boredom.

At least it’s almost over. But unfortunately something even worse is taking its place. Today is the Cubs home opener (assuming it’s not rained out). Fuck the Cubs! I used to live a couple blocks from Wrigley, and I learned my lesson. I will not do that again. But even now, though I live more than 2 miles away, the Cubs negatively impact my quality of life. For one thing, whenever there’s a home game it affects traffic on most of the north side. Backups occur on city streets miles from the ballpark. This means it inevitably takes me longer to get where I want to go (often just home from work). Not only that, but I have to deal with the idiots going to night games on the train when I’m trying to get home from work. They’re loud, they travel in large packs and they’re not versed in train etiquette. And don’t even get me started on Cubs/White Sox games.

This took me several minutes to figure out this morning, and it was frustrating me to no end. I figure as a technology person, this should have been easy, but it was not.

So you want to send an SMS text to a recipient not in your address book on your Blackberry Pearl 8100. Maybe you’re texting in a vote for some reality show or you see some SMS number on a billboard or whatever. What do you do? Here it is! (Note BB Pearl software versions may vary. This works for me today on my T-Mobile 8100.)

1. From Messages, click the Blackberry softkey and select Compose SMS Text.
2. You will be taken to an instance of your Address Book. (Depending on what is in focus in your Address Book, this step may or may not seem obvious.) Scroll all the way to the top, and select the “[Use Once]” entry.
3. Type in a phone number on the One Time SMS Text screen.
4. Click the trackball.
5. Enter your text message and send as usual.

The problem is in step 2, it’s not obvious what to do. I had some entry halfway down the Address Book in focus at the time. Trying to type in a number results in doing an Address Book search. Only if you’re already at the top of the A.B. does the “[Use Once]” jump out at you. I did a google search on this and didn’t come up with any clear instructions, though a couple people asked the question. So I’m providing this in hopes that it helps someone else figure this out. I wish Blackberry would have made this a bit more intuitive.