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.