Balineese pig farmers are great.

Kiva.org is a site that helps people obtain micro loans. These loans go towards improving their businesses, education or lives in general. Kiva obtain their kapital from people like us, “rich people”, to loan to people in the poorer countries of the world. There is a lot to explain and I don’t feel like repeating what is already laid out on their site. Go read some. I know you have nothing better to do. You are reading my blog, after all.

So far I have dropped $100 in to my account. Not much considering it is only $25 a time over a few months, and I’m not trying to ad to my collection of 50 designer handbags. One of the groups I decided to lend money to were the Nusa Sejahtera Group in Bali, and I didn’t like them.

For months I watched as my other loans were slowly making their way back, five percent here, ten percent there, all while these people gave me zero percent everywhere. They took my money and lost it!

A few days back I got an update email from Kiva telling me I have credit available to reloan. People have been paying back their loans and I can now help someone else with a loan. I went in to my profile to see who was paying what this time and BAM! these hard working farmers paid back everything, one shot, in full, everything.

I like me some Indonesians again.

*****

Wayan Nantra is the chairman of Nusa Sejahtera group who lived in the Village Nusasari with his wife and 1 child. Daily work is as a farmer with his wife and also develop the business of pigs at home. Nusa Sejahtera Group has successfully repaid the loan to the MUK of Rp.9,000,000($1,000)

From the previous borrowing Wayan Nantra maintain a sows producing piglets and some sold as many as 8 and 2 pigs are fattened into bolsters. From the sale of pigs Wayan Nantra has profit of Rp. 200,000 per month.

For the next period and Wayan Nantra and Wayan Surmi decided to stop borrowing to MUK since been able to finance their own maintenance in addition to pigs should be more care of his farm.

Arise, my stick man.

For fun, we played Pictionary in extras class. Yesterday, that is. One student got “Waking up” and proceeded to draw this…

He started with the bed, weird as it might be, then drew the lying man and lastly the standing man with a arrow thing pointing to him. One girl was looking at the lying man and shouted “Dead!” He drew the standing man and she shouted “Murder”. He added the arrow and she went “Fight, alive. Jesus! GOD!”

Jesus? God? Leave it to this girl to look at everything differently from everyone else.

Eat my, erm, heals, Halfus!

I downed my first Raid Boss. What you saying now, B****?!

Huh? You have no idea what I’m talking about? What do you mean you don’t play World of Warcraft? Really? It must be hard not being a geek. Don’t worry, let Otto tell you more.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online(MMO) Action Role Playing Game(RPG). MMO because there are a few million people online at any time playing and Action Role Playing because you have a character that you play, gaining experience and gear in order to do even kill even stronger monsters. I play a Healing Gnome Priest called Dhells (Otto was already taken, apparently. If I get my hands on that fool)

Now for the Boss referance. A large part of the game revolves around working with other player to achieve a goal as a group. You are able to join a group of five player in Dungeon to fight monsters, not so monsters and then some really bad-ass monsters. These are bad-asses are referred to as Bosses. Killing them is the ultimate goal of the Dungeon. Well, more like the gear you get for killing them.

Once you have enough Experience, and enough Gear, you usually join your Guild (club, special group, whatever you want to call them) in a Raid, a very high level, very difficult Dungeon with the Biggest Ass Bad-ass Bosses there are. This is where this post is coming from.

We downed Halfus Wyrmbreaker, and we did it with just nine people instead of the normal 10 (there is also a 25 man version)), and we got an extra achievement out of it. I manages to win the gear reward from killing him, but really, I was just happy to have beaten my first high level Boss with my guild.

Unfortunately I was not able to join the guild the next day to have a run at the next boss in the Raid Dungeon and I will not be able to do so again tonight, but that is OK. Maybe I will be online over the weekend a see a bit more of those annoying dragons.

More dots

(Not these dots, but just as funny.)

The tests I do 4 times a year are finished and we are now watching films for a bit. At least, the students who did their part before the test are watching. The rest are writing essays.

This is a system I came up with partly to motivate students to try in class and partly to fix the problem where I miss classes and don’t have time to catch up. What happens is that I see each class once a week, and if that class gets cancelled for whatever reason, I start falling behind. Often the same class gets cancelled two or three weeks in a row. By only teaching three actual lessons and filling the extra periods with games that reinforce some aspects of those lessons these movies as a reward, I have a chance to catch up with the classes I missed.

During normal lessons students get Movie Points for putting in some effort in class. I say effort because that is all I am looking for. Students seem to think that finishing is all that matters. Finishing is easy. All you need to do is goof off for 40 minutes, copy everything from your friend who put in the effort, and voila. You get no credit from me for that. I give two points per lesson and if a student manages 4 points from 3 lessons, they get to watch the film after the mid-term or final exams.

The students writing the essays sit in a separate room. Staying with is boring, really boring, and sometimes I do things to entertain myself. Yesterday I had a red board marker and was giving every student a little red dot where their hair parted. It is funny for a few minutes, it washes away after a while, and no one sees it unless you tell them to look for it. Also, the pen was running dry and the dot was barely visible.

Most of the boys thought it was quite funny. Most of the girls didn’t like it and just asked me not to do it again, but still saw the funny side, and some students were of the “Meh!” persuasion. One girl, however, decided to turn drama queen and was literally crying Snot en Trane (Afrikaans for Snot and Tears). She was literally dripping on the table for 20 minutes. 20 MINUTES! Over something no one will see unless you tell them to look carefully? Seriously?!

I would like to say I was sorry for what I had done, but I’m not. It was funny, it still is funny, and it is no big deal.

Will work for coffee

I’m tired. I am really tired and all because I was having the same dream. Like it often is with dreams, I can’t really remember just what it was. I do have some vague idea though.

I think that in the dream I was supposed to plant something that would serve as some sort of an alarm clock. The same alarm clock that wakes me up at 7am every morning. Stupid, but what do you expect from a dream, right? Because this something was not planted yet I would wake up in order to do the planting, just to immediately realise that it was a dream and that there was nothing to plant.

This happened five times between 5am and 7am. Basically I would fall asleep, enter a dream state after about 20 minutes dream the same dream and immediately wake up. Aaaaaah! If I ever get my hands on that dream fairy.

Let's try this again

My roughly 10 months of near constant depressive stated seems to be nearing an end. I have been shunning people for most of that time, sitting in front of my computer getting a Gnome Priest from 0 to 85 and almost fully raid geared in just a few weeks, while testing other classes.

I have also had a lot of time to reflect on my life in general and why I feel the way I do. I know what started it all but the rest is a bit fuzzy and not that pretty, I’m sad to say. All this is  mostly because of my own behaviour.

There are a few things I have started doing a lately that have made me feel a lot better about myself. Keeping my mouth shut about other people when they are not there to defend themselves has helped a lot. I’m not 100%  there yet, but I am 100% trying. Baby steps, and every day just a bit of effort and it will all get easier.

Today will be the first time in almost 4 months for me to set foot in the Hapkido gym. I just didn’t have the motivation, just like I didn’t have the motivation to take photographs. I can’t tell you why, except that it was cold and the motivation level was not high enough to overcome that. Tonight will be the night that I start working off all that fat I have accumulated over the last few months.

In other news, there is a place in Icheon that now give Korean lessons. I’m not sure of the guy’s experience with foreigners at a level as low as us lot, but he is a university lecturer and it seems like this is not the first time teaching Korean. I will try my best to make this 18 week program work for me. I will try to stick a few extra lessons on there from KoreanClass101.com.

Also on the cards will be photography. I did take the random shot here and there, and I do have them on my memory card and phone, but that is where they have been for a long time now. I need to Jailbreak my phone which means I have to back up my photos. Once I have them on the computer, uploading to Flickr will be easy, so expect a load of posts with what will basically amount to photo dumps.

I'm gay? Why didn't you tell me this before?

Someone I know was starting to piss me off. Pissing me off doesn’t take much, so I have learned to take a lot of that and ignore it. Yes, sure I still get really upset about stupid things and I am aware of it, but I am actively working on ridding myself of this really bad habit. People will always piss others of every now and then, but that is no reason to not be friend with someone.

This guy was getting on my case about my computer and how it relates to the game World of Warcraft. I am fully aware that my Mac is not a gaming computer. I dint buy it to be one. It has enough memory and CPU power, but the graphics card, maybe the most important thing in a gaming rig, was severely lacking. I was playing WoW at low graphics and still getting only 20 frame per second. That is playable because I am a healer, but it is not exactly a great gaming experience.

When the earth quake hit Japan its impact on my connection with the game servers was heavily impacted and my game was basically unplayable for about 10 days. Somehow he got it in to his head that it was my computer’s problem and also my service provider. I explained to him that it made no sense and since my connecting was fine a few days before (I hadn’t thought about the quake being the issue at that point) in the end I was proved right when my connection speed returned to normal without changing computers. He also had this strange idea that my hard Drive was done for despite everything else working find and testing it showing no problems.

Through all of this I was looking in to getting a PC with a decent graphics card. Playing at high resolution would be nice, I though. He gave me advice, but honestly, everything I know about the rig I eventually bought was found on the internet. Names, specs, prices, everything. He did put me in touch with a friend of his and also gave me the number of a place where he lives, but I ended up going to Yongsan and getting everything for a good price. I did thank him which apparently was not enough of him. I didn’t want to go with his friend because I felt weird asking someone I hardly know to go through all that much effort for me and the people where he lives is 2 or three hours away from where I live and they don’t speak English.

When I finally did get the new rig I intentionally did not want to tell him about it because I knew what would happen. He had been pestering me with stupid reason to get a new rig and I had been putting it off because I don’t like spending that much money on something on a whim. It took me more than a month each to buy my Mac and my iPhone. When he eventually found out he did exactly what I thought he would and gave me this “I told you that you needed is and you put it off just to do and then did what I said you should” kind of response. I never said I didn’t need better rig. I said I didn’t feel that I needed it enough and could make do without it.

This pissed me off as I knew it would and I told him what I thought, but in typical style, he came back with the attitude that I am the only one to blame and that he was right all along and I was wrong for not doing what he told me to do. For some reason he does not understand that I have money in the bank for a reason. I don’t spend it the moment I get it and that I will certainly not spend it for the useless reasons he put forward. He posed something on my Facebook wall about it and I was not having any of it any more. If you have to say something like that, send me a message. Don’t make a public post, again. I told him what I thought, he came back with more of the same and I finally decided to unfriend him. This was his response:

“typical pussy move from a pussy guy-face it ur socially retarded...”

Homophobic, senseless and, well, juvenile. (I have to wonder about the bragging over the girls and the constant homophobic comments.)

Apparently not feeling the need to engage in dick measuring over how many women I can pay to have sex with me in one night, how young they are, how fast my internet connection is and who has the biggest computer makes me gay and a social retard. I will have to take a few days to think about that.

Jargon

I was tring to find out what 95% Confidence interval meant and found this on Wikipedia:

In statistics, a confidence interval (CI) is a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter and is used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. It is an observed interval (i.e it is calculated from the observations), in principle different from sample to sample, that frequently includes the parameter of interest, if the experiment is repeated. How frequently the observed interval contains the parameter is determined by the confidence level or confidence coefficient.

I'm sure it is right, but come on. If I am looking for something on Wikipedia then I am likely not an expert on the subject. Drop the jargon, man. (I honestly believe that people who at explain something without at least trying to avoid jargon does not truly know what they are talking about.)