MSN Messenger 1, YM 0

Yup, MSN Messenger is winning this time. At least in one aspect... or at least in my personal case.

I had never thought of using MSN Messenger for chatting purposes, except in my office which happens to use it for internal communication. All my friends and relatives use Yahoo! Messenger; none of them I know ever uses MSN, AIM, or others. YM also never disappointed me or made my system crash, for example. So why bother?

That was until last week when I came across a problem using my new webcams with YM. First I assumed it was because of my internet connection setting. YM requires a 'no-proxy' connection. Ok, I followed the suggestion and changed it to 'no proxy.' The same problem remained stubborn.

Then I thought it was something to do with my wireless connection at home. I googled for some solutions and followed all reasonable suggestions, including installing some scripts as necessary. Still the same old problem -- 'Network error occurred while connecting to the server' came up.

As time was getting closer to my departure to Houston for a 3-month business trip, leaving my lovely wife and my two small, cute boys on the other side of the earth in KL or Jakarta, I gave up on YM and rushed to find an alternative for video calls. As Skype, which my wife and I already had an account, was prohibited in my company machine, I decided to use either MSN Messenger or AIM.

I tried MSN first and as it has worked fine and smoothly for video chatting without any problem at all, I didn't proceed to test AIM.

And here's now I am a happy MSN user, along with my family. The fact that now we can see each other while conversing is so priceless.

A drawback was however found. Once I had started using the new MSN Messenger, all personal contacts in my office MSN Messenger completely disappeared when I logged in it afterward. I had to add them back one by one.


But that was a small hassle compared to the happiness my family and I have found of being able to see each other in real-time... enjoying our smiles and laughters while sharing stories, checking each other's health, or just saying hello.

Forgetting for a while that we are now half the earth away, but also assuring ourselves that our love will only grow bigger and bigger, surpassing any existing physical and virtual walls.

Thanks, MSN!

Furl is Cool

Furl is really cool...

I was looking for a way to save, manage, and retrieve webpages that I have frequently found useful, interesting, nice-to-have-for-reference-later, etc. while I surf the internet when I came across this great site, www.furl.net.

Bookmarks certainly are not enough nowadays. Pages keep on changing at the blink of your eyes and you'll be left behind in this world of information overload if you only depend on bookmarks, though it's online bookmarks which you can open anywhere there is internet access.

Furl provides a much anticipated solution to this problem. It's your personal web. It saves any pages on the Web and lets you find and retrieve them later. This way it's definitely great for many purposes, whether it is for research, travel planning, info sharing, etc.

Furl also serves as a 'social bookmarking' tool. We can share what we have 'furled' with our friends and others. We can subscribe to others' archive and get alerts on what they have found in the internet.

There are few other sites competing with Furl on this area, like Spurl, Simpy or del.icio.us, but I found Furl as more user-friendly and, more importantly, the sites are saved, not just bookmarked. As we know, links can die. And with a quota of 5 gigabytes per member, thousands of webpages can be safely stored for your personal archive.

For detail review of Furl, check out this Techcrunch posting. All sites that I have 'furled' can be viewed at www.furl.net/members/arief78741.

Seandainya bukan ExxonMobil...

Tulisan Ralph Nader yang terbaru agak lain dibandingkan kebanyakan karya dia akhir-akhir ini, yang berupa kritik atau ulasan atas isu-isu hangat yang muncul terutama di arena politik Amerika Serikat. Kali ini dia menulis surat terbuka kepada chairman ExxonMobil yang baru, Rex Tillerson.

Sayang sekali tidak disinggung di situ mengenai Blok Cepu yang akan diserahkan sepenuhnya operatorshipnya ke ExxonMobil setelah melalui proses tarik ulur yang alot dan panjang. Tetapi kandungan surat terbuka Nader ini sudah cukup untuk menyadarkan pembaca akan kuatnya pengaruh raksasa minyak dunia dari Houston ini.

Cukup panjang daftar andil (baca: dosa) ExxonMobil dalam pengambilan keputusan serta peristiwa-peristiwa bisnis, politik dan lingkungan, dari mulai soal ExxonValdez, global warming, Aceh, dan masih banyak lagi. Check out http://exposeexxon.com for more facts.

So, kembali ke judul tulisan ini... Seandainya bukan ExxonMobil, apakah mungkin sebuah perusahaan yang di-hired Pertamina untuk technical assistance contract (TAC) semata bisa menjadi operator dan main partner setelah blok yang bersangkutan diubah (paksa) statusnya menjadi sebuah production sharing contract (PSC)?

ExxonMobil masuk ke Blok Cepu melalui anak perusahaannya, Ampolex, pada tahun 1997 setelah Humpuss Patra Gas melepas sahamnya di TAC blok Cepu. TAC ini akan selesai kontraknya pada tahun 2010, dimana setelah itu akan menjadi milik Pertamina 100%.

Setelah mendapati cadangan minyak dan gas bumi yang besar di situ (lebih dari 1 milyar barrel minyak dan sekitar 2 tcf gas), ExxonMobil ngotot untuk mempertahankan kehadirannya, bahkan berusaha mengubah status area itu menjadi PSC dimana dia menjadi operatornya sampai at least 30 tahun mendatang.

Mungkinkah ini terjadi seandainya bukan ExxonMobil yang terlibat di dalamnya? Mungkin saja tidak dan tentunya pemerintah Indonesia masih cukup berwibawa untuk menolak tuntutan yang mengada-ada, kecuali kalau itu datangnya dari salah satu kontributor terbesar dalam kampanye partainya Bush (Republik) serta one of the top all-time donors di bidang lobi-lobi legislatif di Amerika Serikat.