Agronesia

I found this card game Xeco with ecosystem as its background topic, so you’ll have real animals instead of made up monsters. If you know Yu-Gi-Oh!, then yeah, the basic idea is to fight with our card, but the gameplay is different.

Somehow they have an Indonesian mission (a pack of cards?):

Go Indonesia!

(but why in the earth do they put ™ to the right of the word “Indonesia”? It’s my country’s name dammit!)

But we have to buy it, either in a USA real shop or online. It would be great if they provide the files for us to print ourselves :P.

From the neighbor photocopy shop, I got the schedule for my area’s scheduled blackout. Call it crazy, but for this month PLN (Perusahaan Listrik Ngaco) schedules 10 blackout!

Because today, July 1st, my area is supposed to be cut from electrical supply from 7:00 to 17:00, I went to GLP to avoid it.

But they didn’t turn it off after all!

I don’t know whether to be happy or mad. For one thing, they’ve made my evacuation plan useless and just time wasting. Can I sue them from spreading pure FUD? But viewed from another angle, isn’t canceling a planned evil deed a good thing?

Next scheduled outage: July 3rd.

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.

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).

Starting from June 17, 10 a.m PDT, or June 18 in Indonesia, we can download Firefox 3 final! I’m running its latest RC right now, and will of course download it as soon as it becomes available.

They are aiming to be the most software downloaded in 24 hours, and that’s partly the reason I’m hyping it. You can actually pledge to download Firefox, and 1.5 million people have actually pledged. It’s a shame that while Indonesia has almost 2 times the population of Japan, Japan has almost 9 times people pledging! This shows how primitive, or how free-software-apathetic, the Indonesian culture is.

So, don’t forget to do it tomorrow. (I wonder whether their servers can handle the load)

Well, almost 10 hours…

5 days after the last blackout, Sokaraja got its turn again. They cut the powers off at around 7:24.

I needed to write using my laptop, so I went along my parents to Purwokerto and stayed at GLP for the day (pictured above). When I arrived back home, the lights were still off. It went back to normal operation on around 17:00.

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In this hard times I call “the Indonesian power crisis of 2008″, PLN once again shut the electricity off. But this day, they did it starting from around 17:20! It’s now 18:12, and Sokaraja Tengah is still pitch black. Luckily my laptop has batteries and my modem can live off the UPS.

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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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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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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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