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		<header>
			<h1>Is FreedomPop a viable option?</h1>
			<p>Day 00554: Sunday, 2016 September 11</p>
		</header>
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>20 unfinished weblog entries in <a href="/en/weblog/2016/07-July/">July</a></li>
	<li>8 days until mobile voice/<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> service with my current carrier ends</li>
	<li>38 days until mobile data service with my current carrier ends</li>
	<li>3 days until my FreedomPop (no voice/<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>) cycle restarts and I can find out if I have a higher data-transfer limit than before</li>
	<li>9 more <a href="https://fpop.co./ilZW">FreedomPop</a> friends until I hit my friend bonus limit</li>
	<li>35 days until my old domain registrar can no longer counter my charge dispute</li>
</ul>
<p>
	I had a strange dream last night.
	First, I awoke (in the dream) to find that my mother wouldn&apos;t leave my bedroom, so I couldn&apos;t get out of bed and get dressed.
	Once they finally left, I realized that what little had remained in bedroom before I&apos;d gone to sleep was missing; Cyrus and our mother had moved it out before I&apos;d woken up.
	We had a huge moving truck outside, and much of it had been packed! I went searching for the dresser that had been in my bedroom previously, as it contained (even in the real world) items that I didn&apos;t want packed up just yet.
	I woke up before ever finding where the dresser was (it was decidedly not in the moving truck), but while I was searching the house for it (the house&apos;s layout wasn&apos;t the same as the actual house that I&apos;m in), I ran into someone that had been cryogenicly frozen, then later re-awoken.
	Apparently, they had specified that the people freezing them were to awaken them not more than three years later, but it had been over three years (the person didn&apos;t say how long, only that they were supposed to have been woken not more than three years from the time that they went under), and the person was frantic and ticked off about it.
	I had to continue my search for the dresser, as I had no way to help the thawed person, but as I left them, another version of me from the future arrived to help them out.
	Apparently, I was to gain time travel abilities in the future, and when I did, I came back to bring this person back to the past that they had tried to arrive in.
	They thought that help had arrived for them quickly, but that version of me explained that it&apos;d actually arrived quited slowly.
	From the thawed person&apos;s perspective, help had arrived within the day that they&apos;d woken up, but to future me, it had been years before I had the power to help them.
	I woke up in reality before anything happened with the time traveler and the thawed person.
	What a strange dream ...
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;ve changed Cricket plans again, and once more, Cricket has reset my high-speed data usage for the month.
	This will be the last time that I do this.
	The first time, I downgraded to the new $30 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> plan to see how that would work.
	Would the plan be switched mid-month, or would the plan be changed in the next billing cycle? As it turned out, they switched my plan right away, mid-month, both prorating the service bill (causing them to add a bill credit to my account) and reset my high-speed data allowance.
	Soon after this, I realized how foolish it was to switch plans during my final paid month, but as they&apos;d reset the data usage allowance, I left the change in place.
	Today, I&apos;ve switched back to the plan that I&apos;ve already paid for (they simply took back most of the bill credit, which they won&apos;t pay back to me in cash anyway), so that the month after my final paid month will have a bit more high-speed data to use.
	It was never my intention to flip back and forth repeatedly between these plans and exploit their high-speed data allowance bug.
</p>
<p>
	A while ago, I <a href="/en/weblog/2016/08-August/13.xhtml">bought a FreedomPop <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card</a>.
	FreedomPop failed to make it clear to me that the voice service and &quot;<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>&quot; weren&apos;t regular voice service and real <abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> messaging until after I&apos;d paid for the <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card and it was too late.
	Today, I saw an advertisement for FreedomPop saying that the gratis plan offers 500 megabytes of data transfer each month.
	Now that I don&apos;t need a telephone line, I thought that maybe this would be a great plan for me after all.
	I&apos;m pretty short on funds, so if I use orWall to restrict data usage and only allow K-9 to get through, I should be able to keep my data usage under that.
	I might even have data transfer to spare for calendar and contact syncing (if I ever have a home Internet connection again)! Even if not, syncing might be possible ove <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> somehow.
	Syncing is less urgent than email delivery.
	It would be nice for now to be able to use my mobile again, though even once we no longer need my main <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card for our home Internet connection, I might just try sticking with this more restrictive data usage pattern and cancel my paid account.
	I logged into my FreedomPop account though and found that my account only offers 200 megabytes of data instead of the advertised 500 megabytes.
	My guess (and hope) is that I simply ordered the <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card, then they later upped their offer.
	If that&apos;s the case, it wouldn&apos;t be them engaging in false advertising, but simply bad timing on my part.
	When the billing cycle ends, I might get the full 500 megabytes or I might be stuck on the 200 megabytes plan.
</p>
<p>
	Looking for a way to make sure that I didn&apos;t go over (as FreedomPop <strong>*does*</strong> have overage charges instead of cutting you off properly), I found in the FreedomPop interface that if you add friends to your account, you get more data transfer each month.
	Odd.
	These friends need to be on FreedomPop, but are not required to be new customers and there doesn&apos;t seem to be any repercussions (such as shared data pools) for sending friend requests to people that you don&apos;t know.
	If I can get at least ten &quot;friends&quot; on FreedomPop, I&apos;ll hit their extra data transfer allowance cap of 500 megabytes.
	I&apos;ve sent friend requests to sixty-four random people, people that have posted their email addresses online solely for the purpose of trying to get FreedomPop friend requests.
	If enough people go for it, I might have enough data transfer allowance to be fairly comfortable.
	So far, one person has accepted my friend request.
	200 megabytes might honestly be enough, but not when you take into account that there could be accidental overages and the fees associated with them.
	I need some sort of safety buffer.
	Needless to say, I&apos;ve set Replicant to cut me off before I hit that limit, though carrier usage isn&apos;t as accurate as the mobile&apos;s own measurements, so overage fees are still possible.
	Setting up the <abbr title="Access Point Name">APN</abbr> was oddly simple.
	For reasons that I don&apos;t fully understand, perhaps because of the incomplete service (no voice/<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>), <a href="https://support.freedompop.com./app/answers/detail/a_id/2670">only one piece of information is needed to connect to the network</a>.
	The rest of the <abbr title="Access Point Name">APN</abbr> settings can be left blank, aside from the <abbr title="Access Point Name">APN</abbr> name, but that&apos;s just used internally by the device as a label.
	If you&apos;re not on FreedomPop, you can also use my affiliate link to get a <a href="https://fpop.co./ilZW"><abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card for a discounted price</a>, and I think that it will automatically set both of our accounts up as friends, getting us each 50 megabytes more data connection service per month.
	If you&apos;re on FreedomPop, feel free to shoot me an email (my email address is on my <a href="/en/a/contact.xhtml">contact page</a>) and I&apos;ll either send you a friend request on FreedomPop or send you the email address that I use with my FreedomPop account so that you can send the friend request (your choice).
	Please note that I use a different email address with every service provider that I use, so the email address on my contact page won&apos;t work for friend requests.
</p>
<p>
	I got tired of sifting away literally thousands of spam emails from my old inbox, so I ended up eventually just deleting every email in the box.
	I don&apos;t need any past emails, that account isn&apos;t used any more.
	What I need instead is access to incoming future emails for account password resets.
</p>
<p>
	<a href="apt:libreoffice">LibreOffice</a> Writer is a bit of a pain.
	It&apos;s less of a pain than Microsoft Office in my opinion, but I feel that it tries to emulate some of its quirks, such as treating characters that I type as some sort of syntax that means that Writer should insert something other than what I typed.
	This was getting in my way yesterday, and I was having to go back and correct Writer&apos;s &quot;corrections&quot;.
	Attempting to fix my capitalization and rearranging the letters of words that I typed incorrectly is one thing.
	I find it a bit disconcerting, because I fear that if it makes an incorrect replacement, I won&apos;t notice it.
	However, to date, I&apos;ve never noticed Writer making an incorrect replacement of that type.
	The killer, for me, is when LibreOffice Writer interprets my punctuation to actually mean something other than its literal self.
	For goodness sake, Writer is a document-producing application, not a markup interpreter! I kind of get it when Writer detects my <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>s and converts them into hyperlinks.
	I always go back and undo that, but I get why it would do that.
	When I type a dash character through, I expect it to remain as I typed it, not convert itself into a different type of dash character once I&apos;ve completed the next word.
	The dash doesn&apos;t even do it right away, it waits until I&apos;ve typed a space, then a word, then another space.
	Yesterday, when I wrote the rough draft of my paper on free software business models, I wrote the first paragraph in Writer, then moved it to <a href="apt:geany">Geany</a> before completing the rest, just to avoid these stupid automatic changes that I didn&apos;t want.
	I didn&apos;t want to have to scour the paper after finishing it to see what had been altered and what hadn&apos;t.
	This was an inelegant solution though.
	Believe me, I prefer working in plain text much more than working with a formatted document, but when the final product is to be a formatted document (as that&apos;s what the assignment called for), it&apos;d be nice to be able to see the file in that format from the start.
	I asked for help in a LibreOffice support channel, fearing the worst.
	Most likely, or so I thought, this was a feature of LibreOffice that couldn&apos;t be turned off.
	After all, who would want to turn it off? Shouldn&apos;t documents be formated in a more &quot;lovely&quot; way? Such formatting would make it a bit of a pain when I reformat the essay for use on the Web though.
	When I turn it it, I plan to also make it available on my website.
	As it turns out though, there is a very simple solution.
	Under &quot;Tools&quot; =&gt; &quot;AutoCorrect Options...&quot; =&gt; &quot;Options&quot;, there is a series of autocorrect cases that can be turned on or off.
	Perfect! I left some of them in place just because I&apos;m poor at spelling (I&apos;m a tactile learner), but I turned off most of the annoying ones.
	Today, for me, LibreOffice Writer has become a functional document-authoring application.
</p>
<p>
	With LibreOffice writer no longer being a pain, I wrote up another draft of my <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> essay, adding more details.
	Tomorrow, I really need to complete my <span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span> readings, then begin to draft that essay as well.
	I&apos;ve focused too much on my <span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span> essay, and am running out of time.
</p>
<p>
	Enom wrote back and told me to go to their <a href="http://www.enom.com/help/AbusePolicy.aspx">abuse form</a> and file a complaint there.
	This is the second time that they&apos;ve shipped me to another form to restate what the problem is.
	I don&apos;t have time to deal with this now, I&apos;ll get back to it at some point.
</p>
<p>
	After using FreedomPop for the day, I found that my data connection usage rate was too high.
	K-9 isn&apos;t using a ton of bandwidth, but Orbot is.
	In fact, I think that Orbot might be the biggest user of the data connection that there is on my device.
	Even when the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> network connection isn&apos;t in active use, Orbot must maintain it, which requires active outgoing network connections to the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> nodes.
	I&apos;m not yet sure how to remedy this.
	Also, I found that FreedomPop has taken the liberty of subscribing me to a paid add-on, and if I hadn&apos;t noticed, I&apos;d have been charged $8 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> for it every month! Not cool.
	It&apos;s one thing to recommend addons, it&apos;s another thing to silently subscribe a user to them without their consent or knowledge.
	Just on principle, this makes me not want to give FreedomPop any money, even once I can afford to.
	This unofficial <a href="http://www.gaiageek.com./travel/complete-guide-to-the-freedompop-global-sim">FreedomPop guide</a> was what alerted me to the eight dollar service that FreedomPop was going to charge me for, and also alerted me to the fact that they expire account credits after thirty days.
	What the heck? Add that to their stupid enabled-by-default account top-off feature, which activated 100 megabytes to early, and you have an issue.
	I&apos;m considering paying the five dollar fee to have automatic top-offs disabled, though I&apos;ll hold off for today.
	After having disabled the paid services that they had automatically subscribed me to, the links to the <a href="https://www.freedompop.com/billing_settings.htm">billing settings</a> disappeared on me.
	Luckily, I still had the <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> in my browsing history, but via normal navigation of the website, these settings were no longer available, making it impossible to disable automatic top-offs.
	I am not amused.
	I&apos;ll keep the link here in my journal, both in case someone else is looking for it and so that I can find the page myself when it comes time to pay to disable that antifeature.
	I should wait to disable it though.
	For one thing, I need to see if my plan&apos;s limitations will increase at the end of the month or if increasing the limitations requires a new <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card altogether.
	For another, I should be ready to make use of the five dollar credit applied to my account when I pay to shut the top-off functionality off, so this should happen <strong>*after*</strong> my Cricket account with unlimited data has expired and <strong>*after*</strong> I&apos;ve activated and used my T-Mobile <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card and account credit.
	The T-Mobile <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card and account credit will expire soon, so I don&apos;t have a whole lot of time left.
	After all, I bought that service and <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card over two years ago! Only when I have no other data plans on the back burner should I finish dealing with my FreedomPop account.
</p>
<p>
	Perhaps I&apos;m being a bit hard on FreedomPop.
	Their tactics are a bit underhanded, but what do you expect from a company offering gratis mobile service? How in the world are they paying for this? Once I have my account set up the way that I like it, they won&apos;t be seeing much in the way of funds from me.
	After all, their prices are inflated to cover the cost of all of the people with gratis plans that they&apos;re servicing.
	In all honesty, it&apos;s the fact that they aren&apos;t upfront with their practices that&apos;s the issue, not the fact that it&apos;s not 100% gratis by default.
</p>
<p>
	My mother applied for jobs in Turner, Salem, Sweethome, and Bethel today.
	They&apos;ll head over to Salem tomorrow with Vanessa to look for a new home to move into.
	I feel like all I can do is hope for the best.
</p>
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