Let me remind my fellow Americans that Nazi Germany’s Stasi was NOT in fact called “The Department of Homeland Security”. It was called “The Ministry of State Security”, so let’s please not confuse them.Also note that America is “The Land of The Free”, while Nazi Germany was “The Fatherland”. Hitler was killing Jews, and Muslim terrorist scum are not Jews, so America is clearly different.Let no-one even think we are living in a fascist state of any sort. This is obviously a Democracy — that’s why we have congress to always look out for our interests!Besides, the Germans invaded Poland. Who would the US bother to invade? Mexico? Canada? Iraq is way too far from home to count! Did Hitler have nukes? No! Did Hitler censor the internet? No! Therefore, there is simply no comparison!So, everything is fine. There’s nothing to worry about. Just trust in God, O Land of The Free and Home of The Brave! We’re going to be just fine.-Mike Godwin. Posted from iPhone while defecting to Europe.

via U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More | TorrentFreak.

Unlock Your iphone 3GS 4.0 Firmware

I don’t usually put up tech posts but this one really seemed to warrant my attention.

Firstly let me say that I will never go ahead and just do an “upgrade” on my iphone without researching it completely first. I , like so many other people , went ahead and did the upgrade which then screwed my iphone up an it also wiped off some software that I had on there, that I had purchased.

I am an Mac user and I love a lot of what Apple does, but what I don’t like about them is their “Big Brother” attitude about what I can and cannot use out in the digital world. I BOUGHT the phone from them, I am not renting or leasing it from them , if I drop it in the sewer , it’s gone , my problem … so who is Apple to come through and wipe off software I purchased off my phone and try to prevent me from using it again?

The only thing I really wanted to use was an application that allowed me to connect to the internet with my computer using the data connection from my iphone. I do this about once a week  and in order for me to do this AT&T wants another $40 a month – ( I already pay them $125 a month) and I lose my data plan where it makes it much easier to go over in data minutes – and if I do that, then I have to pay more.

Do not be fooled anything that comes from SWGREG seems to be a scam. I have tried 3 time to get my iphone “jailbroken” and all three of these entities are SCAMS …

www.unlockiphoneus.com and they brag on their site about their customer service which I have yet to hear back from .

www.unlocktheiphone.com still nothing , they went to a lot of trouble to make a really glitzy site that looks legit , but it’s a scam.

www.easy-iphone-unlocking.com at tleast these people responded to an email I sent them , but that was before I gave them money , now nothing. What they do, is tell you about things that you can find on the internet for free , . For $34.95 they will tell you there is still no jailbreak available for the iPhone 3gs running 4.0 firmware.

So far I have tried…

pawnage tool
redsn0w
blackrain
and a few other to no avail.

I can’t tell you how much time, including today , I have wasted on this stupid project so I can use the internet 4 times a month using my iphone, but if you find anything out please let me know. You can leave a comment here of you like or email me at euxart@aol.com

I hope that This post can save somebody some of the aggravation I have been through with this.

[wp-tube vid_id="S8rABZpZjYA" /]

line on back of eugene's head

It makes me crazy, sometimes, when people walk up to me out of the blue and ask me what the scar on the back of my head is from, so I will use this as an opportunity to get more hits on my blog.

First let me say that there are so many ways to ask a person a personal question like this. You can never tell , if someone has gone through some traumatic experience in their life that they don’t really want to talk about , especially in places like a corner store, when they are at work, at a club etc.. and sometimes somethings are just better off not being asked….

Having said all that, if you have read the other blogs , you will have learned that I was a CRAZY fool for several years while “experimenting” with drugs… (I had to keep experimenting over and over because I kept forgetting the results) . For some odd reason credit card companies kept sending me all kinds of credit cards, and in my insanity I decided I wanted to look my best. I had always hated that I was losing my hair ( this was like 12 years ago , now I couldn’t care less ) so I went and had hair transplant surgery. Some people will then say to me “ but I don’t understand why there is a line though.. “ and to you I say “google it”

The lesson here is – I don’t have hair now – I have a scar. Love your-self and save money .

Student Loans and Crystal Meth

Student Loans and Crystal Meth … They Both Suck

It is a pretty well known fact among people who know me that I am a recovering crystal meth user. It’s been over ten years since I have touched the stuff, or anything for that matter. What is not so well known is that I have a staggering $100,000 in student loans. It’s something I am much less willing to speak about and yet it has a pretty direct connection to crystal meth and vise versa.

I , like so many people , was drawn into the idea that I could get a good education at a good school even if it seemed out of my means at the time. I had to work two jobs to get through school, and because I was paying my own way not only for my school expenses but all my living expenses with very little outside help , i had earned somewhere around $12,000 during those years , which I reported on my taxes. ( I had, at the time, thought my family was going to help me with my college expenses , but I thought wrong.)

During those years I guess I thought that by paying all that money in tuition , sooner or later I would get a scholarship or grant that would allow me to get a paid year through school , so I applied for other grants and scholarships , which one year I got, but because I worked for a living they deducted the money I made to support myself from my aid package  Meanwhile there were students there studying absolutely free, partly because and in addition to the fact that they were living on welfare. The moral of this paragraph… it doesn’t pay to play by the rules in the USA.

If I had it to do it all over , I would live on welfare and then not only would I have been bright and awake for school, because I wouldn’t have been up all night working a graveyard job ( that I HATED ) to get through college, but the financial aid office might have felt sorry for me and I wouldn’t be saddled with this sucky debt.

When I took out the loans to begin with it was under the understanding  that I was going to be able to consolidate the loans and extend the repayment period to 40 years which, I figured out , would make the payments about $200 dollars a month, which was a little high, but if I worked in the differential from being and staying in my rent controlled apartment the difference made it manageable. However when I got out of college ( I wasn’t able to finish because my boyfriend at the time, died of AIDS I wasn’t able to finish the last semester also, I didn’t want my debt to get any higher) they told me the payments would be between $500 and $600 a month which was impossible for me to pay , when I told them I wanted to do the consolidation program, they told me they had discontinued it.

I really didn’t know what to do. I talked with people I knew at work. Some people said they knew people who were i even worse debt than I was  and they had gone to one of those debt help agencies that negotiate interest and late fees etc..and get a payment program together with you that can put you back on track.  One of the worst days of my life. It was embarrassing , humiliating , and at the end of it there wasn’t much they could do for me unless I was willing to work three jobs.

This lead to a period of unbearable depression. The kind of depression where I could not find a reason to get out of bed at all. The fact that I had lost my boyfriend and the feeling that I would never be able to get out from under this debt no matter how hard I tried made me question everyday why I would even bother getting up if nothing was going to work out anyways. This is the kind of depression that people very often kill them-selves over, but lucky for me, I found crystal meth. A temporary solution to all my problems It allowed me to get out of bed , clean up the mounting mess and gave me the feeling of hope that surely there must be a way to pay these loans, I mean, people pay them off right ?

So, as you might imagine crystal meth was not a permanent solution. In fact, where student loans were The Department of Education and Sally Mae ( why did they call this agency Sally Mae? …it sounds like she’s like a nice aunt , but really she’s more like the stupid neurotic next door neighbor) were concerned, it didn’t help at all. The paranoia , the VD , the hallucinations , the Vampire People , the sores and the complaints from the neighbors finally all took their toll and I wound up on the streets.

So all these years later, clean and sober , trying to make good on my debts, I did make contact with them and have been paying them what I can pay each month, which is of course not what they want but a lot more than they were getting before, but what I have a hard time dealing with is that the loan is now twice what I borrowed. The interest that accumulates each month is even more than I am able to pay, and there is no way to file bankruptcy. So if I can’t manage to pay all their fines and penalties I could die with this debt. I thought the whole idea of lending students money was to help them get an education but it’s really a money making business.

I am hoping to get my windfall and pay them off but it’s the principal of the  thing that bothers me ( no pun intended ) . There are certainly people with much worse problems than mine but it seems to me that government would want you to get an education to be a productive and contributing member of it’s citizenship, not to make money off you.

If you are a student loan person or just somebody who wants to help feel free to donate to the Eugene Schroeder College Fund below …