Cyber Sprawl

For a little while now i've been thinking about doing an inventory of my cyber identity. After a comment dan made on one of my recent pots, i think it's about time.

This blog started as a mandatory assignment for an anthropology class called "life online," so this feels pretty appropriate

Just organizing this is going to be a pain. I tried doing this functionally, and that didn't work. I'm going to do this by username (i'm not gonna actually post em though. internet paranoia!):

google: gmail (primary email account), blogger (techinically i have 2 blogs, but teh ootehr i only set up to figure out how to link picture from flick to a map i made), iGoogle homepage, Orkut, google mesenger, google maps, scheduler. so that's at least 8 google services. man, i sure hope they don't turn out to be big brother.
wvrs: my work email
AOL: my AIM sn
XFire: mesenging app for gamers. only way to get in touch with one of my friends.
bored.com: used to be my primary email account. now i only sue it as a registration email for sites i dont wanna give real emails to. But ehy, now i have hotmail and yahoo emails for that.
hotmail: MSN messenger, which I literally only use to talk to 1 person. lame.
meebo.com: flash IM app that let's me use all my messenging services simultaneously (minus Xfire). thank gd.
yahoo A: Flickr account
yahoo B: 2ary Flickr account
Travbuddy: online community of travelers. I have 2 travel blogs (with geolinked pictures on a travel map!) and participate in forums whe i get bored. I'm starting to host pictures there more than flickr, and facebook is falling behind.
Couchsurfing: internet community of travelers who support each other by offering places to stay. cool, right? i'm trying to work my way in for some free housing on my backpacking trip, but i dunno if i can work up teh refs in time
Wikimedia: i sued to have a wikipedia addiciton. because wikimedia is retarded, you have to set up an accoutn on each project. so i have shaggorama accounts at en.wikipedia, pt.wikipedia, en.wikinews, en.wikibooks, en.wikiversity, en.wikiquote, and en.wikimedia
Uncyclopedia: keeps me from vandalizing wikipedia
Facebook: my primary social networking tool. I only have orkut to appease the brazilians. travbuddy is taking over pictures though.
Livejournal: i have a friend with a LJ blog who locks 2/3rds of his posts, so i got an account to see what he's up to
youtube: i don't post videos, i just use my account to comment (read as criticize) other peoples movies and collect favorites and subscriptions
dailymotion: same thing

depending how you count, that's 30 different services listed. Damn

and let's see....i know i must be missing something... I read fark all the time, but don't have an account there yet. I play boggle online sometimes. and i have usernames at some newspapers, but i don't think that counts. i'm trying to set up an accoutn at zooomr.com because i heard they let you upload and as many pictures as you want with no cap on bandwidth or storage, so that's cool, but somethings been going wrong over there.

i have a feelign i'm going to be adding to this list as i realize how much i left off it. Fucking internet....

Using my assets

here's how cool I am:
-not only did i not have to get a visa to enter the country (brazilian baby!)
-not only am I not paying for rent (living with family baby!)
-I have connections.

My network in brazil is not limited to my family. My mom grew up here and has friends spread out all over the country, and many of them have invited me into their homes.

back to the weekend.

Fri I saw the brazilian side. Saturday I hit the argentinian side which was SPECTACULAR. way cooler than the brazilian side. I got stories, but i think i'm gonna put those on my travel blog for now. fuck..why do i have 2 blogs??!? this is bad..but yeah, sunday i went to paraguay and bought soem shit that doesn't work. Then it started to rain. I'd already done the big 3 things to do down here, and fuck the torrential rainforest downpour, so i decided to come back a little early. i called the bus station, and they said there was room on all 3 buses to São paulo. Of course, with my luck that day by the time i got there that was no longer the case. So i did the next best thing and arranged to go to Curitiba, a coastal city where i coudl cget a connection to São paulo. Buses leave every hour to SP from Curitiba, so I didn't buy the ticket to São Paulo.

And good thing too. I ended up spending two full days there. My mom has an old friend who lives in Curitiba. In fact, she had been trying to get me to live down there instead of São Paulo when I first started organizing this trip. So this weekend I got to know Curitiba and my mom's friend's family as well as Iguaçu!

I'll post more details about argentina, paraguay, and curitiba in a bit. I've decided this should be the "master blog," and anything i post to the other blog should be logged here in some form. So yeah, i'll get around to that later.

Adultery

blogger, it's time we talked. sit down. have a drink, I need to confess something.

I've met another blog.

I'm sorry, it just sort of...happened. I don't know what this means for us. I still want to write you! this other blog....what we have is different from what i have with the other blog. It's jsut such a pain in the ass trying to post pictures to you blogger....this other blog, it's a TRAVEL blog. I can post date entries, import pictuers directly from flickr.....it even keeps a running map!

i'm sorry blogger, i never meant for this to happen. A backpacker told me about the other blog, and one thing led to another, and now here I am....a blogging bigamist.

Maybe I'll cross post, maybe i won't. we'll see.

I don't know what the future holds for us blogger. This should only be a temporary division of my attention.



please visit my new travel blog . if nothing else, it has a map and pictures. old posts aer written with much the same content as this blog, but at least there are pictures.

Birthday at Iguaçu

It was David's (my uncle) idea. This weekend is a long weekend because of some crazy roman-catholic holidays or something, so why not take a birthday trip(Question mark) going to iguaçu now allows me to focus my longer backpacking trip in northern brazil.

the idea was originally leave for the falls in mid december, go to florianopolis for new years, then work my way up the coast to recife for carnival...a LONG way up the coast. Now the whole carnival plan is much more doable.

so last week i bought bus tickets and a shitty back pack (shitty as in no frame and minimal padding on the hip straps). I left são paulo as always with paulo's disapproval, but with a very full backpack: i decided to use this trip as a guinea pig for the bigger backpacking trip. what have i learned so far (question mark): gotta get some padding for the backpack.

left late last night on a red eye bus. seated behind me was a couple from bermuda: a local who married a canadian. 'i was an underwriter, she was an accountant' 'sounds romantic...'

i learned alot about bermuda. wierd little place. apparently it's reached critical mass with foreign business moving in. mainly insurance companies. moreover, they have more accountant jobs than they can deal with. all sorts of wierd shit....seriously, the country sounds like it came out of a douglas adams novel.

so we arrived this morning and after moving into the hostel (which is a PALACE for a hostel. even has a bar by the pool), i hit the falls with another kid form the hostel. i'd post pictures, but i'm having trouble connect my archos, but i'll try again later. to say the least, the falls were SPECTACULAR. loaded with toursits though, and none of the hiking trails were open to the public. they are all operated by a third party eco-tourism company, so if you wanna hike, you gotta get in on a bigger package. fucking lame ass. hopefully the argentinian side will ahve some hiking, but i doubt it.

in search of hiking, i went across the street to another national park, parque das aves (park of the birds). I was suspicious of this park from the get-go and my suspicions were verified upon entrance: not a national park, an aviary. just a big zoo. i mean, it was cool and they had nice birds, but it was really anti-climactic and i was kinda dissapointed.

still, the night is very young and i've got time to get shit-faced and party. i mean hey, it's my birthday!!! although, ain't nothing special about turning 23....maybe my auto insurance goes down or something.

Technologically Savvy

My Birthday is next week, and my first (and probably only) gift arrived yesterday from my mom. A digital camera, a gadget i've been jonesing for for along time now, and am quite frankly pretty stoked on. Tog et it here, my mom passed it along to a friend who lives in rio who happened to be in the states, who gave it to her daughter who was visitng but lives in rio, and i went to her house to pick it up. I never even got to meet ehr to say thanks in person, she had her housekeeper send it down in a chocolate shop bag. It was raining at the time, so i decided to hang out at the building and learn to use it a little.

I felt really 'mission impossible' flipping through the manual of a gadget i recieved in deceptive packaging from a contact i didn't know and never meant at an apartment building where i felt kind of unwelcome.

Afterwards I hung out with my friend georgiana who lived nearby, and ended up crashing at her pad. I'll post pictures soon, but this damn computer is too old!

But yeah, back tot he point, camera = awesome. it's a Pentax Optio M40. about the size of a credit card, it's really light and has tons of features (although it doesn't have manual control of the apperture or shutter speed...it does have ISO sensitivity though, which i guess osrta controls the shutter speed...). It has optical zoom, and records at a maximum resolution of 8mb. Also, my mom got a 128mb sd card, which suits me fine. From poking around online i think it cost my mom under $200, which is perfect.

it is exactly the camera i wanted. it's small. it's light. It has optical zoom and records at a decent quality. it's cheap enough that i won't feel too bad if it gets jacked.

the last bit is important because next month i plan to hit the road and backpack north through to march or so (fuck, i still need to change my ticket and extend my leave at the firestation!). the whole purpose of this trip was to see brazil, and although i've gone on about one serious sidetrip a month, i haven't seen nearly as much as i wanted to. So as far as traveling is concerned, i'm happy not to have a professional camera on me.

Along with clothes, i plan to take this camera and my Archos (Media player). I had originally intended not to take the archos with me on my travels, but ARCHOS + CAMERA = LETHAL COMBINATION. here's why: the archos isn't just an mp3 player and movie viewer, it's 40GB hard drive the size of my hand. and it's pretty light too. I'm going to look into the cost of a bigger SD card for the camera, but i feel like taking the archos along will probably give me more versatility.

I will be much more bummed if my archos gets jacked than my camera. But at least I can back up my music collection on my old 80gig external before i leave (the uneven power currents here have been wreaking havoc on it though, it's been glitching alot lately and some folders are becoming corrupted).

Class and soccer

I meant to make this post awhile ago, but mess outside from the pending soccer match reminded me to get my ass in gear.

so about a month or so ago i attended a soccer game between corinthians and spfc, the two são paulo teams. corinthians are traditionally "the people's team," whereas spfc is the upper class team. Corinthians where here first, and their stadium is way out on the edge of the city. SPFC is much newer, and their stadium was built in the middle of a wealthy area.

the rivalry between spfc and corinthians is probably one of the most serious in brazil. the game i attended was called a "classico." SPFC were the favorites by far, well on their way to winning the championship (which they may accomplish tonight, if not next week), whereas corinthians had been having a shitty season.

everyone i talked to, corinthian and spfc fans alike, warned me not to go sit with on the corinthian's side. apparently, i don't look corinthian enough; i look like an spfc, and that could get me lynched. I reluctantly took their advice to heart.

as the game got under way, both teams raised their respective banders: huge flags that span a chunk of the stadium. the ends get passed up the crowd, and people wave them by beating on the underside. after a minute or so, they get lowered. The corinthians raised theirs first, an eagle. then spfc raised theirs, a dragon. a tear formed in the banner, just below the dragosn head. as the banner was raised, the tension caused the tear to spread, ironically cleanly beheading the dragon. a very bad omen.

it was a dirty game. there was significant fouling on both sides. at one point a fight broke out on the corinthians side. as the police poured into the stadium to quell the small riot, the spfc fans started cheering the cops on, saying "break them!" ugly, ugly business.

there were much fewer corinthian fans than spfc at the game, probably about as many as attended on that first, cold game i saw with ben. but they were waaaaaay more into it than the spfc fans. the spfc cheers barely circulated the crowd, staying focused only in the hardcore-fans section. moreover, the cheers got super repetitive despite the vast repertoire of cheers. the corinthians, on the other hand, were on their feet, dancing and singing the whole game through.

no goals were scored. bad energy filled the stadium. finally, with about 5min left in the game, the corinthians landed one on the spfc goalie.

wow. spfc couldn't even cheer. the stadium erupted with the songs of the corinthians. i couldn't even hear the beat of my team's drums.

as the game came to a close, i decided it would be a good idea to get teh hell out of dodge. i started moving towards the exit a little before the goal was scored. as soon as the game ended, i was outta there. outside the stadium were more cops than i have seen in one place in a long, long time, forming human walls in full riot gear, dividing the corinthians from spfc as much as possible. i had to hoof it over a hill just to get to my street (which actually pops out right in front of the stadium, but the cops wouldn't let us get to it for a ways).

leaving the stadium was a racket. singing fromt he stadium, singing in the streets, people honking horns (even taxis!), flags waving out car windows, fireworks exploding all around... suffice it to say, all the spfc fans had removed their shirts before hitting the street.

at one point, while waiting for a light to change a car drove by carrying some corinthians. they taunted my group waiting at the intersection. one of the people near me responded, mumbling one of the ugliest thigns i've heard in along time: "allegria da favela." happiness of the ghetto. that's what the corinthians were to this guy, a ghetto team. many people seemed to share his sentiment.

when i got back to the house, i sat down at the computer and started messign aroudn on my email or something. i could still hear cheers and sirens and explosions outside, even though thehosue is a ways from the stadium (by outside, i mean RIGHT outside). the explosions got closer, as did the sirens. then, i started to hear scuffling in the busshes by the window. it was 2 corinthian fans, being chased by the cops for setting off fireworks and generally being unrully. the cops landed their spotlights on em pretty fast, but i mean damn, what a mess.

i found it really itneresting how the class division in the city bleeds into soccer. soccer is the lifeblood of this country. you better believe they talk about soccer pretty damn early on the news. the victory of the corinthians was a victory of the lower class defeating the upper class.

the corinthians hadn't beaten spfc in many years. it was quite an upset.

The best thing to happen to the internet since wikipedia

Ok. I'm not special. I like to go online as a diversion just as much as anyone else. But i also use the internet as a tool for self-motivated study.

today i was trying to find a material for a class i'm teaching today. One of my students is a film teacher, and i wanted to use the "Learning from Youtube" class being taught at Pitzer College, my alma mater, as a topic for discussion. sifting through blog posts, i came across the following incredible fact:

UC BERKELY IS POSTING ALL OF ITS COURSES ON YOUTUBE.

i alerady have a degree. who cares if I won't get college credit? i wanna learn. I never got to take an anatomy class, now i can! hey, if i wanna brush up on my ochem, i don't need to go to a library!

UCB, you guys are awesome. i hope otehr schools follow suit. home-schooled kids are gonna eat their hearts out.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=ucberkeley