Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Photos from the road

Two of these photos are part of an exhibit I currently have up at a new gallery in Ottawa called Fall Down.

Please go have a look. I have photos up there that aren’t in this post. The gallery is at 288 Bank Street near Somerset. The vernissage was last Sunday and a million people were there. Thanks to everyone who came and all the new friends I made.

Cell phone photos

I have a 5-megapixel camera in my phone. A little excessive and it pretty much sucks in low light but if I’m close enough to something, I can use the flash (which I hate using except as a flashlight sometimes). Here are three photos of stuff I found this month…

On the radio today. On a cell phone on Tuesday.

CBC Radio invited me to speak on air about the kissing photos that ran on getguerilla.ca. The show I’ll be on is called All in a Day and I’ll be on at around 5:45 PM. If you’re in Ottawa, the station is 91.5 FM. You can also listen online.

Here’s another photo from the archives… I took it in 2001. I might have been wearing a tuxedo amongst these sweaty bodies.

Another thing I’m excited about is that I was invited to document a gallery tour Tuesday, April 21 called Swarm. This time I wont be documenting with a conventional SLR camera but instead, from 6-9 PM, I’ll be capturing the night using a mobile phone (low res photo, video, audio, SMS, etc…). The idea is that the mobile content will be transmitted to British Columbia artist Brady Marks (who will be in Ottawa) and used in a live video mix from 9-10 PM. Holla at Artengine.

Use S60 as a remote for Macs, iTunes

Do you have a Nokia (S60) phone and want to control your computer with it? Read on.

My previous cell phone (SE w810i) had a pretty decent bluetooth remote that I could use to control the mouse cursor and various media players I use (iTunes, mPlayer, Quicktime, etc…). It was cool but didn’t really have much to offer that wasn’t already in the standard Apple remote.  However, I liked not having to remember the dedicated remote if I was traveling though so when I got my Nokia N95 last year, I was disappointed that it didn’t have a bluetooth remote as a standard. Problem solved: Salling Clicker.

I haven’t tried them all but it has custom remotes for programs like Powerpoint, Keynote, VLC and Quicktime. In addition to controlling your slides, for Powerpoint and Keynote, this app uses the phone’s screen to display presentation notes too. Could be useful?

What I’ve been into most has been controlling iTunes via wifi from the opposite end of my house.  There’s a lot of potential here – especially for homes that have in-wall speakers connected to one system. Clicker’s iTunes interface reminds a bit of a classic iPod but with the added luxury of a search feature. Here’s a screenshot:

This app was released nearly two years ago but it’s new to me and using it makes me feel like I’m in the future! The home automation industry is slowly catching onto using cell phones instead of remotes but there is still a way to go. Imagine using programs like this to easily control lighting with your phone? USB powered designer floor lamps?

I should end this, nerdiest-post-ever, now but here’s a photo of a house I shot last fall. Within it, a lot of automation work was done to control lighting and A/V equipment. See that little circle near the edge of the green wall? That’s a sensor connected to the thermostat! You could probably program that remote in the bottom right to make you coffee.

Cell phone photos & customer service

My fancy pants cell phone broke just before Christmas so I took it to Rogers to for repair. It was told the repair would take “10 business days but don’t worry, here is a courtesy phone you can use in the meantime… But yeah, it doesn’t have 3G, Wifi or Bluetooth or even a camera.” In the end, the repair took over a month and came back with new problems. Delayed service and poorly trained staff have become status quo for the cell phone market and I don’t know why.

It’s a different industry but recently, I called Mountain Equipment Coop’s customer service line. Rogers call centres should really take some cues from them. Friendly voices on the other end who, when they don’t know the answer to a question, seek it out rather than make something up. Similarly, while I don’t think Apple is the be all end all of computers, everytime I’ve called them (which, honestly, has actually been more often than I’d like to), at least they also have nice people to talk to.

It’s funny, I want so badly to like the people I’ve dealt with at Rogers but even though I’ve only been with them since August, the relationship has already gone sour. Maybe I should stop trying to make it work and everything will just magically come together…

In any event, here are a few photos I took with someone else’s cell phone while I was away. Mostly, they’re signs I liked or thought were funny.

Cancel your system access fee

If you use a cell phone in Canada, it’s very likely that you’re paying a monthly $6.95 system access fee. Imagine if you didn’t need to pay it?

From the whispers I’ve heard, there are a few new phones in Canada and while no one in Africa is talking about these things, I recently dropped my phone in a giant vat of a soupy Kenyan dish called sukuma wiki. Long story short, I’ll be shopping for something new when I get home in a week and a half.

There is a bill in Parliament right now called Bill C-555 (AKA the Get Connected Fairly Act) that seeks to outlaw system access fees from cell phone bills as well as, like Belgium and some other countries, outlawing the locking of cell phones to one provider or another.

This could be a big step for mobile communication in Canada.

If anyone has a suggestion on what should be my next phone, please let me know! Extra points will be given for originality For example, an awesome wifi-enabled phone that was released 1-2 years ago might excite me more than the new kid on the block that is currently sold out. My last phone was the SE w810i. It was a pretty small phone but could do so much.

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APC surge protector warranties

When my computer’s battery crapped out in Denmark, it was really easy to get a replacement. “They have me in their computer,” I figured. But, when four of the eight outlets on my APC surge protector decided to stop working, I figured I’d have to buy a new one but I tried my luck and contacted them anyway.

A few e-mail exchanges later and I was trading in serial numbers for a new surge protector! I didn’t even have to give my credit card number. There was a stipulation that said there’d be a return mailer so that I could ship the busted one back to APC but when Purolator came to my house, they didn’t have one. So now, I basically have one and a half surge protectors. APC, if you read this, you can have the broken one back if you want it.

All in all though, a happy and easy experience. Exceptional, in fact.

Wish I could say the same about cell phone service in Canada. 5 months in Denmark and I spent about $60 on pay-as-you-go service (including the cost of a SIM card). Not even a month into my return to Canada and I’ve already spent about that. Also, locked phones in Belgium are actually illegal. Amazing, right?

Zooming in on photos on an iPod

This is old and maybe it’s irrelevant in this iPhone, iPod Touch world but after the data/charging cable on my cellphone has been crapping out*, i needed another way to portably zoom in on an image.  While iPods (photo & video) can display images, the viewing mode is set to an unmodifiable “fit to screen” mode which isn’t that convenient if, say, you need to look at a Google Map of a specific area in Berlin.

I found my way to LittleAppleScripts.com though and found a little script called SplittingImage that properly slices a single photo to fit little sections of it on an iPod display. It’s simple to use and can be quite useful.

*My phone is a Sony Ericsson w810i and while this is apparently a common problem, I haven’t been able to find the source of it or a solution. Any ideas? Anyone?

Cell phones in Haifa

When the Hizbollah isn’t busy trying to blow the place up, Haifa, I learned today, is a pretty calm and interesting place.

Shortly before heading back to Tel Aviv, I was stopped by a group of Arabs (Christian and Muslim). They wanted me to take a photo of some courtyard and once I got there, I found two Canadian flags hanging on the wall. “My sister lives in Toronto…Mississauga,” says the owner of the sandwich shop to which the courtyard belongs. “We are Arab. In Canada, you have native people. Here, we are the natives.”

The small group of people invited me to sit with them. Most only spoke Arabic and Hebrew but one or two spoke some English.

One of them told me about the war and how a bomb filled with ball bearings fell on a neighbouring building. “We nearly died,” said one of the guys.

Then he asked if I had a cell phone. Looking at it, he asks “Is this from Canada? We don’t have nice phones like this here.”

They still have Bluetooth though and they really use it. In countries like Iran where the Internet is severely regulated, I’m told that cell communication is king when it comes to sharing subversive or objectionable content.

The Internet is totally free in Israel but it appears that at least with Arab Israelis, the habit of sharing material over SMS or Bluetooth has caught on anyway. Eager to share, I was subjected to photos of things like white girls in bikinis, a naked girl snorting cocaine who was described to me as a “Canadian girl”. There were also some videos. These guys started by asking if I wanted a few porn videos on my phone too. Then, they showed me some stuff that made me really understand why Bluetooth communication over the Internet is so popular. It was a short program. Two videos. It was stuff many of us have probably already seen but it wasn’t something I was prepared to see in the middle of a friendly chat.

Video 1: Beheading of a North American hostage
Video 2: Autopsy footage from Abu Ghraib?

As I said…footage that had made its way through certain circles on the Web but also footage that was quickly removed by most hosts. You can’t very easily go on Youtube and search for “beheading” and find the real deal.

They went on to show me photos of themselves holding guns both towards the camera and to themselves.

“A person who is poor in their home country cannot call that place their home,” says one of the guys. “We are like black people in the U.S. Most of us don’t have opportunities to go to university. Most of our parents work so much that they never see us. This isn’t normal. It’s not a way to grow up. But, people have to get by, so what do they do? They sell drugs, they steal. There is a serious problem with poor Arabs in Israel and people rarely think of how this creates other problems.”

Despite all this, however, Haifa, the third largest city in Israel, is maybe the most cooperative in terms of religions. Tel Aviv has a considerably large population of secular Jews in their 20s and 30s. Jerusalem, like Haifa, is a total mishmash of religions, probably some you and I have never even heard of. The difference though is that while the religious diversity in Jerusalem is a source of serious tension, people in Haifa appear to look beyond faith and see human beings. “We feel discriminated against but this is our home. We have to get along with people.”

That’s just one story but actually, I spent a good chunk of the day hanging out with a cool illustrator at the top of the mountain top before I set off on foot to the bottom, where I met the people I just wrote about. Instead of walking, maybe I could have taken the Carmelit, Haifa’s furnicular subway, which is apparently recognized by Guinness World Records as world’s shortest metro line.

This country is filled with stories.

Scandinavian cell technology gives Palestine a new ghetto blaster

Like in Canada, Palestine scarves (Keffiyeh) as fashion before politics are sort of a big deal. Like jeans though, these don’t appeal so much to the 20-something set but rather kids from high school. Who is to really say what these people know about the political situation and where they stand? Who is to really say anything about the two guys in the photos above?

Now, about two weeks ago, while walking home, a group of kids came to me like they have nearly every day. They started dancing and for some reason I took my phone out. It may be something you do countless times a day without thinking but a few seconds later, this guy ran up behind me and yanked my phone from my hand! This led into a pretty good foot chase that ended when he jumped off a second-storey balcony but not before saying but two words to me: Fuck you. Quickly, this other guy (passer-by/accomplice/kid-in-the-know?) said that he could help me get my phone back. “Great!” Shortly after, he declares that this can only be done for a fee. Protesting a little, what choice did I have? I offered him 100 kroner (about $20). Not enough. I insist that this is the most I can give but he continues to ask that I offer more. “How much more?” He shrugs. Finally, he says “300 kroner” (about $60). Fine. And I got my phone back about 5 minutes later.

With a November 9 release date in the UK and speculations that Canadians will have to wait until Q1 2008, it should go without saying that there are no iPhones in Scandinavia yet. Inquiring minds willing to drop about $700 might want to know that some online stores are starting to sell unlocked ones that should work on most North American GSM providers, however. Still, iPhone or not, with Ericsson being a Swedish firm and Nokia being Finnish, this area is fairly well covered. What’s more, as cell phones are increasingly becoming the site of technological consolidation, it comes as no surprise to hear that on top of doing telephony things, my phone can take photos, record and edit video, record audio, play radio, play mp3s, (badly) surf the internet, wake me up with Rhianna’s help every morning, store 4GB of media and Bluetooth my life away.

All this but still, I practically always travel with my iPod which does some of the things my phone does but really only does one thing well and that is play mp3s. Not everyone feels the need to carry two devices though and who can blame them? What we can blame them for is forgetting headphones or the headphone adapter and riding the bus while listening to the latest (post-humous) Tupac single. Evidently, using cell phones as a bus ride boombox had once become such a serious problem that the city of Århus even put notices at every stop instructing passengers not to do this.

These are the sounds of a generation though and really, not much can or should be done to squash it. Truly, what I find most funny about this whole thing is how these speakers seem to only cater to one style of music. For example, once, I naively put Louisville band Lords on my phone, hoping that I could jam out on some sick riffage. Well, It turns out that the guy who designed the speaker on my phone favours Atlanta hiphop to Louisville hardcore.