Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

Technologies move so fast. We all know that, but we wouldn't realize it until we face with it. Like right now. I am cleaning my cupboards. Lots of books in it and, wait for it ..., compact discs. Whoa. I used to keep these CDs for backups. So, I am looking at some CDs and don't know what they have on them. The problem is I don't have a CD drive anymore. Actually I have in my desktop machine, but it has been disconnected. I am not sure if there are enough cables inside the machine to reconnect the drive. CDs were God sent. They were cheap and relatively reliable. Now, they're just useless. Everything is stored online. Do you have a "tech-dinosaur"-story?

Some of you may know that I do quite a bit of presentations. Some of the are private or for internal organizations, but many times they are open for public. As an example, the next "presentation" (actually discussion) is on electronics industry in Indonesia. What are the issues relating to that?   I am going to have a discussion with pak Adi Indrayato whom I know for quite a while. We went to the same school since 1982. He is the best person to talk about the electronic ecosystem.This discussion is going to be in Bahasa Indonesia though. So, if you want to know more about electronics industry, then be there (or be square).

I am lucky. I am in the right place and in the right time (for certain kind of technologies). I had this feeling when I had access to a NeXT computer and was introduced to WWW during its infant stage. The same thing with Linux. But, that's another story. Right now, I am in Indonesia, one of the "biggest" internet community (market) in the world. If you have a product to test or a market to penetrate, Indonesia is the place. To see how big it is, have a look at this stats.   There are many countries that are smaller compared to Indonesian's netizen (cyber citizen). Even if the whole population - and the cats and dogs - in those countries have access to the internet, their numbers are still small compared to Indonesian's number. Now, what do we do with this opportunity?

Some of you may know that I have a YouTube channel. It's here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3S4LLQIPK1TT5S2LmieCYg When I started the channel, it was like starting this blog. To share what I know and to challenge myself to be creative. I still do it in two ways; with writing (this blog) and with video (YouTube channel). Before, it was difficult to do the video part because technology was not there yet. Now, it is simple and inexpensive. It was like creating a "homepage" - that was the web site called long time ago - using HTML and blogging using tools that were provide. Now, the challenge is the content. I love numbers, so I like watching how my YouTube channel grows. It was like watching this blog grew. I don't like doing artificial growth. I just watch them grow. Here is what the status of my YouTube channel right now. It is going to hit 5000. A new milestone.   When I said I love numbers, I mean it. When I was a kid, I would watch cars passed on the street in ...

Once in a while, I found a funny and interesting thing related to coding. I love coding (and to code). So, when somebody forwarded this - Stalin Sort, I laughed so hard but at the same time was intrigue. (Here is the link: https://github.com/gustavo-depaula/stalin-sort) The main gist of this "Stalin Sort" is that if you found an element that does not met with the sort criteria, you send it "to Gulag". Ha ha ha. That is so funny. You just delete or drop the element. Just like what Stalin would do. Later, I checked the github codes. Lots of codes there. The first thing I do is to find Perl implementation. I love perl. There, I found exactly what I wanted to see, a beautiful implementation. No, not the one-liner but the more verbose one. I love to explain things. When I see code that "no need to explain", you know you find a good code. It's just like jokes. If you have to explain it, it's not a good joke. Few days ago, I just had to roll my own Python...

It's 2020 and I am still blogging. For many, blogging is a thing in the past. Not me.  This is because I am using blog as a place to challenge myself. To be creative. What do I mean by creative? Well, one of the biggest challenges in blogging is to come up with a topic and then write it beautifully. Okay, the last part is actually not easy, but for many people the first part - to find a topic - is already a challenge. They cannot pass that part. Without a topic, what would you write? Thus, the challenge is to come up with a topic. That is my challenge to myself. That is my training ground to be creative. And then writing it is again a creative exercise. Oh yeah, my main blog these days is not this, but the one in wordpress. It's rahard.wordpress.com. In that blog, I write mainly in Bahasa Indonesia. You can check it out to see that I am still blogging. As for the English blog, I have started a new one in medium.com, but I think I should write in here. One of the reasons I shoul...

We wear the scars today Just because there's no better way to get here Going back to future time May not give us better lives We may end up else where

There are too many sad songs Not enough happy songs This was started to be a happy song but, ended up as a sad song Such a life There are too many hopes Not enough reality We started rough but, we'll end up happily ever after Such a life #BR2020

Some people still believe that data is the new oil, while I still believe that data is junk. Right now I am cleaning my computers. Removing files that are not needed. Uploading photos to Google Photos and Flicker, while archiving those that are deemed not important. And this is time consuming. Really. Yes, even junk can be converted into money. But the effort is huge. I could upload my photos into Shutterstock, for example. Maybe somebody would pick up one of my photos and pay for it. But, this is just a long shot and the number of junk photos compared to the usable ones are just huge. So, this is just my ramblings on Sundays. Cleaning my " oil " ... er, junk!