Antony’s Personal Opinion

When I went back to my home country for my wedding about 2 months ago, I had to drive a car. As some of you may already know, the traffic rules in Indonesia are a little bit different to western countries. For example, amber light (yellow light) in the intersection means accelerate. Most drivers in my home country will accelerate when they see amber light. Why? They don’t want to get “trapped” in the next red light.

When I drove in Indonesia, I always stop on amber light. My cousin said to me, it is dangerous if I stop when the amber light is on. The reason is because we may get hit by the car behind us. The driver behind us may accelerate his car when he sees amber light.

Actually it was a long story why I have a new habit of stopping on amber light. When I relocated to Canada last year, I had to take 5 times driving tests. After taking driving school for a couple of months and taking several times driving tests, now I drive very carefully.

There are so many reasons why I failed several times on driving tests, mostly because I used to drive in a country with no traffic rules… We do have stop signs and yield signs, but they are somehow useless. Nobody looks at it. We do have crosswalk too, but don’t try to cross the street without looking left and right. Most drivers do not yield to pedestrian in the crosswalk.

Well… this is just a warning for you who want to drive in developing countries, like Indonesia. You need to improve your hazard perception there…. IMHO, it is better to use local drivers who have much experience driving in such situation.

Just to give you an overview how driving experience in Indonesia, I have uploaded a video that I captured during my trip back to Indonesia. The video was captured in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Notice how close the motor-cycle to the bus and how pedestrian walk so closely to the bus.

Some of you may already know that we can customize Google home page. If you don’t know it yet, visit http://www.google.com and then click Personalized Home Page. You can display many interesting contents, for instance news, technology, finance, fun, etc., rather than a simple search box.

Here, I would like to share what I have in my personalized Google home page. Just for your information, Google home page is always the first site that I have been visiting every morning in the last few months.

• A: World Cup - Since I am writing this blog during World Cup 2006, I have added this special content.
• B: News - This section contains news from different categories, i.e. “Top Stories”, “Business”, “Technology”, “Entertainment” and customized news. The customized news allows me to pull news from a specific topic, in this case news about the company where I am working at.
• C: Stock Market - It allows me to watch the stocks prices that I am interested in.
• D: GMail - I can check my Gmail account from Google home page too.
• E: Weather - Although I never checked weather forecast when I was in my home country because the weather is almost the same everyday, now it is one of the most important information I need to know.
• F: Sticky Notes - I need this section to write down some TODO tasks.
• G: Interesting to Know - This section contains many interesting topics from different sources, such as WikiHow, Ask Yahoo! and HowStuffWorks.com. Here are some examples: “How to Appreciate a Soccer Game on TV“, “How Kryptonite Works“, etc.
• H: Movies - It shows the movies schedule near my place.
• I: WebCam - This is actually for fun only. I can see live webcam of the city where I am living.
• J: Comics - Daily updated comic.
• K: Games - Two my favorites games, Sudoku and PacMan. This section is useful as refreshment, especially when I have nothing to do.

There is one content that I don’t mention above, i.e. Customize the Google Logo. It allows us to change Google logo at the left of the search box every few seconds. If you are a fan of Google Logo, just like me, it is worth to have this content too.

If you have been reading my blog, you may notice that I am a fan of Google products. Yes, it is definitely true. I am using many of Google products and I have been posting some blogs about them.

Last week, Google just released their newest product, called Google Checkout. Within a couple of hours after they release Google Checkout, I signed up for a new account. Then I tried to buy “something” from one of the merchants that support Google Checkout. Guess what happened? I cannot process with Google Checkout. The picture below shows the error message that I got.

Two days later, I tried again Google Checkout. The same problem…

Then I tried different shops and the results are the same too. OK, I thought it might be that Google Checkout does not support Internet Explorer 7 yet. So I tried with different browser, Firefox 1.5. Still the same problem.

Any hints? How can an ordinary user, just like me, use Google Checkout???