that was surprisingly expected

One of the business associate (from a different company) I work with decided to give me a "cut" from the price mark up for providing them with customers, in comparison to how much they're getting from each customer it's not even 1% but the actual ammount is not that small either, returning the cut while probably the most ethical thing to do is not an option so I'm stuck with either giving the clients this amount back as change for the excess they've paid or keeping it for myself.

to put things in perspective US$1 is around Rp. 9000 and the average wage is around Rp. 1.5 million, so US$ 50 is quite a large ammount around here.

If I was to look at it exclusively from the financial side I'd take the money.......tempting, victimless and I would probably sleep better because I couldn't care less about other people, no one's going to know I took the money right? unless you're a religious person in which you'll say "God will know and you'll go to hell for that" but I'm not so there!

On the other side if I took it I'll be doing what everyone else is doing.

so which one shall it be.....financial gain? or what is left of my moral integrity?

I'm not going to say here whether or not I took the money, I'll leave that for you to ponder and to question what kind of person I am.

Spreading the word

There are alway more than one side of a story, you hear about Hansel and Gretel escaping the evil witch but you'll never hear about why the evil witch became evil, much like the news really.

anyway enough about the Evil Witch, I was scanning the news today and found a link to a very interesting blog written by an obviously educated Iraqi women in Iraq, nothing special about it, it's just another blog with personal entry logs with persoal views I just happen to find her entries amusing, the only difference is it shows a side of the whole Iraqi conflict that is hardly shown on TV aside from that it reads like any other personal blogs, go on, read it I'll guarantee it'll give you'll laugh maybe even cry a little while understanding a little more about Iraq and Iraqis beyond the smoke screen.

Zero reduction in productivity

They call it cyber-slacking, sure if you have a heavy workload and neglecting it by constant non-work related browsing halting your productivity I guess you can be called a cyber slacker but if you have very little or near zero workload and you spend your time at the office browsing after you have finished the work you wouldn't be slacking now would you? since going home early isn't an option when working in an office environment what else can you do but surf teh eent4rw3bz?

back to work....again

Well I did go to work on monday but I had a run in with some bad chicken sate (Indonesian version of a kebab) for dinner and within hours my stomach decided to throuw it all out or at least it felt like it was going to, bottom line is I couldn't go to work yesterday an instead I just sat my ass all day playing we love damacy and kingdom hearts 2 with a more than frequent toilet breaks and did my other job which was translating comics, surprisingly staying at home was more productive than if I had gone to work an oddity which does not come around very often for me.

While I'm not fully recovered from my encounter with that food extending my sick leave for another day may be asking for too much so here I am back at the office, ok-ish but I'd rather be home.

AAAAAHHH!!!

It's St. Paddy's day and I completely forgot about it! I've got nothing green to wear! NOOOooo!!!!!!

Reduction in life expextancy due to economic pressure

2 New translations orders just got in and I have to finish 1 book (about 180 pages each) in a week, let's see I can squeeze my gaming time to about 2 hours and do about 40-50 pages in a day with approximately 10-20 pages an hour and finish it in approximately 5 days (not including hammering in on the weekends), considering I usually get home from work at about 6pm if I'm lucky so I'll probably be sleeping at around 12 or 1 am maybe even later and wake up at about 4:30 to catch up with my gaming time before going to work at 6:30 am.

Who needs friends when you have a game console?

I HAVE ZA POWA!!!!!

I HAVE ADMIN POWA!!!! I have godlike powers surging through my veins! no, seriously, after a extended argument regarding my network access I finally persuaded the techie (there's only one in the entire office) to bestow me with the awesome power of a network administrator to its fullest extent, now I can shut down the network on every computer in every department if I wanted to. Let's see them dissmissing me for gross negligence now!

Honestly though I'm not gonna do that...... <_<>_>

larger than life

Using a projector as a computer screen can really put things in a different perspective. There I was sitting in Intercontinental Hotel (Jakarta) convention room waiting for the Education expo to start, with no one else around but the security details and I have 2 hours to spare I did the only sensible thing to do for a guy with a notebook and a projector, I plugged the projector in and played Warcraft 3. Imagine 60% of the wall section of a hotel convention hall wall as your screen and the units you see on screen are bigger than the teacup you're holding and chatting online with a screen that big gives a whole different experience, I'm liking the television as a projection medium for interactive entertainment lesser now, I can imagine how uncomfortable playing an FPS on such a big screen can be but an MMO may actually be fun. Despite the huge screen however I still I had to use my earphones to get the a good audio.

Last strech

Another chapter in my life is closely coming to an end. As I sit in front of my office computer logging into my Monash University student account for the last time memories of the past 5 years of my academic life suddenly came rushing to my head, both good and bad, thoughts of what I could have done better and the things that I have accomplished during my tenure as a university student.

I remember about 5 years ago when a young 18 year old student set my foot in Melbourne embarking in an adventure that is tertiary education, he was sure where I wanted to be but unsure on how to get there. he knew it was not going to be an easy road to take but nonetheless a road that must be taken.

So there I was, standing in line in Monash University for the first time waiting to sign up for my subjects of choice, although I knew I was applying for a course called bachelors of arts I had no idea what was in it, all I knew was that at that time it had a GPA requirement that I could achieve realistically, advanced methematics is not part of the course nor the course requirement and that it had nothing to do with studying fine arts specifically, as I sat there looking at my options I was stunned by the amount of options they had for me ranging from languages to social studies to history, my choices were clear I wanted to know more about society and I wanted to study politics so I took sociology as major and politics as my minor, later I realized that they weren't offering the politics subject I wanted so I switched to history. Once that was done I had to wait in another line to get my photo taken for my student ID card, the photo was black and white and the card was made out of laminated paper and my face was veritcally compressed to fit the frame, in short it was cheap, really cheap but for some reason I was proud of it, I finally made it, I was a student in one of Australia's more prestigious university but more importantly I was academic.

It was not long until I became the president of the Monash University kendo club, while my skill were not comparable to some of my peers the coach saw that I was fit the manage the clubs administration. Personally I thought I did a decent job handling most of the administrative work in running the club however there are other things that I wish I could have done better, it was by convenience that I was also picked as the club delegate, a position I held for almost 3 years since nobody else wanted to do it. On the academic side being active in the club cost my academic performance to a small degree while other factors cause the decline of my overall performance and before I realized I had spent 5 years in a 3 year course but nevertheless I made it, I refused to take the easy way out and I finished my course, I've reached the end of another stage in a persons academic life I am a Monash University graduate.

So here I am now, much less of an academic, reading the last reminder of the 90 day limited access notification in my student e-mail account reminding me that after today I will no longer have access to the student account, soon I will be a bachelor in almost every sense of the word but before that I wait for the finale, the last curtain call, the last train stop, the last page in my academic life or what ever euphemism you can come up with, the day I will receive that damned piece of paper that every academic or crazy delusional individuals who are under the presumption that a university degree will guarantee a better job worked for years to obtain, once that is done I can finally close the book for good......that is until I decide whether or not to take a Masters degree.

Goliath online....

After the long grueling process of moving heavy objects to pulling cables from the ceiling my work area is finally set up, I've got a new office computer which I aquired by going over my managers head,and teh int4rw3bz works.

The good thing about my new space is it's right in the corner where I can see people coming in but nobody can know what I'm doing on the computer unless they come around behind me but I'm pretty sure they won't do that simply because it's very cramped, I am the king of my own realm and the the only access to he office toilet is right behind my desk so I'm going to start charging peple for that.

I still don't get the wi-fi coverage as I would hope but I can always hassle the people in the office room nearby for that.

....Meanwhile back at the office

Like I mentioned sometime ago, my office is being renovated, being beause it's still not done yet, al the furniture are on top of the other, none of the computers are plugged in and only one phone line is connected well at least the fax machine is still operating. I'm just wondering how I'm supposed to work today, from the looks of it I'm going to e doing a lot of lifting.

Re-sorting over 2000 songs

I've finally some time to time to sort out my iTunes list since I've got some more music from my trip to Melbourne, I thought it was a good idea until I realized I have more music files than I can handle and a limited drive space in my notebook.

Sorting out my music files needs at least more than just a few hours, there's the clone tracking and deletion then the re-catagorizing followed by the moving of the files from the external drive to the internal drive, renaming the file names, transferring the songs to iTunes then the re-naming some of the songs in the song info menu since some of them were incorrect, too long or just plain old gibberish and finishing with reallocating the songs in the proper list or re-re categorizing but within iTunes as oppose to the previous re-catagorizing which was in the file folders.

Now that I'm almost finished I can see my choice in music in my notebook is much more limited than last time but that's good since I'd have less songs to pick for my regular listening......then there's my iPod but that's a diferent story.


.....now I just realized out of all that I forgot to get one song from Melbourne and I have no way of getting it soon, sucks just doesn't quite capture my current predicament.

Post script

Now that the exhibition is over I just realized something, I'm stranded here in my old school, none of the office drivers are available to pick me up, my brother's using the family car, a friend of mine who I thought lived in this area is currently overseas and I hardly have any cash to grab a cab home. I wish I still have that house just behind this school like we used to. On the positive side I'm stuck in a familiar place so I decided to go for a little unsupervised no-safety wall climbing on the old wall they have here, also I met one of my old teacher and one of my younger brother's old teacher (if you're reading this Mr. Pujo sent his regards) so it's not all that bad.

....and there she was.....the big black horse that kicked me years ago....old but still alive and kicking.

Going old school

It's about 12 years since I've seen my old junior high school. funny how things turn out, I'm working in a place that helped my university application years ago, I'm working in conjuncture with the place where I used to study and now I'm in my old Junior high school grounds in a building that didn't exist when I was studying here I wonder if I'll be dealing with my old elementary school sometime soon.

Well I'm currently here in my old junior high offering students here an option to go to a small and not very famous university (UNSW) and for once the school offered me free lunch AND SNACKS!! never in my time here as a student have they ever offered me a free lunch or free anything for that matter and it wasn't bad either. While most students are looking to get into a more prestigious and lucrative yet painfully impossible to gain entry and not promoted in this exhibition such as Harvard, Princeton and Berkley, I'm dealing with students who have their feet on the ground but still want to study in a university but with a different experience. Yes that's how I'm promoting studying overseas to people now, not the academic prestige or credentials, not because some local universities have questionable reputation and definitely not because overseas graduate are guaranteed a job, it's the experience, I'm offering them to have a different experience in life to have them living a somewhat different life than the ones they are used to and explore other possibilities.....great marketing pitch eh?

The university I'm representing now may not be as famous as the previously mentioned American education Institutions but it doesn't mean it's crap either, but that's besides the point, the point is I'm now on the other end, the non studying but not teaching end either but it still feels kind of wierd.

moving day

It's moving day in may office today, from one side of the room to the other side since they're going to move the wall forward meaning I'll loose my old workspace. From what I can see I'll be working in a very cramped space as oppose to my current spacy one. I'll also be loosing my free Wi-Fi connection for my notebook so I can't keep in touch some people via the net while at work, probably my only real gripe about the whole re-arrangement, well that and the claustrophobic workspace.

I hope I can get some stray wireless feed at my new workspace.