My phone has voice-activated dialing:

Simon: (presses voice dial button)
Phone: (pleasant robot voice) Say a command!
Simon: Call bus check
Phone: (pleasant robot voice) Did you say (scary robot voice) call dentist?
Simon: No.
Phone: (pleasant robot voice) Calling! (dials dentist’s number)

(”Dentist’s office.” “Can you tell me when the next number 5 will be coming by?”)

All my hopes and dreams were fulfilled the day I achieved 24/7 location-independent access to the internet care of my jerkberry. It’s like having your best friend (one who doesn’t particularly like you and has an obsession with porn) at your side at all times.

On Sunday morning in a taxi home I found myself engaged in my own (and now predictable) version of drunk-dialling. I’m sorry, but I still think emailing Kuwait from the back of a cab barrelling towards the trashy side of a blue-collar town at four in the morning is a little exotic. I’m sure that says something about me.

The problem arrives in the combination of the communications options presented by the jerkberry mixed with a drunk’s tendency toward carelessness. I woke up in the morning absolutely sure that the embarrassingly self-serving, “woe is me I’m so awesome and the world is so messed up” email that I thought had been sent to my de facto life coach doing time in the middle east for the crime of educating himself actually got posted to the ‘On The Road’ section of jerkspot. Though this was not the case, my inability to adjust my processes once I’ve identified a weakness guarantees you that one Sunday morning soon you’ll be more entertained than I had intended you to be.

The moral of the story is: Hopes and dreams invariably lead to soul-crushing humiliation.

My faith all things right and good suffered a blow when I encountered a problem this afternoon that THE INTERNET™ couldn’t solve. I had to use a phone and call a number and talk to someone to figure something out. And it’s left me a trembling, disillusioned shell of a human being.

In the interest of righting wrongs and doing good and adding to the global clutter, this here love letter is all about making it so that the next sucker who has the same problem doesn’t need to go through the same soul destroying process. So… you have a BlackBerry from Telus Mobility and you neeeeeeeed to access the internet from your laptop because the little BlackBerry screen is too small to truly enjoy the asianpubes.com site that Scott just recommended to you while at The Mix? Tethered modem to the rescue:

You have to download and install the “Desktop Software” software for your BlackBerry — you can get it on the CD that came in your JerkBerry box, or from mytelusmobility.com if you’re like me and you lose all CDs immediately. Since Telus makes it so hard to find I just downloaded the latest version from RIM and it worked for me.

Now the magic:

1. The BlackBerry has to be connected to the laptop using the USB cable.
2. The Desktop Manager has to be running and say “Connected” for the connection to work, and every time you dial the connection.
3. You’ll need to create a dial-up connection using the “Standard Modem” that was installed along with the desktop manager software. (The laptop doesn’t actually dial a number and use your airtime, this is just how the connection is made.)
4. Find the Network Connections screen and choose “Create a New Connection”.
5. Do what you must to get to the ‘Connect using a dial-up modem’ option. It’s something like Connect to the internet -> Create my connection manually but it changes depending on the version of Windows you’re using.
6. Give the connection any name you want. Like “Telus”. Or “Emergency Mobile Porn”.
7. Enter the phone number: #777
8. Enter the username: (your phone number)@rim.telusmobility.com (e.g. 9876543210@rim.telusmobility.com) (that’s my real phone number. call me.)
9. Use your BlackBerry’s serial number (11 digits) as the password
10. Click “Finish” or “Done” or whatever it is, then dial the connection. It should connect almost instantly.

Wow! So simple! And yet so counter-intuitive! Now enjoy the ability to feed your internet addiction regardless of physical location.

You probably need one of them there “Email & Web” plans that they offer, and even then Telus will charge you something like $6/MB the second you go over your allotment. So, like, five minutes on youtube and your monthly bill will be astronomical. This serves as your warning… I don’t want to see you making a tedious viral video about how many pages your stupid phone bill is just because of what you learned here.

The end.