Walking the Dog

As of Friday night, I've begun to embrace that quintessential suburban activity of walking the dog. However, it's sort of different here. To begin with there aren't many dogs about and so far I've not seen any dogs or anybody walking a dog. Man's best friend does not enjoy high status in this predominantly Muslim country.

The reason is that the poor animal gets a bad press in the Qu'ran (or Koran as it's written outside the country) due to a certain incident. I've forgotten the details but Desy knows (she told me the story originally) and I'll get her to recount it to me again. Probably because of that story, the saliva of the dog is considered haram (forbidden under Islam) and most Moslems are vigilant in avoiding getting licked by an overly friendly pooch.

Gromit, as our dog is known, had previously never ventured outside the house and so a whole new world has opened up before her, filled with myriad smells and strange animals. So far we've encountered startled cats, furtive rats and elusive toads. It's also an experience for me because, even though I've been in Jakarta for many years, I've rarely walked its streets.

Before I bought a car, I always felt a bit conspicuous walking about the neighbourhood on my own. Desy has never been keen to walk ever (most Indonesians see it as a pointless activity) and so I've seldom ventured out on foot into the suburban night (walking in the day is not an option). Now I have the perfect excuse. I'm just a man walking his dog. I can loiter at my whim or allow myself to be pulled along by the beast at the end of the leash.

I'm sure that I'll have more to report about my evening adventures as I travel further afield and venture down previously untrodden byways. Actually tonight, I was walking past the local mosque at prayer time and, as it often does, my mind fell to considering worse case scenarios.
There was no fence around it, only fifty metres or so of open space. What if Gromit suddenly broke free of her leash and dashed off into the mosque, scattering the faithful as she scurried about? She'd be surely killed and then the outraged congregation would turn on the dog's owner.

Fortunately it didn't happen and I've lived to post another day. Perhaps my post today is of the sort that Andrew Keen had in mind when he wrote his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. I came across a great article today in the Guardian commenting on his book.


The article begins:

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

Far from his birthplace in Golders Green, north London, Keen is now being labelled the nemesis of the new worldwide web. The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into 'digital narcissism'.


I don't know if I've destroyed much culture or ruined any livelihoods but, well yes, I guess I am a bit of a digital narcissist but I can always argue that I'm doing it to retain credibility as an ageing teacher of Information Technology. How will my students take me seriously if I don't blog, or belong to a social network, or upload videos to YouTube?

YouTube

I've been downloading from YouTube a lot recently, getting videos for the Web 2.0 topic that I'm currently doing with my ITGS (Information Technology in a Global Society) class. I've only uploaded one video and that was just as a trial. It's been sitting on YouTube since March and I remembered that you can embed videos from that site into a blog. I'd seen it done many times but never thought to try it myself but as part of a determined plan to extend my technological skills, I'm embedding that video into this post. It's only 22 seconds in duration if you plan to watch it and is decidedly domestic but if it succeeds then I'll try to upload something more interesting to YouTube later and embed it in a later post.

Here goes:

The Law

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I recommand you read this

I was downloading some software today and received a prompt containing the word "recommanded" in regard to a particular course of action. I don't know if it was simply a spelling mistake or a deliberate attempt at humour by combining the words "recommended" and "commanded" into a single composite word. Whatever the reason, I've now adopted the word and its variants (recommand, recommandation etc.) and will use them on appropriate occasions. For example, if a student's concentration has lapsed ten minutes into one of my frequent pedagogical monologues, I can reclaim attention with the warning "I recommand that you listen to what I'm saying".

My posts are likely to be more frequent now because I've discovered that within Microsoft's Word and OneNote, I can simply type something and then choose "blog this". You can send what you've written to the blog of your choice (selecting from a drop-down menu) and it's posted. Simple as that. Attaching photos is a little more complicated but that will be my next step. Of course, you can edit what you've uploaded later if you need to.

YOTYEB

As the old TMBG (They Might Be Giants) song says:

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're even older, and now you're even older,
You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're older still.

I can't think of a better way to put it. My 58th birthday was celebrated quietly at the in-house bar that can now boast of being open 24 hours thanks to the flashing sign that Desy bought me as a present. As I often do on such occasions, I paid homage to the great god Bacchus by indulging in a bottle of white wine. So it goes.

Mista Vista

Maybe the horns in my previous post are appropriate because I've been bad. After making rather derogatory comments about Microsoft in previous posts, I now have Windows Vista installed on my laptop. How did I come to embrace the Great Satan? Well it happened like this. The school where I work entered into a software site licence agreement with Microsoft a couple of years ago and part of the deal is an entitlement to free software updates for Office and Windows, whenever they become available. As an employee, I'm can install these programs on the laptop that I use at school, validate the installation with Microsoft over the Internet and the software won't cost me anything.

The temptation was simply too strong, I upgraded my Office 2003 to Office 2007 some weeks ago and after recently increasing my laptop's RAM to a hefty 2Gb, I made the transition from Windows XP to Vista TODAY and earned the moniker "Mista Vista", the first kid on the block to get to play with Microsoft's latest operating system. So far, and it's only been a few hours, I'm quite impressed. It offers a very slick interface and the whole experience is made sweeter by the fact that I haven't had to hand over any of my hard earned dollars to Bill Gates. The photo in this post was taken from the same location as the photo in an earlier post showing Tux (the Linux mascot) towering over Microsoft's head office.

Alfresco Blogging

Sitting outside this morning with my laptop, I actually noticed a variety of insects in the garden and the occasional arrival and departure of some small birds. There is wildlife in Jakarta but because I spend most of my time indoors, either at home or school, I rarely notice it. There are certainly some beautiful butterflies or kupu-kupu as they're known in these parts. I have grown insulated and disconnected from my environment.

Ah well, as the day warmed up, I'm ashamed to say that I retreated to the comfort of my study and played around a little more with Adobe Photoshop. The thing about a bald head is that it is just so bald and what better way to add interest than by growing horns, which I've done. I like the look but in a conservative country like Indonesia it would probably lead to the revocation of my work visa. So let's keep it a secret, shall we.

The Equinox Cometh

It's nearly here, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun reaches the first point of Aries and the days and nights are of equal length. Of course, in Jakarta, the event marks the autumnal equinox because the city is just a little south of the equator and it will occur at 7am. The configuration of the planets at this time is unusual in that all the planets (including the Sun and Moon) are contained within an arc of about 135 degrees with Saturn spendidly isolated and diametrically opposite this grouping. This would be an interesting planetary pattern to be born under.

Meanwhile, I've been making use of my holiday time by adding the ability to receive postings to my blog via email or a blog feed accumulator. Furthermore, my old blog postings from my Geocities blog have been transferred to:

http://reeves.sean.googlepages.com/oldblogentries

and I've resurrected my Geocities site at:

http://www.geocities.com/sean_reeves/

for professional purposes, specifically to start working on my curriculum vitae. I've already put a rough draft up and will refine it over the next few weeks.

My Google site at:

http://reeves.sean.googlepages.com/home

will be used as a personal, rather than professional, website. I've just got a basic opening page up at the moment with a link to my old blog entries. I'm basically having a bit of a tidy up and reorganization of my cybersites in an effort to avert cyberchaos. Such an enterprise is of course appropriately Saturnian because Saturn represents the psychic urge toward structure and categorization (amongst other things).

Born Again

I watched an interesting documentary the other night called "Jesus Camp". It's deservedly garnered a number of awards and focuses on evangelical Christians in the United States. To qualify as an evangelical Christian, you apparently have to be born again by accepting Jesus as your saviour. Unfortunately, 43% of those who were born again were under 13 years of age when the experience befell them. Equally disturbing was the fact that 75% of home-schooled children in the United States live in evangelical families. Some of these kids are then sent off to summer Jesus camps such as the one depicted in this documentary where they are indoctrinated even further.

The evangelicals see themselves as involved in a battle to reclaim their country for Christ and to make it a Christian stronghold against the dark forces of liberalism and secularism that the devil has unleashed. They view the devil as a very real force at work in the world and are very firm in their belief about heaven and hell. The documentary features Ted Haggard who in 2005 was voted by Time Magazine as one the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Unfortunately, in November 2006 (soon after the documentary was produced), poor Ted resigned or was removed from all of his leadership positions in the evangelical movement because of allegations of homosexual sex and drug abuse (which he subsequently confessed to). The evangelicals are far too unshakeable in their beliefs to be troubled for long by embarrassments like Ted. They'll put it down to the work of the devil and have an extra prayer session.

The brainwashing that these children are subjected to is a reminder of what goes in some of the Indonesian pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) where a similarly narrow and distorted view of the world is inculcated. It makes you wish that a secular education was made mandatory for all children and that religion was declared a form of mental illness. George Bush owes his presidency to the support of these evalengicals and in the documentary it was reported that Ted Haggard used to meet with the President every Monday. I wonder if the meetings have been cancelled now that Ted has been disgraced, or maybe he still turns up and the two of them share a little methampetamine and laugh about how gullible the American electorate is.

Everybody wants to be a dog

The writing is very small in the photograph above but it says "Everybody wants to be a dog" and it's one of a number of photographs that I found on a blog professing to display the 100 best advertisements of all time. It shows a terrapin knocking on a door wanting to be taken for a walk. Just struck me as funny because our household has both terrapins and a dog. I don't know what the product is that's being advertised.

For many years, in fact until quite recently, I'd not had much contact with animals. I'd long ago given up eating any of them but I wasn't close to any sort of animal. In fact, it occurred to me about a year ago that I'd become quite estranged from them really. It was just an observation and I didn't do anything about it. As she's grown up however, Sabina has been intensely interested in all the animals that she has come across and I've started to see the animal world again through her eyes.

It was her insistence on buying terrapins and a dog that led to their current incorporation into the household. Every weekend, Sabina helps me to clean out the terrapin tank and shampoo the dog. She very much wants to be involved in every aspect of their care. Her success in acquiring terrapins and a dog has of course emboldened her and she is currently very insistent that we acquire a horse.

There are small horses that she often rides beside the supermarket where we shop and so she is constantly reminded of their existence. Her persistence will be to no avail however, because our backyard is too small. If we acquired the block of land next to our house on the other hand, we could ... no, that's silly thinking.

Here's a photo that was taken of her on a horse. She has added some special effects that are available with her mother's camera phone software. Nobody else really knows how to add these special effects but Sabina is quite competent is accessing all of the phone's features, including music and video.

Night of the Marauding Musangs

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Having complained in a recent post of the absence of wildlife in our local area, I was surprised by news tonight of an incident involving binturongs (or musangs as they're known locally). I was aware of the existence of these animals in the local area and that they prowl around of a night. I had even caught a glimpse of one maybe a year or so ago but I'd never thought too much about them. However, yesterday evening, our neighbours (father, mother and adolescent son) were sitting in the front of their house when they noticed two musangs descend from a nearby tree. Suddenly, the animals charged toward them and the family retreated. This was only a ploy however, because the musangs turned and carried off the family cat that had been relaxing out front as well.

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I've never heard of musangs killing cats and there is nothing in the literature about such attacks. They regularly attack chickens, rats and birds but not cats. This cat wasn't a kitten. It was a fully grown female. The recent cull of poultry in the area (to reduce the risk of bird flu) and the fact that fruit is currently out-of-season suggests that they may have been driven by hunger to launch this audacious attack. The photo in this post is not one of the said miscreants but instead is a photo taken from a very interesting blog called The Voltage Gate at:

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http://thevoltagegate.blogspot.com/search/label/Binturong

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There is some fascinating information there about these animals. The binturong can grow to a metre in length and weigh 15 kg. It is also known as a bearcat and is one of several species of civet whose anal gland secretions can be used to make perfume. Interestingly:

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The binturong is the only Old World mammal to evolve a fully prehensile tail, meaning the tail is dexterous enough to be used to manipulate objects, like food items. The rest of the mammals possessing a fully prehensile tail are only found in North and South America (monkeys, opossums).

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So I'm reading up on this little known but most interesting animal, partly out of curiosity and partly out of apprehension because we have recently acquired a small, white dog by the name of Gromit who is not much larger than the ill-fated white cat that was carried off. We normally leave her outside of a night but tonight we have brought her inside just in case the musangs strike again.

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Sabina, our resident four year old, had been maddenly insistent for several months that we purchase a dog. Her constant whine was "beli anjing" (buy dog) and eventually resistance crumbled. The catalyst was an ill-advised visit by her grandmother to the pet shop a couple of hundred metres away. Sabina spied a white toy poodle, about three months old, and there was an air of inevitability to the purchase after that. I was consulted as the final arbiter in the matter but because I had once owned a toy poodle by the name of Chloe, I felt it was a case of kismet.

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It would be difficult explaining to Sabina that her beloved Gromit had been carried off in the night by marauding musangs.

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The Wall

Welcome to the wall. The nature strip with its trees, bushes and grass is no more. I have just learned of the probable reason for its erection. A reliable source has told me that during the recent floods, the kampung or village at the back of the Japanese International School was flooded and some of the residents sought temporary refuge on the green fringe. This occupation couldn't have been for very long because I never noticed anybody there at all. However, the School felt that this occupation might become permanent and compromise security.

The school owned the land and had set the area aside as parkland in accordance with local government regulations that require a certain percentage of green space to be made available as part of any development project. All that seems to have swept aside with the supposed threat of a refugee camp developing and the area has now been thoroughly bulldozed and the concrete wall now abuts the footpath. It's comforting to know that there is a logical reason for this environmental vandalism. Extending this logic further, perhaps all green spaces in Bintaro should be bulldozed and walled off from the general public because of the risk of conversion to refugee camps.

Why not just move the fence and leave the trees in place? Why bulldoze everything? At least people inside the school could have enjoyed some shade and a little slice of nature. This construction has certainly added to the uglification of Bintaro. The graffiti has already begun and will continue because there is such an impressive expanse of wall.

Wildlife

This is a photograph that I took at school yesterday. I just happened to have my camera on me when this moth, about the size of a dinner plate, landed near to me. I was the only one who saw it, there was no one else around. I've edited the background of the photograph to enhance its shape. It was the first moth of this size that I'd seen in Jakarta and it reminded me of the general disregard for nature that exists here in Indonesia. It's rare to see a natural creature apart from ants.

Progress seems to be measured by the extent to which humans can impose themselves on the natural environment with little thought to the environmental consequences. Most of the aquifer in Jakarta is contaminated by E-coli because septic tanks leach their contents into the ground. Jakarta has no sewerage system. There is so much water being pumped out of the aquifer by high rise buildings and malls that ground levels have subsided by a metre or more in places. Salt water has begun to penetrate further into the aquifer so that areas near the harbour cannot use the groundwater because of its salinity. Most of the population is reliant on groundwater because the reticulated water system is very limited.

The rivers are convenient places to dispose of household and industrial waste. They are clogged with rubbish and are uniformly putrid. They get flushed out in the rainy season and then the cycle of pollution starts all over again. Residences are kept clean but what happens to the rubbish that is removed is apparently of no concern. It's OK to toss it into a vacant lot, sweep it into the gutter, dump it in a river. Ecological awareness doesn't extend past the boundary of the property. There is no sustained educational initiative to change these attitudes and so Indonesian children are destined to be as ecologically ignorant as their parents. The future can only be worse because there is limited awareness that anything is even wrong and certainly no willingness to do anything about it.

The Degreening of Indonesia

No sooner do I mention the degreening of Indonesia than an example of it appears in my own backyard. On the way to school today, I noticed that a long strip of land that runs adjacent to a perimeter boundary of the Japanese International School is being stripped of trees. It is doubtless being made ready for some development and the formerly green and grassy area will be replaced with buildings and Bintaro's catchment area will shrink a little more. Amusingly, Bintaro is marketed as the garden suburb but its greenery is rapidly disappearing in the face of rampant greed. Land developers of course are the same the world over but in some countries there are constraints placed on them. Not here. It's a pity that I don't have a before as well as an after photo. The difference is quite dramatic.

Disaster Management

The photo is taken from today's Jakarta Post. To continue from my previous post, my Second Life adventures were brutally interrupted by widespread flooding in Jakarta. The flooding was so severe that it inundated the building that my ISP used to house its telecommunications equipment. My Internet connection has been out from Friday to Tuesday and was only reconnected tonight. Most reputable companies have a disaster management plan that they can put to work in cases like this but not my ISP. They obviously got out the mops and buckets and went to work mopping up for a few days. I have a CDMA card that I can insert into my laptop and this enables me to use the mobile phone network. Unfortunately, that was knocked out as well. It was only my PDA with its GPRS connection to the competing mobile phone network that held up and I was at least able to check my email.

I shouldn't complain I guess because there are still many people homeless as a result of the flooding. There are actually only a couple of million people who even use the Internet regularly in Indonesia. That translates to about 1% of the population. The rest have other priorities, like not getting washed away by floods. The flooding has been exacerbated by an alarming decline in green space within Jakarta and its environs. Parks and recreational areas do not make any money and are sold to developers who build housing estates and luxury shopping malls. This is what masquerades as urban planning here. Increasingly, the rainwater has nowhere to go but into the gutters that are already choked with garbage. The gutters carry the water into creeks and rivers that are also full of rubbish. When you have a lot of rain, you have a big flood. It's as simple as that.

Before the flooding and the cessation of my Internet connection, my adventures in Second Life took me to an orientation island where you were prepared for interaction with others in the larger virtual world. However, things went wrong from the start. I wandered into the ocean and spent most of my time walking along what seemed a biologically dead ocean floor. When I finally activated my flying ability, I was above water but zooming over miles and miles of trackless ocean. The island was nowhere to found and then the program crashed. Hopefully, I'll have a more auspicious experience next time. I notice a lot of the large IT companies, like Microsoft and Dell, have a virtual presence in Second Life and Sweden has even opened an embassy there. The Australian government is active as well and has established some sites.

WoW

WoW stands for World of Warcraft and is the most popular MMORPG on the Internet. The acronym stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game and the 8 million registered players in WoW, not surprisingly, assume various roles and collaborate on quests of one sort or another. I know all this because I set my year 11 computing class to find out as much as they could about online gaming. I'm still assessing what they discovered but I did my own research and was surprised at the numbers of online gamers as well as the huge revenues that the industry generates.

The class is also investigating online gambling and so am I. The graphic above is a screenshot of a slot machine taken from www.freeslots.com where I've been playing on and off. As you may be able to see, I've accumulated 2359 credits but unfortunately this does not represent real money. Compared to the real slot machines that I've played, the returns on this virtual slot machine seem remarkably generous. I've discovered that there are online poker rooms, online casinos and online bingo. Interestingly, the 2003 world poker champion started out playing in one of these virtual poker rooms and in this way secured an invitation to a real world event that he went on to win, much to everyone's surprise.

In my online investigations, I've also come across a site called Second Life where you can lead a virtual second life in addition to your own real world life. You join up and select an avatar, a character to represent you in this virtual world. It doesn't cost any money to join but if you pay money, you can buy virtual real estate and build a house on it and presumably live in it. For purely educational purposes, I've joined Second Life, selected my avatar and am ready to interact in my new virtual world. Unfortunately, not having paid any money, I don't have any virtual money (called Linden dollars) and so I'll be roaming about as a virtual beggar. I still have to download the software from the site so that I can begin my second life but because I've seriously exceeded my monthly download quota, I'm waiting for the new month to dawn. Then I'll be ready for a new adventure.

Memorandum of Understanding

It seems that Microsoft's recent MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Communication and Information Ministry has come under fire from critics in the House of Representatives who are arguing that "it would create a monopoly for Microsoft, and undermine the government's own "Indonesia Goes Open Source" program, which encourages the use of free and open source software in the public sector". Here is the full text of the article that appeared in The Jakarta Post of January 19th:

Microsoft defends multimillion dollar deal with RI government

Business News - Friday, January 19, 2007 Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta 

Microsoft Indonesia has spoken out on a controversial recent deal with the government, arguing that the deal was initiated by the government as part of its efforts to improve Indonesia's information technology sector as a whole.

Microsoft Indonesia president director Tony Chen told reporters Thursday that the agreement had been clinched against the backdrop of the government's efforts to reduce software piracy, including negotiating with major software vendors for the use of their products by government institutions.

"As a majority of the computers in government institutions use Microsoft products, we were among the first the government invited," he said.

The Communications and Information Ministry signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Microsoft Indonesia in November last year to provide a total of 35,496 licenses for the Microsoft Windows operating system, and 177,480 licenses for the Microsoft Office productivity suite to government institutions.

The MoU will also offer long-term guarantees for the new software investment, ensuring free upgrades for up to three years.

Microsoft Indonesia is also required to work closely with the government in a partnership to improve IT literacy in the country, including providing computers and IT training to schools across the country.

Tony said that the MoU -- with a 70 percent discounted licensing price -- would result in savings of up to US$200 million for the government, compared to the $250 million it would cost if the government was to buy licenses at regular prices. The government would also save $60 million on the free upgrades.

He said that the agreement also showed the government's seriousness about fighting software piracy, which would help attract more investment to the country's IT sector.

Yet the deal has come under fire, including from the House of Representatives, with the critics arguing that it would create a monopoly for Microsoft, and undermine the government's own "Indonesia Goes Open Source" program, which encourages the use of free and open source software in the public sector.

The trend to use free and open source software has emerged in recent years around the world based on various reasons, including antimonopoly sentiment, transparency, cost efficiency and national security. Among the countries and institutions that have gone open source are Peru, the Extremadura region of Spain, the municipality of Munich in Germany, and a number of government agencies in China.

Microsoft and other proprietary software developers do not disclose the source codes of their products.

Tony said that the government had opted to sign the MoU due to the still-limited use of IGOS, while it needed to move fast to improve both Indonesia's IT sector and public services.

Tony's arguments were confirmed by Communications and Information Minister Sofyan Djalil.

Yes indeed and whatever did happen to the IGOS (Indonesia Goes Open Source) program? Well the website is still there at http://www.igos.web.id/english/english.htm but obviously forging a deal with Microsoft will help ensure that the use of open source software remains "still-limited".

If ever a country needed free software it's Indonesia and it's good to read that at least some parliamentarians are questioning what the hell is going on. The graphic in this blog entry I found on the site www.uncyclopedia.org that is actually a wiki and contains some funny entries about IT topics. I found the graphic by entering the word "Microsoft" in the search box.

Alternative Measures

What do you do when you've lost a plane with one hundred people on board and the search has drawn a blank? You slaughter a buffalo of course! The Adam Air plane is still missing but searchers have not given up as this article from today's daily paper confirms:

Searchers slaughtered a buffalo in a traditional ceremony and consulted psychics Friday, the fourth day after an Adam Air jetliner went missing over Sulawesi. In Majene, West Sulawesi, a search and rescue team enlisted the help of local shamans and slaughtered a buffalo in a traditional ceremony, where food offerings were made to the spirits of the jungle and prayers were offered to ancestors to "clear the path" for the operation. "When we come to a new place we greet the spirits here," Majene military chief Zakariya told AFP. "You can see that even when using very hi-tech devices and enlisting the help of Singapore, we have still not found anything. So this is an alternative measure that we are using", he said.

I think this local article nicely complements my previous post concerning the camel sacrifice in Turkey. It's refreshing to know in 2007 that in this corner of the world reliance is not being placed solely on "hi-tech" solutions to solve problems and that traditional methods are still being embraced. 

This is indeed a search that has not gone well from the outset. Initially it was reported that wreckage of the plane had been found and that there were ten survivors. This turned out to be totally fictitious. Waiting relatives and friends of the missing passengers were outraged but there is little they can do but wait.

On a final note, it occurred to me that Adam Air could be an unfortunate name for an airline company in Indonesia because "air" means "water" in the Indonesian language. It would seem very likely that the missing plane has gone down in the sea. Meanwhile, about 400 ferry passengers are still unaccounted for and the chances of their survival look bleak.

Disaster Strikes

I'm afraid I couldn't resist posting the photo from the front page of today's daily newspaper. The caption for the photo is "POOR MAN'S MEAT: A woman sorts through meat to be distributed to the poor at Bogor's Parung subdistrict Sunday." 

Yum! Pity we can't see the flies buzzing around. I read today that some of the poor were far from happy however, complaining that they received far less meat than last year and what they did receive was largely bone. So who got all the juicy bits? 

The year has started rather badly here in Indonesia with 400 still missing in a ferry sinking and a plane missing with 102 people on board. This comes on top of ongoing floods and landslides. The disasters just seem to keep coming. Another report in the paper states that: 

More Indonesians say they are economically worse off compared to 12 months ago and most cite the increased costs of basic goods and travel expenses as the main reasons, an end-of-year survey says. 

How citizens here cope on the meagre wages that they receive is a mystery to me. Of course, there are an estimated forty million who are unemployed and don't receive a wage at all. It's hard to imagine how things could get much worse here but of course they could.

Back in Jakarta

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