I've converted to Buddhism

27-09-2010 18:36

[I've been writing some blog postings offline, so they'll tend to come in waves when I get internet access - so the dates above may not match.]

To obtain an Indonesian work permit, we have to declare our religion. From a list of 5: Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist. So atheist is not an option. While I'm not happy about this, I've chosen Buddhist as being closest to atheism - I just need to remember I've registered as a Buddhist and not make any accidental conversions during my placement.

The VSO staff have been great here - we've been chauffered around by Ujang, our Balinese driver, and shown around the local bars and restaurants by other VSO volunteers. They've been excellent at providing information, looking after our visas and work permits, and generally removing any minor hassles. Meaning we can concentrate on getting acclimatised and learning more about the programmes that VSO work on in Indonesia.

The VSO office also has one of the nicest smoking areas I've ever seen.




VSO staff and volunteer up on the roof terrace.

Greetings from Bali

I've arrived in Bali for in country training before starting my VSO placement proper.

First impressions of Indonesia? It's true, everyone is very friendly. Even the immigration officers at the airport were smiling and joking - compare that to the stony faced gatekeepers at any UK or US airport.

Met by VSO staff and volunteers at the airport, whisked to hotel and then local fish Warung - grilled snapper, rice and some mental chilli sauce, for about a pound. Hostel looks stunning even in the dark - rooms open onto a palm filled courtyard with chirping crickets and birds.

I've met some of the other volunteers on our 6 week language course - sharing a room with Paul, a genial dutchman working in disability. Beach games have been organised for tomorrow - let's hope I can withstand the enforced jolity.

So far no massive culture shocks, and I don't want to come home yet. So far, so good...

I'm in love with Xubuntu

I've just installed Xubuntu 10.04 - and it rocks. It's based on the Xfce window manager, which while it can do all the fancy stuff associated with KDE and GNOME, defaults to boring. So nothing fancy, just a classy looking interface with multiple workspaces.

One of the things I like about GNU-Linux is that the operating system tends to be far less CPU and memory hungry than other commercial OS, leaving your PCs power to be used on the stuff that matters (like the applications), rather than on a nice animated file transfer monitor, for example. But recent linux windows managers have included more and more of these bells and whistles, hoovering up CPU and RAM. What's worse, in Kubuntu the window compositor appeared to cause the system to hang sometimes.

In the 90s I was working with fairly simple IRIX and Solaris (and even Sun OS!) systems - in those days an operating system provided the ability to open windows, use multiple workspaces, and a clock, which is pretty much all you really need. Xubuntu provides this, in an uncluttered and accessible format - no plasma dashboards, cashews or pop up notifications.

[I still find it extraordinary that the concept of multiple workspaces hasn't been taken up by Microsoft - but then it did take them an extraordinary length of time to steal tabbed browsing from Mozilla.]

There are some advances in functionality too - wireless access works out of the box, rather than requiring 2 days of faffing about with wpa-supplicant as it did with Kubuntu 9.04. Perhaps most excitingly, I can now watch my best of the Two Ronnies DVD with Gnome MPlayer, which previous players have stubbornly refused to read.

There's a live CD downloadable from here - recommended.