Hari Minggu

Hari minggu just means Sunday in the Indonesian language and that's what it is here as I write this latest entry. The Government's Communications and Information Minister announced that yesterday was National Bloggers Day (I don't know what happened to the apostrophe) and so it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the fact with a fresh post. While there are of course many bloggers in Indonesia, the percentage of the population who maintain a blog would be quite tiny due to the lack of penetration of the Internet. SMSing is pervasive, even among the poor, but use of the Internet is not.

I'm rather cynical about the practice of declaring special days for anything, whether they be National Blogging Days or Save the Forest Days or whatever. "Blogging party gets official stamp of approval" is the title of the article that appeared on the front page of The Jakarta Post today. The minister gets some publicity but he's actually not doing anything except to say that blogging is good. The Government might do better by reducing its spending on multimillion dollar military equipment and channeling some of it into improving the telecommunications infrastructure so more people could actually blog if they wanted to.

Blogging could certainly help promote the Indonesian language. Another article in yesterday's paper is titled "Foreigners show 'less interest' in Bahasa Indonesia" and goes on to quote a linguistic expert on the Indonesian language who is from the United States but is currently working here in Jakarta. Uri Tadmor says "during the last few years, the number of students who want to learn Bahasa Indonesia in North America and Australia has declined rapidly". Learning Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai has become far more popular, he said. Predictably, the Indonesian Education Ministry response to the news was that to simply deny it and instead confidently announce that "foreigners are showing more interest in learning Indonesian".

Don't get me started on the Ministry of MisEducation or I may get frogmarched to the airport. I need to move on. There's a very interesting analysis of the blogging phenomenon to be found here and some very funny comments to be read, one of which I'll quote here:

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Blogs can be useful however, as I was reminded last night when I checked the latest post from a PCTips blog that I subscribe to. I'd recently lamented the fact that in Vista's Business Edition, there are no games. My wife, Desy, likes playing solitaire on my laptop when I'm not using it but she wasn't able to after I updated from XP Professional. This blogger had experienced the same disappointment and frustration. Microsoft must have figured that being the business edition and likely to mainly used in business circles, this version of Vista should be free of games. It turns out that the games are actually on the computer's hard drive but they need to be activated. The post described how to do that.

The Fall of Alpha

Musim hujan (the rainy season) is upon us here in Jakarta. A couple of days ago there was a very heavy downpour and some gusting winds. The result for one of our local supermarkets (Alpha) was that a big advertising sign crashed down on at least two cars, crushing them completely. Fortunately, there were no people in the cars at the time.

As you can see from the photograph, the structure that came down was massive but the winds that brought it down were hardly of hurricane strength and the fact that it fell suggests very shoddy construction standards. This is the carpark that I use at least once a week and I've never once considered the possibility of the towering Alpha sign crashing down on my head.

It's rare for anything stronger than a gentle breeze to blow across Jakarta and construction standards would seem to reflect that. In the case of the Alpha sign, it was the considerable area of the sign that led to its downfall because of the equation F = P x A where F is Force, P is Pressure and A is Surface Area. The resultant force was too much for the supports holding the sign in place to handle.

If a sustained and powerful wind were ever to blow through Jakarta, the results would be catastrophic because construction standards seem to rely on the assumption that will never happen. Meanwhile, Jakarta residents can look forward to their annual flooding as gutters and waterways clogged with discarded rubbish fail to cope with the volume of water pouring into them.

The streets of Jakarta are generally clean but that is only because an army of sweepers (paid Rp200,000 or A$30 a month) keep them that way. The rubbish however, is simply swept into covered drains that wait for the annual flushing from rainwater to clear them, thus passing the problem on to the canals and waterways.

MIRAS

Indonesians love portmanteau words or words that are made from a combination of other words. "Miras" is one such example, being a combination of the words "minuman" meaning drink and "keras" meaning hard. The word flashed up on the TV screen during the local news tonight and I asked Desy what it meant. I was surprised that I hadn't heard the term before. The news item concerned a number of a people who had died after drinking some sort of lethal brew. So "miras" doesn't really refer to hard liquor like whisky but instead to locally produced rocket fuel whose composition can only be guessed. As the cartoon above says "MIRAS: minuman pencabut nyawa" which means that it can suck the life out of you, literally.

When I first arrived in Indonesia, there could be found on the supermarket shelves bottles of locally produced spirits like Vodka and Whisky. The prices of these concoctions were very low and I remember purchasing a bottle of vodka once, taking it home and having a quiet sip. One sip was enough however, and it sat untouched on the kitchen shelf for many a year until being finally tossed out during a cleanup. I don't think this stuff was lethal, just very rough, but it gave me a hint of the sort of stuff that's out there.

The supermarket shelves are empty now of all such spirits following application of the unofficial 5% alcohol rule. Supermarkets no longer stock beverages with an alcoholic content above that limit and so there are only beer and mixers to be found. The mixers are very colorful, boast an alcoholic content of 5% and contain vodka, whisky etc. as their active ingredients. Ever adventurous, I recently sampled one and got an instant headache for my trouble. So the spirits that once haunted the supermarket shelves back in the old days are not gone, instead they've been diluted and put into these noxious mixers.

Strong alcoholic drinks are still easily obtainable however, despite having disappeared from the supermarkets. I'm told that some of the vendors who push food and drink carts around the streets also surreptitiously sell quite potent and very cheap alcoholic concoctions that probably come close to qualifying as MIRAS.

New Gadgets

A busy holiday period in which I've journeyed far and wide but in a technological sense, not a geographical one. In fact I haven't ventured out of Jakarta and instead I've been trying to keep myself technologically relevant by catching up on all that's happening in what's termed Education 2.0, an impossible task of course. I can only absorb so much and then my brain gets full, but I'm pleased to report success at least in creating a test podcast and accessing it via iTunes.

It's important to not only start using as wide a range of Web 2.0 tools as possible but using them repetitively so that I consolidate and refine my skills, and push the boundaries of what a particular tool can offer. As most to these tools are social in nature, it's important to consider how to reach as wide an audience as possible. I may develop an interesting and technically proficient podcast but what's the point if no-one listens to it. It's the same with blogging. Bloggers like people to read their blogs and so they need to attract readers.

Social networking sites can help in this respect as I realised when looking recently at Jacqui Cussen's Facebook profile. It was there that she made reference to her blog which I subsequently read and then subscribed to. In order to get the most out of blogs, it is important to subscribe to the ones that interest us. Feed aggregrators, like Google Reader, will regularly check the blogs that we have subscribed to and alert us to any new posts. We don't need to periodically check all those blogs ourselves, it's done automatically for us. Other tools, provided by free sites such as FeedBurner, enable us to check the number of subscribers to our blog and the number of visitors we have had. These statistics, when increasing, can encourage us to keep blogging and also to raise to raise the quality of our blogging.

So the message in the post is to SUBSCRIBE. It doesn't cost anything and you can always unsubscribe at a later date. You only need to remember to check your feed aggregrator regularly. A good way of doing that is to make that site the opening page when you start your web browser. Do it today.

Frantic Facebook

I joined up with the social networking site Facebook some time ago but didn't really make any use of it. Recently however, some of my current students discovered that I had a Facebook account and invited me to be their friend. Since then further invitations have been coming in a steady stream and I've already connected to several of my former students, who are now studying in Australia and the United States. Of course, each new person whom you accept as a friend has his or her own circle of friends (whose details you can see) and you suddenly find that you are part of a very large network of people, all connected via Facebook.

The activity on this site can only be described as frantic and until you become an active part of it, you don't realise the magnitude of what is going on. I'm vaguely nervous about the possibility that I might be the oldest member of Facebook, because my experience so far indicates that the average age is about 20. Of course, I've been talking about social networking sites in my IT class for quite some time but my current practical experience is giving me a much deeper insight into the way they work and the speed at which they work. I also had largely inactive MySpace and Friendster accounts but I've just recently deleted them, having realised that one social networking site is quite enough for a slow poke like me. I'm sure the 20-somethings are juggling multiple social networking sites simultaneously while they chat and play online games but I'm not up to that.

A Day in the Life

I've started a photo blog on Picassa, Google's photo sharing site, in which I upload a photo every day. It's taken with the low resolution, VGA camera of my Nokia N73, quickly edited using the oilify option in my GIMP image editing software, transferred to my laptop via Bluetooth and then uploaded to Picassa. Of course, I could upload directly from my phone but my service provider charges by the kilobyte and so it would end up being a bit expensive.

So I'm creating a sort of mini-painting to capture the minutiae of my life. The motivation comes not so much from narcissism but from a sense that I need to start making more use of the wide range of online services available and coordinate them more efficiently. The photo album will be maintained at http://picasaweb.google.com/reeves.sean/ADayInTheLife. I'm simply numbering the photos as Day21366, Day21367 etc. with the numbers referring to the numbers of days I've been planet-side. I've included the very first photo (Day21366) in this current post.

UPDATE

June 30th 2021

The Picasa links above (and below in the comment) are no longer active!