xolotl

No, in fact, I do not go there. I was not referring to any expat board in particular inasmuch as Angry Gringos are present on all of them.

I have known Mike's internet persona for seven or eight years now and from that I've come to hope that he will not coddle the anger that is so common among expats (he's been using a tagline like "Tijuana is more than Avenida Revolución" since I've known him) even though he might not completely understand the resentment that the locals have toward their new gringo neighbors.

The fact is that you [that's vosotros, not tú are in a foreign country now so it behooves you all to learn how best to get along. I do not have the complete answer, either, since I come from many countries. But I am absolutely convinced that none of your neighbors will welcome a chauvinistic gringo into their midst. We all need to get along down here.

We are here in Tijuana because we want to be here, not because we have to be here. If we don't like Tijuana, we should go somewhere else. And your immigration attorney will be your first test of that commitment. If he doesn't believe you, he will have a hard time representing your interests before the government.

So this is not the simple answer that Scribbles contemplated. But I do think that it is the right answer for all of us.

It's like Cuco Sánchez once said, only those who love Mexico should be able to criticize her.

X

Yes, I can appreciate that. If you want really good ice cream, you need to go to Spain or France. Lactose intolerance is too high in Mexico to support such a product. But, oh!, the ice creams in Europe! When I was a kid, I was convinced there were two forms of vanilla ice cream in Spain, the helado de crema that I knew in the U.S. and the helado de vainilla, which is something utterly transcendental. It took me many years to realize that helado de crema was simply frozen cream with no flavoring whatsoever.

But, as to what we're now calling the "reverse stuff", as if the gringos were more justified than the Mexicans to slow down traffic at the border, please understand we have this little problem. During our current Prohibition, the drugs have been flowing north and the guns and money have been flowing south. But who is it who crosses the border on a daily basis? Something like eighty percent of all traffic comes from Tijuana, either to work in San Diego or to shop San Ysidro.

I wonder how many borders you all have crossed. They are all different. Some are forbidding, some are welcoming. Compare northbound and southbound in San Ysidro, for an example. My personal favorite was Shannon Airport in Ireland, where I showed up with a head full of LSD and baggage full of recreational drugs and all the Customs agent said to me was "Do have a nice visit, sir." My worst was probably Miami, where a Customs agent came up behind me to address me in bad Spanish. I had just flown in from Suriname, one of the few countries in this hemisphere that does not speak Spanish, so he caught me completely off-guard. I tend to answer in the language I'm addressed in so I spent about fifteen minutes trying to convince this guy that I'm not Cuban. Even so they went through my bags very carefully to make sure I didn't have any illegal cigars or bombs or DNA from Che Guevara.

As to the ice cream, here in Mexico it's called nieve not only because much of the population is lactose-intolerant (and, yes, there were no cows here before the Spaniards showed up) but also because the ruling class in Tenochtitlán ordinarily finished their meals with snow brought down from Popocatéptl or Ixtaccíhuatl by fast runners and flavored with fruit purées.


Here in Mexico, revolution is not triggered by anything petty. What caused the Boston Tea Party? Seriously, I think the reason why firearms are illegal in Mexico is because armed rebellion is so distasteful. We are meant to put up with almost anything. Not accept, just endure.

That's the Mexican way -- to accept things up to a point but after that then all hell breaks loose. It behooves us all to make sure that all hell does not break loose once again.

I appreciate your kind words. In fact, all of us in Mexico appreciate your kind words.

X

VoIP is a thorny issue.

First of all, you have the VoIP providers. In the past they were carpetbaggers, no technical expertise, bad customer service, beaucoup downtime, dishonest billing practices. Most of that seems to have shaken out, though. We're now down to providers who are competing on standard marketing terms.

Then you have the hardware. Lots of it, all over the alphabet soup (ATA, USB, softphone), and dozens of codecs to choose from depending on what hardware you've bought into.

And then there's the ISP. Most (on both sides of the border) supply upload speeds at a fraction of their download speeds -- they even have a smug marketing term for it that I've forgotten. Empirically, though, when my contract with Cablemás (hereinafter "Problemás") was for a quarter-meg, they gave me half a meg bps download and something like 20K bps upload. This is not enough to sustain VoIP (and they know that, they're in partnership with Axtel and give their Axtel customers much better upload speed), so I went to the local manager with printed data to complain. He looked at my speeds, my latency, my jitter, and my packet loss. Then he looked at me levelly and said "But when you average your upload speed and your download speed, you'll see that we're giving you far more than we promised." Now I've paid them two hundred pesos a month to upgrade the bandwidth to 1.5Mbps and they're giving me 300Mbps on the download but only 110K bps on the upload -- and so, if only we might average the two raw figures of their world-class service, we might find that they are exceeding our expectations. Jejeje. Even so, their latency and their jitter make for subnormal VoIP service.

And finally there's your own load on the bandwidth. Doing any websurfing? Any P2P? That has to go. Even with my enhanced bandwidth I shut everything down when a call comes in. But at least now they can hear me now.

So I am not too quick to fault MagicJack for bad service. Service is an issue within the entire supply chain. I have a friend in Colonia Libertad right at the border who swears by his MagicJack, but then he uses MagicJack for what it was designed to be used for -- mobility without much overhead. Me, I can't say because my life is not laptop; I use an ATA because I need a base station.

But I will be quick to fault Skype for their monopolistic practices -- they say "free -- free -- free" -- but only if you stay within their network. We've been there already, Mexico City, 1920s, Bell versus Ericsson ... and now with Carlos Slim against everyone else. No, if you go VoIP, you may as well go open-source. I use an open-source VoIP service and Skype doesn't like that because people around the world can call me for free. Skype doesn't support iNums (international phone numbers) and Skype doesn't support SIP brokering (peer-to-peer in the VoIP world). Worse still, whenever I've spoken to folks on Skype, it's always seemed like Skype deliberately mucked up the connection. Skype is a very jealous mistress. Skype is not free. Vonage is not cheap. Look to open-source VoIP if you want to save money in the long term but be prepared to by your own ATA at the outset.

Now, about Mexican phone numbers, those are controlled by COFETEL. And it is a truism that governmental agencies become coöpted by the industries they're meant to oversee within a generation of their inception. (Before anyone complains, that "law" was invented by a friend of mine who is currently practicing law in California and who is, to my horror, a member of the Opus Dei; to his credit, when I charged him for the Teapot Dome Scandal, he readily accepted fault even though he wasn't alive at the time of the scandal.) Anyway, Mexican phone numbers are currently very expensive for everyone outside of a handful of great metropolitan areas. Even now, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, our beloved Baja is still considered to be among the Mexican hinterlands. Your VoIP provider can give you an incredibly inexpensive phone number for Mexico City or Guadalajara or Monterrey or Puebla but your friends in Tijuana will spend a fortune when they call it.

And here's the rub. We've been using VoIP in Tijuana for about six years now in order to call Tijuana, Ensenada, and Hermosillo. That's where the rest of our family lives. It's been cheaper to call from our San Diego number via VoIP to those three cities than it has been to call from a proper Tijuana number (which we once had) to those same three cities. And now we've stopped using our San Diego VoIP number because we now have to pay for uncompleted calls to mobile phones in Mexico, thanks to a law that Telcel rammed through.

So, if or when you do VoIP, don't expect to get a Baja phone number. Look for an area code close to your gingo family. Or your western European family. Or your Australian family. Or even your central Mexican family.

And, if you really want to save money on your telephony, look to suppliers who offer "iNum" and "SIP broker". Open source is our future.

X

The plus sign is supposed to be the international sign for YOUR local international access code.

If you're dialling from Gringolandia, "+" means "011".

If you're dialing from Mexico, "+" means "001".

Every country's different. Although some of them are the same. Which is what makes cultural exchange so challenging.

X

I would vote with Diane.

IP proxies aren't all the same. Some will mask some of your personal data, others can impersonate foreign IP addresses if needed, and many (it is rumored -- I have not so corroborated) might simply be phishers that pass all of your data through to the intended server while collecting your keystrokes for their own purposes.

There are technical sources on the Internet that can advise you much better than a bunch of transplanted cachanillas might. And by that I don't mean to slight Diane's advice -- in fact, I will need to find an IP proxy for professional reasons within the next year and her recommendation is now an automatic candidate. The real point is that IP masking is not a simple question -- there are a good dozen or more variables to what might or might not be masked -- so it's best to learn what it is you need and compare that to what is available to you. Try Googling "IP proxies" and see what you might learn.

Whenever you come into a website, your web browser identifies itself down to platform and build, the URL of the website you're coming from, your static IP address, and default character set. That much I have confirmed empirically. I have read that we are also broadcasting our MAC address (the unique identifier of our cable modem or router or Ethernet card).  Since there are many reasons why "intellectual property" might not leave the U.S. (for examples Helms-Burton and Millennium Copyright), there are many reasons why we might want to mask our MAC address.  For one thing, DepostFiles (one of RapidShare's big competitors) won't let people from Mexico log on to their free service -- they make us subscribe to their paid service.

It would be interesting to know what you've chosen for your IP proxy and why.

X