Relax it is only me

March 16th, 2007 by Reza

Those of you who knows me knows that even though I do criticize, I try to be subjective about it, I try to find the balance between good and bad, and I would never say it in a public place (well not more than 5 people) anyway. But on some things, a line has to be drawn and something was shown to me that just crossed that line, something came up and deserved a public flogging, outrage, even perhaps demanding a petition.

The STEI - Sekolah Teknik Elektro & Informatika (School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics) of ITB (institut teknologi bandung, my almamater) just put out a profile video of itself.

It’s 17 minutes of uninteresting and incomprehensible drivel. Well to be fair, I only saw 10 minutes (10 minutes of uninteresting and incomprehensible drivel), who knows, maybe the other 7 minutes were actually quite good? I basically lost any interest after that?
You can access the STEI video through google video

What was wrong with this video? Well for starters language. It looks like it’s supposed to be in English, but not in any grammar or dialect that I know of. Unless you call Inglish (Indonesian-English) as a dialect. The language was plain awful and incomprehensible. I don’t know who wrote it, and the reading of the text (the background narration) was hmm… muddled.

So what else is in this video? Well there’s an animation of two elephants building robots. But no actual research products. There’s also the mission and vision statement of the school. We Indonesian love our mission and vision. Everyone has it and they love to put it everywhere. In campaigns, in proposals, in introduction to schools, in website and yes in this video.

So who’s the target market of this video? Is it prospective students, who I think would be really interested in our departments because of the mangled english and the great mission and vision of the department? Or is it likely other professors from other school who is likely to be interested in our departments because of mmmm… the fact that ITB was formed in 1920 and named Technische Hogeschool te Bandung, and of course, very importantly the mission and the vision of the school.

Yes.. I am being sarcastic

Sure it’s easy to criticize. Yes people are gonna tell me that instead of talking trash about it maybe I should’ve made it. Well no. It’s not my project. I’m not getting paid to create it, and why would I, I don’t have the necessary know how and time to create it. I do know a bad prospective when I see one. If we’re (STEI) paying for it, then I expect something better, something more exciting, something that makes me want to go there. If we’re not paying for it, then hell, why aren’t we, we should be utilizing professional to do this instead of being cheap and using amateurs.

I’m thinking of creating a petition:

pull STEI ITB flash
Remove the video?
never use it again
and never mention it again!!!

Tags: ITB flash english bad awful STEI video

March 9th, 2007 by Reza

Winter’s almost over, hopefully. Even though I didn’t ski, or snowtube like I usually do, there were still a lot of things to be done:

Just enjoying the snow and warming each other

Here I am walking (yes walking) on the red cedar river. It was frozen solid in the middle of winter so we were able to walk on it. Of course we didn’t linger long. We didn’t know how long would it hold up. It’s now a free flowing river again.

Sledding down the hill. There’s a small park near here, next to the shopping mall, Frandor . Anyway there’s a small hill there that you can sled down for free. Because it’s not specially made for this sport it is a bit dangerous. So you have to be very careful….

February 2nd, 2007 by Reza

I’ve always thought that the satellite views in google maps were created from real actual satellite view. Apparently not so, according to this blog article. In sidney, Australia, they used a map (complete with the google logo) to take a picture of the ground. Look at the silly things some of the people there are trying to get into the maps.

On another note, I actually wanted to create a blog article, with a map to my old school in Australia, unfortunately the picture of the school was covered by a light cloud. Too bad….

February 1st, 2007 by Reza

Jorge Cham, comicus and creator of the PhDComics series came to MSU yesterday. Various posters were scattered around the MSU campus, all having his famous line “Free Food”. I had three emails reminding me of this event (from the graduate secretary), which was more emails than any other events I’ve heard of before.

Anyway, I wondered what he wanted to talk about. I’m a big fan of his comics of course (it’s so true it’s scary), being a PhD student and all. I just didn’t know what kind of talk he was giving. He was quite funny, and he really knew how to play the audience, making a lot of pauses here and there.

The title of the talk was the power of procrastination. Surely he was not telling us to procrastinate? It turns out that his talk was more about keeping your sanity in grad school. At least that’s what I got out of it, unfortunately I had to quickly get out and do some shopping as we have run out of rice at home. So I didn’t get the free food either

I guess his main point is that procrastination has its good side. His example was that Newton, Einstein, and the founders of both Google and Yahoo! are both procrastinator. What was Newton doing under the tree when the apple fell on him? Einstein could’ve been a middle manager in his patent office had he not procrastinated and wasted time on the theory of physics. The Yahoo! founders advisor’s was on a sabbatical so “hey, you want to do something.. I don’t know like.. categorize the internet?”. I guess procrastinating has its uses after all. Maybe I’ll do more of it in the future he .. he ..
Some quotes of the night

• “On average, grad students make $15 a year than a person working in mcDonalds (in california). You can do a lot with $15, you can buy one CD …. per year”
• “Berkeley recently did a graduate student mental health survey … They found that 95% of students have ever felt overwhelmed. I know what you’re thinking, who are the other 5%?”
• “Oxford dictionary defines procrastination as postponing something needlessly. Well it seems we have a loophole there, what if there was a need for it?”
• “Procrastination is not equals to laziness. Laziness is not wanting to do something. Procrastination is just not wanting to do something right now”

January 30th, 2007 by Reza

Just read an article on hazing. Most US schools have disallowed any form of hazing. What is hazing, well, it’s an initiation ceremony where older students pick on, bully, torture younger student before letting them join their organization, club, or whatever. The article talks about two year punishment given to those performing the hazing. Interesting to add that “willing participation” of the hazee (I know, it’s not a real world) is not an accepted defence.
In indonesia hazing, or more likely to be known as Orientasi Studi (OS) or Study Orientation (We Indonesian just love our euphemism) is still common. I’ve heard all the reasons that these things are held, to make younger student grow up, get them ready for the real world, make them respect their elders, help them survive independently, and make them bond as a group.

Hazing and OS is one of my raw spots, I’ve never agreed to it, and I’ve always thought of it as stupid. I’ve even been inside the committee, and I still think it’s stupid. It hasn’t changed me, and I doubt it has changed anyone else. Except for those doing the hazing (a classic study of people given too much power is the stanford prisoner experiment in the 70’s.

I’ve never seen any actual documented proof that students get better after these sessions (compared to before). Personally, I’ve tended to resent those people more, I’ve lost some respect to them, and compared with those never attending a single OS session, I’m no better off, and I don’t think anybody else is either. Yet, I’m still not sure why this tradition is still around.

January 29th, 2007 by Reza

Cool, I managed to break IE with mapdaze. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you should stop (stop using it). Even IE 7 crashes. I’m not sure why. Is it the script? Is it the PNG file?

This morning I tried a request to mapdaze via IE-6. Not only did the page not show up. The computer got so heated, that you can hear the lovely (and pretty loud) humming of the CPU fan. I decided to turn kill IE. Any suggestion?

January 28th, 2007 by Reza

I’ve changed the name of the map-blog-embed project. I’ve also bought a new domain, so now instead of netdais.com, I am going to use mapdaze.com. It’s still the same site, only different (hopefully better) design, and a little bit better features. Now all I’ve got to do is tell everyone (which is not hard, considering that so far only 2 people have signed up for the service) to change their links

One problem I’ve been having is that sometimes maps don’t show up in IE6 (I’m not worried about below IE-6 as those people should change their browser). Anyway, the trouble seems to be that IE6 tries to run the script to quickly instead of waiting for the google map API to load up.

January 24th, 2007 by Reza

I was riding in the bus due to the wintery condition. I happenned to look around, and realized out of the 6 people sitting next to me, 4 of them were wearing headphones and listening to music, well presumably listening to music anyway. They could be doing other things with their headphones of course, blocking out sounds, keeping their ear-holes warm, trying to look cool (because it looks like they were listening to music), and of course, the conspiracy theorists favorite, because they were getting instruction from headquarters (or alien ships, depending on which conspiracy you subscribe to) and they were spying on me.

I don’t like wearing headphones, I don’t listen to music much. It’s not that I hate it, or that I think it’s the work of the devil. I just don’t… The same way that I don’t eat too many cookies (except for last night). In fact, in facebook I am in a group, called “I’m the only kid on my block without an Ipod”. I’m serious about this. Which is only half true, because my wife has an Ipod, and what’s hers is mine right (just kidding darling…)

Back to the topics of headphones. I’ve never been a fan of music. I like to look around, see the world, listen to the natural sounds of the environment, listen in on people (whoops…). Seriously though, the one problem with having a headphone in your ear and listening to music (as opposed to any other reasons stated above), is that you lose any environmental cues that you may have to survive. You don’t understand what’s going on around you, you don’t move your butt when you’re supposed to. I’ve seen many cases of people trying to get through the cramped bus to get through the door, and they are blocked by a person who won’t move, because they’re too busy listening to music and not noticing that somebody else wants to pass by. Other cases include not moving to the back of the bus (which means that nobody can get in the bus), because they don’t know the space behind them has emptied up…

Wow I’m ranting…

Another thing about listening to music is what does your mind do? I tend to think a lot when I am at the bus, imagine, assess, ponder, and most of the time.. daydream. What do people think of with music in their ear? This is a real question I’m asking, because, I just don’t know seeing as I’m the only kid on my block without an IPod.

January 23rd, 2007 by Reza

I’ve been working on a new project this last month. This project is the reason why I have the domain ferrydiansyah.com.

The project is simply a tool that will let users easily embed google maps into their blogs. I want it to also act as a directory for blog articles which you can search by location. Here is the site of the google map embedding project (www.netdais.com). It’s still currently in beta, and it has some pretty stiff competition. Of course I’m trying to reach a different market especially for bloggers.
I don’t have a blog for it yet (I know that a lot of “startup” does have blogs for their product). I’m not sure I’ll create one
as of now. It’s still in beta by the way, which means that bugs are a plenty

January 20th, 2007 by Reza

Just a map of my lab, competing with zalfany’s article on his lab. My lab is located on 3353 Engineering Building, Michigan State University. Each building in Michigan State has its own address, I never use the street address. In fact, I don’t even know what the street address is