Solstice greetings and a year in review
Dec. 24th, 2003 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipWhen I sent out the Summer Solstice wishes and review of last year an old friend astutely described it as an "Annual Report". In many ways this is true. The end of year festivities, do invite a peculiar combination of feasting and reflection. This would probably be even more the case in the northern hemisphere where this time of year falls upon midwinter rather than midsummer. In any case, dear readers, rest assured I wish you the very best for your feasting and reflection. Of the latter, being the public person that I am, here's mine...
The year started in an chaotic fashion. I missed my plane from Dili to Bali for New Years Eve (Merpati's fault, not mine) so New Years Eve consisted of me drowning my misfortune in a couple of bottle of very dodgy Indonesian wine and collapsing at 10pm. At the same time I finished the first version of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, which was the first website for any government Ministry for that country - and still is.
My first visit to Indonesia was a lightning tour - starting at Kuta (where else), had a cruise to Komodo cancelled due to the weather, so decided to spend a few days traveling throughout Bali including the temple of Besikah, the Batur volcano, the artist village of Ubud, Klangklang and the wonderful Sanur. A thoroughly memorable and amusing moment was a monkey in Ubud which decided to break my glasses. I'm still wearing them, patched together with epoxy, like a genuine computer nerd. After that I went on a bus journey from Ketapung to Yogyakarta, checked out Borobudur (huge ancient Buddhist temple), took another bus journey to Semanrang, spent a day there, then a train journey to Jakarta, then to Krakatua and back to Bali.
On my return to Dili I found myself doing substantial work on developing their national passport database over the following two months - not really my field, nor the reason I had been sent there, nor even the Ministry I was working for. But flexibility is necessary in such in environment. Apart from flexibility one of the skills you have to learn in places like East Timor is a lack of professionalism - bureaucrats (and technicians) who simply won't do a task because they don't want to or have a personal issue with those making the request. This was part of the reason why the email setup took for the Ministry took from January to August and the whole reason why one particular Ministerial Division had nothing on the website until the departure of one of their international advisors. Such behaviour is unacceptable in the workplaces of advanced economies and I wonder how much third and fourth-world impoverishment is due to take the system for a ride.
In February, March and April, apart from the standard tasks which every systems' administrator is familiar with I also wrote "Neon-Komputador" - a comprehensive but introductory text for the Ministerial staff and others. To put it bluntly, I worked like a demon, finishing the 200pp book in less than 100 days. Two particular events aided this - one was the departure of one Victoria Jankowski who visited me in February and the other was Telstra pulling out of the country. Prior to that I had been a fairly social person - afterwards I knuckled down and concentrated almost exclusively on work. After all, I am here to do a job, not have a holiday.
One of the things I desperately wanted to achieve was to use IT as a source of income for East Timor, primarily through utilisation of the .tp domain space for an international telephone directory. I am certain would have raised several million dollars income within five years if was implemented properly. I carefully wrote a report outlining the situation in language that was as non-technical as possible - citing examples from other impoverished nations who had also taken similar income raising steps (such as Laos), I lobbied, I explained I did all the right things. And the Minister responsible rejected the proposal because he didn't like the name. Several months on there has been absolutely no change to the cctld. The entire thing is in a state of paralysis and the opportunity to raise income is slowly sliding in the distance.
To add injury to insult this was also the period of time when my passport visa had to be renewed - but no, the responsible Division had managed to lose it, making me an illegal immigrant in a nation where I was serving as a volunteer. A lengthy meeting with the National Director of the Police was required to sort things out - fortunately he had a sense of humour. Oddly enough however, something quite similar happened in Malaysia a couple of months later. My passport was stamped as I exited Singapore, but not as I entered Malaysia. When I left Malaysia a several days later, to return to Singapore, there were very confused looks on the faces of the immigration police. All fairly amusing in hindsight.
To add to my worldly experiences a case of dengue, or perhaps pseudo-dengue, was also memorable. Pseudo-dengue? Well following blood tests on my housemate who had the same symptoms no dengue was detected. But it sure looked like dengue (rash appearing first on the stomach, spreading to chest and then arms and legs) and it sure felt like dengue (fever, feeling that one's bones are being crushed, inability to walk). So if it wasn't dengue it was certainly a fever making a damn good pretence of it. Still, what is a journey to exotic lands if you don't catch exotic diseases, right?
In August, with my departure from the Ministry rapidly approaching I conducted a three week training course for the staff. The first sessions were well-attended. After that it dropped off substantially. Another disappointment - it is almost as if the people there did not want to learn. For those who did stick out the entire course and have made the effort to work their way through the computer manual I am certain that there skills will be, in a short time, far greater than the majority of those in advanced economies. Obviously, this could help them a great deal, but one cannot enforce motivation.
In the final weeks of my work in East Timor I decided to take another brief holiday - this time first to Bali (Sanur again), through to Singapore for a few days, across the border into Malaysia and straight up to Kuala Lumpur, then on to Penang for a few days, back to Kuala Lumpur, back to Singapore, back to Bali, back to East Timor and the following morning on the plane to Melbourne. To say the least, witnessing such divergent socio-economic systems and levels of development was certainly confronting, but by now thoroughly expected. Whilst far from world weary I now consider myself a fairly experienced and efficient international traveler. Of course, I have left this until quite late in my life, but can certainly envisage carrying out this sort of lifestyle for the immediate future.
Returning to Melbourne, as joyous as it was to see old friends again, did result in some letdowns. Although I had been previously assured that I would be reemployed through the Labor Party on my return, this has not yet eventuated, which has put a great deal of pressure on my savings. It was doubly painful in a financial sense as the Parliament offered a voluntary redundancy for one year one day after I announced my resignation from the parliamentary pool. It would have been nice if someone had 'phoned me to tell me that was coming up as it would have been worth an extra $8 500. Another financial letdown was the fact the Administrative Appeals Tribunal could do nothing about the failings of a certain real estate company called Chambers. By following their advice I found myself some $1600 out of pocket in lost bond as they included me as a respondent in a dispute with others and used my money to pay off that dispute. But I have a little revenge planned for them.
October and November, which was supposed to be dedicated to my thesis, took a sudden turn with the death of Dr. Jim Cairns, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Cairns was the first political theorist I read in my life, at the ripe old age of twelve. Cairns had a lasting impression on my own intellectual development and I was fortunate enough to meet him on at least two occasions and talk to him on several others. Within hours of his death I was on the 'phone to a colleague and started organizing a special memorial function for the good Doctor. Furthermore, I started writing a political study of his work which I completed within eight weeks (including a one week holiday in Tasmania). The idea was that the study, which consisted of some 72pp of text, would be published and distributed on the night of the memorial. But two days before this launch my publisher, function co-organiser and formerly a good friend, pulled out of the publishing commitments. I was not amused to say the least. It was two months of my life which I put a lot of work in because I believed it was a good cause - I could have be improving my own qualifications or improving my financial situation.
December has been dominated by a visit to New Zealand, with travels throughout the north island. Mostly based in Palmerston North, where my mother and brothers live, I have also journeyed through Auckland, to Gisbourne to meet the rest of my family and will be visiting Wellington in the next couple of days. It has been a nice way to finish the year, although having been distant from my family for nearly my entire life means that I probably will never develop the sort of bonds (positive or negative) that most people have. In a sense I enjoy this as part of the experience has generated a strong sense of my own independence - now I have a relationship but without undue obligatory burdens on either side. New Zealand I must say is a very beautiful country, but unless I was dedicated to hiding myself away to concentrate solely on writing or some other homely existence, is not sufficiently vibrant enough to make me want to live here. I have also recently picked up some temporary coding work with Ireland's major Internet Service Provider, ConnectIE, working on a disability access website, so perhaps a move to Europe isn't too far from the realm of probabilities.
One particularly nice discovery this year which deserves mention has been livejournal (www.livejournal.com), which I started entries on in early March. It's like usenet except one doesn't have to put up with spammers and has a user-friendly interface. As a combination of journal (public and private), personal bookmarking tool, and community newsletter it has no equal. I've managed to met a number of quite wonderful people through livejournal. If you don't already have a livejournal, I thoroughly recommend getting one. Some of you, for professional reasons, will probably have to use a pseudonym. Originally, I took up an account with livejournal simply because so many of my friends had done so and it was an easy way to keep track of what they were up to. Now I find it a good forum to document my activities, and bounce ideas off others.
Looking at the year as a whole I honestly feel that this has been one the most productive and satisfying in my life. I managed, under very difficult conditions, a medium-scale heterogeneous voice and data network, I coded and developed an enormous website for a foreign ministry (consisting of several hundred pages and in four languages), wrote a detailed introduction to computer technology and had it printed by the United Nations, I transcribed and put online the largest collection of words for the Tetun language, I wrote a political study of former Deputy Prime Minister, co-authored a well-received presentation for the International Conference of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, rewrote most of my PhD (which will be handed in - again - next month), and spent a decent amount of time in six nations (East Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand), and discovered new family members that I was hitherto unaware of. It has hardly been a financial success by any stretch of the imagination, but I've certainly had poorer days in my life. My self-confidence, never something that has ever really been in short supply, feels stronger than ever before. And my personal life is blessed by some of the most loyal and dedicated friends that one could wish for (with exceptions already noted), with one Erica Hoehn receiving special mention for her tireless editing, spell checking and proofreading of my work this year.
Despite all this I face the new year with the trepidation of uncertainty. I have absolutely no idea about what I'm going to do in the next few months or for the rest of the year. I have reapplied to Australian Volunteers International for any work I can do in Palestine, Mozambique or China. I have applied for numerous jobs in Australia and New Zealand and will be putting some pressure on the Party over my employment situation as well (frankly I would prefer to work for Federal rather than State MPs). I could get back into academia in serious way, although I'd certainly need some additional supporting income. Frankly, I just don't know what I should be doing next - I'm on a bit of a loose end. Whilst it is very unlikely I will suffer a period of paralysis, what is more probably (and possibly just as inefficient) is that I'll attempt several projects simultaneously and finish none of them efficiently or effectively. This is something which I strongly wish to avoid. It with this mindset that I gaze into the extremely murky future that is 2004.
The year started in an chaotic fashion. I missed my plane from Dili to Bali for New Years Eve (Merpati's fault, not mine) so New Years Eve consisted of me drowning my misfortune in a couple of bottle of very dodgy Indonesian wine and collapsing at 10pm. At the same time I finished the first version of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, which was the first website for any government Ministry for that country - and still is.
My first visit to Indonesia was a lightning tour - starting at Kuta (where else), had a cruise to Komodo cancelled due to the weather, so decided to spend a few days traveling throughout Bali including the temple of Besikah, the Batur volcano, the artist village of Ubud, Klangklang and the wonderful Sanur. A thoroughly memorable and amusing moment was a monkey in Ubud which decided to break my glasses. I'm still wearing them, patched together with epoxy, like a genuine computer nerd. After that I went on a bus journey from Ketapung to Yogyakarta, checked out Borobudur (huge ancient Buddhist temple), took another bus journey to Semanrang, spent a day there, then a train journey to Jakarta, then to Krakatua and back to Bali.
On my return to Dili I found myself doing substantial work on developing their national passport database over the following two months - not really my field, nor the reason I had been sent there, nor even the Ministry I was working for. But flexibility is necessary in such in environment. Apart from flexibility one of the skills you have to learn in places like East Timor is a lack of professionalism - bureaucrats (and technicians) who simply won't do a task because they don't want to or have a personal issue with those making the request. This was part of the reason why the email setup took for the Ministry took from January to August and the whole reason why one particular Ministerial Division had nothing on the website until the departure of one of their international advisors. Such behaviour is unacceptable in the workplaces of advanced economies and I wonder how much third and fourth-world impoverishment is due to take the system for a ride.
In February, March and April, apart from the standard tasks which every systems' administrator is familiar with I also wrote "Neon-Komputador" - a comprehensive but introductory text for the Ministerial staff and others. To put it bluntly, I worked like a demon, finishing the 200pp book in less than 100 days. Two particular events aided this - one was the departure of one Victoria Jankowski who visited me in February and the other was Telstra pulling out of the country. Prior to that I had been a fairly social person - afterwards I knuckled down and concentrated almost exclusively on work. After all, I am here to do a job, not have a holiday.
One of the things I desperately wanted to achieve was to use IT as a source of income for East Timor, primarily through utilisation of the .tp domain space for an international telephone directory. I am certain would have raised several million dollars income within five years if was implemented properly. I carefully wrote a report outlining the situation in language that was as non-technical as possible - citing examples from other impoverished nations who had also taken similar income raising steps (such as Laos), I lobbied, I explained I did all the right things. And the Minister responsible rejected the proposal because he didn't like the name. Several months on there has been absolutely no change to the cctld. The entire thing is in a state of paralysis and the opportunity to raise income is slowly sliding in the distance.
To add injury to insult this was also the period of time when my passport visa had to be renewed - but no, the responsible Division had managed to lose it, making me an illegal immigrant in a nation where I was serving as a volunteer. A lengthy meeting with the National Director of the Police was required to sort things out - fortunately he had a sense of humour. Oddly enough however, something quite similar happened in Malaysia a couple of months later. My passport was stamped as I exited Singapore, but not as I entered Malaysia. When I left Malaysia a several days later, to return to Singapore, there were very confused looks on the faces of the immigration police. All fairly amusing in hindsight.
To add to my worldly experiences a case of dengue, or perhaps pseudo-dengue, was also memorable. Pseudo-dengue? Well following blood tests on my housemate who had the same symptoms no dengue was detected. But it sure looked like dengue (rash appearing first on the stomach, spreading to chest and then arms and legs) and it sure felt like dengue (fever, feeling that one's bones are being crushed, inability to walk). So if it wasn't dengue it was certainly a fever making a damn good pretence of it. Still, what is a journey to exotic lands if you don't catch exotic diseases, right?
In August, with my departure from the Ministry rapidly approaching I conducted a three week training course for the staff. The first sessions were well-attended. After that it dropped off substantially. Another disappointment - it is almost as if the people there did not want to learn. For those who did stick out the entire course and have made the effort to work their way through the computer manual I am certain that there skills will be, in a short time, far greater than the majority of those in advanced economies. Obviously, this could help them a great deal, but one cannot enforce motivation.
In the final weeks of my work in East Timor I decided to take another brief holiday - this time first to Bali (Sanur again), through to Singapore for a few days, across the border into Malaysia and straight up to Kuala Lumpur, then on to Penang for a few days, back to Kuala Lumpur, back to Singapore, back to Bali, back to East Timor and the following morning on the plane to Melbourne. To say the least, witnessing such divergent socio-economic systems and levels of development was certainly confronting, but by now thoroughly expected. Whilst far from world weary I now consider myself a fairly experienced and efficient international traveler. Of course, I have left this until quite late in my life, but can certainly envisage carrying out this sort of lifestyle for the immediate future.
Returning to Melbourne, as joyous as it was to see old friends again, did result in some letdowns. Although I had been previously assured that I would be reemployed through the Labor Party on my return, this has not yet eventuated, which has put a great deal of pressure on my savings. It was doubly painful in a financial sense as the Parliament offered a voluntary redundancy for one year one day after I announced my resignation from the parliamentary pool. It would have been nice if someone had 'phoned me to tell me that was coming up as it would have been worth an extra $8 500. Another financial letdown was the fact the Administrative Appeals Tribunal could do nothing about the failings of a certain real estate company called Chambers. By following their advice I found myself some $1600 out of pocket in lost bond as they included me as a respondent in a dispute with others and used my money to pay off that dispute. But I have a little revenge planned for them.
October and November, which was supposed to be dedicated to my thesis, took a sudden turn with the death of Dr. Jim Cairns, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Cairns was the first political theorist I read in my life, at the ripe old age of twelve. Cairns had a lasting impression on my own intellectual development and I was fortunate enough to meet him on at least two occasions and talk to him on several others. Within hours of his death I was on the 'phone to a colleague and started organizing a special memorial function for the good Doctor. Furthermore, I started writing a political study of his work which I completed within eight weeks (including a one week holiday in Tasmania). The idea was that the study, which consisted of some 72pp of text, would be published and distributed on the night of the memorial. But two days before this launch my publisher, function co-organiser and formerly a good friend, pulled out of the publishing commitments. I was not amused to say the least. It was two months of my life which I put a lot of work in because I believed it was a good cause - I could have be improving my own qualifications or improving my financial situation.
December has been dominated by a visit to New Zealand, with travels throughout the north island. Mostly based in Palmerston North, where my mother and brothers live, I have also journeyed through Auckland, to Gisbourne to meet the rest of my family and will be visiting Wellington in the next couple of days. It has been a nice way to finish the year, although having been distant from my family for nearly my entire life means that I probably will never develop the sort of bonds (positive or negative) that most people have. In a sense I enjoy this as part of the experience has generated a strong sense of my own independence - now I have a relationship but without undue obligatory burdens on either side. New Zealand I must say is a very beautiful country, but unless I was dedicated to hiding myself away to concentrate solely on writing or some other homely existence, is not sufficiently vibrant enough to make me want to live here. I have also recently picked up some temporary coding work with Ireland's major Internet Service Provider, ConnectIE, working on a disability access website, so perhaps a move to Europe isn't too far from the realm of probabilities.
One particularly nice discovery this year which deserves mention has been livejournal (www.livejournal.com), which I started entries on in early March. It's like usenet except one doesn't have to put up with spammers and has a user-friendly interface. As a combination of journal (public and private), personal bookmarking tool, and community newsletter it has no equal. I've managed to met a number of quite wonderful people through livejournal. If you don't already have a livejournal, I thoroughly recommend getting one. Some of you, for professional reasons, will probably have to use a pseudonym. Originally, I took up an account with livejournal simply because so many of my friends had done so and it was an easy way to keep track of what they were up to. Now I find it a good forum to document my activities, and bounce ideas off others.
Looking at the year as a whole I honestly feel that this has been one the most productive and satisfying in my life. I managed, under very difficult conditions, a medium-scale heterogeneous voice and data network, I coded and developed an enormous website for a foreign ministry (consisting of several hundred pages and in four languages), wrote a detailed introduction to computer technology and had it printed by the United Nations, I transcribed and put online the largest collection of words for the Tetun language, I wrote a political study of former Deputy Prime Minister, co-authored a well-received presentation for the International Conference of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, rewrote most of my PhD (which will be handed in - again - next month), and spent a decent amount of time in six nations (East Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand), and discovered new family members that I was hitherto unaware of. It has hardly been a financial success by any stretch of the imagination, but I've certainly had poorer days in my life. My self-confidence, never something that has ever really been in short supply, feels stronger than ever before. And my personal life is blessed by some of the most loyal and dedicated friends that one could wish for (with exceptions already noted), with one Erica Hoehn receiving special mention for her tireless editing, spell checking and proofreading of my work this year.
Despite all this I face the new year with the trepidation of uncertainty. I have absolutely no idea about what I'm going to do in the next few months or for the rest of the year. I have reapplied to Australian Volunteers International for any work I can do in Palestine, Mozambique or China. I have applied for numerous jobs in Australia and New Zealand and will be putting some pressure on the Party over my employment situation as well (frankly I would prefer to work for Federal rather than State MPs). I could get back into academia in serious way, although I'd certainly need some additional supporting income. Frankly, I just don't know what I should be doing next - I'm on a bit of a loose end. Whilst it is very unlikely I will suffer a period of paralysis, what is more probably (and possibly just as inefficient) is that I'll attempt several projects simultaneously and finish none of them efficiently or effectively. This is something which I strongly wish to avoid. It with this mindset that I gaze into the extremely murky future that is 2004.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-25 01:33 am (UTC)Congratulations on a productive and interesting year, it's inspiring!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-25 04:07 am (UTC)I feel pretty good about 2003 - it's just that I can't fathom what 2004 holds. That concerns me a little.
So, how was your xmas?
Chambers
Date: 2003-12-26 12:44 am (UTC)Re: Chambers
Date: 2003-12-26 04:20 am (UTC)Well (as you know) it was a nice place, and a fairly good rent. But jeez their adminstration left a "little" to be desired...
My problem was I when I moved to ET I told them I was gone within my final rental period and others wanted to take over. First they told me to sign over the bond form (as the old bond was in my name) and then they told me to hold onto it until the new tenants had paid me out (which would have made applications for bond assistance rather hard for them). There was no communication for a few months and when I finally asked what was going on, they told me that they were taking the new tenants to the Bond claim tribunal and were going to use my bond to pay for their arrears...
Ahhh, but such sweet revenge I have planned for them...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 11:13 am (UTC)And I hope I have been a tad more than a proof reader and editor :)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 06:31 pm (UTC)Real estate agents depend on public reputation. Especially at auctions.
And I hope I have been a tad more than a proof reader and editor :)
Of course, but you have been deserving of a medal for your Herculean efforts in those areas!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 11:30 pm (UTC)