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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.08.17 12.35 |
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 This is a bit outside of the usual Lithchat posting fare, but since it involves stuff that happened in Lithuania, it might fit. Within 48 hours of buying my iPhone here in Chicago on the day of their release, I was in Lithuania, making me, I suspect, the first person in the nation to have and use one. Now, obviously, I knew that I'd get slammed with international roaming charges, so I had a backup, unlocked Motorola SLVR L2 that I would use as my phone while abroad (which I subsequently destroyed and replaced with a Nokia 1112). The iPhone I had mostly for music and as a leash to the US, should any emergencies arise.
But because Cozy has free wireless, I was able even to use the iPhone in Vilnius to check my email and surf the web. This I did twice during my eight-day trip, and I also used international roaming once before flying out to confirm some information via email. Otherwise the iPhone sat in my room, doing no more duty than alarm clock and mp3 player.
Imagine, then, my surprise, when my bill from AT&T came with 50 separate "ROAM GPRS" charges totalling more than 6mb and, at $.02 a kilobyte, costing over $130.
So I called AT&T—and the details remain rather unclear—but the conclusion is simple: EDGE is "always on," so theoretically using the phone at all, even just to wake it up to get an email address from your contacts list, can incur hidden costs when you are abroad.
The financial threat is simple to understand: anywhere outside of the US (including, despite the variance in calling rates, Canada), data costs $.02 a kilobyte. It is possible to buy an international data package from AT&T, and the woman to whom I spoke pitched it to me, for $24.99 a month, which gives you 20mb to use. Overages are, depending on country, between two cents and a half cent a kilobyte. So clearly avoiding these charges is something an international traveler should find important.
AT&T will turn off your EDGE if you call them (at 611) and ask them to. Presumably one should do this while boarding an international flight, since the airport pre-flight is the perfect place to use EDGE like a maniac. Then, one must call again upon return to the US to get the EDGE service reactivated. This clumsy procedure is the *only* way to travel internationally with your iPhone where one can both avoid ludicrous data charges and still call the device an actual "phone," should there be people trying to make contact in an emergency.
I asked the staffs at AT&T and Apple if an EDGE connection is established just in waking up the phone. Apple refused to answer, saying that "all billing" issues have to do with AT&T, ignoring the fact that I was asking a technical question. AT&T also did not answer straight, saying that EDGE is "always on," but that that's not a problem, since I have "unlimited data." Of course, when I reminded the woman that this was about international roaming, she just added that, yes, it would cost abroad, without answering, again, what the threshold of iPhone activity is before it makes EDGE connections and starts the two-cent-per meter.
For a long time, I had suspected that EDGE is "always on"--when I wake up my iPhone near cheap speakers, I often immediately hear the distinctive static that is cellular information floating in the ether, without even making a call or anything. And that seems to be the default that I will now assume. So until someone with more technical expertise can figure out what, precisely, one can do on an iPhone without either turning it to Airplane Mode or using the EDGE network, I will have to call AT&T to disable the service every time I fly abroad.
Incidentally, a lot of this information is contained, though in far more chaotic form, on the Apple forum about the iPhone. |
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.08.17 12.41 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.07.20 12.48 |
 I noticed this same thing the last time I flew FlyLAL to Lithuania in 2003, but for some reason it struck me especially earlier this month when I flew from Gatwick to Vilnius and back: Lithuanians read lots of newspapers. FlyLAL gives out free copies of Lithuanian dailies on their flights, and on one of my flights this summer, by the time I boarded the flight, all the newspapers were gone.
The FlyLAL flight is already surreal by itself, from the hot pink uniforms worn by all the staff, to the real estate sticker ads clumsily stuck on the overhead compartment doors. The stewardesses pass out menus and sell beer by the half-litre can. People show little respect for either the "no cell phones" rule or the "wait until the plane has come to a complete halt" rule. And, of course, everything is in Lithuanian, including "FlyLAL," which is very, very hard for Lithuanians to pronounce.
But what sticks out most for me is that everyone is reading newspapers. Over the course of the flight back to London, my rowmates* blazed through issues of Vakaro žinios, Lietuvos rytas, and other papers. Others finished not only reading the papers, but also started to go at work on the various crossword puzzles. Imagine sitting on a flight from Chicago to New York, where everyone is reading newspapers, to get a sense of how odd this phenomenon is. In fact, I'm not sure when the last time I saw someone other than I read a newspaper on a domestic flight (and, even so, usually I only buy the NYT for a crossword to occupy me or a Boston Globe to get homesick). I suspected that the reason for this massive influx of print culture on FlyLAL was the result of the newspapers' being free, but then I read:
2005 metais vienam šalies gyventojui per metus teko 64,2 egzemplioriai laikraščių - kiek daugiau nei 2004 (63) ar 2000-aisiais (56,3) metais.
What's interesting is that if you take the number of newspapers sold in the US daily (55 million), multiply by the number of days in a year, and divide by the US population, you get about 66.4 newspapers per American, per year. In other words, if there is a difference in newspaper readership, it's not visible in these back-of-an-envelope numbers. Yet I've never seen as high a percentage of people on a US-based flight (or even on the el, with its abundant, free RedEyes) reading newspapers as I did on FlyLAL. As for what everyone was reading about—that is a story for the next article.
* My rowmates were friends who spoke to me in crystal clear Lithuanian, but between themselves spoke what could best be described as 50/50 Russian and Lithuanian. I'm still getting used to how Russian is used in Lithuania, but the way these guys flipped from language to language with each other was astonishing.
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.06.18 15.59 |
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 What a gift! Just as I was about to start researching a boring article for lithchat about lustration, Labas.blog drops a pleasant piece about an online competition at Delfi to create Lithuania’s “vizitine kortele.” Labas.blog takes on the issues of limiting oneself to the trispalvė (as it’s a color scheme already very much in use throughout the Global South) and of emphasizing on ąžuolai and švyturiai as symbolic of the nation.
Delfi includes examples of tourist logos from other nations (the one for Spain has haunted me for years). This serves as a reminder that other countries have fared rather well without reincorporating their national flags into their logo. The Czech Republic's logo, for example, creates a world of multitude by having a five-colored palette of voice balloons. Brazil coyly addresses its own national unity through miscegenation in its overlapping puddles of different colors. In fact, with “BRASIL” in negative (i.e. white) space, it almost suggests that the state apparatus, which holds the nation together is cut out and removed from the cultural life of the nation. Or that whites run the state.
I’ve made my issues with the fetishization of geltona-žalia-raudona clear before, and I think I would almost reflexively support whatever logo manages to say something about “Lithuania! The Tourist Spot!” without resorting to those colors, though my issues are less related to Lithuanian exceptionalism (the underlying theme of the Labas.blog post) and more political: there’s something odd about adopting the color scheme of the definitionally exclusionary nation-state in order to create a logo that screams, “come from abroad and spend your money here!”
 This being the case, of the options available, I think I like the third the most. “PAPRASTA - ŽALIA” read the two attributes assigned to the nation, and they are rather nice attributes, though “paprasta” can quickly become a source of mockery, and, well, Lithuania’s credentials as “green” are somewhat lacking, also. Still, it's something to strive for. Also, the logo reproduces amazingly well in monochrome and with a limited palette—both are crucial aspects of logo design for me (despite the multicolored monster I created for the next Pasaulio lietuvių jaunimo kongresas). Furthermore, the tree itself recreates the patterns we're used to seeing on juostos or žiurstai or whatever, without being species specifc (an oak tree) to the point of making a useless claim for exceptionalism. In fact, going over the logos again, it's a no-brainer.
 Of the others, the next one that strikes me aesthetically the best is the ninth, the lighthouse with “Atrask mane” underneath. Unfortunately, the logo ends up being an ad for sex tourism, with the lighthouse now a comely young woman with ribbons in her hair. I’ve been sniffing covert sex tourism in advertising for Lithuania for years now, and it seems like the designers of the logo could have been a bit smarter about that. I can’t look at that logo now and imagine anything other than pouring out of Brodvėjus at 4am and playing a game of hide-n-seek as the girl steps of a curb. Atrasiu... Atrasiu, nesirūpink...
Three of the logos incorporate a lot of blue, though they all, also, still incorporate the trispalvė, making t-shirt printing more expensive (that being one of the reasons a good monochrome logo is best). One has three psuedopods escaping either from a whirlpool (is that Moscow? Kaliningrad? the EU?). That blue spiral can also be a giant fingerprint, suggesting a laughable commitment to a totalitarian state. Lithuania may be unique like a fingerprint (whatever that means), but the idea of fingerprinting all tourists is one I think the US has monopoly claim to. The next logo I simply fail to understand. Are those foam noodles floating in the Nemunas? If your logo looks like spaghetti, you may need to reconsider. The last blue logo, calling Lithuania “refreshing,” serves as an ad for a bottled water company, from perhaps 1988. There's something disturbing about having a huge point of impact in your logo, as though the tourist has to choose which path he or she will take. That strikes me as too stressful. Also, I can’t stop thinking about cocaine when I see that logo, for some reason. (Is coke refreshing? Diet Coke Plus certainly is...)
The other logos strike me as generally amateurish, but they are still there for you to check out to your heart’s content. Delfi does not give the vote results after your vote (yes, I voted for Nr. 3). But what would your logo look like? I think that, all told, mine might look essentially exactly like Nr. 3, though probably a bit more obviously like a pattern from a juosta and a bit less like a logo on the back of a carton of Tropicana.
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.06.19 06.38 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.05.11 00.14 |
 Facebook group supporting Estonia
What was this space? We were in what was once West Berlin, after all. Why was this part of the Tiergarten so done up? And, more importantly, why did the huge golden inscription under the soldier explain, in Russian that this area was for the “Eternal glory to the heroes, fallen in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union” (Вечная слава героям павшим в боях с немецко-фашистскими захватчиками за свободу у независимость Советского Союза)? After all, only a few meters away was Marcks’s “Der Rufer,” who stares toward the Brandenburger Tor and shouts, as though at the Iron Curtain, “I go around the world and shout, ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’” (Ich gehe durch die Welt und rufe Friede Friede Friede)
Once we approached, we found a small, informative display. We had stumbled upon the Sowjetisches Ehrenmal, a cenotaph constructed (from stone, apparently, from the Reichskanzlei) in the deforested park in 1945 (with the destroyed Reichstag still in view) to commemorate precisely what is written under the soldier, specifically the 20k or so Soviet soldiers who perished in April and May of 1945 defeating the Nazis. That the cenotaph was in West Berlin seems to have been an fluke of history—borders drawn post facto—and, during the split in the city, apparently Soviet troops would still stand on patrol by their obsolete artillery, in the middle of the Tiergarten.
I can understand the eagerness with which the Red Army wanted to construct a memorial to their fallen comrades in the middle of the capital of their now vanquished enemy. What surprised me was the astonishing condition in which the monument remained, despite being in West Berlin and despite being now totally under the control of the government of Berlin in the fancy, new Bundesrepublik. Every time I read yet another article about the current situation in Tallinn, I recall this Ehrenmal. It strikes me that neither side of the conflict is doing a particularly good job of being intellectually (or historically) honest, and that both the Estonian and Russian governments should take a page out of the “nie wieder” form of historical memory present throughout Berlin—from the Jüdisches Museum to the new roof of the Reichstag building that forever reminds the viewed of its torching to help Hitler’s rise to power on the backs of communists. I can’t, in good conscience, say I support either side of the conflict; I can only hope, which I aim to make clear on the flip, that a sensible middle ground can be found, if not in the actions of the governments, then at least in the minds of those agitating on one side or the other. |
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.05.11 21.15 )
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Skaityti toliau...
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