I want to vote for this guy and support this new law!

Working with my friends in France on their website, it’s a lot of fun, what is also fun is trying to give interface ideas to the Shopify team in Canada. I am looking forward to getting back into software/UI/web/design so I thought I’d share ideas that I posted for them.

Technology is so crazy sometimes I have been coming to realize that we always do so much then forget how we did it, that’s why I have been blogging things like how to network a Mac and PC or hack an iPhone without WiFi or things like that because usually after you do it once, you forget!

See, I don’t always stay in front of the computer, went out dancing with Marcia last Saturday night, short, but sweet!

My friend didier is back in Los Angeles from Paris. It was great seeing him while I was there in December and may see him again in a month in Los Angeles. While talking today he showed me a link to his new site, so I send out a sneak preview here.z

Keep it up Didier!

Didier Rosa’s new website for fine cuisine.

My friend Mary showed me a link to her LACC blog today. It’s pretty cool. I was really saddened to hear about the LAPD killing yet another mentally disabled/autistic person from her blog.

So sad. I love the way the world is getting so connected though! Keep up the great work Mary Eng.

http://thereallacc.blogspot.com/

Wow.

As anyone who has seen my internet 3G woes, today is a happy day. I bought a new chip the other day in the hope that the APN kolbi3g would help me get faster upload speeds, but this sort of voo-doo networking has come to an end now that they have kicked off all of the freeloaders getting the high speed for cheap and people like me who recently signed up for the high one finally are getting 340kbs upload as opposed to the 120kbs throttle I had been experiencing, I am so happy, just in time, too, since I am finishing up a website and it is great for me as I need to get some stuff done!

I saw this video that devastated this man and his family’s life after reading the following article and am just saddened that the police in the US can get away with things like this. In Costa Rica, you can sue the police if they do something like this. I hope that the macho perpetrator pays personally for this crime. So sad for him, his wife and family, read on here.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011882857_harris17m.html

Well, ICE changed it’s freebie/cheap data service this week and I have to say, so far so good. I had the super cheap plan a month ago and it was really great with my iPhone that I had at the time. Actually it was incredible, but then I accidentally traded in my true 3G chip card (returned it to ICE) to upgrade my GSM card to the 3G card and ICE automatically programmed to “icecellular” with *99# modem (I didn’t realize that’s what was happening, the woman wasn’t particularly informative or helpful in explaining what was happening at the counter in San Pedro). I don’t totally understand all of the differences between the upgraded GSM vs. native 3G chip, but the main difference was the upload speed was brought down to .11mb on a constant throttled basis even for the expensive $27 plan. Whereas on the true 3G card that I had before which uses the kolbi3g APN and the Proxy server 172.XXX.XXX:8080 (can’t remember it off the top of my head), I was consistently getting a 256kb upload speed. (I kind of consistently am checking the speed at speedtest.net .)

Needless to say this was sucking big time: I had been paying $10/mo for a better service and then I paid $27/mo and got worse service for the past month. (I use my Pantech Windows Mobile Phone as my main modem to get online here in Costa Rica, so it’s kind of a big deal.) On Friday, I went and got another 3G chip and phone/modem line (much to the chagrin of my wife whose name it is in), and signed up for the cheap unlimited 3G dataplan (128kbs down/64kbs up) with the assurance we could easily upgrade to the more expensive service. Well, I was hoping it would be open and free on upload/download like my first card/chip. No such luck. They have it throttled, too.

However, as the weekend progressed, my service on my full $27 upgraded GSM to 3G line was consistently high even at times when it would normally really slow down (6:30pm, or when the kids get out of school in the afternoon.) So it seems that they have throttled all of the cheap plans and this is freeing up space for people like me with the higher speed plan. This is great, but they still have it throttled on the upload if you use the icecellular APN, but I found on Saturday I was able to Skype pretty well even with the low upload speed, I imagine this is because there’s less bandwidth being used and it is more consistent for the upload, and the download was pretty stellar. I am going to change my new 3G card on Tuesday or Wednesday for the higher speed plan, to see how it goes on the upload. Their advertised rate on the high speed $27/mo. is 1mb/384kbs download/upload. So, I am hoping that I can get it. When you go in in Turrialba, they know less about it then me (for the most part, the average person), and they say no assurances or we called about this issue on the upload and they said something crazy about battery being low… ha ha that’s a good one!!!!

Anyways, I have two of these phones and want to sell one for $225 if anyone is interested in having one because they can’t find the Datacard. It’s both a phone and a modem and actually has been running really great as a modem, just using internet sharing on Windows Vista. I can get it to work on a Mac as a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network), but it’s dog slow. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work on USB on the Mac which sucks, and the phone only has Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t go that route, which I did on the iPhone (both USB and WiFi). Instead I have set up an Ad Hoc network and use a Proxy server on my PC to get my Mac online. Costa Rica really makes you work if you want to get your technology to work. That’s for sure.

Let me know if you are interested in buying one of these phones. I can send a PDF and here’s an image, too.

A friend of mine, Sidney Genette, put this link up about value vs. hourly. I have been basically freelance for 15 years, including a long run in the middle that was freelance, but in-house, hourly.

The client basically paid me hourly, but the reality was it was value based. This was great for both of us, except I had to show up to get the check, check out the article. Hourly is a hard paradigm to break out of this much is certain!

http://biznik.com/articles/hourly-rates-you-could-be-making-so-much-more?utm_source=articles&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2010-05-12

I kind of love the transition we are technologically right now with the smartphones, Facebook, privacy and the net.

I found this article and kind of agree with a lot of it. The Apple iPhone is an amazing tool and will be. Being in a country outside of America for a year struggling to get internet has been educational and lovely for me. A lot of pain, but I have learned a lot as a result of it.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331