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

My HP was shiny and black and silver, I loved it for about one year. And then, it failed. I still have it and the four discs they told me to burn when I just purchased it (thanks HP, at my hourly rate the cost of my computer just went way up) were pulled out to restore it. Didn’t restore, it choked. Hmm, not so good (to say the least). HP support couldn’t help, they tried sending me disks, still didn’t work. In hindsight, two years later I think it was the internal DVD/CD player that was failing. It took at two or three months later, couldn’t get it to work, kind of gave up. It had been running XP which I liked.

Then one day I remembered that I had MS send me a copy of Vista for free because my computer was purchased around then, I thought, okay, I will give it a shot. I managed to use it with Vista but I hated it. At least I had a computer. By then, about two years ago, the battery was dead really quick, and then the sound card was starting to go. I was getting into music at the time. Everyone was you need a Mac, you need a Mac, I was in L.A. and they love their Mac’s there, I loved agonizing everyone there saying the PC was better… However, i was finding all I was doing was technical stuff to get the thing to work. I finally got a Mac and then three months later, of course, put a duo boot Boot Camp and Parallels. Tired of carrying around two laptops. Well, as soon as I did that the problems began on my Mac. I had a 100 programs PC or so and lots of fonts and keyboard commands. But then last year I dropped it. Hard drive dead. Luckily I had a clean and easy copy of my Mac side of the computer made from Carbon Copy Clone. The PC side is so hard (some linux guy tried to help me for like 8 hours a couple months ago making a 80 mb .img file I know I will never use for an old Compaq, no thanks!) The moral is HP isn’t going to win, Palm blew it with their buggy 650 or whatever it was that I loved but that broke and screwed all the early adoptors. My $1300 HP printer is a beast, too, and bad support the one time I made the mistake of calling (the guy was pretty smart and informed. The iPhone and iTouch are brilliant and are the only game in town. He’s a maniac (Jobs) and I hate the closed nature of it, but as my music teacher told me about a Mac vs. PC. It works. That’s the main thing. And one of the guys above is right, the virus thing and all that bloatware is killing it. Bloatware is currently killing Adobe, too, and all of the nag screens to reinstall. My Mac never bugs me to install stuff or update. Everytime I turn on that Piece of Crap, it tells me it’s an emergency and I have to download this, do that, or tells me this or that. You know what? Just leave me alone to do what I want to do today, the distractions on the internet are already enough!

I love how they are saying Jobs hates Flash, if you read what he wrote, it’s very interesting and accurate. H.264 is great but reading that Microsoft is only going to ship I.E. 9 with ONE CODEC is frightening. However, if it works. I was waiting to buy my new Canon camera based on it’s codec (the old one sucked!)

Apple is going to kill it (until they get to greedy, too, already kind of are, but it’s worth the price for their products!).

As someone who is pretty much self-taught for all I do, I am fascinated with the learning process.  I met a man named K.B. Jinan in the World Social Forum in 2004 in Mumbai, India (it seems the world knows the new name now, no longer necessary to use the old name of Bombay).  

I spent about an hour interviewing him and he had some amazing things to say, I think I could really do something with those tapes in addition to what I already did which you can see here:

Anyways, what I find totally fascinating is watching my child Maya learning. She’s almost 11 months and she just is non-stop with trying to figure things out. I feel like I am the same way and would love to stay that way, but know that the way in which she approaches it is so much more amazing than I do. I suppose I was similar, but her non stop curiosity is what is really mind blowing. I feel like watching her learn is going to allow for me to learn more.

I have an iPhone and an iTouch and watching my daughter play around with it at 10 months and do drawings and then try to use the touch screen interface on a Windows Mobile 6.1  phone which doesn’t have the feature is cool.  Watching a five year old cousin of my daughter use the same iPhone’s music program which is essentially a step-sequencer with tonal modalities that make it hard to sound bad program it visually with a little squares as opposed to how it sounds which is how I always did it was cool.  Watching a 65 year old client interact with an iPhone I had procured and her long nails and not so agile fingers try to navigate it is and was a contrast.  In the end the iPhone was a  business application for her and it ended up working great (after 30 hours of looking for the right application on the internet to share business docs from a PC server to her iPhone).

For me, I use the iPhone/iTouch to study user interfaces and to study in general.  I am taking courses at Stanford and MIT basic programming on iTunes University as well as graduate level UI Design stuff.  I got started wanting to take the iPhone application development course at Stanford, but three courses in I realized that a web designer an Objective-C programmer does not make!  It’s pretty cool to be back in college again.

  Filesharing my 3G WM 6.1 phone is what has got my new fascination with networking going on.  For someone who got on the Internet in 1994 and wrote his main paper in International Relations in 1990 entitled Computopia I really don’t know that much about networking, but that is beginning to change.  I tried to teach myself a bit on the web, but that was like no way impossible tooo many ads.  Google will be bit in the butt for what they have created on the web, this much is certain.

Well, I got here to Wordpress today because I was trying to integrate this Blog into my Shopify website at http://electroliquid.myshopify.com This is just a Dev site right now as I develop for my clients/friends in France.

I spent a ton of time reading for this solution and am finding more and more that Youtube is the solution because if it’s a Mac solution they don’t show you the PC side and if it’s a PC soultion, it’s usually useless and doesn’t work.

1. From the PC side to get it to work is best here: It’s BRILLIANT found after hours of trying!

How to share Mac OS X Leopard files on a Windows Vista Network

The PC side of this video above is amazing, I never would have hit Refresh!

2. This is from the Mac to get to the PC side:

A little less descriptive but hey, it was working for me! I found in the comments that you have to use ipconfig in dos to get the IP number of your wireless network (as opposed to your net connection, a good distinction).

So in your PC you go to Start-> Run (WindowsKey+R) then type CMD then you are in DOS and you want to enter ipconfig and then hit return. Be sure to type on the mac side the ip number for the sharing connection (i.e. wireless/ethernet vs. your connection to the internet).

I find that these Youtube videos are way easier then all of the text sometimes!

Now if only I could figure out how to get Internet sharing to work from my PC to my Mac, I am using a WAP access point on 3G network on my cell phone. The quandry is I just want to use my Mac, but I can only get the cell Windows Mobile 6.1 sharing to show up via Bluetooth (which is extremely slow) as opposed to USB sharing which on this PC which is pretty acceptable! Ugh, I will succeed!

Broken Fingaz -Graffiti Stop Motion from Broken Fingaz on Vimeo.

Found this out on the net today, it’s pretty cool graffiti artwork and the music isn’t too bad, either, it reminds me of the work of a guy in Argentina, that’s amaaazing, probably the innovator of this genre of work, can’t remember his name, if you can please inform!

If you are an artist and or animator and are interested in using some of NIO’s music in your work please give a listen at NIO we like Soundcloud here at NIO. Let me know I can get you some high res files. I am in particular looking for video interpretations of Exotic Erotic. The NIO.COM website will be coming live soon.

I have been working on a website for someone in France lately in my free time. I know how to flirt with women and ask for directions among other things in French, but since I began learning French when I was a dishwasher in Switzerland in a cafe and never took an official course, I don’t know it that well.

Doing translations for a website with words like “Section” or “Category” or “About Us” among many, many other words is tricky. I found that av.com and Babelfish had been my way to go since like 95 or 96. Just habit I guess. But it’s gotten a bit rusty and hard to use. I tried out Google’s translation service and it wasn’t that great either. So somehow I happened upon WordReference.com and it is awesome.
It tells you so many varieties and exactly what you need to know. It also seems to have a convenient cookie feature that remembers what your last radio button selected was so you don’t have to do the DropMenu thing which is so time consuming and bad for carpal tunnel.

Just my thought for the day back to the Creations Ethniques website.

Wow, it was an odyssey but I made it! I have been working on an album here in Costa Rica which I finished a few months ago, it was a lot of work, but I did it. Now I wanted to try and promote it on the web. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I live at the end of a dirt road up in the foothills of an active volcano in Turrialba. We are renting, and the owner had told us that they had ordered phones so we could get internet. What they had not told us is that they hadn’t paid their bill to ICE the phone company/electric company state monopoly or that we were going to have to install a few telephone poles. Things move slowly here in Costa Rica so weeks turned into months. I didn’t mind not having the internet because it can be so distracting, I was working on music etc. I heard for ages about this datacard thing to get 3g and internet through the air.

I realized that I could probably get it through the net and since I have switched to Mac for everything pretty much, I though, ok, I will get a 3g iPhone in order to get online, jailbreak, unlock it and then get 3g card and then figure out how to tether it as a modem in order to get online.

Wow, easy enough right? WRONG.

Oh my God, I had no idea how hard it would be and what I would learn along the way. First of all, I can be pretty technical if I have to be. In fact, I like challenges. But I also like simplicity as well. That’s why I switched to Mac. Trying to set up a side-chain on your bass in Logic with the correct routing and threshold, etc, etc. is already hard enough, so I don’t/didn’t want to worry about the OS in music and on my Macintorsh. But then I found out, wow, Mac’s are simple until you are trying to crack an iPhone or get into the guts of the system. What a pain and not recommended for the light of heart. I had no choice because I was tired of driving three miles to my in-laws house just to check my e-mail and get online make calls, etc. So here were my barriers.

First there was price. I haven’t worked for a year, having sold my car and living on the proceeds here in Costa Rica. iPhones are not cheap. I do not like spending a lot of money on something that is easy to lose/break and isn’t a content creative tool. Most of the iPhones that are 3g and unlocked/jailbroken on E-Bay are in the $300–$600 range (there’s a distinction one discovers in the journey (jailbroken is far easier than unlocked). I write this April 2, 2010, the firmware 3.13 with a codbase whatever you are pretty much S.O.L. from what I understand (unless it was upgraded through Pwnage. I bought an AT&T phone that wasn’t unlocked or anything for only $200. This was kind a of a risk because I had to have it sent to someone in the states then shipped to me without checking it out on AT&T to see if it actually works. Well, guess what, it came to me cracked. She mentioned scratches on the back, but actually never said there was a crack on the back on the bottom or that the camera doesn’t work or the WiFi. Buyer beware on e-bay especially iPhones.

No wi-fi not working when you are trying to unlock a phone turns out to be a BIG deal, BlackRa1n and GeoHot’s “easy solution” don’t work. I finally found an iphoneexplorer app and BB forum on cell phones that worked in India that involved dragging over blacksn0w.dylib and com.apple.CommCenter.plist I barely know what these things are and when I tried dragging these over into iphone explorer on the PC and it was crashing it and not dragging over. On the Mac however it crashed iPhone explorer .93 but still dragged the files over. After maybe 40 hours spread out of 2 weeks (I had given up, no WIFI on the iPhone was a real pain, not many solutions anywhere), this Indian work around was my last hope, before I was going to send my phone back to the States to a buddy who was going to give it a go (we both suspect the crack on the back of the phone was disconnecting the antennae).

Well, I have it now and am writing from the end of the dirt road in the mountains. If you are in Costa Rica and need to get your iPhone to work, give me a holler, I am available. I felt that some of them purposely told false information in order to get people to accidentally upgrade to 3.1.3 perhaps blogs being sponsored by AT&T and Apple.

iPhone is not available at all in Costa Rica through standard ways, so….

I had this show in Los Angeles a couple years ago, and as always with an artist it took a while for me to get going on it and show what I had been up to. I have actually been doing a lot with the fractal images. It was kind of cool, first time I had my name on television. (Hopefully not the last!) It’s amazing what having a publicist can do for getting the word out there for you.