If you happen to live in Shivaji Nagar, Bangalore and you get your cable tv from Devya Satellite Vision you can watch the first installment of world information city tv tonight from 1830h to 2100h IST. World Information City TV is a project of Bombay based artist Shaina Anand and is part of the World Information City event. Apparently they have made a movie out of my camera misfortune a couple of days ago.

Among other things i dropped my camera (a canon powershot pro1) today. I had dropped it once before and nothing had happened then but today it broke. The 30 cm fall from a table on a stone floor resulted in parts of the casing coming of the body and the trigger casing being broken so that the trigger did not work anymore. (no pictures of the damage here as the camera is broken). Of course it sucks if you are far away from home and have 10 more days to explore the back alleys of Bangalore. But then the same back alleys can give new life to almost any piece of electronic equipment:

For the sake of comparison we first went to the official canon service center form digital cameras somewhere in the vast northwestern extensions of Bangalore city and there i got exactly the treatment i expected. They told me that my camera was broken and needed to be fixed and that they could not do that themselves but had to send it to Delhi which would at least take a week (knowing Canon, that means 6 weeks or more – my last experience with their service in europe concerned getting a replacement battery charger and that would have taken them 6 weeks even though it was a shipping model!). They also could not tell me how much it would cost but they were sure that the entire body needed to be replaced (read: will be very expensive). But as i said we only went to canon for comparison and after this everything else could only be better.

Next we went to national market which is your location in Bangalore if you want to get anything electronic and/or digital. From the latest Nokia phone to last week’s hollywood release on dvd (or last month’s bollywood release as the pirates respect the national entertainment industry slightly more than hollywood and give them a month or so of exclusivity for their theatrical releases). Lawrence had told me about a stall that where it should be possible to get the camera repaired, but the guy only sold cameras. he did however pointed me to a stall in another market around the corner where someone would be able to fix my camera.

At this stall there were two gentlemen sitting in the middle of a pile of cameras in all states of disassembly (and a framed picture of someone in a suit that was obviously taken during the middle of the last century but according to them it was nevertheless ‘the inventor of the camera’). Unfortunately they were to busy to repair my camera before monday but assured me that come monday morning i would get it repaired for rs. 250 and that it would take no more than two hours.

We went back to national market in order to buy some DVDs but on the way back i noticed a sign stating ‘Ajith Camera Repair at the end of a narrow dark hallway. So went to see Ajith who was sitting in a 2 square meter room that was filled with cameras and other electronic equipment in advanced stages of disassembly. Nothing in the room looked like it had been produced in the 21st century, but Ajith was confident that he could fix my camera in 15 minutes for a ‘simple price’. So i left my Camera with him and in exchange he gave us a little booklet ‘Why you must be Born Again’ by Edmonds Owhorode. Shaina asked him if he was a Born Again Christian which he confirmed and i knew my camera would be born again to. Actually it took my camera 3 times 15 minutes to rise from the ashes but the price was indeed simple: a mere 200 rupees which is less than 4 euros.

update (12.11): Lawrence told me today that a friend of his has actually been commissioned a while back by a camera manufacturer to research why the cameras sold in India had fewer defects than the cameras sold elsewhere. They concluded that from the fact that the percentage of cameras brought in for repair is significantly lower than in other countries. I guess this is simply due to the fact that nobody brings them to the authorized service centers because they suck.

I better do not mention that at the immigration control. My iPod mini seems to have a rather ahistoric view on partition: It seems to assume that it never happened, instead all of India became Pakistan. consequently there is no Indian Standard Time option in the ‘change time zone’ menu (closest thing is indeed Karachi time). on the other hand this could also be a well deserved punishment for having a half hour time offset to almost all the rest of the world and thus be without any geo-poitical implications but try to explain this to the RSS… (no not the feed stupid!)

Unlike everything else on this pages this image is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons attribution non commercial license. I have always found the non-comercial licenses slightly stupid as the whole concept is incredibly difficult to define (but we are working on it). Now i wonder what the maker of this mini-dv camcorder had in mind when they slapped this sticker on it. and how in hell are they going to enforce this? (message to panasonic the camera in question is used by a non-profit operation). And since when is it possible to restrict the use of tangible things of technology after it has been sold? i always thought this was a more or less exclusive privilege that Hollywood imagines in it’s wet dreams.

Right now I am at the submidialogia event in Campinas organized as part of the Waag Sarai Exchange Platform on the campus of the local university Unicamp. It is a pretty impressive gathering of all sorts of Brazilian media / open access practitioners ranging from free radio activists to government officials involved in the digital culture projects the Brazilian government is deploying throughout this vast country. Parts of the event are streamd live although without the marvelous simultaneous translation services by lots of volunteers the Portuguese only stream will probably be pretty much useless for most readers of this post.

The place where Unicamp is located – Barão Geraldo – is a bit surreal. It is a pretty wealthy settlement that reminds me a lot of California. Accordingly the hotel where some of the participants are staying is called Funcamp:

Update (26 feb 2006): A short report about the conference is available on the exchange platform blog.

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.