Here’s a new track in progress inspired by the amazing poetry and voice of Destiny White.  We met while I was DJing for some performances at the incredible Anamaya resort in Montezuma, Costa Rica in December, 2010.  This is a first installment of some upcoming tracks and collaboration.

Pura vida de Montezuma, Costa Rica.

I love Costa Rica. It’s an amazing place. There’s a lot of beauty here. Unfortunately, if you are into trees, you quickly discover there’s not too much beauty in the cities and towns here. Perhaps it is the farming mentality, but in San Jose, Cartago, and many other cities, there are hardly any city trees at all. As a result many of the towns are extremely hot and barren concrete somewhat ugly places (at least from my aesthetic sensibilities).

So what can be done? Education of the importance of city trees is key.

Here’s an inspiring story from South Africa that I hope people will share with Ticos in power. I have to say that I am impressed lately with a lot of the small trees I see planted all of the time lately in San Jose and think their mayor is doing a lot but as the following story illustrates, people need to be educated in the importance of trees and letting them grow.

What I find disturbing is the amount of 30 to 80 year old trees I see chopped down all of the time. These are the big trees that give more shade, more oxygen. It’s a cumulative effect that will take decades to recover. For example, in the shopping mall between San Jose and Cartago they recently chopped some big trees that were in front of it. You don’t have to be super smart to figure out why they did it. The manager of the mall thinks, “Not enough people are coming here. If I chop the trees, more people will come because they will see it.” No, that’s not the reason. It’s because it’s on a curve and everyone is going really fast. It’s a pain to drive in there and get out. If you are heading towards Cartago, you need to remember in advance and get across the highway. Yes, it’s only two big trees that are gone (yet another two, I see it almost daily). And it seems like there’s some newly planted trees right nearby. It will only take 30 or 40 years until they get the size the old ones killed last week are. I will be 80 years old (I am 43 now). There will be a new manager at the mall (will most likely be gone by then anyway, location, location, location). If they are educated, hopefully they will not chop down the new trees.

Pura vida.

Here’s the feedback from my first online MP3 purchaser:

Travis-

I love your cd!  Its grown on me each time I listen to it – great vibes – what genre do you call it?  Who are some of your fav musicians and styles?

Peace

James

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhornne Clemens, 1835-1910)

After all of my difficulties with an iPhone 3G with no WiFi as chronicled before, I was excited to check it out in Costa Rica again.  We went to four cell phone places my first day back in San Jose trying to get a Kolbi Prepaid card or better yet a permanent line with unlimited up and down on the data plan,  but none of the places would sell us the Kolbi 3G plan, so we finally went to ICE near Tibas in San Jose.  It was raining and in the ten minutes there our umbrella got stolen!  But aside from that the guy was pretty much not very helpful (big surprise) and they showed me a list of the “approved” 3G phones of which only the iPhone 3GS was one not my 3G.  I was like ugh, not again.

However, being quite experienced of the ways of Costa Rica, we left (with the umbrella the guard said had been sitting there for days so we should take that one, but then outside another guard said, hey, that looks just like my umbrella, whatever, Costa Rica!), and had the plan to go back to Turrialba where they have a very helpful place across from ICE where they actually help you and tell you the information you need to know.

The next day it was super easy to get set up, they had expanded since I left the place four months before and had the place next door and a good way to set up your new phones and could help with the 3G.  I really wanted to have an unlimited Data plan on my iPhone not a pay as you go, but since it was going to involve ICE, and they usually like to program your phone in weird ways, I decided to go the easy route and get on the 10,000 pay as you go plan and I am so happy that I did!  It was only 1/2 an hour and I have WI-FI where I am at and may where I am going to the beach.  The prices of the DATACARDS have gone way down, so I think just to make it easy, I am going to buy a dedicated ICE Huwaei Datacard and have that on my MacBook.   I found last April when I would use my iPhone as a modem or a MiWi hotspot it would burn pretty hot after a few hours or at times the charge would come down, so I’ll just make it easier that way.

Feel free to comment or ask any questions or advice.  If you need networking or connectivity advice in Costa Rica, I am available!

ICE Finally giving High Speed Upload

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!

Pantech Duo C810 For Sale

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.

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….

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.

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.