Did i mention that the people over here are paranoid (or to put it more mildly: security obsessed)? I have never seen so many armed security guards in my life. and then there are the (electrical) fences around apartment buildings in the better-off neighborhoods and zillions of police agents who drive around in their cars with their guns on their laps (i have been too scared to snap a picture of this particular behavior until now). Anyway i went to the bank today and there they had a security guard in a box with just his head sticking out. no idea what the purpose of this is (is he supposed to be hidden but this particular guard was too tall? or is the box bullet-proof and supposed to protect him in case of a shoot-out?):

Yesterday i seriously thought i would not like São Paulo. It seemed empty for a city with 16 million-or-so inhabitants. And the people who where on the streets where either selling incense, crystals and other hippie-shit (on the Praça Republica next to my hotel) or the seemed to be a bit too fond of tattoos and body manipulations for my taste (all the kids i ran into on the subway on their way to some kind of tattoo convention). But mostly they were simply absent.

The lack of people on the streets was apparently also due to the fact that it was sunday AND referendum-day and brazilians seem to take both their sundays and there referendums rather serious. As far as the latter are concerned it even seems that the police is not allowed to arrest anyone 3 days prior to any election/referendum as this would mean that the arrested cannot vote. apparently this law is a relic from a past when politicians would get supporters of their opponents arrested so they could not vote. As far as i understand this it is not that crimes in this period go unpunished but rather the arrests will be delayed.

Anyway i have changed my mind about the city. This place is absolutely mind boggling. It is pretty much what i would have imagined a 21st century megalopolis when i was a kid. The city center is an anarchic chaos of high rise buildings which seen as a whole has a heterogeneous beauty that surpasses the clinic beauty of places like Amsterdam by orders of magnitude. Combine this with science fiction attributes like heli-pads on top of lots of buildings (that people actually seem to use for helicopter travel within the city), lots of satellite dishes and other aerials, private properties surrounded by electric fences and churches that have their own parking garages underneath them (pay by credit card!) and i am sold to São Paulo.

Tonight on Avenida Paulista there was a open air screening of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘. This is probably the most appropriate places to screen this movie i have seen so far.

Seems that not only the people on the São Paulo Metro like strange combinations, but so do the vending machines (Vending machines for books on public transport systems have been covered elsewhere). In any case the book vending machine at the Barra Funda metro station offers an interesting combination of titles for R$ 4.99 (€2.20) each. Next to two titles by Niccolò Machiavelli (‘The Art of War’ and ‘The Prince’) there is a book about the immensely popular (at least in Brazil) social software application orkut (‘orkut – who do you know’):

This combination does of course a number of questions: who reads books about orkut? And who the fuck gets the urge to read Machiavelli on the subway? And what is the relationship between google and Machiavelli anyway?

It is my first day in São Paulo and as it is raining (how did that happen?) i spend quite some time on the subway, which is always a good place to find out about local customs. For some reasons high heels seem to be very important here. In fact so important that people who seem to have a rather complicated fractured leg/knee combine their external steel frames that keep their bones aligned with 10cm plus high heels…

I am on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo. The 777 is equipped with KLM’s top of the line in flight entertainment system which is actually pretty good. Having access to more than 100 movies (in economy class) is rivaled only by bittorrent (note to self: try to download movies on my next connexion equipped lufthansa flight). The system also includes SMS/email capabilities (send SMS for just USD 2.50 apiece! w00t!). to compose SMS messages you have to move a cursor across an on screen keyboard with a four way controller on the remote thingy that is contained in your armrest. now this is the poorest user interface i have ever used. It took me about 10 times as long to send a SMS as it usually does (and i am ridiculously slow with my phone). The interface really sucks especially if u have to use the 4 way to move the cursor to the arrow keys on the virtual keyboard on screen in order to move the cursor in the text entry field. Extremely redundant interface layers. it becomes even more redundant (or should i say frustrating/idiotic) if one realizes that the back of the remote thingy actually is a phone complete with letters on the number keys. But of course they don’t work in the SMS section.

Of course there is nobody on the whole damn plane that you could even explain – let alone complain to about – this royal (dutch) interface fuck-up. And if you ask me this is part of a much wider problem that gets more serious as more and more transactions get automated. I have serious gripes with the interfaces of the dutch and german rail ticket vending machines that effectively keep me from using them and there is no one standing next to them to listen to my complaints. The only people you could possibly complain to are the people who are slowly getting replaced by the same machines (the agents at the counters at the railway station) and that makes it feel extremely awkward to address such issues to them (‘sorry sir i think the machine that will get you fired from your job could be made a bit more user friendly so you can loose you job a bit faster…’).

I cycled past the tiergartentunnel in Berlin today. This road tunnel crosses under the tiergarten plus a bunch of government buildings in central Berlin. the construction of the tunnel has been completed several months ago, but the opening of the tunnel has just been delayed for another 3 months because the security software is malfunctioning. For me this pretty much sums up the 21st century so far: Paranoia and a tendency of making even the simplest things (i mean seriously: a tunnel! even moles can build them and they are almost blind!) so complex that the software engineers can fuck them up.

Just read trough the Final Conference Paper (warning: pdf) of the Creative Economy Conference that was held last week in London as part of the British EU presidency. It is a pretty troubling paper that seems to be build on two general assumptions: 1) DRM is good for humanity and 2) the more/longer/stronger Intellectual Property Rights the better. Both of these assumptions are obviously stupid but they seem to be what you get when you let corporations sponsor (and dominate) government conferences.

The paper does contain two especially stunning statements that do illustrate what kind of role citizens should play in the creative economy (if you ask the creative economy types). They must be consumers of products that are supplied by the creative industries and for the rest they better shut up. My favorite statement is this:

there are concerns from consumers’ and civil society representatives that DRMs will restrict uses they believe they are entitled to (emphasis mine)

There goes fair-use, there go exceptions to copyright that protect non-consuming uses of creative works. And the DRM loving authors of this document seem to want to make a point of it by creating a PDF that i cant copy and past the text out of. kinda stupid of me to believe that i have the right to quote from this paper. This silly belief must be related to the fact that i am belonging to a minority group of people who actually want to use the powers of digital networks:

A range of alternative licensing arrangements were discussed, all of which cater for some consumers/citizens demand to interact creatively with content in the online environment.

If you ask me this is a pretty outrageous demand indeed. and at the very minimum these people need to be punished by making them type their quotes from PDF documents.

Another trip to london another blurry phone-cam picture of girls in black (here is the last one). i was sitting on the Hammersmith tube on my way to the hotel when two college girls stepped in. One of them was wearing a black dress and a black headscarf quite obviously for religious reasons. Generally one would assume that women who dress this way do this to comply with the modesty that the Qur’an requires from muslims. However this girl was openly carrying a playboy branded notebook which – at least me – is hard to reconcile with the very concept of hijab…

Cycling past Alexanderplatz i noticed a group of people standing around a table in an otherwise deserted area on the northeastern side of the place. I stopped to take a closer look and it looked like they were playing some kind of game wile drinking and generally enjoying themselves on this unlikly location. When i approached them they told me that they where cubans and that they came to this very spot every day (as long as ‘the weather did not torture them’ as one of them expressed it to play domino, drink and be with friends. Asked why they had chosen this particular place they told me that this was because of the noise (it is right next to a mayor road) which would remind them of Cuba. Now i have always imagined cuba a bit different but if they say so i am fine with it. The whole thing somehow reminded me of my old mah jong set. guess i have to find someone to play with again…

I went to a soccer match for the third time in my life today: AC milano against Reggina (still have no clue where or what reggina is though). The first time was Hannover 96 against Bayern München and the second time was Celtic Glasgow against 1FC Köln. Doing this i saw my first ever live goal. I missed the two goals in of 96 against Bayern because i was looking the other way when they were scored and i missed all 5 goals during Glasgow against Köln because the day before a truck had run over my glassed and i could see shit. Today i missed the first goal (i was still walking up one of the spirals of San Siro) but i saw the 2nd (Milano) and the third (Reggiano).

Empty south curve of San Siro stadion I had gone to see the match because it rained and i did not know what to do and i always wanted to immerse in the atmosphere of serie a match. I bought a ticket for the fan block of AC only to be found out that the fans where boycotting the match and would not let anyone in during the first half of the match. Apparently they were protesting against the ever stricter regulation football fans in italy have to face. There where banners saying ‘+ decreti -spettatori’ All over the empty blocks in San Siro. So i went for a non boycotted section for the first half. Of course this completely defied the aim of immersing in the atmosphere as the stadion was almost silent with the hard core fans being outside. (hence the title of the post which translates into ‘bad mood’). The second half had a much better mood to it but as the 2 goals for Milan where scored in the first half the whole thing was less than satisfying…

Did i mention that it rained?

Update (07.oct.05): there are a couple of pictures taken from the opposite site showing the southern tribune during first and second half of the match on the fossa dei leoni site.