I'm still here, don't you worry

So, I've been busy at work, although it's starting to ease up. It looks like my time in Singapore is going to be partly work-related, which rocks because I'll be paid, hoteled and expensed for a little bit of work there. I wasn't even sure I'd know how to completely fill up the days anyways. To top it off, my dad might be in Kuala Lampur around the same time, so there's a fractional chance I might be able to skip over and visit with him for a day or two.

As for work here, It's strange, I have to get up at least once in the middle of the night everyday to put a new tape in the transcribing computer, so I'm getting spooky, vivid dreams from entering REM a second time.

I'm seeing alot of hotels and aeroports in Indonesia, but it's whetting my taste for real travel. I'm hoping to visit Papua and explore Kalimantan the next time I come through here. Actually, I'm channelling my wanderlust by staring at digital world maps and drawing dots and lines on them and making promises for 2008. I get more and more ambitious everytime I look at it. I'll need to get more pages for my passport.

What have I been thinking about lately?

I'm wondering alot about symmetry of opinion. Take any given question, and you can find rational people passionate about one side or the other. Do these kinds of questions, questions that appear defensible from both sides, have any definitive answer? It used to make sense to hold left-wing positions on things, but is it necessary to identify this way? It might be better to simply resolve to handle questions one by one as they arise and try to resolve them in as rational and pragmatic a way as possible. I think there's a place for me in the world doing that.

On the other hand, I miss the days where I could feel idealistic about things. I remember the G8 protests back in June 2002, when I was 16, and lugging boxes around for a Socialist Party display. A year later I was protesting the Iraq War with a big sign that read "No More War for Oil!" with little black cardboard cutouts of oil barrels for effect. The world seemed unspeakably vast, its problems enormous, but it seemed like a correctable place. "If only the government would listen to our collective voices!" we were singing. Those were exciting times. But now the world is small and transversable, its problems seem smaller and more fundamentally engrained, and the corrections often as harmful as the problems. And it's incredible the kinds of things I could defend when I felt so idealistic, for instance "well, it was Stalin who subverted the Soviet Union.. really Leninism might well have led to a worker's paradise..." Watch "The Last King of Scotland" to see where I'm now coming from.

Not all idealism is lost, though. There might not be a single "right way" for the whole world, but you look at some individual problems and there appears to be clear right and wrong. Not everything has to be backed up rationally. One thing I do feel increasingly passionate about is human rights. If you want to improve the lot of the human race, you don't start with the majority. You start with the minority, the minority for whom things suck the most. The people locked up in prisons and trapped in torture chambers. It's a rejection of utilitarianism - even if there are millions in poverty, I increasingly think the place to start is at the bottom. I think I'll try to get reinvolved with Amnesty International when I get back home.

I'm also developing a curious side interest in the War in the Pacific, partly from some of the war sites around here. Everyone knows bits and pieces about Germany and the Third Reich, but the war in the Pacific Theater is terra incognita. It was different than the war in Europe, in part because the Japanese were different from any people in the world. The war itself was a mysterious, dream-like hop from tropical island to tropical island against a martial foe that worshipped a living emperor. Lush islands occupied by cannibals and Stone Age peoples. It was a war of eerie silence punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. It's strange too how the Japanese "woke up" from their nightmare after the atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and promptly became one of the most peaceful peoples on Earth.

Good night, and Good Luck, as an influential newscaster used to say.

Musing

Was the little boy in the Osama Bin Laden shirt smiling or leering at me?

Working in Indonesia

So, in a fortunate turn of events, three short weeks after returning home from India, I'm working in Indonesia. This blog is becoming a de facto travel blog.

Naturally, when I came home, I was looking for work. The threat of having to go build tennis courts again loomed uneasily over my head. Dad made some enquiries with the field staff in his mapping company, which I've worked for before, and found that there they (urgently) needed someone in the field, preferably someone who had worked with the same applications before. Done and done. I'm a lucky bastard.

I find that I'm always curious about what exactly other people do on their jobs, so I will spare no detail in my description. Basically my job is the following:

My company does aerial mapping to make height maps of terrain. We "shine" a radar beam at the ground, figure out the phase difference using interferometry, and using this - generate height maps of very large areas. To do this, we also need good GPS data to know exactly where in space our aircraft is, and the mere GPS data abroad our aircraft isn't sufficient. In normal operation, the aircraft does two flights a day and maps a few stripes of the Earth on lines. After each flight I check the GPS and system data to make sure it is sufficient and does not indicate an amplifier or something is burnt out in the radar (in three days of work there have already been problems to spot). Then I check the navigation data for indications of motion, since too much aircraft motion can also harm our data quality. If the aircraft bumps, I figure out if I can save the particular line (I check on Google Earth, and if as we bump we're passing over a volcano or water or something that doesn't matter, I can ignore it,) or split up the line and save the remaining segments of the line. If we've flown the same line more than once, sometimes I can stitch the good segments into a complete line and save another pass. Then I feed this information to the flight planner, who then knows what lines we we need to fly the following evening or morning, and s/he can draw up a flight plan to present to air traffic control.

So basically, in the past week or so, I've spent three nights in Denver, Colorado getting some brush-up training, two nights in Singapore getting the work permit, three nights in Jakarta, and now I'm in Balikpapan, Indonesia (on Borneo) settled in for the next couple weeks. Singapore was a really nice place - however truly it holds up to William Gibsons' description as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" or another's "The World's Only Shopping Mall with a Seat at the United Nations". Just a really pleasant, cosmopolitian city. Everything gave me a favourable impression, and my friend Irena is going to have a wonderful time there on exchange come August. Indonesia it self is strange. The obvious comparisons I draw are with India - and comparing Jakarta with Delhi, Jakarta must be ten years ahead. For one thing, Jakarta has skyscrapers. With the fluctuating power supply in Delhi, they don't trust elevators - so the height of skyscrapers is limited by how high you can walk. It must be all the natural resource wealth. It feels reasonably safe, but there are constant reminders of how terrorism hangs over the place - for instance, going into our hotels there is a security clearance and they check the trunks of cars about one hundred meters from the hotel entrances. It's strange to think that there are people who want to kill me without meeting me somewhere out there, but in a country of 200 million people, it's reassuring to remember that they're submerged in a flood of otherwise friendly people. We've had a long history of working in Indonesia, and alot of the field staff have stayed here months and months and married Indonesian wives.

I finally read Bukowski's Ham on Rye, and as it turns out, the book made the rounds around the field crew a couple months ago so everyone had a word in on how "twisted" it was. I like how brutal his honesty is, I suppose it's a beatnik era thing (even if he wasn't a beatnik) He catches alot of the foibles of childhood with precision. But, God, how Bukowski was a slave to his body - a typical fighting, ill-sociable, boozing hound. Yet somehow he managed to find his way to a typewriter and pound out a string of books.

Anyways, in typical Indonesian form, our military escort didn't get his tasking orders on Friday afternoon. So, we get the weekend off (normally it's a 12 hour day, 7 days a week!), and I'm going to go down to the gym and work out. Hopefully I'll write a more entertaining sounding entry later.