Nothing about Everything

1. Per today (April 7th, 2007), speed of 42KByte/sec (using 3G) is still achievable. This is awesome, especially for me who is used to CBN XL 7 KByte/sec speed. 2. After I'm connected, web access is redirected to Telkomsel homepage. There I can click on package I want to choose . 3. The billing is based on time spent connected to internet, after choosing the package above. 4. At anytime in the session, I can see the time I had spent online or time left on the selected package. After each session, I received SMS stating the time I had spent. --- Update: 9 April 2007. Disconnect incidents are too many, about once every 15 to 30 minutes. Update 24 April 2008. Cbn XL unlimited 3G has been reduced to laggy 3KBytes/sec.

Overall: Pretty good. 1. In spite of 3G theoretical bandwidth of 384 kbps, CBN XL bandwidth is limited to 64 kbps (that's kilo bit per second), which translated to 8 KBps (Kilo byte per second). In practice, it's around 6 to 7-ish KBps. But early on March, it was around 20KBps according to Sony Ericsson update manager.. I guess they cut it down. 2. The connection is pretty stable. Disconnect is rare even when your 3G modem moves around Jakarta while connected.. Maybe 1 out of ordinary disconnect every 2 days. That's excluding a what seems to be a pre-programmed disconnect every 24 hours period of connection. I guess it's their method to enforce the so called dynamic IP.. 3. Sometimes it's difficult to start connection. When that happens, wait for a while and repeat. I give up trying to find the culprit (either from CBN or from XL). Some other time, you can connect but you can't resolve any website name. Reconnect until you're assigned to the correct DNS. 4....

I hate this one specific ex-officer. Based on what I gathered, ever since he lived in this one exclusive residential estate, permits involving every construction project in that area become his business. The procedure to get a permit is very bureaucratic, EVEN WHEN WE GIVE MONEY to his staffs. You really don't want to know how worse it is when we hadn't give any money yet. Even after we get the permit, we must still endure a painstakingly long procedure to have the gate keeper allow any delivery even if it's delivered using a fucking small 4-wheels truck. Such delay may cause problem in a project profit since no material means no work can be done. And this whole permit business is not even acknowledged by government. Basically, he unofficially control this area and pulling out rules from his asshole and apply them as he sees fit.

In my somewhat limited experience, vendors of materials in Indonesia, particularly in construction industry, is rather bad in complying with promised specification. There is one high profile company whose product did not satisfy advertised specification. What they did is quite scandalous given it's position as a market leader and it's name affiliation to a highly reputable multi-national company with highly significant presence in it's field.. People whose work specialize in that field can easily identify the specification change. On the other hand, although the change is visible with naked eye, it's quite subtle. I don't think I will ever realize the change if noone point it to me. Sadly, not many field worker point it to their supervisor. Maybe they they thought they don' want to complicate their daily work because of this "whistle blowing". There is another company, whose brand is very strong on the Indonesia's public eye (depending on province)...

I don't know why but this week my mood is pretty bad. Although I do get angry from time to time, I rarely explode in front of everybody. Well, not that rarely but I may say relatively rare. Anyway, a couple of days ago I cracked. I threw a fit of anger and do lots of yelling. What particular about this anger is that I don't really know whether the situation deserve such an extreme reaction or not. In addition, by being angry I lost a key advantage in doing business with them.. The event is really simple. That particular day, the quality of materials delivered to me is really pathetic. It's so pathetic that I, the one who usually tolerates many defects by allocating the materials usage so that defects become irrelevant, end up rejecting up to 90% of what they sent. All supposed to be well. Bad goods, relative to their price, get rejected. It's fair. But the supplier had the guts to talk to his friend, saying that I should not order those items if I don't know how to ...

There goes again another blog posting I wrote due to my effort to anonymized the parties involved.. Anyway, I'll just post the footnote. Footnote: In Indonesia, resolving a receivable due (by parties who do not really trust each other yet) is done by exchanging mone y or giro with invoice and/or delivery order. The seller usually send his debt collector to buyer office to do the exchange on site.

Since my comment on someone blog is still stuck in moderation mode, I decide to post it here. Mika, After giving it some thought, I still unable to find simple things that we (read: ordinary outsiders) can do to make people more prepared for flood or preventing flood. Many schemes need cooperation of people in charge, or a simply need a LOT of people. One prevention scheme I can think of that requires a lot of people is: an alarm system to notify possible floods in various part of Jakarta. It requires a comprehensive survey of Jakarta. First we identify pockets of water that happen when raining. For each pocket of water, we calculate the average height of the ground of water pocket relative to sea level. Then for every pocket water nearby this one water pocket (name: A), we identify the minimum amount of water required before water in A flow to another pocket water. Note that, we can also treat dam as pocket of water. Note also that we can consider usual places where clo...