www.indrani.net

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Indrani Soemardjan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:49:20 PDT

Indrani Soemardjan posted a photo:

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Indrani Soemardjan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:48:56 PDT

Indrani Soemardjan posted a photo:

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Indrani Soemardjan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:48:23 PDT

Indrani Soemardjan posted a photo:

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Indrani Soemardjan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:48:05 PDT

Indrani Soemardjan posted a photo:

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Indrani Soemardjan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:46:53 PDT

Indrani Soemardjan posted a photo:

Early Detection

rani — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:24:27 +0000

when the bomb finally blasted, it is easy to say that the perpetrators have mis-used religion, and people are quick to condemn. But the real question is, how do we detect the men and the ideologies which are on the course to transform themselves into bombers? most people don't have the guts to condemn them at that early stage. so how?

Blogging Again

indi — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:31:34 +0000

I am sure nobody misses my blogging but the creator of this website. The truth is: I forgot my login password to our blog entry system. Lame excuse, eh?

I don't work for Vopak Asia in Jakarta. Starting April 2009, I have been taking care of two start-up companies under Ancora Group, which is a new breed of Indonesian organization established by Indonesian entrepreneur Gita Wirjawan.

The first baby of the two is Ancora Sports. Its goal is to develop Indonesian Golf Champions both amateur and professionals, by providing the necessary platforms of training, local tournaments, International events and player management. Under the same umbrella, we run Ancora Golf Institute in Jakarta and Bali where talented golfers receive proper training by our PGA Teaching Pros from New Zealand and Australia. We have a dormitory where our Asian Tour (see: Indonesia President Invitational ).

The second baby of mine is Omega Pacific, a music production and distribution company which was set up to serve as a platform for musical talents in Indonesia and the Southeast Asian Region so that they can network with each other as to enrich their creative capacities. If you went to Dwiki Dharmawan's World Peace Orchestra concert in Jakarta recently, you would have seen Omega Pacific logo appear as the producer of the music recording itself. Come to think of it, we also produced Nial Djuliarso's music.

All of the above businesses were founded by Gita himself and all I am doing now is to ensure the babies are nurtured and growing according to Ancora's mission.

Among other things, Gita has also established Ancora Foundation, offering scholarships to Harvard, NTU and Paramadina as well as creating kindergartens all over Indonesia. If you'd like help other Indonesians (or obtain a scholarship to an Ivy League), please feel free to visit the website.

Finally, I have had the courage to ask my wonderful wife for the password to the world of indrani.net just to share with you what I have been doing lately.

How to Quit Your Job and Be a Happy, Professional Mom

rani — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:46:45 +0000

"Career doesn't define me. What I do in my life defines me. I am a mother first. A career is one of the many things I do in my life" Michelle Obama

Yesterday I called a friend of mine who just had a baby three months ago. From what was intended to be a quick phone call turned into an hour, since my friend decided to share her worries and anxiety. She is currently in the first weeks of being a SAHM (Stay at home mom) and still grappling with her new life, with some difficulties. Having been employed in a prominent Indonesian bank for more than six years, her new life at home is too surreal for her.

A job, a workplace, or a career, has provided her with a sense of identity and sense of purpose. When she was no longer attached to a job, she became lost (and she didn’t realize that). Indeed, being part of a corporation gives a person an easy sense of identity, because the “sense of purpose” was injected by the corporate structure and the job description. There’s no need for a journey for self-discovery. In a corporation, who you are, where you stand, what you do, what’s your rank, it’s all instantly imposed on oneself. In fact, it’s generally what people do. People join a group, or a club, or an affiliation (religious, political, hobby, whatever), because it gives affirmation of one’s identity, necessary for one’s “survival”.

And now, my friend is a stay-at-home mom. But she’s not happy (yet). And she’s confused, why she’s easily irritated by her children, why she’s easily snapped up to her husband. Basically being a SAHM turned out not to be a bed of roses at all. And when I highlighted that it may be because of her losing her sense of self-worth, which has been provided by the corporation for a very long time, it was like a revelation for her.

I am not claiming to be an expert in this field, not at all. Nevertheless I decided to share my own perspective and experience of the situation to my friend. I decided to take a break from career when my first baby was about four months old. At that time, it was more practical that way. We were living in Singapore, and having a nanny or a maid was totally outside our budget, so we decided to take a leap and I quit my job. I can totally relate to my friend’s feeling during the early days of being a SAHM. Embarrassingly, it took me about one year to reconcile and make peace with the fact that I am, indeed, a SAHM first and foremost.

Although people may think that it is not, quitting job and becoming SAHM is actually a big change. Especially if one have been employed or have a more-or-less settled way of life. It is not an easy process. So, it is totally normal to go through a soul-searching process. I personally find some tips and tools that I wished I had known before, to make my own transition easier. And I hope it can be useful for you who want to take the same leap of faith.

Keep up the rhythm, dress yourself up

Just because you don’t commute to office every day, you’re excused to waking up late, not taking a shower, and dozed off. You can do that on the weekends, but we’re talking about weekdays here. It is good, and I found it necessary, to maintain a basic structure in daily life, because other things (such as projects) can be fit into the puzzle when the structure is there. It’s easier to do by just keeping a daily rhythm similar to when I was working in the office. Wake up the same hour as when you need to get ready to go to office. Determine that, say, from 9-5, will be a “productive” hour which you can spend by setting small tasks and goals for yourself, or doing projects, even though you’re now doing it from home instead of office.

Don’t stay in the sleeping gown (I stayed in my sleeping gown all day for the first few months of being SAHM, and really, it has kept me low in the mood). Dress up neatly, nothing fancy, just neat enough so that you can easily go in and out the house, or receive guests without having to excuse yourself. When done in the morning, it sets out the mood for the day.

Write a Journal

With a jumbled emotion during the adaptation process, my friend was confused and stressed out, and she doesn’t know why. I found writing has brought three-fold benefits for me: One, it is therapeutic because it helped me untangle my feelings and thoughts. Two, it helped me separate real issues from emotion-laden freakiness. Separating issues from feelings is really important in order to maintain smooth communication, especially with the spouse. If you like, you can let your spouse read the journal too. Third, the writing process itself gives a feeling of “productiveness”, that helps to return the feeling of self-worth and speed up the process of self-discovery. If anything, you can always password protect your Microsoft word document.

For me, the following journal structure helps. First, I write everything about my feelings, everything. Just pour it out. Then, I read it again, and proceed to write the second part, on why I feel the way I’m feeling. Third step, I read it again, and start to write conclusion, outlining the real issues and the emotional impact. The last step, I can figure out ways to address the real issues, but only keeping the emotional aspects on the sidelines.

Make a Name Card

Make a name card with your name, email address, cellphone, and whatever you define yourself to be. You can write “Professional Domestic Manager” or even “Mother”. Or you can put your projects or plans, like “Freelance E-Commerce Entrepreneur”, “Child-Rearing Researcher”, or “Early Childhood Education Specialist”, or “Breastfeeding Counsellor”, whatever. When one works in a corporation, the name card is a projection of him/her who represents the corporation in the public sphere. As a SAHM, you are representing yourself. The name card is a tool that depicts and projects your aimed identity or goals. It also gives the SAHM an “equalizing” factor when socializing in a diverse group of people. When talking to your husband’s colleague, for example, instead of weakly and diminutively present yourself with “I’m only a housewife” presentation, you can confidently say, “I AM a professional housewife”, reach out your hands forward, shake hands firmly, and hand out the name card.

Yes, I am a housewife and mother first and foremost, but I’m also doing it professionally (although I’m not paid a salary). And please, it is not an easy job to do. Every day I do my homework of doing research on child-rearing, household management, ensure everything is in order, ensure my kids have balanced nutrition, source for good pre-school, sit in parent teacher association, etc etc.

Hopefully the tips above can help the transition into SAHMhood easier for you all, who has been so used of being an employer. And hopefully you can be a happy, professional SAHM!

My Personal Meta-Brain

rani — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:40:27 +0000

Finding the right Knowledge Database Software

I’ve been using Wikipedia since 2004, but I haven’t been active lately. My excuse: Busy taking care of my kids. However, Ivan Lanin dragged me back into Wikipedia world, by arrowing me as the secretary-general of Wikimedia Indonesia, so I have to slowly get involved in wiki again (To the Indonesian wiki community: please be kind, I’m sort-of new here).

At the same time, little Kei began to join a preschool, so I started to get myself busy with things, which necessitates me to reorganize myself. As you might have known, my memory capacity has been somehow impaired after going through a severe bleeding during child birth. I theorized that it was caused by the reduce blood flow into my brain when my blood volume was cut by more than half. So, I’ve been a junkie in logging and tracking stuff, such as tracking my expenses and time spent. But how about other take note of other things? How to help remember things? How to organize “My Personal Knowledge”?

I tried Freemind, but somehow it loses focus when the mindmap gets really big. I tried Personal Brain, but I got tangled in branching nodes while I didn’t get to input much information there.

And then Ivan showed me his local installation of MediaWiki, that got me into thinking, “Hey, if MediaWiki can help organize knowledge of the whole world in Wikipedia, it surely could work to help me organize my thoughts?”

Trying MediaWiki

So I decided to give it a try. First, I tried to install MediaWiki on my Dreamhost server. It was easily done, thanks to Dreamhost one-click install. Then I simply modify LocalSettings.php to make it private, and as another layer, I password protect the whole directory too. But thanks to Indonesia’s slow internet access, going to my online personal wiki takes ages! Often, my thoughts vaporized into the sky before the wiki page opens.

So I thought, the installation has to be local. Technically it is easy. First, install XAMPP, then install MediaWiki. I tested it and it seems great. MediaWiki offers great flexibility in putting and organizing my thoughts / notes. Each thought / word / notes got one dedicated wiki page, and it can be tagged by using Categories. The categories can be arranged in many different ways to suit my organizational style. I’ve been using this for two weeks. Interestingly, I use it initially as contact database. There, I put one page for each person with complete contact details, info, history of meetings and correspondence. Then this person’s page is then linked to a different page containing the information of his/her workplace, another page for minutes of meeting, and another project page for project details. I found that MediaWiki is more flexible in putting information about a person compared to the Notes field in Microsoft outlook, and the big plus is that the person’s page can be linked to other things such as minutes of meeting, etc. You can’t do this in Microsoft Outlook contact, so, I use the MediaWiki database as a complement to my Microsoft Outlook database. MediaWiki as reference repository (contact history, minutes of meeting), while Microsoft Outlook as the workhorse from which I send out emails, arrange meetings, calendaring, etc.

In sum, over these past two weeks, I found out that MediaWiki has been a great tool to take notes, to organize my thoughts, and to link one piece of information to another. It is very flexible (although not as graphic as Freemind or Personal Brain), and it is very much expandable (I began from contact database, and expanding into minutes of meetings. Later I might use it for putting references and project notes). It is like my personal meta-brain. So far it really helps my impaired memory.

Syncing MediaWiki Database

But then another problem arises. Indi and I work from four different computers each day. Two computers at work, two computers at home. It’s nice to have access to the same MediaWiki database from all these different computers.

There are three alternatives to solve this problem.

First: sync the whole XAMPP folder to different computers through external hard disk using SyncBack software. But this has to be done manually. Doable, but painful.
Second: Put the XAMPP MediaWiki installation to a thumbdrive and run from there. Not as painful as the first one.
Third: Put the XAMPP MediaWIki installation to sync on-the-fly by using DropBox This is the best option so far, since I don’t have to think, and the files will be synced. However, big caveat, the downside is that the initial sync will take a long time, thanks to Indonesia slow internet access, because XAMPP + MediaWiki installation equals about 270 MB of data. It took me 18 hours for the initial sync. But the good thing about DropBox is that it will only sync the file difference every time we make changes. So the subsequent synchronization is very easy and fast.

Securing the MediaWiki Database

But it is not the end of the problem. After being able to sync across computer, how do I ensure that the database is safe and secure? Restricting access through MediaWiki interface is not enough, because the MySQL database is still accessible by file browser locally. Luckily, there’s an easy solution for that. Enter Truecrypt. With it, I simply make an encrypted file container in which I put the whole XAMPP + MediaWiki database into it. This encrypted file container is put in My Dropbox folder, so that it will be synchronized on the fly. Then, each time I want to run XAMPP, I have to mount the encrypted file container by entering a password. The file will be mounted as a drive under My Computer. Then I can run XAMPP. The good thing about running it through Truecrypt, is that XAMPP will get root folder under the computer drive, so that I can run XAMPP directly without having to run XAMPP installation.

Recap: Step by step

So here goes the step by step, more to help me remember, and hopefully it’s useful for you too. It will take around 30 minutes to install.

Download DropBox, Truecrypt, XAMPP, and MediaWiki
Install DropBox
Install Truecrypt
Create a Truecrypt file container, minimum size 512 MB in My Dropbox
Mount the Truecrypt file container as a drive, example: Drive X:/
Unpack XAMPP into X:/xampp
Run xampp by using command line: Go to drive X:/, then type “cd xampp”, then type “xampp_cli start xampp” which will start xampp
Set the initial security setting in http://localhost/security
Unpack MediaWiki in a subdirectory under /xampp/htdocs
Run the installation script
Modify LocalSettings.php as needed to restrict editing of the MediaWiki database, insert personal logo, and to enable Clean URL
Move LocalSettings.php to the correct folder as part of the MediaWiki installation
If you want, you can add .htacess file to enable Clean URL.
MediaWiki is ready, go ahead and enter as much info as you want
Close the browser
Stop xampp by command line “xampp_cli stop xampp”
Dismount drive X:/, and if you’re connected to the net, Dropbox will instantly upload the Truecrypt volume. The first upload will take a long time.

Once the Truecrypt volume is uploaded, you can run the MediaWiki database again to modify it with these steps:

Mount the Truecrypt file container
Run xampp by using command line as above
Access MediaWiki with your browser, do whatever changes you want.
Close browser, stop xampp by using command line as above
Dismount Truecrypt file container
Dropbox sync will start immediately, and will upload only the changes (not the whole file)

Alternatively, if Dropbox is not an option, you can use USB drive by creating Truecrypt volume inside it, and following the steps to run xampp as above. This way, you don’t sync between computers, but you will always depend on the USB stick if you want to access your database. You need to install TrueCrypt in all the computers that will access your MediaWiki database.

Why we don’t blog as often as before

rani — Sun, 24 May 2009 08:30:32 +0000

Lately we are really slow in updating our website. My last entry was 2 months ago, while Indi’s was six months ago. Our main excuses are twofold: First our family goes through a series of change (both the kids and the parents), and secondly, we’re busy taking care our growing child. With one preschooler and one toddler, one can’t afford to sit down in front of the PC and concentrate on writing something.

Another excuse is that the internet is not the same as 3 years ago when we begin to blog. We began to blog in 2003, taught by our friend Iqbal Baskara, because we simply wanted to update family and friends in Indonesia and around the world with the news of our life in Singapore. At that time, not many people blogged. Hence, publishing our stories in the internet was largely a private matter, with only limited people knowing about the existence of our little family website.

Then more and more people began to blog too, and somehow indrani.net was dragged into the blogosphere thanks to merdeka.or.id (now defunct), planet singapura, pesta blogger, and also boingboing.net .Our writing style began to change, and we became more reluctant to write as we felt we had to please many people, and have to publish longer and more elaborate entries.

Concurrently, development of enhanced blogging / personal media platform began to provide more nuanced publishing means. We began to publish photoblogs at flickr. Have nothing much to say? Off to twitter or plurk we went. There are more choices for privacy too, like when we began to publish more private entries in multiply.com. Then come facebook, which was really compelling, because it provides various tools for different purpose: like photo tagging, status update for short blurbs, note tagging, and option to customize readability for each postings for specific target group of people.

The availability of these various tools drifted us away from indrani.net. Indi is still active online, but mostly on facebook.

Which brought us to rethink about indrani.net. We realize that our family and friends are all in facebook and they read more our status updates in facebook instead of in our website. That, makes the original intent of indrani.net less relevant today. Moreover, indrani.net lacks focus that makes outside reader difficult to relate to such diversity of the topics.

Actually there are many things we’ve been planning to write, but it’s all stuck in the draft form. Aside from not having the time to write, we’re also reluctant, because some topics may offend people. I feel, now, with more people accessing the internet, we’re not able to write as freely as before. Because of that, we publish less frequent, then because of that, we have less readers.

So, I don’t know where indrani.net is going, or whether it is still relevant nowadays. Actually I shouldn’t really care about it, since, again, it is our private family website, and we can write whatever we like there, and we shouldn’t really care about whether it’s still relevant, or whether it’s still have readership. We should write because we feel like writing, and perhaps we should be more disciplined to find time to write. Indeed, for me personally writing is a great exercise for my mind, and because of that, I write for myself and shouldn’t really care about readership or what people think about my writings.

In sum, I don’t have any plan. No plan to revamp indrani.net into something else. I will keep indrani.net as it is, and hopefully we’ll keep on writing. If you read our website, and is offended, or disinterested, or dissatisfied, just go away.