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.

Wordreference.com is an amazing resourse for translation quickly, accurately and on the fly.

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.

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.

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