At first I was happy to find another website that blogs in English and informs the outside world about Indonesia. However, when I started to read more of its article, it reminded me of muslim-haters such as faithfreedom.com and such.

A few examples:
[ The Crusades and Liberal Islam ] (see comments by Patung, its owner)
[ Tennis Team won't play is Israel ] – (quoted: “The Indonesian refusal to recognise the existence of Israel rears its ludicrous head again”)

It’s absolutely Patung’s rights to express his/her opinions. But with “Indonesia” in its website title, while the articles doesn’t reflect what many Indonesian think; well I was just hoping that he’d be able to be more neutral.
Or at least makes it clear that the website contains his personal opinions; which may not necessarily represent most Indonesian.

I’ve dealt with many muslim-haters before; some are just mislead / misinformed, some have flawed logic, but some intentionally use any way to destroy Islam. I’ll engage in a discussion here in my spare time, and we’ll be able find out who’s who.

Ternyata tidak perlu menunggu lama untuk mulai melihat hasil dari teori Jendela pecah sehubungan dengan Playboy Indonesia – di edisinya yang ke tiga saja, majalah ini sudah semakin syur dibandingkan dengan edisi-edisi sebelumnya.

Dan seperti biasa, kembali dijual di jalanan dengan bebasnya. Sesuatu yang tidak akan bisa terjadi bahkan di negara asalnya sekalipun. Memang Indonesia ini luar biasa.

Jadi, kapan nih kita bisa mulai menikmati wanita yang telanjang bulat 100% di Playboy Indonesia ? Edisi kelima ? keenam ? Wah sudah tidak sabar nih

Today is again a very sad day for Indonesian. An earthquake and tsunami combo has hit from south of Java. Death toll has surpassed 100 mark, but it’s quite certain that it’d climb to much more than that.

The quake can be felt from Jakarta (north of Java). The tsunami was reported to be as high as 18 feet / 5 meters.

I read today’s newspaper frozen in shock, finding it hard to believe that it’s happening again to us in such a short time – tsunami in aceh, violent quake in yogya, landslides in many places; and now this.

Indonesia seem to be the place for experiencing off-the-scale disasters.

On 1851, Tambora mountain erupted.
The explosion shot so many ashes to the sky, it blocked much of the sunlight. Year 1815 ended up known as the “Year Without Summer”. Tens of thousands people died from famine, because crop failed to produce. The exact details of the explosion could never be found out, because all population around the mountain was killed on the event.

On 1883, Krakatoa (Krakatau) erupted.
The explosion was so violent, the mountain itself and the island it was on got destroyed in the process. It also produced the loudest sound in recorded history – reaching 180 dBSPL in places 160 km (100 miles) away, heard from Australia (3500 km away) and Island of Rodrigues (4800 km away).
There were no survivors on the island of Sebesi, about 13km from Krakatoa. Many other settlements were also destroyed so thoroughly; some, like Ujung Kulon, was never repopulated. Human skeletons still found washed up on east coast of Africa up to a year after the explosion. Worldwide temperature didn’t return to normal until 1888.

Welcome to Indonesia.

Just a few days ago, I moved the mailboxes of a client to Dreamhost while praising them for their technical support (they act very quickly and knows what they’re doing). For good measure, I also told my client how big Dreamhost is, and that they should be able to provide us with a very reliable email service.
I said that because email is vital to this client, since almost 100% of their businesses are done via email.

Then Dreamhost experienced what might be among the worst incident they’ve ever had in their history. Ouch.

Beginning since 15 July 2006, only now (18 July 2006) their services have started to be running again.
My client was already breathing very heavily just behind my neck, with all intent to kill me very soon; which he cancelled when suddenly we got our email back. Phew.

Then I remembered many years back, when I was still a junior staff at Takaful Indonesia. I just managed to secure the takaful.com domain, then hosted it with my friend at Indoglobal.com.
After a while, I said thanks for their service and I’m sure our website would be very secure in their hands. My friend was humble and realistic enough to politely said that (in summary) there’s no such thing as 100% secure server on Internet.

A few days later, Indoglobal got hacked pretty bad.

I’ve learned my lesson – from now on, I’ll stop praising my webhosters, and just enjoy their exceedingly good service for me

Note that the incident re: indglobal happened years ago. I know that they’re much better now in regard to security; but I’ve promised not to praise my webhoster any more, so I’ll stop right here