This ongoing project is called aifonografi, a project coined by Andira Pramanta and Arief Rakhmadani. It is a simple photoblog with many contributors. What sets it apart is that the contributors are required to be either in Indonesia or Indonesian anywhere in the world, have an iPhone, and to contribute a photo a day, throughout 2010 (at least until we decide if we want to continue this next year or not). We have a theme on every weekend that lasts a day, and it’s free-for-all for the rest of the week.

So here we are, on the fourth day of 2010, 17 members, and growing bit by bit all year long. Come take a look.

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!!!

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.

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?

Note: This is a repost of what I’ve written in Neuro-Designs’ Company Blog.

Just two days ago, our good friend Jonathan Nasution came up with the idea on integrating Twitter users to report traffic updates. I took the chance to develop this website together with him, as a pet project for Neuro-Designs. The basic idea is to have Twitter users update their status with the latest traffic report, and we mine that data as a feed to WordPress. The result? Well, you would just have to see it for yourself.

This is work on the go, so I’m quite surprised with what we can come out with in just two days. I really feel that both WordPress and Twitter are easily integrated, and they contribute an immense impact to the world of Web 2.0. Thanks for all the support and suggestions, guys! Especially to Charles Johnson, Aulia Masna, and Andira Pramanta.

I just finished a personal project which I decided to do in my free time during the holidays. Think of it as my dedication to pro-bono church works. My personal project is the Indonesian version of the Bible. Why? Because I found no Indonesian iPhone/iPod Touch versions of it over the internet, so I decided to make it on my own.

I’ve been using electronic Bibles to reduce my load when going to the church since I used my old Palm Zire 72, and when I moved to the Sony Ericsson K610i afterwards. After I bought the iPod Touch two weeks ago, and got it jailbroken, I figured that with its superb text-rendering capabilities which is far better from my previous gadgets (Thanks to OS X), it can be a good eBook reader with a nice legibility. So why not have a Bible in it?

I’ve set up a dedicated page for it here (which became a reason that I have to spend more time taking care of my personal site) with all of the needed instructions provided. So if you’re an Indonesian, and happened to own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and needed the bible, feel free to download a copy.

Last Thursday, UPH faxed me an invitational letter to join in the upcoming UPH Design Week 2007. Basically they’re asking if they can exhibit my final project during the Student’s Exhibition. I’d say, why not and give it a go. I am prepping an authorization letter from the office, though, in case something goes awol.

We finally have a company blog. After months of vigorous projects and tiring deadlines, I finally have the time to complete the Neuro-Designs blog. Actually, I’ve already installed WordPress to the server sometime ago, but then I decided to erase it because we haven’t got time to do this now. Hopefully we get to know our clients, friends, and visitors better with our new blog.

Anyway, I backed all my recent projects to Nyonyo’s PowerMac and hoped that it didn’t power off before everything was copied. I also backed up some files to my newly fixed iBook with its supposedly-brand-new logic board, hoping that I don’t have to use the PC to continue my daily work. Unfortunately, my iBook repeats it’s destruction on me again, so here I am, at the same time, losing both my Macs for a while, and stuck on a PC. Trust me, migrating to a Mac for year and back to a PC does feel awkward. I started to look for Expose and Dock, and using Control-Click to interact with it… Geez… Thankfully, before I migrated a year ago, I put the start menu on the top of the screen, so I guess wouldn’t miss finder that much.

This could probably the time for us to buy a Network Attached Storage, so that when things like this happens, we could access our files from just about any computer.

Tomorrow, my iMac (at least) is supposed to have its power supply replaced. I can just hope that the power supply is the last of my problems. My other biggest problem would be this everlasting cough that I’ve been having for almost a week!