Agronesia

Well, not a thorn actually, but I got a small furniture splinter stuck on my right hand’s palm. I used the old and trusted method to get the invasive object out…

First, you need to have a safety pin which we call “peniti” in Indonesia. Then, burn the sharp tip in the stove to make the safety pin… er… safe to use! It’s supposed to kill all the evil microbes in it. You can see in the photo above that it’s pitch black because of the fire.

After that just use the sharp end to stab and push the wood fragment out. It might hurt a lot depending on the penetration deepness. But of course it’s better than letting the small thing stay there and risk an infection.

Quite easy, actually…

On Windows XP’s command prompt (cmd.exe), we can use the keys Home to move the cursor to the start of the line and End for the end of the line. I’ve been baffled a long time why Linux’s terminal bash don’t behave the same. Instead they spit the tilde (~) to the screen.

It turns out that we need to use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E respectively. Linux command line interface has just become more usable for me :).

Perhaps you have other favorite shortcut keys?

My parents bought an IDE to USB adapter some time ago to connect an orphaned hard disk. The product name is “R-Driver III USB 2.0 to SATA IDE CABLE”. It consists of a power cord and a data cord. A 1-page manual and cables for SATA are also in the package.

The manual instructs you to set the drive’s jumper settings to Master. After that you just use the power cord to connect the drive to an electrical outlet, and the data cord to link the device to the USB port of your computer. Windows XP can load it without problems. Plug and Play!

I can now access my 80-GB hard disk easily :). It also worked on my parent’s HD.

If you need an Indonesian word list, probably for language processing, a starting point to make your uber dictionary, or others, here it is:

indonesian_word_list.zip (103 KB, 36203 entries)

The data is from the Indonesian dictionary for OpenOffice.org, kindly provided by Benitius Brevoort. I searched for it a long time ago for my program WordFinder which is used to find suitable words for mnemonics. For English words, I could just use the regex in Stardict.

I hope you find it useful.

No, not Utada Hikaru’s song…

Yesterday I rode my cousin’s Honda CRV. It has an automatic gearing (am I even using the correct terminology here?) and it was my first time riding such machine.

There were quite some modes we can choose for. There’s P for parking in which the car won’t move even if pushed. Then there’s N for neutral, in which we cannot make the car move using the pedal, but the car can still be pushed. R is for reverse, and D is for drive. And there are still some other stuffs for steep roads.

Switch to D to start moving. Once it’s running, it’s actually very easy. Just press the pedal!

Also don’t forget to use your right foot even for the breaks.

Have you tried one?

I dare say this Mr. 588011503136145672 is an elliptical galaxy

I found this website named Galaxy Zoo. After we register there and pass the test (yes, there’s a test!) we can start help them classify galaxies! Another great way to spend your time when you’re bored.

Although there are only 6 categories to choose there, apparently asking for human help is better than making a program to classify it. If you don’t know anything about galaxy shapes (like me), don’t worry because there’s a very visitor-friendly tutorial.

From the 15-question test, I answered 12 correctly and passed:

Thanks to the tutorial, I now know some stuffs about galaxy classification. First we have the boring elliptical ones and the more interesting spiral ones. The spiral galaxies can be further classified based on their twirling direction, clockwise or counter clockwise. Then we also have image of merging galaxies and anomalous image caused by stars or satellites.

Most of the stuffs I encountered there were low quality blobs so far, but I’m hoping to discover a conical galaxy one day.

Midroad in Jakarta, I saw a deviant writing on the wall:

Susah
Bensin
Ya
Jalan
Kaki

Which means “If fuel is difficult (expensive), just walk!”. The funny thing is that the words are designed so that it can be abbreviated to “SBY-JK”, the current leaders of the country (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-Jusuf Kalla). It’s certainly a form of protest against the recent price increase in fuel.

It is scheduled that we will go to Jakarta soon to attend a close relative’s big auspicious event. An around 9 hours journey (IIRC), and I’ll take the first drive.

I got my driver’s license (SIM) in a 100% legal way. Yep, I passed all the tests :). However, despite that, my driving skill is kinda bumpy so let’s all hope there won’t be a wreckage tonight.

By Anonymous coward on Slashdot, with some modifications:

Teacher: “Did you write this whole thing yourself?”
Student: “Yes, of course!”
Teacher: “Are you sure”
Student: “Yes, 100%”
Teacher: “Well, a huge chunk of your report is straight from Wikipedia. I already checked it.”
Student: “Um, yeah, well, um I wrote that Wikipedia page.”

Luckily in Wikipedia we have complete log of edits, so that claims like that can be checked :).

Just when I thought things had gotten better, the lights went off again. It started from around 13:30 until around Maghrib. I spent most of the day reading Routledge pictured above, and actually had to go outside when things darken a bit!

I haven’t touched this book for ages so it’s probably not all bad.

PLN should stand for Perusahaan Listrik Nyebahi (The electrical company that we hate).