Me, the pilot

I flew up to Banda Aceh in an Airvan today and I was the only one on the flight besides the pilot. After we had taken off, he started doing some paperwork and I asked if the plane had an auto pilot. He said, "Yeah, you!" So I started flying without any instructions. After a few minutes I had it pretty figured out. It wasn't too hard except since it was a pretty small plane with no rudder trim, while we were climbing it pulled left a little. I flew about half the flight before he took back over. No, I didn't take off or land. I'm pretty sure that is still beyond me.

Contagious Whistling

I've discovered something over the years. Yawning isn't the only thing that is contagious. Whistling is as well. Every time I get the urge to whistle, it seems that someone else joins in within about 5 seconds. This makes it really awkward to continue whistling. Sometimes I can't even remember if I started or if I am following the other person. Give it a try sometime. If there are people around, start whistling and see if someone else starts as well.

Going to Banda Aceh this weekend

It looks like I will be in Meulaboh for a while longer so I've decided to go get my motorcycle and move it down from Banda Aceh. I will fly up there this friday and drive it back down on Monday. This is the stretch of road that gave me so many problems last time. I've heard that the road is supposed to be in better shape now. No telling though. I'm more prepared now than I was before. I can also stop by in Panga and check out how the Agriculture project is going.

God vs. science

There seems to be a lot of news stories right now talking about God vs. science in the news. I really hate it when people pit God against science.

First it implies that anyone who believes in God is not scientific. This is despite the fact that modern science was started primarily by Christians wanting to explore God's natural laws to their fullest extent. People who believe in God are not idiots who don't believe in science. The debate should actually be classified as God-science vs. We-don't-know-science since non-God scientists can't explain where science, matter and the natural laws came from. Now who is believing things without knowing where they came from?

Too weird not to post

I don't usually rehash news stories that don't relate to me but this one is too weird. Apparently in the path of Hurricane Katrina was an Army training base for dolphins. The Observer claims that the dolphins were trained to use toxic dart guns to kill terrorists attacking military vessels. Some of them may have escaped during the Hurricane. While the Observer claims that the dolphins could be carying the guns but I am highly skeptical that they are left on the dolphins all the time, much less during a hurricane. How odd would that be though to have killer dolphins roaming the gulf?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1577753,00.html

Life at the beach

I love living near the beach. It is nice to be able to drive for 5 minutes and be at an undeveloped and beautiful beach with nice sand and great waves. I went yesterday and splashed in the waves for a while. Today we had the regular sunday beach party after church. Loads of fun.

Hurricane Rita - hitting close to home

I've heard that Rita is scheduled to hit close to Tyler which is only about 30 minutes from where I went to college and my sister is there now. She says they are stocking up on food, flashlights, candles and water in the bathtub. All you LU people out there, keep your head down!

Lightning again!

Seems like lightning follows me wherever I go. Our internet got hit by lightning last night. Fried the netmodem for the satellite and the wireless bridge to the office. Will be a few days till it is fixed. Luckily this time it isn't my responsibility to fix it. I'm using the free UN internet for now but it is a 15 minute drive from the office and will be closing down in a week.

Beginning the Fish Ponds Project

Today we started digging the new fish ponds for the people in Gampong Lhok. I went out there to check it out. We hired a trackhoe to do the digging. They are lots of fun to watch. The operators are amazing. They are able to use the shovel as if it is part of their body. He can dig about 4 ponds in a day which are 20x8 meters. We will be doing between 30 and 40 ponds for them that were destroyed by the Tsunami and helping them stock them again.

Browser Bonanza

Lots happening on the browser front today. If you are using Firefox (if not, you should be), be sure to download the latest update. It fixes several security issues that have come out recently.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Also, Opera the "other browser" besides Firefox has decided to become free instead of having to be paid for. If you haven't already tried it out, you should.
http://www.opera.com/

Finally, if you are using Internet Explorer (the big blue "e")... Don't.

**Update: Stupid comment spammers. Go somewhere else.

SimCity 2000

I installed one of my old favorites last night and played till about 2 in the morning. I'm disappointed that I can't get the Mac version to "launch" the arcologies. SC 2000 is still my favorite of all the SimCity games just because of the arcologies. Lots of fun. I was still able to take a city from start to almost 9 million in just a few hours.

Randall Answers

I only got two questions, so that is all I'm going to answer.

What were you doing 4 years ago today? (Well, today in your time zone--it is still yesterday here:-)
By Thainamu

Randall - Fours years ago on September 11th, I was in college and just woke up to begin the day. I flipped on the news as I do every morning and the were saying the second tower had just been hit. I remember being very angry for quite a few days.


Have you maintained regular bowel movements ??
lol

By Scott

Randall - Living in Indonesia this is actually a huge issue. Sanitation is not very good here and people are not very cleanly. Almost all Indonesians don't use toilet paper. I'll leave it to your imagination what goes on there. What this means is that the amount of dysentary, giardia and other bowel problems are quite common. I've heard that 60-80% of Indonesians have worms and almost that many have some form of bowel problems. Slang for #1 and #2 here is "little water" and "big water". That gives you some idea of how bad it is.

In response to the question, I do have problems from time to time. For the last few months I've had suprisingly few problems although in the last couple days I'm thinking I need to find some antibiotics or something again because I am definitely not regular. Glad you asked.

Goodbye to Janis

Janis Miles, my sister-in-law's mom and my mom's best friend died yesterday from cancer. She has been suffering for a long time and is now in Heaven. I remember going over to her house every Christmas Eve for a party with my family and some other families. I'm sad to hear she has left but praise God for where she has gone.

Podcasting

About a month ago I finally broke down and bought an iPod. I've never been a huge music person so to spend $300 on a device that plays music seemed a little silly to me. I actually bought an Mp3 player about 6 years ago for an outragious amount of money and have been hugely disappointed with it (most recently because it isn't supported in Windows XP). I went ahead and bought it anyways and a few days ago decided to find out what the buzz was about podcasting.

I have to say I really love podcasting. Basically, anyone on the internet can publish a "radio show" that will automatically be downloaded to your computer and iPod. While this is cool, it isn't enough for me to be that excited about. What I found when I was poking around in the iTunes podcast directory though was hundreds of churches with their sermons online. All I have to do is subscribe to the podcast (free) and every time they release a new one it automatically downloads to my iPod. I can then listen to tons of great sermons whenever I want. I can also hear random people talk about anything. Exciting.

Mmm Pickles

I had pickles last night for the first time in I don't know how long. Its funny the things you miss when you are living in the middle of nowhere.

Meetings, meetings and ...

I'm back in Medan again for more meetings. It seems like that is all I ever do now. There is lots of big stuff that needs to be taken care of and I may find out real soon about the computer centers. I'll be glad to find out, either way. I'll be headed back to Meulaboh on Saturday morning.

Friends at beach on Sunday

Here is a picture of my friends, Joanna and Emily, who came down from Banda Aceh, at the beach on Sunday taking a picture of the sunset.

Friends are fun

I had a visit from a couple of friends for the weekend. They came down from Banda Aceh and we had a great time. I didn't get a lot of sleep though since we stayed up talking a lot. We even went to the beach on sunday which also was lots of fun. Time to go get some sleep now.

Ask Randall

Since so much in my life has changed recently I thought it might be a good idea to do another "Ask Randall." This is your chance to ask me about anything, my job, relationships, Indonesia, the universe. It's up to you. After a couple days I will try and answer as many as I can. I can't guarantee an answer if it isn't a question about me though. Just post a comment to this post with a question in it. Happy Asking!

Cake Rocks

I've always loved the band Cake but my new favorite song by them is Mr. Mastadon Farm. I'm still not entirely sure what it means but sure is fun to listen to.

Here are the lyrics:

birds fall from the window ledge above mine
then they flap their wings at the last second
you see birds fall from the window ledge above mine
then they flap their wings at the last second
I can see their dead weight just dropping like stones
or small loaves of bread past my window all the time
but unless I get up and walk across the room
and peer down below
I don't see their last-second curves
toward a horizontal flight
all these birds just falling from the ledge like stones

now due to a construct in my mind
that makes their falling and their flight
symbolic of my entire existence
it becomes important for me to get up and see
their last second curves toward flight
it's almost as if my life will fall
unless I see their ascent

Mr. Mastodon farm - Mr. Mastodon farm
cut swatches out of all materials
Mr. Mastodon farm - Mr. Mastodon farm
cut swatches out of all materials

Nagan Raya Inaugeration

Yesterday morning we had a big party in Nagan Raya for the handover of the first 30 or so houses we finished. It was a great party with food from our Cafe and about 45 government officials there including some pretty high up people. Ray Branch, the Asia Area Director for SP was also there. Lots of fun. We are still building about 400 more homes in that area alone.

Response to criticism about the response to Katrina

I've been hearing lots of rumblings recently about how slowly and ineffectively the relief to Katrina has been in relation to what happened in the Tsunami in Asia. I'd like to throw my two cents in about what it was like here after the Tsunami so people can get an accurate comparison.

I'll focus on Banda Aceh since that was the hardest hit and center of the Tsunami. In Banda Aceh, all roads in and out were completely smashed for hundres of miles in each direction. All telephone communication was completely gome. The sea port was destroyed making it almost impossible to land ships. There was no communication out of Banda Aceh immediately after the Tsunami. In fact, it was 3 or 4 days before anyone heard anything about what had happened there and even then people weren't believed because it was too unimaginable. The US and Singapore militaries got there after day 4 and were distributing water and food to major areas of Banda Aceh. In many areas up the coast, survivors lived on coconut milk for over a week before anyone was able to make it there with just water.

It was about 8-10 days before anyone besides a few military people were able to arrive. Most immediate relief people started arriving about two weeks after the Tsunami to try and get food and water to the people. It took a good month or more until regular food distribution systems were set up. Remember that all stores, supply lines and stockpiles were destroyed so there was no food available for anyone.

Two months after the Tsunami they were still pulling over 500 bodies a day out of the wreckage just in Banda Aceh. A couple of months after the Tsunami the road to Medan was reopened. After 5 Months a temporary very poor road was constructed to connect Banda Aceh and Meulaboh.

To this day the road between Banda Aceh is barely passible, in fact, there is a limit of 5 metric tons on the road because the temporary bridges are starting to break. Houses are just now starting to get built in some areas while others are still months away. Schools, hospitals and public buildings are only in the planning stages and most programs are just now getting going.

I've heard it reported that it will take 9 weeks to pump all the water out of New Orleans. There is 200 miles of coastline here 8 months later that is still under water.

I say all of this to help people realize that things are not going slowly with Katrina. It only happened 8 days ago. Most people couldn't have gone more than a day or two without food or water and most have been evacuated to Texas or somewhere else. The fact of the matter is that people are being helped as quickly as possible. When tragedies like this happen, things get very difficult for a while. The best thing to do is figure out how you can help, not complain.

Katrina is a terrible tragedy as well but the relief people should not be criticized for their slow response when in actuality they are moving MUCH faster than happened here in Aceh. My prayers go with the people affected by Katrina and I hope they can be as patient, friendly and helpful as the people here in Aceh.

Responding to the crash

The plane crash happened only a few miles from our office so our director decided to sent a quick response team to the scene. I was in the office so I was put on the team. When we arrived there were still fires burning and they were still pulling people out of the wreckage. It started pouring down rain and we handed out water to whoever needed it. I got absolutely soaked in no time and after a while things started calming down so we returned to the office to dry out and regroup. We are planning on offering our assistance in any way possible to the authorities. The airport is open again so I will be flying out to Meulaboh in a few minutes again.

The governor and former governor were on the plane. Luckily the vice-governor was not because he cancelled yesterday.


Google News
Jakarta Post Story

Update: The CNN link was wrong so I replaced it with the Google News link

Crash at the airport

I just got a message from a colleage on her way to Singapore that the flight before her crashed on takeoff out of Polonia Airport here in Medan. It was a Mandala flight and right now it doesn't look good for the people on board. I was going to be on a flight this afternoon out to Meulaboh but the airport may not be open by then so I might have another night in Medan.

The most annoying thing abut traveling all the time is...

Fingernail clippers. I've been traveling several times a week for the last couple months and haven't really had a place to drop all my stuff. I try and keep a pair of fingernail clippers in my toiletries bag but I forget and put it in my carry-on instead of my check in. Then when I go to fly again they get taken out and confiscated as a "weapon." Come on. It is WAY easier to kill someone with bare hands than with fingernail clippers. Anyways, every time I want to use them now, either I'm in a place where I can't buy them or I buy them and immediately get them taken away. Sheesh. It is time to go buy another pair somewhere.

Vacation time

It is very nice to be in Penang. It is the small things that make the difference. The fact that I can shave in a sink and not in a bucket, a real sit down toilet, a shower with hot water (I haven't used the hot yet since I so used to the cold), fajitas at restaurants and starbucks with free internet! How much better could life get?

I did get some work done here. I ran into someone that I needed to meet with anyways and we met for the whole morning and most of the afternoon on work stuff.