luv the tech

we don't have a fixed phone line at home. we tried to apply but the guys there at the state-owned telephone company implicitly asked for some "extra payment to speed up process" and we refused. we have to rely on our cellphones. how about internet connection? i bought this internet pcmcia card pluggable to my notebook. to control my usage, i chose a prepaid system. so far so good.

and then yesterday, when i was browsing, a window popped up. my internet phone card required recharging. before, i always made the recharge over atm. so, on our go, we stopped by at one. it turned out, the atm was broken. what should i do. fortunately i have a gprs system in my o2 cell. i logged in to my bank website, used a password key generator, and recharged my phone card. then i activated it via phone.

within five minutes, i am able to write this post.

i love technology.

"apa artinya cinta"

anna and i are reading this movie review in tempo magazine. it's on "apa artinya cinta", reviewed by leila chudori. it's too harsh you feel sorry for the movie crew and artists. but, as i said elsewhere, it's a review -- and review is a subjective act. leila has all the freedom to kill a movie. nonetheless, i usually buy her taste.

but anna has a good point: leila might just be a representation of her generation, or at best, her peer. meanwhile, that movie, just like other chick-flicks, has it's own niche. the fact that youngsters are willing to pay and stand in queue several hours is an indication that there is demand for this type of crap -- whether you like it or not.

that said, i suggest my peer: avoid this movie!

hospital that doesn't seem to be

my father in law is hospitalized. this hospital is supposed to be one of the best hospitals in the country. yet, anna and i are surprised by the their slow service. my in-law got in yesterday at 1pm. he was taken into the icu. they took his blood sample. and we had to wait 3 hours before they told us that anna's father had to stay!

is that cool ER series really just a fiction?

the expensive minute

receipt

anna is always outraged when we exceed the 60 min 59 sec of a parking-hour, on the way to paying it! and i can't blame her: the last minute is the most expensive minute.

yay, it's holiday

it feels good to have saturday on wednesday from this week to next week!

pity the housewives

It’s been 2 days I am home. I’ve got a terrible flu (no, it is not avian flu) that forces me to stay home for rests. Being home during the weekday for two days really bores me to death. Not only that I am too weak to do housework but also I can not connect to the internet (read: outside world) until Aco is back -- he's got a pcmcia. It is ridiculous knowing the fact that Kabelvision’s (tv cable and internet broadband provider) head office is just less than 1 km away from our house! When we first moved in, Aco and I visited the office to apply for the connection, but they said no plan to extend the cable to our neighborhood. We then applied for the second time last month, together with our 20ish neighbors, expecting that 20 connections would be more interesting for them to invest. However til now, no news whatsoever.

So, I ended up watching local television. Most of the programs are gossips, criminal news, quizzes and what-so-called “sinetron” (mini series drama). This is just a brief statistic from 11 local channels from 7am – 5pm on Wednesday:

• Gossip show: 23 programs, average duration: 30 minutes, prime time: 7-9am, 11am-1pm, 2-4pm.
• Criminal news: 14 programs, duration: 30 minutes, prime time: midday
• Sinetron : too many to count, duration: 30-60 minutes, mostly morning and afternoon. (more in the evening, though)

I believe most Indonesian housewives are fully-engaged with this black-box during the day. If I were a housewife, I would probably spend most of my time at home watching TV while I was cleaning, washing, cooking, and ironing. It is very easy to get engaged, you just need a remote control and a TV (of course). In my opinion, TV is the most perfect media to educate people, especially housewives. With good programs-such as in Discovery, Animal Planet or National Geographic, TV can make the greatest change ever in human life. The power of knowledge and experience shared will give a multiplier effects to the children. They can gain knowledge from their well-educated mom. In the long run (borrowing from Aco's term), good quality human resources are simply there at the market. Instead of launching BOS ("bantuan operasional sekolah" -- school assistance aid) that needs to be advertised hugely in 2-full-page newspaper to justify the achievement! Get awake, minister!

intrusive, intrusive!

i once wrote a short paper titled "do consumers buy advertising?" (sorry no weblink). i concluded, yes. and that means, advertising is a good thing. but i might need to restate my position. why? lately i feel bothered by many ads got into my cell inbox. when you travel across countries, it might be a good thing that once you reactivate your cellphone in the foreign airport, you get this message telling you some good deal on calling rate. but not too much, please.

now, even the government can have access to your cellphone. i hate it when there's an incoming sms from somebody not in my address book, yet, her/his/its name appears as such. see? meaning i HAVE to recognize it. i am forced to recognize it. believe me, this is not the same with ads in newspaper or magazine or tv. on today's cellphone, you have less freedom to ignore such sms. you have to read it.

and not just cellphone. the comment field in blogs are in danger, too. freedom has dark side, no?

(i'm tempted to talk about intrusion in google, too. yes, now, whenever i want to surf with google.com, i HAVE to go to google.co.id first. hey you out there, why are you forcing me to use co.id?)

productivity vs toilet

What is the correlation? You might not be able to link it directly, but this is how I relate these two things together. Economists (including Aco) calculate productivity by dividing output with input. Input in this case is defined as the sum of resources (capital, human resource, etc), where output is the final product of a process. So, the larger the result from that division, the higher the productivity is. Then, what does toilet have to do with productivity? Well, probably not many people might even think of it. But I think toilet affects the productivity.

This is the story of a toilet. I had quite a number of intriguing toilet experiences that no one ever think about. In one of my project assignment at a government oil and gas company, the toilet in the building where we worked for about 2 years was very “fascinating”. There were 4 toilet rooms with toilet bowl in it, but no toilet seat at all. Imagine how you are going to pee in that kind of situation! The first time I used the toilet, it took me about 5 to 10 minutes to get the best position to pee in this toilet! I was curious how the others can survive with it. So, on one conversation over lunch with my colleagues I asked some of them on how they use the toilet. And, I got amazing stories! A woman colleague told me that she used to do half-squat every time she peed because it was impossible to sit on the toilet! The other one said that she sometime sat on it –with the help of a roll toilet tissue to cover the bowl--because she could not stand the squad position if she had “big event’ that usually took minutes. The most hillarious one is that some of them even squatted over the toilet bowl to avoid contact with the non-hygienic bowl! For some of my metrosexual male colleagues, the toilet thing was really a big problem. They solved the problem by going to a five-star hotel located about 1 km from the office just for “pup”.

Another experience I have now is quite the same, even though not as hilarious as the previous one. I am assigned at the state utility company where there are 2 toilets which tissues as the problem. Sometime I have to spend 3-5 minutes looking for tissue. Some of us try to find another toilet in different floor. You do the math for the time spent on these non-value-added activities!

You may think that this toilet story is just a tiny problem that you would not be bothered to think about it. But, have you ever calculate the economic side of this extraordinary situation? How much opportunity and time we can save if we have clean and proper toilet? Let say, 15-20 minutes of no added value a day, can be accumulated to 100 minutes a week, 2000 minutes a month and 24000 minutes a year (equal to 400 hrs. try converting this to consultant rate: 8hrs = USD 600-800). Not to mention that actually bowl-type of toilet is really not suitable for some of Indonesian people. Instead of seating on the bowl, they squat ON it! If you are the next person using the toilet, you have to really clean up the seat!

Back to productivity, when the output is less due to employees’ beyond-control factors, it is the responsibility of the employer/client to solve it. Working environment is not simply office, computer, networks, colleagues, documents, but also toilet and temperature (I’ll write the last one later in different post -- I can assure you, this is as much interesting!).

alias

Alias

have been watching "alias" lately. mostly out of curiosity after reading the graphic novel some years back. it's not dissappointing. anna seems to disagree, though -- she always falls asleep with those glasses on her nose. (surely she loves "friends" way more. even "everybody loves raymond" can not beat her sleeping call).

back to "alias". garner is a bad actrees. don't be critical on acting skill, if i may suggest -- just take it easy. it's sidney bristow. forget about garner. (but that guy who does sloane and another one playing jack bristow are good).

great place to work

this morning i told aco i want to be a parliamentary member. less work (or should i say no work to do?), less thinking, but good salary with lots of allowances. they themselves just approved another 10 million rupiah allowance per month, excluded the following compensation that they had already have (in million rupiah):

• basic salary:4.2
• position allowance:9.7
• intensive communication:4.14
• honors allowance:3.7 (what the hell is this?)
• package allowance:2
• electricity:2
• telephone :2
• family allowance:0.588

compare that to a worlwide management consulting company where i am working in now; with its famous slogan: "great place to work", ours are really nothing.

however, money is not everything. i still value our personal development, critical thinking, respect to others, integrity, honest and hard works more than those allowances. and lastly, i don't want to be a person that is cursed by millions of indonesian people.

the power of "thinking without thinking"

Yesterday I turned down one candidate that I interviewed for a vacancy in my office. It is not that she doesn't meet the qualification, but something was telling me that she is not the right person that we're looking for. People might think that I am subjective. Well, thanks to my husband who bought me "Blink" (to cheer me up 'cause I couldn't go with him to Phuket, sniff) which makes me more convinced that you actually can make a very good decision in the first 2 seconds. That’s the power of our brain. As Malcom Gladwell said "with mastering the art of 'thin slicing' we can think without thinking."

Cheating on my laptop

I have been blogging for more than two years now. In all those time I have been with this very laptop, my R32 ThinkPad. Am considering now to get a new one. I’m a believer in Moore’s Law (“The number of transistors per chip that yields the minimum cost per transistor increases at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year”) but as Anna correctly points out, increased computer power might not be my key reason. It’s the weight that bugs me more. What keeps me from not doing it, however, is the cost of migrating to a new one. I hate moving. I have so many software installed here – original CDs of which I have lost (or even if I still have them, I have to make big effort to run through all the installment process again; followed by reorganizing all the auxiliary files and docs). Not to mention my very ill filing system (blame it on Google desktop search!). [Hey, am I revealing my outdated knowledge in TI? There should be a good migrating software out there, right?]

Once I ran a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a cost-benefit analysis on getting a replacement laptop, done by myself whose tech know-how is limited. It told me, I should hold on for about one or two more years… (But this ain't got no bluetooth, ooh…)

the price of mango

I never understand how ‘price’ is defined, even though my husband always has an explanation of every price phenomenon I encounter. My opinion is that price does not always reflect the value of the good or service I consume. Here is the story of a mango price.

Two weeks ago, I was grocery shopping at at a well-known “mid-and-above-class” when I saw mangoes displayed in the fruit section. I immediately bought it, because I love mango and it’d been a while I had not have mango. The price was IDR 1950/gram and the price board said “mangga harum-manis spesial” (special sweet-and-smell-good mango). Taking for granted the IDR/gram denomination, I took two, one for me and another for my husband. I was a bit shocked by the resulting price I should pay. It was IDR 18500 for two mangoes, or around IDR 9000 each (equivalent of three can of cokes!). I was tempted to put the mangoes back, but, hey “I want mangoes! I should buy mangoes”. I justified myself: “The board says these mangoes are ’special’”. There I went. I assumed “price comes with quality” – as my husband always says. Finally, the mangoes were in my fridge. The next day, I eagerly peeled one mango and tried it. It was … sour, a bit hard and not special! I felt deceived. I was disappointed: “price does not come with quality at all”.

Since I was still craving for delicious mangoes (no, I’m not pregnant, by the way), my husband suggested me to “buy it from who specializes in it” – this is another mantra of his economics. He supposed that special fruit store with lots of customers should imply higher quality. So we dropped by at a famous and crowded fruit store – that sells nothing but fruit (my husband even insisted to look for a store that sells nothing but mangoes. No such store here). I picked “export quality” harum-manis mangoes priced at IDR 1650/gram. Though it was slightly cheaper than the previous one, it still cost IDR 8000 each (again , I bought two). As soon as I got home, I took the knife and sliced one. Well, the taste was a slightly better than the first one, but still it was far from delicious. It was very different from what I expected the term “special quality” should be: sweet, nice smelled, and a bit (for lack of better term, but you know what I mean) crunchy.

But today, I was very happy. I took the risk to buy two mangos from a hypermart that cost only IDR 6300, or around IDR 3000 each. Surprisingly it tasted… very yummy. Sweet, nice smelled and slightly crunchy, just what I expected! Admittedly, when I decided to buy it, I did not expect that it would deliver such a “special quality”, given the price. This is the graph that I draw for this phenomenon (see graph). I will to pay more for higher quality, but what I get sometime does not have the quality that it should deliver. So, why should I pay more if I can not get the quality I demand? When I confronted this fact with my husband, he said, “well, it was simply a market distortion”. He – annoyingly -- still believes that price comes with quality and good quality is always more expensive. The price has been distorted by “the inability of the producers or sellers to maintain the quality, yet they took advantage from asymmetric information – consumers have no idea” . He’d better have better explanation. For me, this kind of ability and information should be embedded in the quality and that is why I am willing to pay premium price.

In conclusion, next time if I want mango, I will go to hypermart…

Amsterdam

As I am writing this, we are en route to Paris by Thalys. We left Amsterdam about 5 minutes ago. Well, I should say we managed to leave… We got to the train 3 minutes before it departed after a 10-min rushingly dragging our luggage all the way from Dam to the Centraal Station. There was an accident that caused the tram we were in should cease its operation.

Thalys is not as good as the train we had from Frankfurt to Amsterdam – ICE, a new train that travels 220km/h. Thalys is older, less neat, and less comfy. It might also be a reflection of the fact that the Netherlands is a little less developed than Germany. (But we are enjoying the service in Thalys: mozzarella and pineapple sandwiches – ICE offered nothing).

Of course is not that Amsterdam is less attractive than Frankfurt. In fact, we kind of like Amsterdam more. It’s an old city with friendly neighborhood. It is kind of small compared to Jakarta, you can walk or ride a bicycle to see around; or if you want to explore the canal, you can take canal bus. We stayed in small but cozy hotel, La Boheme, in the Leidseplein area, the center of city activities.

We walked around, from Rijkmuseum to Van Gogh Museum, from Leidseplein to Dam to Centraal Station, passed over Red Light District, Magna Plaza, National Monument and Madam Tussaud Museum. We learned that Amsterdam is a city of bikes and museums. However we only visited one museum: Van Gogh due to time limitation.

We also went to Rotterdam, the second largest city in the Netherlands, however we found nothing much to see.

So that’s for 3 days of Goethe and Van Gogh experience. Now, we are looking forward to ‘meet’ da Vinci in Paris and Picasso in Rome.

If you like to see some pictures that we took, click here

frankfurt

writing from friedberg, less than an hour drive from frankfurt. just arrived yesterday, 6 hours after anna came from chicago. whether frankfurt is really nice or not is to be explored today. so far, it is.

freakonomics of toll road

while anna was en route to u.s. i was contemplating on the thing we had been talking about. it's the toll booths. or more specifically, the ticket persons in the toll booths.

i once told anna that it seems to me that the ticket persons in the toll booths in jakarta outer ring are way slower than their counterparts in toll booths within the city limits. the farther the booths from the city, the slower the ticket persons. i had been hypothesizing that this could be due to higher flow of traffic inside the city that outside. need to test this against data.

we so far just rely on naked observation. here's the thing. the city toll road ticket price is Rp 4,000. in indonesia there's no such single paper or coin for that -- you have to give either four Rp 1,000 bills, eight Rp 500 coins (unlikely, who wants to grab eight coins while rushing?), or any of the bigger denominations: Rp 5,000; Rp 10,0000; Rp 20,000; Rp 50,000; or Rp 100,000 (the latter two unlikely -- many times the booths are not prepared to give change against these big bills).

now, what is your reason to choose the toll road and not the non-toll ones? to save time -- and you are willing to pay for saved time. so, you want to maximize time-saving. at least, i maximize time-saving. this is what i usually do when i am about to enter a city toll booth. i show (or even, waive) my money (usually i got no time to collect four Rp 1,000 bills. it's easier to grab one Rp 5,000 or one Rp 10,000) before i really reach and stop at the booth. and the ticket person who has seen my money give me my ticket and the change at the same time.

compared that to toll booth outside the inner city. i do exactly the same, but trust me, the response from the person inside the booth is ... different. no matter how obvious i showed my Rp 5,000, he or she will take it first, then ring the register, and then give me ticket and the change (fyi, the ticket costs Rp 2,500 -- but it's irrelevant to my story now; except that it is of course more difficult to manage Rp 2,500 than Rp 4,000, since the former should include one coin, for exact amount). from 2 weeks of observation, the average time i spend more on the outer jakarta toll booth is about 2 minutes, compared to the inner jakarta toll booth.

you would say: what would you make from 2 minutes? yes, that's small. but think about this: if it costs me an extra 2 minutes, what does it cost the person(s) in the vehicle right behind my car? assuming a fixed inefficiency rate of 2 minutes per ticket, that makes it 4 minutes. what does it cost the person the 15th car behind me (trust this long queue is not unusual in here)? it's 2*15 = 30 minutes! that's a real "late to the meeting"!

but i'm more intrigued by the question of why a ticket person in outer jakarta toll booth slower than that in inner jakarta toll booth? is it true that the flow of traffic higher inside jakarta than outside? maybe not. so what is it? anna offers another way out: probably only the better ticket person can be in the inner jakarta (and "better" is a reflection of a person who appreciate time in the sense of having a sense of urgency). this is interesting.

after all, i ask mysef. if i'm so picky in this thing, why don't i just prepare my exact amount of money before even driving? well that's true. but still, our friendly ticket person will take that exact Rp 2,500, then ring the register, then give the ticket with a smile...

addendum: anna just reminded over the chat: "you're exaggerating. it's less than 1 minute". maybe she's right. i was exaggerating. but even if it is less than 1 minute, the math remains. in fact, anna was telling me that if we happen to be number 10 or 15 in the line, one minute inefficiency in the booth translates to 10 to 15 minutes.

what we're looking forward 

look... 

read... 

moving in

Finally, we moved to our own house last Tuesday, after all the fixing, cleaning and filling in the house done in quite a while. We’ve never had experienced in managing a house before, which we thought that 2 or 3 weeks was enough to prepare it before we move it. Turn out, it took almost 2 months! Actually, up to now, the house still needs some fixes and cleanings; however Aco told me that the house should be a living thing, it will grow as we do, it won’t be ready, clean and perfect if we don’t live in it.
Our small but cozy house is a double-deck 75m2 Japanese-style house, 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. All the bedrooms are on the second floor, one bathroom on the first and the other on the second. We painted the living room with broken white, one bedroom with light green and another one with cappuccino brown. Our kitchen was planned to be light orange, a very warm orange as shown in the brochure. But the paint came out differently on the wall. Shinny bright orange. It is so bright, even when the light is turned off during the night, you can still see. Never trust the brochure. We repainted with light green.
The house is located in Karawaci, Tangerang, 20 km west of Jakarta. When there is no traffic jam, it is only 20 minutes drive (with 100km/hr) from Central Business District (Semanggi). However, during the peak hours, 7am-10am and 5pm-7pm, it can take 1.5-2 hours drive! So, better avoid those hours if you like to visit us.
Our house is in an estate that is developed by Lippo group. The neighborhood is well managed by the town management. Our neighborhood is clean, quiet and secure (hopefully!). It also provides all the facilities such as shopping mall, school, hospital, transportation, not to mention abundance of food stores and cafes. One thing that Aco and I like very much is to have a cup of morning coffee at Coffeebean which is located on the side road in front of UPH. Aco said, it reminds him of Harvard…

shouldn't you fix yourself before you sell it?

on a flight to balikpapan, i grabbed this newspaper. and it told me about indonesian lion air's plan to buy 60 aircrafts from boeing. i was amazed. before the plane took off, i had a chance to send a short message to anna. "lion is buying 60 pieces of 737-boeing. it wants to get the asia pacific market. having flown with them once, i say, dream on". in fact, we had bad experience with this carrier -- despite it's reputation as the number two in the country.

holidays should mean days in peace

we are busy moving in. things turn out to be a little more complicated than we expected. the house needed some additional construction. we thought that could be done in not so long a time. but, as it turns out, in the residential estate we are going to live in, you can't have construction workers work on mondays, nights, or holidays. at first, i thought this is a rule by law -- and i condemned it: why should the country decides who and when to work? but anna told me, that it is our neighborhood estate's policy. why, asked i. because people who live there deserve quiet time. most of them work in jakarta, about an hour away from the complex. at night, on weekend, or holidays, they sure like to enjoy their home, away from works. and that means, no noise from construction, please. not to mention distraction to safety.

that, i agree. with a sorry to construction workers.

interpreter

interpreter (pollack, 2005)

so we went to see "the interpreter". it's awesome. kidman and penn are superb, especially the latter. the dialogues are smart (e.g. "black or white?" -- "no, thank you" -- "no, is she black or white"?). the plot is not too special, but sidney pollack is, well the sidney pollack. the only thing that bothered me is the hollywood flavor. it wouldn't have hurt if there were no any romantic moment between penn and kidman. thank god, she leaves at the end.

just married

the wedding

nearing the day

the short notice