Agronesia

Not even a week after the last outage, my house at Sokaraja Tengah, Purwokerto went dark again! This time the lights went off at around 8:30.

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The last time the battery was on the verge of exploding. This time, the handphone just wouldn’t turn on!

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Today, around 9 AM, when I was translating a chapter of Tae Kim’s tutorial, the lights went off. Well, as expected of PLN, the national monopolizing body of electricity in Indonesia.

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(no, that’s not me, both the hand and the little thing. I’m the one taking the photo though)

In my house there are lots of mouse, rats, or whatever they actually are. They make noises from the ceiling at night, they poo anywhere they want, and worst of all… THEY EAT CABLES! When they succeed cutting the telephone line, there won’t be any internet for me, so they deserve to be exterminated.

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This is not exactly new stuff, but I just recently found it.

Chimpanzees are known as a highly intelligent animal. They use stone and wooden tools, hunt in coordination, and can be taught limited sign language. What might be surprising is that on a particular intellectual test devised by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, young chimps outperforms university students.

Here’s a simple explanation of the test, which is actually a fun game:

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Yesterday night, the television began announcing that starting from May 24th the new prices of fuel will take effect. My parents immediately asked me to fill the almost-empty tank of the car. Accompanied by my youngest brother, we took the ride to the closest gas station.

It was not far off, but we got halted by the one and only traffic light between my house and the station. The counter showed that we had to wait for 50 seconds. On our left and right were motorcycles with their riders dressed in all sort of thick clothing to protect them from the fierce coldness of the night. “Hurry up!”, I said to myself as if it would speed things up. I knew people everywhere are now rushing to the station, so I better arrive soon to prevent being the tail of a long line.

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Welcome! You surely know my old blog, Singularity on the Plane. I’ve decided to get serious on blogging so my first step was to move out of wordpress.com and host my own WordPress, get a proper domain name, and split my blog into several blogs.

As you might know from my old blog, I blog a lot about Japanese language. So it is no wonder that I’m opening two Japanese-language related blogs, Aguro and Yumeko. The main difference is that Aguro will be written in English while Yumeko in Indonesian. Also, Aguro will be more “personal” since it tracks my study progress, much like the good old Plane.

You might be surprised that I’m giving a shot at Midoria, a blog about my casual study on plant taxonomy. I didn’t post about it a lot on Singularity, but actually I kind of secretly studied it now and then on real life.

There’s also the Indonesian-language version of this blog. You can treat it as a subset of this English version, where only articles of high value will be translated. So my 1000-words essay about the effect of coughing on poverty will definitely get translated there, but stuffs like “OMG today I went to this shop and the food was like super-delicious!!!” will probably be only on this English version.

So this place will be the continuation of my old blog: a jumbled mess of any and every thing that are outside the scope of my properly-defined blogs. Watch out though, topics appearing here frequent enough might get forked into its own blog. Software (especially free software) and programming are two of the things I have in mind :).

Wish me luck that all this reorganization will work out well!