Tried having breakfast outside. It starts some weeks ago, when there’s a cafe opening near my neighbourhood. Like mentioned before, actually had planned for it since previous new year when I stayed overnight in friend’s place. But it failed, so this time I tried going alone. Proofing also why I ends up spending my weekend alone rather than going with friends. Being able to go with my own pace and schedule is a lot easier than having to follow someone else’s, which might not even have the personal dedication to follow a schedule that they made. I admit, I also had a lot of failed plans though.

First, before going there, I want to walk around looking for photos. I took picture of a parking lot too. The parking lot is just an opening with worn out cement floor. There’s a little trees in the entrance where I took picture, and the other entrance over there about 150 metres ahead. Well, apparently it’s forbidden to take picture without permission there too (I’m not even taking picture of the building!). The security guard there told me so in tone that I deemed intimidating and really ruining my moods.

Then, I still have to wait for a while before the cafe staffs are ready. I only ordered toasts for today, and tea (free with the breakfast package). Then, time to starts typing stories. Luckily the internet is already running at that time, so I can took my files from Office Live Workspace and post some comments in Hatena Haiku, ah, and post a diary entry (my ID there is nSeika).

My ideas flowed quite well, although I’m a little stuck when looking for reference of language that used base-12 numbering. The going to toilet experience is not so nice too. Because it’s still too early, the customer toilet is not operational yet, so I had to go to service toilet which are humid, smelly, and not well stocked. Glad I bring some of my own.

About half an hour later, peoples starts coming too. The most crowded is a Chinese restaurant with promo. IDR 200k minimum for 4 peoples will get a roast duck almost for free. The restaurant is full even on 10 in the morning. Discount and freebies are the magic word for these kind of economic situation isn’t it.

The breakfast is costly, but well… for once in a while. Next time I think I’ll try the other menu too.

It seems that the psychological limit for budget conscious notebook buyer in Indonesia now are Rp.8 million (USD 1 = IDR 12k, approx.).

My brother had sold off his old tablet PC and looking for new model. Sadly, I don’t know enough about budget level notebooks. It made me kind of regretting it.

Today, we went to look for and buy a new one. The list of candidates all are above the budget constraint, Vista included. So finally we settled on an Toshiba Satellite A215. The variation has AMD Turion X2 TK-57, 2 GB RAM (after upgrade), 160 GB 4800RPM HDD and ATi Radeon X1200 graphic. It cost Rp.7.5 million. I didn’t notice that the specs.

A search after getting it home shown, this is a 2007 model. There are variants available with faster CPU as well as larger hard drive. Most important thing I noticed is that the hard drive is slow. Hope it won’t kill him during gameplay.

I think, I made the right decision by not going through the rain. After waiting for the rain to stop, and step outside, there’s a pair of rainbow (actually broken rainbow).

The cloud formations are pretty too. Golden colours from the sunset is breathtaking.

But the best is not on the sky. After taking several pictures, I realized the peoples nearby are starting to took out camera to take pictures too. There’s also more casual photographers using phone cameras to take shots of the rainbow.

I believe not many really took care to stop and watch. If there’s not that group who started to take pictures, probably nobody will be curious enough and stops to take pictures too.

More in the 2008-11-29 album.

Now, scenes previously. Well, I had a date with the usual concept, which I would describe as high-speed data-transfer of useless jokes and information. Details varied from recent comics, jokes, story of life, and others.

Taking care of bank accounts are getting more and more difficult too. In case I lost my wallet, the ID card would need about two weeks to process and have the replacement issued. But the bank will only accept those non-transaction supports using ID card. Also, for more advanced jobs, they only give service in weekday, not on weekend.

Finished most of the works today. Still continuing the sale story, today I bought some more cooking books and also a gardening book. The gardening book is more for reference, because it has pictures and names of many tropical plants species, especially flowers.

Then, because I’m rather free, for lunch I decided to go to Plasa Indonesia to pick up my subscribed magazine. Then, going to the basement to get a lunch, which cost me a lot (T_T)

Anyway, back to the office, before we go home, the boss gave us a stack of comic to check for parts that needed censorship. The place I work in is conservative about such things, but it became even more critical lately due to the pornography law.

In comic, kissing scene and casual nudity needed censorship, even in comic which is already targeted for elementary school students in its home country. Something more than that? I heard in a title, they even cut off a whole chapter(!?)

BTW, currently I’m trying to manage 4 online diaries, which seems really difficult to keep up with all ^^;

Today, we had employee only cleanup sale in the parking lot under our office. The books are products of the book and multimedia publisher group of Kompas-Gramedia group. Discount is up to 70%.

The best seller there is the Indonesian National Geographic magazine. They sell the 2005, 2006 and 2007 edition in package of 11 books (without December, I wonder why). A package is priced at Rp.40k (±€2.47), that’s more than 97% discount. I bought one package, 2007.

Other books I bought are three cooking recipee book. Actually there’s a non-fiction book about language that tempts me to buy it. But because I think I won’t have enough free time to read it, and I don’t really bring much cash, I leave that one out.

But… bringing them home is another story. Yes, that 11 books is the primary weight and strain to my arm and shoulder.

PS: two weeks to arrange a new ID card? They must be kidding.

Although having no access to the pre-public beta build, I feel like I had a concern about the design of the new Windows 7 taskbar. There is that concern that the design is easy bait for those who likes to echo “copycat” from the Mac group (which is why I’m glad there’s still someone who says it looks like KDE rather than Mac :P). But there’s also a concern of function that I can’t find words for.

Windows 7 copies Mac OS X in ways that are bad. I will give one specific example here, but save the rest for a more formal article: The new taskbar copies Mac OS X’s terrible Dock by allowing you to mix and match shortcuts (to applications and windows that are not running) and buttons that represent applications and windows that are running. Those running apps and windows can be visible or hidden, and there are subtle changes to the taskbar buttons to note that. You can drag and drop these buttons into any order you want. Looking at my taskbar right now, I see these types of buttons in this order: Shortcut (not running), Shortcut (not running), Shortcut (running), Shortcut (not running), Shortcut (running), Shortcut (running), Shortcut (running), Shortcut (running), Shortcut (running). It’s a mess. It is simple, I guess. But it is not easy to use.

A great Google article, the difference between 'easy' and 'simple,' and why this is a problem for Windows 7 - SuperSite Blog

His words formed it in more concrete way. I’m used to the Windows taskbar, with a distinct difference between shortcut & system icons and applications. If everything is mixed by default, it became somewhat confusing.

But, this is by personality though; like when I don’t really get it when they mentioned the implementation of “magic square” for Mac OS’ menu bar, which has a unified menu bar for all applications in the upper side of the desktop. Recently, I rarely used full screen mode for applications, and I like to be able to see the grouping (menu bar stick with the window it controls). It’s more logical for me that way.

There’s also the paradigm of accessing everything by searches (not that extreme in reality) such as on desktop and for example, web mail. In Windows, there’s also the Search folders. But I’m still caught in the way from age of DOS (and UNIX?) of directories, controlling for myself how I group everything. I’ve started tagging my pictures, but when browsing them, I still ends up utilizing directories rather than searching the tags.

I guess, I’m with the group that will be kicked out by natural selection (^^;)

It started from a peek at the schedule board. Next to my division’s room is the computer magazine editorial. They often got invitations for press events and write it down in a white board as well as who must go and write the report. I crossed their room to go to the toilet, and paying attention to the schedule of events, such as the recent Photoshop CS4 event, HTC Touch HD release event, or Sony Ericsson XPeria release event.

Yesterday, I saw an event at Cali Deli cafe at Jalan Surabaya. From there, done a search, probably an interesting spot. Then, I found out, the street is an antique market. Sounds interesting. Since I still hasn’t got my new ID card, it’s impossible to visit the IndoDefence Expo anyway, so this is my alternative :D

To go there, I took the 213 public bus, from Grogol to Kampung Melayu. After Hotel Indonesia roundabout, the bus goes straight through Diponegoro street. Stop at Jalan Surabaya. At first, I was greeted with luggage shop. So many, I thought I walk into the wrong street. Thankfully, after a while, antique shops shows up.

There are really many interesting stuffs there. Ceramics, traditional masks, old swords, traditional fabrics. Wooden crafts, wayang. There’s also old bakelite phone, old fan and various brass nautical instruments, which is what I’m most interested in. Compass and sextant that looks like from the age of exploration. There’s also big wooden wheel. Further to the other end of the street, there’s some store that sells old camera too.

After visiting and took some pictures, I went back, but stopping for a while in the Tanjung Duren crossing bridge. I’ve been interested in visiting this one for some time. The bridge doesn’t go from side to side, but one side ends in a park between the street, canal, and freeway. There are lot of trees there. Had to say, I doesn’t feel regret for it. The place is pretty for something right next to busy street. There’s not much place I can visit that has such view. Also, there’s not that many peoples crossing, so there’s in a limited sense, solitude. :)

But all the leaves are green and full of life, different than the autumn colour when I first saw it.

Pictures are in this album: http://kiriel-salem.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!280A1538334A1CB9!992/

Providing accurate map data is expensive. Street survey and location information, as we could imagine by logic, is a tedious process. Map provider, like in your GPS devices, might credit the map info to another company specializing in the field.

Thus, licensing information for every city on this planet will be expensive, not to mention updating the data. The same as in Live Maps. In smaller cities, and many countries, Live Maps wont have any business informations yet.

Here, user contribution kicks in. To cover search on areas where Live Maps doesn’t have business information, Live Search uses what’s called “Collections” as information. These are made by users. Thus, you could have community contributed information about restaurant, stores, or other points of interest.

Not quite Wikimapia still; and as other information database build “Hitchiker Guide”-style, many informations are not really accurate. Area could be represented by a dot missing the real location by some kilometres, and without any informations. But better than nothing right ?

So, how do we make a Collection ?

First, on Live Maps. There are two alternatives. The quick way is by right click over the location point, and then choose “Add pushpin”.

Another alternative is, click on the Collections menu on top right of the map, then choose “Open your collections”. This will open the Collection Editor dialogue.

In the lower part of the dialogue are icons for Points, Trail and Area as well as line style. Use these accordingly to mark the location you want to save as a Collection.
(Credit: thanks to Chris for correcting me about this :)

After that, type in the informations in the dialog. There’s also link for more information (e.g: website of the business) and to upload a photo (only one). After you finished, click save.

After saving, there’s a dialogue to review the item and to add new items in the collections.

You can add more items in the collection in the same manner as adding the first one. Mark the place using one of the shapes (Pushpoint, Track, or Area) and enter the information.

The logic I use is, imagine collection as a larger area (for example, a street) and the item is for a point of interest (for exampe, a specific store).

Then, save.

You can see the other Collections available in the map you’re viewing from the menu Collections --> Explore collections.

My feedback here would be, I’d prefer that Live Maps allow user to add collection of a trail or area directly, rather than only the option of Pushpin in the first step.
Famous locations seems to have multiple collections assigned to it that are shared to public.

PS: if you create a Synth using Photosynth, you should add the location (the globe icon when you view the Synth in website). If you add the information, the Synth will be added as a Collection in Live Maps.

Update: updated about creating trail and area item from Open your collection dialogue. Thanks to Chris for the correction.

Remember the Publish → More Services in Live Photo Gallery ? Other than Flickr, we’re promised an extensibility. For the developers, there are API you can use to build plug in. For most of us programming-illiterate, we’re promised eventually there will be.

The Windows Live Photo & Video Blog has posted new plug-ins by peoples in CodePlex to the plug-ins download page.

The plug-ins are, LiveUpload to Facebook and LiveUpload to YouTube. This enable you to publish your photo or video to the two online services, just like you could publish to Spaces and Flickr. :)

Souvenir from last Saturday’s Indocomtech event.

It’s just a usual souvenir, but the one I used for my access card (from corporate birthday event) is getting old and just in time for a replacement. Too bad, my phone’s lanyard strap is too small to slip more than one set of string (thus I can’t complete my ambition to put 10+ phone straps). But on second thought, that phone is too heavy I should be worried about leaving it hanging for it’s life on tiny strings.

Anyway, as souvenir, can’t expect much of the quality though. It doesn’t seem something that would last long, although the Vista cell phone screen cleaner (alas half peeled off) and Microsoft Dynamics waist bag (the inside is quite dirty and screen unfriendly though) I got from friend is still more or less useful. :D

Imagine, a world where even kids in a remote town used credit card to buy candy in local store. All the salary in the world are paid through electronic transaction from the company’s account to the employee’s. And physical money are nothing more than remnants of the past.

It sounds like a reasonable future. Every transaction is done through networks of financial institutions like bank or credit provider (and maybe other companies not yet existing).

But… I wonder what happened to something of the current economy. What limits the amount of money in transaction? In the old days (at least as old as money), money represent real goods are resource. We also have the government to limit how much physical money can be published.

But when physical money become irrelevant in daily use. When institutions could give credit by “adding numbers into debtor’s account” as “money from the future” or something. What limits the amount of money flowing in our economy?

Besides, does this means every of those institutions will always be liquid because the “hard cash” in that age would simply be the numbers in their electronic data which might always be ready?

Well, to tell the truth, I don’t understand what mechanism that works in limiting the amount of money that can flow in our present economy anyway. Is it through auditing of assets that a company have that they can’t give out more credits than what they’re worth?

Image pattern recognition is still something difficult, even for us (ever tried ink blot test ?).

Get something funny using Live Photo Gallery’s face recognition feature yesterday and find something fun.

I just point and shoot a picture during when I went out. Then, after importing it from my camera to my desktop using Photo Gallery, I browsed and look for which are worthy of the del button.

This one had person identified, while I know I didn’t take picture of anyone’s face. Out of curiosity, I tried checking. Sometimes, it points at something like hand, or just random object. But this time… I think I saw a face, or at least a pair of eyes and mouth.

Too bad, I didn’t have much luck with the other misidentifications yet so far.

I wonder if this feature could spot ghost apparition accidentally caught in random photo also (^^;)

  Quote

Microsoft Introduces Updated Windows Live Services: Leading Web companies work with Microsoft to sim
Availability

This next generation of Windows Live, available at http://www.windowslive.com, will begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009. Today’s release not only marks a milestone in the evolution of the Internet, but also represents a key new opportunity for developers, advertisers and other organizations to build services that serve their respective constituencies.

*incoherent mutterings* US (not including me) and the rest of the world. Heard they'll start on November 12th, and I'm really excited to see the new Windows Live. Then greeted by that. I believe that my update for Live HotMail is together with other non en-US users. So, should next time a user install Windows, or Windows Live, we just make a false claim that we're in Uncle Sam instead of stating the real information because it's the complete version. Ah, IIRC, the weather applet in Origami also needed en-US regional setting ?

A bad dream for today. I dreamed playing in the kitchen, and found two fly traps. It’s the type that lure flies to enter, and then trap them inside until they died by dehydration.

The body uses transparent plastic, and presenting the view of the flies, grey and dried and their eyes looking at my side. Some had red eyes, some had yellow eyes that are shedding, leaving the greyish inside.

Hope it’s not a bad sign -_-

After going to Mangga Dua to look for CD for my father, I went to Kota. There’s an event sponsored by the local department of tourism from November 8th to 9th.

And I’m so so wrong. From yesterday, and today, the whole square is infested by mass from FBR. What is that? Well, it’s a civil organization in Jakarta. In my opinion (and I think many others), it qualifies as a private army. They’re organized, and could send down their mass on a raid.

Not really bad if it’s against another organization that also cause problem, but if it’s done against civilian their leader think is wrong? And also the members could tend to be arrogant because of the number and think they’re above the law. Well, the usual problem with a private army.

*sigh*

Doesn’t get many pictures. During such time, able to ride motorcycle sounds very practical.