Yes! Thanks to all the airmiles I racked up during the year I was able to find a flight to NY for a really low price. It had been a race between my decision to go and airfare. I decided to go, then the flights had gone up a bit, so I thought about it a bit more and decided it was still worh it, then the prices were even higher, and so on till it was just too expensive. But this sunday I found that tiny little link on the airline site. “Buy airmiles”. It had been hiding from me all this time, I swear. I clicked on it, entered the number of miles I needed and felt my eyes grow big as I saw the price. I can afford that!. In 12 hours I had all the arrangements made and the ticket bough.
Cleaning old drawers can be an interesting experience. That’s what I did yesterday. Among the guzillion things I tossed out (I clearly have a problem with letting go…), I found the following:
4 US Dollars, 2 brazilian Reais and 25 Uruguayan pesos.
Several old photos of me. Around 1999-2000 I was F*@%ING THIN!!
A reciept for a Walkman I bought for my birthday in 2000. I paid $99 for it. The exchange rate then was $1 ARG = $1 USD. Now it’s $3.10 ARG = $1 USD.
A reciept and some bills from my first cell phone (photo 1). I remember I had to carry two batteries if I wanted to keep it running for a whole day. Not that it mattered, no one ever called me anyway.
A photo I took in photo school, with a pinhole camera I built out of a shoe box. I tossed out a whole bunch of photos from then, but I had to keep this one. (photo 2)
Several 1.44″ disks. I own two computers (one of them 5 years old) and none of them has a 1.44″ drive.
The user manual for Need For Speed 1. They recommended a 90MHz computer. The Mac Mini I got recently is 40 times faster than that.
Two old pair of glasses. Including my first pair. Way way bigger and nerdier than I remembered (nope, no photos of this).
Two letters from one of my friends from photo school. Reading them now it was pretty obvious she was into me. But of course, being the big dork I am I didn’t realize at the time. *facepalm*.
A “Give me coffee and no one gets hurt!” sticker. Now on my laptop. (photo 3)
My friend Chris submitted an awesome shirt design to Threadless and it got accepted, so now he needs some votes to get it printed. You need to go vote for his design. It’s totally awesome and I totally want one.
And I know, I totally sound like a valley girl. What-ever…
I just came across this story about how Virgin Mobile Australia is using flickr photos on some of their ads, and how they are now facing a law suit. From the article:
On the billboard, Alison’s friend has vanished and so has the Adidas logo on her hat. Her image is accompanied by a mocking slogan — according to the ad, Alison is the kind of loser “pen friend” (pen pal) whom subscribers will finally be able to “dump” when they get a cellphone.
Someone saw this ad on the street, took a photo and uploaded it to flickr. As he points out, the ad rightfully credits the photographer with a link, as the Creative Common license requires, but the problem now is the agency would have also needed a model release.(Well, turns out the photographer had a non-commercial license after all, but that’s another story)
But the law suit isn’t what caught my attention. It was the reaction of the photographer to this. While the model was obviously concerned about the use of her image in a demeaning way, the photographer asked:
Give me a break. How about worrying how your stuff is being used instead of trying to get free stuff? And how about making sure you choose the right license type for your online content? All my online stuff is under a Creative Commons non-commercial non-deriv license. That means that, if you give me credit, you can use my images as long as it’s not for a commercial purpose, and you can’t modify them.
Barcamp Buenos Aires yesterday turned out to be a great event. Top notch organization, good wireless and enough food and drinks so that the 130 geeks (quite a bunch of us with Macs, ahem) were fed and happy. Because seriously, give these people beer and internet and no one will complain.
One thing stroke me though. I knew more people at Podcasters Across Borders, an event 9000 Km away —5000mi for those of you who don’t speak metric— , than at Barcamp Buenos Aires which was a few hours away. Both events had the same amount of people, so what’s the deal?. I remember having a chat over coffee with Julien about something like this. He asked me something along the lines of why didn’t I start something here. My reply was “because my community is this one“, refering to the north american podcasting community. You see, when I started listening to podcasts, back in March or April 2005, there were no shows in spanish, let alone local shows. When I checked for argentinian podcasts some time later I found two, and one was pretty bad. Even now the amount of local podcasts is ridiculously low compared to the rest of the world. So I listened to shows in english, and I became involved in that community.
But now I am starting to be part of this community. What do I do? Do I make my blog and my twitter bilingual? Do I keep reporting on these events in english? Ah, who knows. We’ll see how it goes.
For now, check some photos. Those brochettes look yummy in any language.
I’m at the Wixi presentation at Barcamp Buenos Aires. It’s an online application that allows you to store all your media. First thing I thought when I saw it was “this is the google OS!”. The desktop is very similar to a desktop in your computer, with the added value of being able to embed media, and even complete folders, to other websites. Sounds extremely interesting. I hope they give us beta invites :)
Barcamp Buenos Aires Web2.0 is underway! I’m at the Communications 2.0 talk right now. There are a bunch of pretty interesting sessions throughout the day (including Beer 2.0 :) ). Live Ustream transmission: Room 1 and Room 2.
That’s what my Gmail says now instead of, well, “Gmail”. I asked people on twitter a bit ago and from the responses I got it sounded like it’s just me who’s seeing this. Did Gmail change to GoogleMail in Argentina or it’s now GoogleMail in other countries too? There is a gmail.com.ar, maybe it has something to do with it?
2. 
