NIO
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.
The choice of ICE using the UMTS/HSDPA 850Mhz seems to be a bad one, considering I have been looking all over the internet multiple sites and languages worldwide for the Huawei E166 Datacard (3G Modem) to no avail. I.C.E. won’t sell it to you. There’s a few other models if you check out the Huawei devices website in the 160 series, I thought those would work, but no, be sure that they have the right UMTS/HSDPA 850mhz, was thinking I could get a used one from T-Mobile, but those won’t work either. What a joke, for months everyone wants this card there’s nowhere in the world to get it. Good job for the future! Go ICE! There’s a few E161s you can get from alibaba.com for wholesalers in lots of 10 or 50 but those are the wrong frequencies.
Good luck!
Don’t even ask what it’s like to try and unlock a 3g iPhone purchased on eBay. I consider myself pretty technical, but oh my, watch out, you gotta be hardcore for that one! Easy to make mistakes, that is certain. Looking for something easier now. 
And if you want a review (in Spanish, we all speak Spanish down here in Costa Rica anyways) puedes encontrarlo aqui. Es muy interasante descripcion: http://bozape.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=9
Great post man!
D & N Beach Club, Malpais, Costa Rica
Dj Malte of Real XS (Ibiza) Spinning Sunset filmed by NIO
It was pretty cool hanging out in Malpais with Malte and his girlfriend. The sunset groove was cool and a lot of people told me later they were enjoying it down by the beach. Malpais is really an incredible part of Costa Rica, a lot of work to get there, but worth it when you get there.
Well, I still have a ways to go for being as happy as most Costa Ricans but I have to say, it is kind of contagious. I made a journey out to Malpais and Santa Theresa in the Nicoya Peninsula last week and it was beautiful and amazing, but definitely not Costa Rica, in the sense of the real Costa Rica filled with Costa Rican’s. It was a great beach town filled with cool expats, beautiful surfers and incredible nature and wildlife, but wait, I guess that is Costa Rica, too.
Well, my version of Costa Rica has been family. All family all the time. My new Costa Rican family, and wow are they incredible people. Maya is 9 months old now, and we have bought her a few things but we didn’t need to because every relative or cousin and all of the neighbors within ten blocks have bought her presents. My friend Janelle who is half-Brazillian and has a nine year old son I have known since he was two, told me, “The people in L.A. hate children, you go into a restaurant and they look at you weird for your child, etc… etc… In Brazil, however, and Latin America, children are rock-stars. Everyone loves them so much and gives them so much attention.” Well, she is right, it is amazing for me to witness it. This must one of the reasons it’s such a happy place.
Abolishing the Army wasn’t a bad idea either.
See Nicholas D. Krostoff’s article below.
Beautiful Beach at Santa Theresa (Malpais), Costa Rica
It’s great to be on the road again. I haven’t been to a new place in a while, especially a beach, so it was refreshing to arrive here in Malpais and Santa Theresa from San Jose and before that Turrialba, Costa Rica two days ago. It is pretty far out there and removed from the rest of Costa Rica both physically and in vibrational level. From what I understand it is a recent phenomena in the sense of becoming popular and getting bigger, more tourists, etc.
This of course is no phenomena at all in the sense that newly discovered beach towns which expand have been going on for ages. I find this one to be a pretty refreshing one in the sense that it hasn’t been really built out too much yet. What seems most amazing is that there appears to be virtually no construction right on the beach so, no beach bars, no hotels, etc. right there. This is kind of great and kind of not so great in the sense that it’s pretty pristine, but it’s hard to have the creature comforts that I sometimes like to indulge in. There are two exceptions, however, to this: Day + Night and another restaurant way down in Santa Theresa that apparently has been there for ten years.
What I find interesting is how there’s nobody building there on the beach, just a couple of places. I have heard that the coastal commission (or Costa rica) s strong and prevents it. What I can’t help but notice when I compare it to scenes in Goa, India or Ko Phan Gang, Thailand or Tulum, Mexico is that there doesn’t really seem to be the locals there and the sort of homegrown little businesses and families making a living off of the beach who had been there always. What seems to have happened is that the land all over the world has been so massively commodified, restricted and legalized for the corporations and rich. The current crisis seems to have confirmed this. The results are higher prices for the tourists and the locals don’t make that much. Most the people making money here seem to be a lot of Americans, Israelis and Europeans. This scene will continue to blow up, but the complete privatization of the world seems to continue at the price of humanity and society causing distinctions and a separation from oneself to the other.
It’s a beautiful place to visit, come and help make it the next Playa del Carmen, there’s always the next beach up the way (unfortunately it’s most likely now owned by a bank, an investor, a rich person) so the barbed wire might be surrounding it. Nothing against the rich, but the institutions are getting to strong in domination of every aspect of our realities these days.
http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com
I like seeing the artwork of my fellow Americans check out what they are up to in Detroit.
Artist Doing Their Best in Hard Times
Health Insurance Rates Skyrocket in California 39%
I am a healthy adult, vegetarian, etc, etc. I had health insurance for about four years. From that time about 2005 to 2009 my premiums went up from about $111 to $267. From what I was reading in the above article they would be most likely $390 by now. This is and was outrageous. When I found out my wife was pregnant (and she was visiting from another country), I realized that it was going to be virtually impossible to get health insurance or pay for the birth simply in a hospital.
We determined that it was going to be best to do it in Costa Rica instead, and from what I am reading I am so glad for that decision. In Costa Rica when you go to a private hospital to give birth, you get a detailed list of the prices and what they cover IN ADVANCE. I first experienced that in Thailand almost 20 years ago when I had to go to the hospital there. They gave you a list: One price for private room, another for shared with one person, and a cheaper for a group room. Pretty straight forward. Why can’t this be done in America?
Our cars when they are sick have more rights then their owners. The mechanic has to give you a signed quote in order to “operate” on them.
Most countries in the world you can ask in advance what the price is going to be, and then make an informed decision, this more than anything so that people can comparison shop instead of the hoping insurance might cover it, is what needs to happen for true insurance.
Price control must be done as well that is the only way that we are going to move forward on this (oops, did I say a dirty word?).
This has been a big year for me. Aside from the birth of my first daughter (ok technically within the past year), I finally decided to give up my PC habit. It was hard. I loved my PC so much. In fact, I think I was practically the only person in Los Angeles who ever defended them, in fact I loved antagonizing everyone I could down there with how PCs were better. And I am a graphic designer, but I swore to it. I even was giving Sony Vegas (a video editing program) a lot of my time.
The past couple days I have been getting a little bit into the internet again. This time it is WordPress. I have been trying to get a little bit more savvy on it and find it really exciting to do. After eight months off of the interenet for the most part working on my new album in the mountains here in Costa Rica, I had a need to get online more and attempt to communicate and generate income.
While it is kind of a whole new way of doing the web then what I had been doing, I can really see the power of it.
The databases are taking over.
What I have been working on mostly is the website CostaRicanWeddingPhotos.com with my new partner Maria-Jose Sanchez. Check it out and if you have a need of photography let us know. E-Mail Travis
Follow me on Twitter