Flight Incident

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007, I had a flight from surabaya to jakarta. My father drive me to Juanda airport. Lots of uneasy feeling that time. We depart from our house nearly without sparetime incase of traffic jam. It's true that we didn't have any meaningful traffic jams. But The rain falls heavily.

We arrive at airport at 16.30 while my flight depart on 17.10. Still enough time, I thought. So I rush to check in at AirAsia counter. The counter officer said that the flight will delayed one hour, to 18.10. So I have to wait one hour. I'm fine with that actually. What makes me uneasy is, untill 18.50, there's still no news about the ship we will board. People start to wandering arround at airport lounge.

The cause of this unpredicted delay is accident of one of Adam Air ship which slip off while landing on runway 10. According to newspaper, it's sustain large pressure at a moment before landing which makes the ship unstable and broke the wheels. I don't know for the detail though. That accident makes some ships which will land on runway 10 must detour to Ngurah Rai airport at denpasar, bali. while ships that just departed from jakarta returned to Soekarno-Hatta airport.

The cleaning of runway 10 takes time. At 8.20, AirAsia ship finally arrived. We board to it at 8.40 and depart at 9.00 or more. Thus, we delayed for four hours. The last two incident involving aircraft are involving Adam Air. Still in our memories where Adam Air lost at Makassar. Now, We had a little incident involving the same company. Although there's no cassualties, this can drive people opinion about safety on Adam Air ships. Specially for the victims. As for me, we can't fully blame the company since that time, the weather suddenly turn into a really bad conditions.

I hope all companies can learn from this incident and think more about passengers' safety.

Flood everywhere...

What a rough day. All of our plans are screwed up by nature. Floods are everywhere and they make mass transport's routes are messed up. Some cut their route, some even stop their services. And that’s including those which ran by transjakarta which we call busway.

Busway. When these routes implemented, people who need a neat mass transport and people who have short times are happy with this. While people who drive cars tend to disagree with the way busway ran which takes one line of the road lines for them only (which makes them can travel almost with no traffic jam, except for junctions).

When government of jakarta expanding busway routes, lots of people expected them. But no one care about their route line. Now, when we have heavy rains, some of the lines where drowned by floods. This really makes the worst situations possible. The roads which not flooded are packed with cars, and sometimes the separated busway lines which can't be used add the complexity of the problems. Until yesterday, only one of seven routes running. Other routes are flooded at some points.

I wonder when will the government start to think about flood prevention, and I mean the real prevention, not just silly prevention which actually not that effective. Rainy season is just started, and we already have this floods. I wonder what would we have next (-_-)a

iPAQ rx4500 series

Great!! That's what I can say about this pda. When I've read the review, most of them said that although it's compact, somehow it not that comfortable for right handed person. But when I tried myself, it's not that bad. I can operate my ipaq with my left hand only (right handed usually hold the handheld with left hand and stylus with right hand, right? ^_^a). Either on portrait or landscape mode, I can operate it easily. I know it's hard for the first time, but you'll learn that it wasn't that hard.

OK, enough with design, let get in to the features. First, wireless connections. This handheld already implanted bluetooth 2 with EDR on it. So, say no more to slow data transfer via bluetooth. When I try to pair it with my K800i, it run smoothly. Setting for bluetooth services also easy. With only some steps, we can acquire bluetooth services of paired object. In my case, one of them is Bluetooth DUN (Dial-Up Networking) which the most important service when we can't connect via ActiveSync or wi-fi. When I try to connect using Bluetooth DUN to my K800i and access 3G network, it's connected with no problem at all.

The wi-fi also great. It's support 802.11b/g while others usually still applying 802.11b only to their pdas. I've tried it to connect to wireless access point with no problem. Except that we can't connect to access point when we connected to activeSync. This also applied to bluetooth DUN.

The other advantage of this pda is, it has 1 GB internal flash memory which make me can delay to buy memory card for it. While it has 1 GB internal memory (aside with internal 64MB RAM), it also has SD slot for SD memory card or SDIO devices. I'm not sure yet how much it can handle for external memory. If it can handle 4 GB, it will nice. But 2 GB also enough (with 1 GB internal, it will be 3 GB in total).

Lastly, the battery. The battery life are not that great. If we use it to intense, the power will depleted really fast. But when I use it to play musics using GSPlayer (music player for Windows Mobile) and turn off the display, it can run surprisingly at long lifetime. I've use it to play music for 4~5 hour and only used up the power for 20~25% which can run approximately more than 16 hours (until we run out of power, which we don't want it :p) or around 10 hour with minimum use of pda function (almost no wireless connection used).

The cons are, the button. while d-pad buttons usually not used to much, but when we need it, we can only use up-down function from scroll-wheel. and the scroll-wheel didn't do the left-right function when we reach the bottom of list icon. Here's the example. I assign the flip button (Portrait-Landscape toggle) to start button. I press this toggle button, the start menu appears. Using scroll-wheel, I move to "settings" and click it by pressing the wheel. In settings window, I can move up-down using the scroll from the last accessed icon. To select other icon, I must use stylus.

So, my opinion on this device is ... great. compact, accessing all buttons is not that hard (at least by me :p) either in portrait nor landscape. Has bluetooth 2 with EDR and wi-fi with 802.11b/g specification which give me broader connection selection, and the price is affordable. So? ... it's great :D~