I am grateful for this.. but I really have to tell the whole story.

Last Saturday, I found myself being invited to this university-scale meeting on an INHERENT project. If you haven't heard of it, INHERENT is this project where pretty much every national University in Indonesia is to be connected with a (relatively) high-speed backbone line, pretty much making a gigantic WAN comprised of universities around the nation.

The connection itself is done already, with benefits we've all been enjoying here in Brawijaya. Said benefits, of course, is not the joy of scientific discussion or knowledge sharing with friends from other universities; rather than that, we reap the obvious benefits: we're now getting our mp3s from multimedia.gc.itb.ac.id.

Hehe.

Anyways, the meeting itself was pretty much about doing some web-applications that would revolve around this INHERENT thingie. And this was my first time to be involved in a project meeting like this. Needless to say, it sucked.

First of all, it's too long (not to mention that it started one-and-a-half hour later than the scheduled time). Second, there's a bunch of wannabe-geeks trying to look and sound smarter than others ("When I'm in Kentucky...", "Back in my days in Aussie.."-kind of talk etc), which was sad because it's pretty obvious that they're not really into this web-app thing.

The most obvious evidence is this:

• The number of time AJAX is mentioned: Zero.
• The number of time Web 2.0 is mentioned: Zero.
• The number of time Ruby on Rails/Django is mentioned: Zero.

This is 2006. Are you sure you're talking web-apps? This is so laughably impossible.

Well, enough bashing. I would simply say that in the next 30 days (or less), I will probably have to concentrate on this project. Which probably means pending on other projects. Oh well. I hope the money is worth the effort.

By the way, yes, haven't I mentioned that they didn't even make it clear about how much we will all be paid? This is the third reason why I didn't like being involved in university-, or goverment-scale projects. If only I didn't need the money..