from the horizon

I recently had a conversation with an Indonesian friend of mine who is studying Law at a University in Banda Aceh. He complained at the fact that a number of his teachers would only spend about 10 minutes in the lectures, before leaving to go to their other job at the BRR (Badan Rehabilitasis dan Rekonstruksi – the Government Department of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction for the Tsunami relief).

He is a very smart student, and is very keen to get a quality education. However the current situation is impacting on his studies and he is currently looking for scholarships to study abroad (if anyone knows of any, please contact me, and I’ll pass the information on!).

I can understand the teacher’s motivation, as I am sure that they can get much more money working for the Tsunami Relief than they get paid working at the university. However their neglect of the students who they are responsible for educating is disgusting. It is ironic that their work for the BRR is supposed to be to help Aceh. However because they are failing to teach their students at the university, I am sure that their work has a negative impact in the long run.

It has always been my intention to make my own design for the presentation of my blog. It’s only taken me more than a year, but I’ve finally gotten around to making my own “blog theme”.
This involved me hacking round some CSS and PHP (I say hacking, because I went in without know much about either of the languages!). I also learnt how to use GIMP – a very user unfriendly graphics editor (Hurray for Open Source!).
In my attempt to create a prettier looking blog, I found out about anti-aliasing and have some interesting analogies along the lines of my Quantization spiel. Might write about that one later!

Go to a few different pages to check out the different banner pictures. A gold star for the person who can guess where they are all from (there’s 6 different countries so far!).

Feedback and comments are welcome (it would be nice to know that someone appreciates my blog beautification efforts), please let me know if anything isn’t working or doesn’t look right. (I’m following my philosophy of participatory testing – which means that you test it for me )

I’m pretty open minded when it comes to other cultures, and different values, but there is one thing which I just don’t get in Indonesia: what they do with their rubbish.

People seem to have a totally different attitudes toward a clean environment. Although the will keep the insides of their houses spotless, there is so much rubbish littered all over the place. Piles of rubbish collect in open spaces and the open sewer, people are quite happy to throw rubbish on the ground, or out of vehicles. It’s been said that in developing countries people are used to all the rubbish biodegrading, and the problem is with all the plastics and other such materials which have been introduced from the West. When I order food here, it is wrapped up in a banana leaf and paper, then put in a plastic bag (the sort they use for everything), which always makes me cringe.

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