BELLAMYBUDIMAN

Today is my second day in Singapore, and I’m writing this from the Geek Terminal, supposedly 15 minutes before the ASEANpreneurs event starts. And I’m really enjoying the superb high speed connection here. A true broadband, nonetheless.

As a sidenote, in case you didn’t know, the ASEANpreneurs Youth Leadership Network is an organization created to promote entrepreneurship in the ASEAN region. And their current program is the Alpha Challenge, focused on the young potentials so that they also could become successful entrepreneurs in the future. I was fortunate enough to be invited as one of the speakers in the networking event today.

It’s been almost four years since I went to Singapore, and every time I went here, it always brought me the same fascination. Some say that they who lived here are often complaining because of the strict rules and that Singapore is a “fine” country. You can’t practically do anything without being fined. Okay, maybe I exaggerated, but there are tons of rules here like no littering, no smoking, no illegal street-crossing, no chewing gums, and so on. Maybe the citizens grew tired of the rules, but as for me, it’s a relief from the chaos in Jakarta. To me, Singapore is a heavenly ordered country with clear signages, clean roads, better traffic, and a good neighborhood.

Getting somewhere from anywhere is painless here, the public transportation is second to none, accurate, and somewhat affordable. During my stay here, I rely mostly on MRTs and public buses. Of course, there is one hassle today when I took the wrong bus and went the wrong way =). But that was entirely my fault for not checking the route before going in the bus. Taxis, however, are expensive and not recommended for short trips.

Wayfinding is also terrific, the whole island is packed with free Wi-Fi, and thanks to my friend Dirman Suharno for letting me know about gothere.sg, and thank God for my iPhone, finding my directions on the go is truly a snap! Even my iPhone didn’t require additional settings to use StarHub’s GPRS service. How cool is that?

During my stay here, it feels like I’ve been burning out calories more than I did for a year in Jakarta. Walking from one end of Orchard Road to the other end twice really pulled my leg. But no matter, walking is healthy, and walking for three days straight is a good workout.

I sure wished I could stay here longer, but I’m taking a break in the middle of work. So I have to head home tomorrow and enjoy the world’s best airport just before I have to deal with Soekarno-Hatta and its ugliness. But one thing that I must do before leaving tomorrow is hawking right next to Concorde Hotel (was Le Meridien).

Lastly, given the question “when do you think Jakarta, or in this case, Indonesia could be like Singapore?” I would say… KAPAN-KAPAN!!!

Yep, I just did a redesign to my personal website. It was long overdue, and the design before this was created three years ago. So, yes, it was way overdue.

As for this one, I started the design with no PhotoShop just yesterday. I think this was the second time I did that. The first one was the current Neuro-Designs design. I was trying to push myself on how to foresee a design without any aid from a visualization software, and work them directly on HTML codes, except for the logo and background texture, of course. Typography-based designs never failed me before, it certainly didn’t fail me this time :).

Those with a keen design consciousness, you will see that my website is now a pure Helvetica experience with grids! I’m sorry, Windows users, unless you have the typeface installed, you’ll have to resort to Arial (which is euwhhh…) or your default sans serif typeface if you hated Arial that much and decided to delete it.

Despite that I finished the basic design in practically a day, there are still lots of things to be done, and I’m more than sure that there will be bugs. So I’m looking forward on monitoring and optimizing my new design for days to come.

Just like normal designers, I too like photography. I’m not a hardcore photographer, or consider photography as a source of income, but since I bought the Canon PowerShot G10 almost two weeks ago, I’m trying at best to lure out my photography skills again. I now carry the camera regularly, and shoot anything whenever I got the chance. I just love the camera, it is surely money well spent. For now :)

My Flickr account was actually created quite a while ago, but I haven’t really decided on how to use it, since Facebook’s photo app already served me well. Now, I decided that my hobby photographs should go into Flickr, and everything else should go into Facebook. In short, Flickr = serious, Facebook = the rest. It’s about time that I take this hobby a bit more serious.

Click here to visit my Flickr photostream. And I’ve also reopened the Gallery section of this website. It contains 20 of my latest photos.

The end of the year is getting near, and the holiday is on its track toward the new year. For me, most of the time, having a holiday from the office means that this is the chance to unclutter myself from months worth of bills, receipts, and a tremendous amount invoice copies I’ve accumulated throughout the year. I always try my best on keeping my life paperless, which means less hassle, less storage, and cleaning up my home would be a snap. But this is not without a challenge.

One of the first rules that I always keep in mind is that I get rid all of those unimportant receipts (Such as dinners, lunches, parking tickets, ATM receipts, and everything else that doesn’t go up to IDR 100k and more than 3 months old). This is fairly easy, just pile them up, put them in the shredder, and boom, it’s safe for disposal or recycling.

The next step I always took is to keep all the receipts for all items that come with a warranty. This could be cellphones, PDAs, computers, automobile spare parts, softwares, and sometimes books. Or in my case, generally everything that costs more than IDR 300k. You’ll never know when you would get into trouble, especially when your country doesn’t have a 30-day money back guarantee. But I do dispose them after the usual 1-year warranty expires.

The last step that I haven’t quite figure out is actually account statements. Over the years, I’ve got at least like five or six different account statements from various services, be it credit cards, cellphones, insurance, cable TV, and so forth.

Since last year, we’ve been a continuing design service provider for our US-based client called Pixily. Who are they? Long story short, they can keep all your documents, receipts, and things like that online for easy access. That means, you can simply recycle all the original papers once they have it stored on their servers. A brilliant idea which makes your documents accessible from virtually anywhere, as long as you are connected to the internet. And since they existed, that means companies in the US consider digitized copies of their receipts legit. And unlike our country, the US Government also has the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which is a good start for having less paper clutter in your life. But giving the benefit of the doubt, can anyone point me if our government has such act as well?

As for the office, I kept a copy of Yep on my Mac. Regularly, we digitize all of our office’s receipts and statements, creating digital copies in PDF for archiving and easy retrieval whenever we need them. This is way easier than to have ourselves messing around with horde of receipts every time or so.

But even after all this effort, I still can’t decide whether I should recycle all those credit card billing statements or not. Here are some questions that I have in mind, particularly when living in Indonesia:

• Do Indonesian banks consider digitized copies of account statements legit? I once applied for a credit card (Bank Danamon), and they asked me for the real cellphone billing statements for the last three months. I asked them whether I could print digital copies and send those out instead. They said no, they wanted the REAL ones. And oh, BTW, they promised me a Gold card, and even until now, a promise is just a promise. But that’s another matter.
• How can we be paperless if PDF document copies from governmental sites are not even real PDFs. Mostly, they are actually scanned paper documents which they created with typewriters. This means, our own government doesn’t even know if Microsoft Word can export documents to PDFs for the citizens to download. Try the Direktorat Pajak, for example. Messy… Just messy.
• We don’t have a dedicated recycling center where you can go there, bring along your paper waste, and just drop them off for recycling. We do, however, have those so-called dedicated trash bins that allowed us to separate different kinds of trash into different bins. But, of course, we know that here, this method does not work at all.

Bottom line, I’d love to get rid all of the account statements that I’ve scanned, but in particular for my first question, does anyone know if that works here? Is it really hard to live efficiently here?

I finally got my Alkitab hosted graciously at modmyifone. So if any of you want to install it to your iPhone or iPod Touch, things have just got much more easier. Just open up Installer, install Books.app, and then install the Alkitab.