Los Angeles is an amazing city. So many contrasts, so many stories. Today I am staying in Highland Park with some friends.
I just finished my “portal” page for the music and art of Travis Winn, aka, NIO.
I will be releasing to the public my new album “Origins” soon, available for purchase. Some songs are already up.
Enjoy!
Go to NIO.COM to see the new “portal”.
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.
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….
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.
Travis, Marcia & Maya in Cahuita National Park
One of the best things about living in Costa Rica is the wide variety of micro-climates which exist here. While I live technically in what is known as the Central Valley of Costa Rica, the reality is that Turrialba is just on the edge of the Atlantic Lowlands heading into Limon, Cahuita, Puerto Viejo on into Sixaola to continue to the frontier with Panama.
After three weeks in Europe with family, one amazing wedding in Sitio Mata, near Turrialba. I decided I needed to continue my openness to the world and needed to travel. So I set off with Marcia & Maya to the beach. We left pretty early and got there in about three hours stopping along the way. It was a rare nearly cloudless day and the Caribbean beach was an amazing site to see. Heading towards Guapiles on the “highway” from Turrialba the views of the Turrialba Volcano were astounding. I stopped along the way and found a lovely property for sale 45 acres for $180,000 with an incredible view of the volcano right on the main road and a small Caribbean wooden plantation home and 30 head of cattle. I spoke with the owner. I love the idea of it, but don’t have the income to support it now, would love to have someone I know buy it.
After traveling in Europe, we were much more relaxed with our seven month old on the road, she was such a trooper on the planes, not crying even once all 40 hours there and back, it was really quite astounding.
Merry Christmas!
Click Above to See it High Resolution if you want!
Visa’s are changing around the people and the new open traveling and cosmopolitan masses need to inform their governments their desire to spend more than 90 days in other countries.
From the BBC:
India Changes Tourist Visa Requirements
Musée des Instruments de Musique (Mim)
Tonight I visited the Musée des Instruments de Musique (Musical Instrument Museum). I have to admit, I even liked the acronym for the museum mim there was something inviting about it, perhaps being so close to mime, perhaps my art name of NIO seeming , who knows, but I arrived in a snowy evening the week before Christmas.
The music instrument Museum near the Gare Central (Central Train Station) Is an amazing site to behold. First to get there if you are heading out from the central plaza you have to walk across an incredible plaza. Before arriving to the museum there’s a gorgeous red lantern building that appears to be a part of the Brussels central train station, but instead is what I believe to be a temporary tea house and restaurant.
Don’t miss it!
www.mim.fgov.be
Hofberg 2
1000 Brussel, Belgium
02 545 01 30
All Content Copyright Travis Winn, NIO. Nothing is Original.
