how i persuade my daughter

ever since i got scholarship for master degree, i have more time to be at home with my daughter. she’s 3 year-old. lately it’s hard to tell her to take a bath. she always has excuses not to. if we force her, she’ll cry and get mad. so we must find a way to persuade her. this morning she refused to take a bath and prefer to watch children song video clip. the girls on the clip are singing and dancing and they look happy. i suddenly remembered we have a book with a picture of a poor girl lying on a bed. she’s so skinny and sick because she’s suffering from malnutrition.
so i had an idea to compare the girls on tv with the girl in the book. i told my daughter that the girls on tv are happy and pretty because they take a bath and have meal everyday but the poor girl in the book doesn’t like to take a bath and have meal. i asked her to choose which one she would become. she chose the girls on tv. so i said to her that she had to take a bath right now.
she agreed but she wanted to drink her milk first and then she would take a bath. and so it was.
well i lied a little about the poor girl in the book, but at least i made my daughter to take a bath this morning. but i have to find another way next time if this one doesn’t work anymore

china, the world’s latest buzz

Image by Getty Images via Daylifelately i notice that many people are talking about china. in the news on tv, newspaper, mylot, even in the classroom my lecturer talked about it. how successful they are and that we should learn from them. well the chinese surely doing a lot of progress in the last view years.
they are very creative and productive, they have a lot to export, they bombard the world with their products. some that can easily be found in my region are fruits, milk, motorbikes, cars, cellphone, washing machine, tv, air cond., clothes, sandals, shoes, etc. even my daughter’s hair accessories. anywhere you go you see stuff “made in china”.

how come they achieve so great? the following are what i was told. it’s because every chinese has to work. i’m sure it’s any kind of work but not crime. everyone is given a chance to do what they like and work to be the best. for example, if you like badminton, you play badminton and make yourself a master of it. wages in china are low, no matter what skill you have. but the government provides most of your basic needs. education is free, health treatment is free, transportation is free, etc. so parents don’t have to worry about their children’s needs because the government will fulfill them.

consequently you can’t be rich. i think for many of us this can be a problem. but maybe for those who likes to live modestly it’s acceptable. what’s important in life is being happy, money comes later. are the chinese happy? if you’re happen to be a chinese who lives in china, i’m waiting for your comment.

blocking spam with foreign language or alphabet or characacter

sometimes we get spam of foreign language that we don’t understand. we don’t even know the alphabet, very annoying. there are plenty of them, some from romania, china or greek. we can set spamassassin to give them higher score and then treat them as spam. here’s how to do it (tested on 3.1.4) : Read more

i won’t recommend starone anymore

i’ve been using starone from indosat for my internet connection at home for about a year. i chose them because they offer a package which is affordable for me, the cheapest that i could find :). i have to pay 99.000 rupiah a month for maximum 1 Gig of usage. if i use more than that, they’ll charge me 300 rupiah per Meg. i usually pay around 100.000 to 125.000 rupiah a month.

at first i was quite satisfied with the connection, i could browse the internet and login to remote server comfortably. and everytime i meet a friend, i always recommend them to use starone too. it’s cheap and fast enaugh. but starting about a couple of months ago, i don’t remember exactly, i feel the connection is no longer stable. on certain period of time the connection is very slow, it’s no longer comfortable to browse the internet. but it was still tolerable because it happened only for a while, an hour or so.

but lately it’s getting worst, i can’t open even a single page, and it happen for hours. like yesterday for example. i had been online for about 2 hours and then around 3 pm i felt the connection was slow, some pages couldn’t get loaded completely, so i decided to go offline. at the evening my wife started to get online about 8 pm, 30 minutes later she complained because the connection was slow. so she went offline. about 9 pm i started to get online, i could not open a single page. i was very upset.

this thought about stop recommending starone has been on my mind for the last few days…… i finally put it on my blog so people would think at least twice before applying for starone.

here are some tests i did to test the connection lastnight. because i couldn’t open speedtest.net page at all, i login by ssh to a remote server (very slow to connect) and tried to download a file to see how the speed was. here’s my first capture (look at the transfer rate, it’s only 0,1 KB/sec) :

about an hour later the capture turned like this (no progress, transfer rate is now 0,0KB/sec) :

so from now on i would recommend “please think twice before you apply for starone”
look at the ping capture above, very unstable connection, wasting my time….. :((

swelter and sweaty, it’s global warming and energy crisis

i feel the air is sweltering lately, days and nights are sweaty. it must be the global warming effect. i think there are two important issues that the world encounter today. it’s the global warming and the energy crisis, both are connected. i remember reading a small book written by prof. prasasto satwiko not long ago. it’s about bad things or as he called “desease” that causing energy crisis.

i would like to share a few of what i red and hope that people who read this will have a better understanding and can do something to make this world better. it’s started from you, don’t wait for others. if it’s not happening in our lifetime, hopefully it would be for our children.

our knowledge and technology are getting more and more advanced, but why do the earth’s getting worst in most aspect?

1. science is just science
“knowledge is nothing until you put it in practice”. we have enough knowledge to understand that breaking the harmony of nature is a bad thing to do. but we keep doing it because we want to live a lifestyle which makes us feel comfortable physically and psychologically. we reconstruct, adjust and sort science to suit our lifestyle. whatever is right but not suitable for our lifestyle, we put them aside, even betrayed. the separation between the truth in science and the way we live is passed from generation to generation. as time goes by, the separation becomes usual and formed into tradition and culture.

2. narrow interpretation of energy
energy as an activator system for life on earth has been studied and recognized for a long time, but not many people who use energy in their daily lives realize that they’re actually involved in the system. what a scientist called as energy is actually the same as what a monk would called as spirit. but we can’t explain it’s origin. empirically, the way people use energy is showing an isolated attitude. the isolated way of thinking will not help to understand the energy problem as a whole.

3. the jail of consumerism
our wants is not always our needs. mostly we buy things for prestige. you buy a luxurious but fuel-extravagant vehicle when your need could actually be fulfilled by a simple fuel-thrifty vehicle.

4. meat consumption
United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases, more than transportation. greenhouse gases are good for maintaining the earth’s temperature, but too much of it can be dangerous, it’s global warming.

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