Antony’s Personal Opinion

Frustating with Garuda-Indonesia.com

Recently I was planning my trip in Indonesia. I am going to visit my home country for about 3 weeks. So I visited Garuda-Indonesia.com to look for schedule information from Yogyakarta to Jakarta. If you don’t know, Garuda Indonesia is the largest airline in Indonesia.

OK back to the topic. This is what I did: I entered Departure city, Arrival City and Traveling Time. Then I clicked Schedule Info button. Guess what happened? Nothing… I was waiting for about 5 minutes and nothing happened. Then my web browser displayed an error message. OK, I tried again a couple of hours later from my office. Same result, waiting for about 5 minutes and my browser displayed an error message.

Oh no…. what should I do now? I can’t believe this is the service from Indonesia’s largest airline.

I think all of you have ever used Google to search something on the Internet. Do you know that we can many other interesting “search” with Google? Here are some of them:

• Calculator. Google’s search box is actually a very powerful calculator. You can enter many different mathematics operations, such as:
  • 4 + 5 * 10
  • sin(60 degree) * cos (30 degree)
  • ln(1.5) + sqrt(4)
  • 3.5 gallon in liter

• Currency Converter. Get the latest exchange rate from Google. For example:

• 1 USD in CAD
• 1 Euro in Indonesian currency
• 3.5 USD per gallon in CAD per liter
• 3.5 Canadian dollar per pound in Singapore dollar per kilogram

• Definition. If you find a strange word, you can type “define …” in Google’s search and you will get the definition of the word.

• Stock quotes. If you want to know the price of a particular stock, type the ticker symbol.

There are many more interesting things you can do with Google’s search box. Just visit this page and explore them yourself. It is very useful.

Don’t you agree that the whole world should be able to study for free? Recently I am calculating how much money I have to spend if I would have a child that want to study engineering/science in the university. Fortunately, I don’t have a child yet. Puih….

We all know that education is so expensive. It may not be going cheaper either. So we have to prepare education for our children as early as possible. You may say that there are a lot of student loans these days. But living from a loan or credit is not a good habit. I have been trying myself not to live from credit, except mortgage. Of course, there is a possibility to apply for scholarship too, but not all students are eligible for that.

Now, let’s see how much is the tuition fee for several universities in the world. Assume that my child is going to study computer engineering (undergraduate degree) as international students.

• University of British Columbia, Canada
  Tutition fee: C$ 21,093 / year ~= US$ 18,341 / year
• University of California Davis, USA
  Tuition fee: US$ 17,304 / year
• National University of Singapore, Singapore
  Tuition fee: S$ 22,420 / year ~= US$ 13,925 / year

As you can see, the tuition fee itself is more than US$ 10,000 / year. If we include other costs, like room, food, books, etc., it will easily hit US$ 20,000 / year!

One possibility to get cheap education is going to a country where education is free, for example Germany. I myself is a graduate from Germany and I enjoyed free tuition fee there. Unfortunately, I heard that some German universities has started to apply for a small tuition fee. It is not as expensive as other countries, but then not free any more.

Well, let’s prepare the best we can for our children’s education….