The Wisdom and Knowledge of The Taxi Driver-part 1

“In many parts of the world there’s always the group of people who run the streets, both night and day. They interact with vast number of people of different characters, while they themselves are also a people of character, whom sometimes annoying, plain hilarious, shady, cool, educated or street smart. Some of them are very fond of speaking their minds, while others are very shy. These are the collection of the wisdom and knowledge of the taxi drivers, whom are kind enough to share and talk to me during my travel across Indonesia (mainly Jakarta).”

• On the recent terrorist attack: “The xxxx must be the one behind the attacks in Indonesia and the rest of the world, just take alook at 9/11 why are most of the xxxx employees are taking leave on that day?”

• On Indonesia’s Independence: “Indonesia has it all. It has achieved its independence, it’s a prosperous country, its beauty is unsurpassed, pity it lacks one thing. Justice.”

• On Swine flu or any other flu: “Isn’t swine or the bird flu is created as a biological weapon? It’s politics all along I tell you.”

• On the increasing number of AIDS patient in rural area particularly Papua: “There’s only one explanation why the incidence rate is so much higher in Papua compared to Jakarta (in which has higher number of prostitute). The lack of education.” ~ I added “as well as the low economic power”

• On prostitution: “The prostitute along this street is really not a prostitute at all, they dress nicely not wearing any skimpy clothes yet often I see they’re often being picked up by cars. Those who pick up must have a spare money on their sleeve, heck if I had some I’d probably do it as well”

Cheap Internet: Does It Possible (part 2 of Indonesians & Their Internet Culture)

Update: The Ministry of Communications and  Information Technology said that the cost of the Internet will be reduced to allow greater acceptance with the public. Hope this will be the key to provide better utilisation of the Internet to the masses. news taken from here

Update 2: The cost of the Internet will be lowered after the legislative election on April 9th. A way to attract the voters? I’m sure the user will not put too much care on it

On my last post I was talking about the lack of use of email as a mean of effective communications. There are several factor that made this e-mail communication did not become a reliable and effective method of communications.The pressing matter is the availability of the cheap internet access. When I meant cheap, I also meant that it have to be reliable in good quality (in terms of speed and signal) to ensure the process of effective communication.

Indonesia is steadily improving in its internet access, however it is far from satisfactory. In comparison with countries like Malaysia or Singapore, who enjoys cheaper price of Internet for better quality, Indonesia seems like a country full of choices but none of the choices could be considered best. Real life example should apply here; Telkomspeedy the sole provider of ADSL internet access in Indonesia as a whole, have put the price of Rp. 450.000 for their 3GB quota, while Malaysia with their Streamyx cost as much but with no cap (www.telkom.com, www.streamyx.com).

Well we can always look for scapegoat for every matter in Indonesia, which include on this laying of price, however, that is not the point of this writings. The point is how do we can achieve what Malaysia and Singapore have been able to achieve. Of course there would be a lengthy discussion and regarding what could and should be done regarding this matter, a project proposal, and to the point of acceptance and rejection.

Telkom as the national telecommunication services would automatically handling the ADSL route of Internet connection. This act as a double edged blade, first as Telkom had the technology and infrastructure they could readily deliver ADSL internet access, however, being the sole provider would mean that the market is monopolised by Telkom. There are however, gaps that could not filled by Telkom and its ADSL access, there are the people who are always on the move, People who are unsatisfied with the package offered by Telkomspeedy access and people who does not have phone line yet (but of course they have mobiles). This over the time creating a new number of ISP with competitive price and package, however, none of the new ISP are targeting the third of the market, because of the lack of infrastructure and low number of Internet user in Indonesia (only 10% of Indonesian uses Internet regularly out of its 200 million people (Kompas, 27 December 2008)) Based on the situation above it could be determined that there are several things could be done in order to sort this problem out.

1 Lower the price of Telkomspeedy, this can be done by subsidising the cost of the Internet from the education budget.
2 Build infrastructure that could support the other ISP to provide internet access other than the big cities.
3 Provide training of basic internet feature (data collection via google, correspondence via e-mail, etc.) in school, government offices and people who need to interact with other people.
4 Make a program to use the Internet for regular correspondence, for example; Students from two different secondary schools across cities in Indonesia will try to correspondence with each other via email, they could share stories or pictures regarding their school etc.
5 Create an awareness to use email as a medium for correspondence and point out the the advantage of using email rather than snail-mail.
6 Build a proper library with cheap and qualified internet access, for people who does not have computer to use.

Onno W. Purbo have an interesting idea on how to achieve low cost internet by using a frying pan. There are wiki articles on how it could be achieved; 

http://opensource.telkomspeedy.com/wiki/index.php/Teknologi_RT/RW-net

http://opensource.telkomspeedy.com/wiki/index.php/Wajanbolic_e-goen

*both of the link is on Bahasa Indonesia.

The basic idea is to share internet services in community where one household would act as the primary user for the service, while at the same time sharing the connections with people in the community. The frying pan would act as the receiver in other households. 

By using this method, people in community could actually bear the cost of the Internet together, which is rationally going to be cheaper, thus achieving the more effective communications.

Cheers

A trial

Now, I’m trying to use flock to post my blog posting, which is seems pretty awesome but let’s just see how’s the results going to be shown on the blog.

For you guys who have no idea what flock is, it is actually a new free web browser, which is aimed and made specifically for the web 2.0 world. It is provided with a side bar which contain all the social networking (facebook, filckr, youtube, twitter) as well as media sharing, blogging and online bookmarking site which is generally almost all those you need to kill time.

why is it cool? aside you could post up blog directly from your browser (you don’t need to go your site), you could check facebook without also going to the site, it is also functioning as a great normal web browser because it is powered by mozilla (see the thumbnail).

So if you guys a new web browser directly use for your web 2.0 life, you could get flock here and found all the information there as well.

Cheers!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web 2.0, social, sharing, blog, trial

Do scientists make a good businessmen?

Last week I was attending a “seminar” titled “The Importance of Commercialization”, however it turns out that the “seminar” was actually an introduction of a new postgrad course offered in Monash University Australia which is the Master of Business (Commercialising Science and Technology).

Based on the booklet received at the seminar and the seminar itself, this course give its student more choice in their career, which involve the development of wealth-creating opportunities in the business of science and technology. The key features offered in this course is the specific intent to assist student in commercialising leading edge medical, scientific and technology research projects, in other words the course will teach student the fundamentals of business, economics, legal and management skill required to contribute to this process.

OK, let’s face it science student does not essentially make a good businessman nor does business student would make a great scientist, and this is somehow looked like an interesting career path for science student to get out from spending their life in researching or resorting to another career path which totally different from their studies (whom many of them did). So based on the possibilities of these career path this is totally an alternative and promising pathway wasn’t it?

In an economic sense yes it is, because it will give the possibilities for one of the student to become an entrepreneur and build their own company, make a discovery thus a lot of money etc. etc. However the choices are still ours right? If I want to make medicine which people in third country can afford rather than chasing profit it’s still my choice right? If the world was turning because of the money, I still could standing still without it right? If the temptations were there and the chance were given am I a fool not to join in the rally to chase of commercialization?

I don’t mean that scientist does not have the rights to obtain economic wealth, it’s just that if all the orientation is based economically then where does the next research fits? is it for creating a cure for a disease or is it for making a profit from a cure of a disease?

The knowledge for this is significant, but it is not the mindset of scientist should have, I believe, because there are still people who can’t afford medicine in this world, and our burden is to provide them with what is available, not overcharge them.

Cheers

—————-
Now playing: Damien Rice – Delicate

What I’ve learned this week

I learned that:

• Sacrifices are always necessary.
• To be more patient is important.
• My opinion is not the same as their so don’t be selfish.
• The generation gap is widening.
• Cunts are running the world now and forever.
• The peaceful mind is already there in your head, It’s really up to you whether you want to reach it or not.