Sylvan Silence

It's been a long time since my last post. I don't know why. Staying in Jakarta over the long holiday break didn't generate a lot of newsworthy postings I guess. Anyway, in an earlier posting titled "Gengsi", I talked about the popular habit of cutting down a perfectly healthy, shade-giving tree that stands in front of a house and restricts the view of passers-by . In the photo, Sabina sits atop what remains of an obviously healthy tree that once stood on the footpath outside someone's house. It's just around the corner from where we live. Unfortunately, there are many more examples to be found within walking distance of our house.

I'm reminded of the Joni Mitchell song lyrics: they cut down the trees and put them in a tree museum, and charged the people a dollar and a half just to see them. I recently heard a great new version of that song (Big Yellow Taxi) by the group Counting Crows, with Vanessa Carlton contributing vocals. If cutting down the tree is too difficult or expensive, then savage lopping is often carried out instead. Indonesia is about to overtake Malaysia as the world's largest producer of palm oil. The forests with all their biodiversity are disappearing rapidly and massive palm oil plantations are taking their place. Big but illegal profits are to be made, firstly from the timber (that is sold to China and other countries) and secondly from the palm oil itself. Within a few years, tree museums will be the only place to view Indonesian rainforest trees. These museums will be little pockets of rainforest, left standing in an effort to attract tourists who will be charged a dollar and a half (around 15,000 rupiah) just to see them. So it goes.

Engage brain first

My granddaughter is currently on holidays from school. She started in January at a private school that shall remain unnamed. On her final day of school, she received her report and a copy of the school's yearbook. Nothing unusual about that. A closer look at the yearbook however, shows photos of all the children, their full names and the names of their mothers and fathers, the children's dates of birth, complete addresses and telephone numbers (handwritten by the children themselves).

Now this is a country where kidnappings of students for ransom money is on the increase and initiatives like this just make the kidnapper's job easier. It could be argued that the yearbook only goes to the students and their parents but the reality is that it would have gone off to the printer first where many people would have had an opportunity to peruse the contents. In addition, yearbooks are often just put down somewhere and can easily go missing. As far as I know, there was no consultation with parents about whether they wanted these details disclosed in the yearbook. The privacy issue here is that the information originally supplied by the parents to the school should have been used for administrative purposes only and not serve as content for a yearbook.

What were the staff at the school thinking when they got these children (four years old and upwards) to handwrite this personal information onto a sheet of lined paper that was then scanned and attached to their photographs? Clearly they weren't thinking at all. Amazingly, I don't think any of the parents have complained about the issue. The culture here is to just accept these things and not make trouble. Educational commonsense is not in plentiful supply in Indonesian schools and that's not going to change anytime soon because NOBODY COMPLAINS!

Gengsi

One of the things that sets Indonesians apart from Westerners is the concept of "gengsi". It was well explained in an article that appeared in The Jakarta Post this morning. Here is a quote from it:

Maintaining gengsi (pride, prestige and appearance) is of the utmost importance for many people in Indonesia. People, especially in the big cities, try to maintain their gengsi in order to keep in with their peers, and please the people around them. They are status and power oriented, with a strong need for external and social affirmation. Indonesian society is often described as collectivist, as compared to individualist. This is maintained in a close long-term commitment to the "group". The "group" could be a family, extended family or extended relationships. Acceptance from the whole group is extremely important.

It's hard to capture the full implications of the word with the translation "pride, prestige and appearance", although that's certainly a part of it. The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" also conveys a sense of it. Indonesians who can afford it love to buy homes beside busy roads where more people are able to admire the house's facade. The more impressive the facade the better. What's inside doesn't matter nearly as much as the external appearance. Shade trees that impede the view of the house from the street are brutally lopped or cut down entirely, replaced by palms that are less obtrusive and cost a hell of a lot of money. As many cars as possible need to be stacked in the driveway of course. As an individualistic westerner I prefer an outwardly modest-looking home hidden behind trees and located in a quiet street.

As quoted, commitment to the group is also a strong part of gengsi. The family is the most important group followed by religious grouping, ethnicity and nationality. In a country as diverse as Indonesia, there are many ethnic groups. The Javanese are the most populous but other prominent groups include Sundanese, Betawi (native Jakartans) and Batak. Most of these ethnic groups have their own language and that strengthens the sense of belonging. Curiously, Indonesians must declare their religous affiliation and can only choose from amongst Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. To a non-religious westerner with loose family ties, no strong sense of ethnic identity and only a vague sense of nationality, Indonesia can seem "foreign" at times but remembering the importance of gengsi helps make it more understandable.

Miss Mary

Let it be known that I am not really all that comfortable on social networking sites. I was invited to join Friendster by a work colleague and thought that I ought to accept because, after all, I'm teaching Information Technology to students who all belong to one or more social networking sites. So far I have three friends (all work colleagues) and 512 so-called second degree friends. I'm afraid I'm almost totally inactive on Friendster but so far I've received two emails from random persons who have viewed my profile. The last one, received yesterday, went like this:

Hello My Dearest One,



Dear how are you today? and how is things moving with you? hope fine and you are in good health. My name is Miss Mary, I am looking for a very nice man of love, caring, sincere, easy going, matured, and understanding, then after going through your profile now on this site ( www.friendster.com) i pick interest in you, so i will like you to write me via my email address which is as follow (mary4u_babyreal@yahoo.com ) so that i will give you my picture for further discussion, because i am really looking forward for a serious friendship with you,



Yours New Friend Mary

That's how easy it is to find new friends on Friendster. I like the phrase "how is things moving with you?" It has a Rastafarian ring to it as in "how is things moving with you, man?" but with "man" really drawn out and sounding like "marn". "Miss Mary" has a nice ring to it as well and I'm definitely "matured" but I'll let someone else run with that one. Feel free to pretend you're me.

The Timeless Land

The Timeless Land is a place in time, a four week period in which the school bell falls silent and timetables no longer dominate the day. Any day can be a sleep-in day, if I want it to be, and I can stay up after midnight, any night I want. I can read books. I've already read one called "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon. The reading of it, completed only a few minutes ago, has affected my writing style, but only temporarily I hope. It's written from the point of view of a fifteen year old autistic boy and the style is similar to the text that I've italicised. The boy has a fascination with prime numbers and loves Mathematics and puzzles.

One of the puzzles that he discusses in the book is the so-called Monty Hall problem about a game show host who asks a contestant to choose one of three doors. Behind one door is a car and behind each of the other two is a goat. The game show host knows what's behind what door and before opening the door that the contestant has chosen, he opens one of the other two doors and reveals a goat. The car must then be behind one of the remaining two doors. The game show host then offers the contestant the chance to change his original selection. Should the contestant stick with his original choice of door or change doors? Intuition suggests it doesn't make any difference: the chances would still be 50-50. A careful analysis however, reveals that if the contestant changes his original selection, the chance of choosing the car is 2/3 while sticking with his original choice offers odds of only 1/3. There is a very good explanation of why this is so at www.answers.com.

This problem does not relate directly to the story however, and the novel is not about Mathematics or problems in logic. It's a story about a "curious incident" that befell a "dog in the night-time" and it is related in the first person by the autistic boy. I found the book quite enjoyable and I intend to go out and about tomorrow and purchase another book, because that's what I can do on holidays. I can also choose to not go out at all and postpone buying a new book until another day. I could stay at home and read an old book, or watch a video, or I could do neither of those two things but instead practise guitar because one day I might have to busk for a living. OK, "enough already" as they say in Yiddish. Suffice to say that tomorrow is full of possibilities and free of school bells and timetables.

The cyber-mice are running a little faster this year

After marking examinations, correcting practical work and writing about one hundred reports, I'm ready for a holiday and finally I have time to blog again. I'm reverting to blogging from Word because I find that I like the output that it creates in Blogger. The ScribeFire that I used last time gives the text a cramped look, the same as what you get by simply editing within Blogger itself. Why this should be so I've no idea.

In reference to an earlier post, the IT article did get published in The Jakarta Post last Sunday but without my name displayed. That's standard practice I think for what is termed an "advertorial" which is presumably a cross between an advertisement and an editorial. Maybe I should try for another letter to the editor. Maybe my blacklisting period has expired. I'll have to choose my topic carefully in case I offend again.

It doesn't look as if there will be much travel these holidays. Home renovations and car upgrading will see to that. So I'll have four weeks or so to do much as I please. I'll certainly be spending a lot of time upgrading my computer skills because lately I feel like I'm slipping behind. It was nearly twenty years ago, in January of 1988, that I taught my first computer lesson and in those pre-Internet times, the pace of change was a lot slower.

In terms of experience, I guess I'm qualified to teach about the History of Computing. Hopefully it will be made a formal academic subject one day and when those cyber-mice start running just a little too fast for me, perhaps I can take up the teaching of it. I would be a living fossil who could talk of the dreamtime before the coming of the silicon ships ... oops, I mean chips.

Just in case that scenario doesn't pan out however, I intend to work on my musical skills over the holidays in an effort to boost my busking credentials. It may well be that, for an old IT teacher who couldn't handle the pace of change, the only livelihood will be to provide musical entertainment on the footpath to passers-by. It wouldn't be such a bad life, at least there would be no more reports to write.

The Pace of Change

I've prepared this post from within ScribeFire, a Firefox plug-in, that enables me to post to a blog from within the browser itself. It's very convenient and just another of the many features that are making blogging easier and easier. However, there are just so many new so-called "Web 2.0" features appearing in cyberspace that I feel like I need to spend all of my coming four weeks holiday just trying to catch up with them all. There seems to be an change of pace in Internet innovation or it is just that I'm not keeping up with the pace of change, as in the mice are running a little faster this year sort of thing.

I received a comment to my YouTube video about the Great Wall of Nippon. It was from a 29 year old Australian who wrote "this is such a pointless video and I hate your accent, it sounds very poor". I thanked him for this helpful feedback but explained that the video was intended as part of a blog post and wasn't meant to stand on its own. I was surprised that someone had come across the video from within YouTube but I guess it just goes to show that however obscure you think your posting might be, there is somebody out there that will stumble across it.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Portable Slideshows

I just noticed that Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo sharing service, now provides a facility whereby you can turn any photo album that you have stored there into a slideshow that can be embedded into a web page or blog. You have the option of choosing from a variety of frame sizes. It just illustrates how easy it is becoming to present personal photos and videos on the Internet in interesting ways. To illustrate the facility, I've chosen the smallest frame size and used my December 2006 photo album containing shots taken when Desy and I visited my brother in Australia. The captions associated with each photograph in the web album can be displayed or not displayed, depending on the user's preference. In this case, I've chosen to display them. Various controls become available once you click on the slideshow. Try it and see.

The Jakarta Post

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The Wall Part Two

I wrote about "the wall" in a previous post, explaining that this formidable edifice, that had once lurked behind a spacious green belt, was recently relocated so that it now abuts the roadway. The wall divides the Japanese International School on the outskirts of Jakarta from the rest of the neighbourhood. Naturally such an expanse of white concrete proved a magnet for graffiti and one day it may cover it all and end up not looking so awful. It's hard to capture the extent of it in a photograph or even series of photographs, so this morning I took a video of it on my way to work. I've put the result on YouTube for all to see. Click here to view.

A Watery Grave

Who says nothing exciting ever happens in Bintaro? This afternoon, at the end of the street, entertainment was provided by a crane pulling a car from a storm water canal. The driver of the car had somehow panicked when behind the wheel and she and her female passenger ended up in the canal. Neither was injured apparently and the salvage attempt was successful as this YouTube video shows. The video size is a little under 8Mb if you're thinking of watching it.

Midnight Special

I'm writing this as the witching hour draws nigh but unfortunately it's Thursday night and I have another day of teaching ahead of me. I've fallen into bad habits lately, napping when I get home from school and then not being able to sleep while most honest citizens, and a few dishonest ones, are snoring soundly.

SBY (the acronym for Indonesia's president) is going to have a cabinet reshuffle soon, according to the political pundits. The reason I mention it is that perhaps he'll replace the current Minister of Education who was responsible for the implementation of the "60 and you're out rule" for expatriate teachers. Would a new minister rescind the rule? It's probably unlikely but even if it did happen, we ageing pedagogues would still feel unsettled because another change of minister might herald a reimplementation of the rule.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on my stay in Indonesia. Tick. Tock. Soon I'll launch my worldwide cyberspace campaign to keep Sean in Indonesia. Via the blogosphere and the social networking sites, the collective cry of injustice will persuade the powers-that-be here in Indonesia to grant me complimentary citizenship because of my selfless service to the education of Indonesia's youth. As the clock passes midnight, it's comforting to imagine such improbabilities.

I may as well end a gloomy post on a gloomy note by quoting from today's Jakarta Post: Indonesia is losing its forests faster than any other country, with the equivalent of about 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour, according to Greenpeace. Certainly an inconvenient truth but unlikely to cause much concern in the corridors of power. This rate of destruction will not be arrested because environmental awareness and concern are not a serious part of the national educational curriculum.

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).