A1GP Lippo Village Circuit Design

As I mentioned in previous blog about F1 GP at Singapore roads, Lippo Village (a.k.a Lippo Karawaci) will host A1 Grand Prix on 6-8 February 2009 for Indonesia.

Years ago, all racings as well as A1GPs were hosted at Sentul Circuit on Southern Jakarta. Somehow Lippo Group was interested in hosting this event and surprisingly will be held on Lippo Karawaci city roads every year at least for 5 years ahead. This brings Lippo Village as equal as Monte Carlo, Macau, and Singapore as the hosts of city-street racing.

For Jakarta residents, Lippo Village (Karawaci) at Tangerang seems a bit far, 30 km from Central Jakarta. Driving car to Karawaci will take average 25 minutes of time. Is known as a small city developed by Lippo Group, this area is complete with residences, mall, hospital, schools, and university. The best place to live in my opinion - apart from its distance. Some places are well-known for Jakarta people to come: Siloam Hospital, Universitas Pelita Harapan, Supermal Karawaci, and Benton Junction.

Circuit Design

The most interesting part of this design is that it incorporates many existing parts of the city. Even more, they are building new roads to create a more dramatic racing.

Singapore Banks in Indonesia (a.k.a Who owns Indonesian Banks?)

When Singaporean travelling around Jakarta these days, they will be feeling like at home country Singapore. Easily can they find Singapore bank's logo in every corner of the city. As information, only 6 locally-incorporated full banks are operated in Singapore, each has strong fundamentals. But banks live in that tiny country must expand in order to keep growing.

After some mergers and acquisitions in Indonesia banks since 2000, some local banks have been acquired by foreign capital investors (read as Singapore's). Before 2007, those acquisitions were still on paper-based and management levels. But you can see in recent years that those banks one by one is changing their logos to inline with their motherships.

• Bank Buana, taken by United Overseas Bank, now become UOB Buana.
  
• Bank NISP, taken by Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, now become OCBC NISP
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• Bank Mitsubishi Buana, taken by Development Bank of Singapore (DBS Bank), now become DBS Indonesia
  
• Bank Danamon, taken by Asia Financial Indonesia (Deutche Bank + Temasek Singapore), still named Danamon.

3G Internet with AXIS GSM

Today Axis launches new Internet package bundled with free 3G modem.

Axis 3G sells this package for IDR 1.388.000, and you'll get:

Made in Europe, born in Indonesia

Nothing is more happier than having the first child. So this is my happiest moment in life, she was born on 22 November 2008 on 07.00pm. After waiting for more 12 hours from the morning, finally she was borned by normal birthing with help of dr. Stephen Mandang at …

GMail Theme Feature

GMail is now rolling out new and nice feature for millions of users. We can apply predefined theme to GMail, and believe me they all are many and nice looking.

One of my favourite is a terminal-like theme. This can make my screen very look like an AS400 dump terminal …

Apple Online Store Indonesia

Apple should have seen huge demand of Apple related products in Indonesia here. These couple latest year we can see that fast growing of Apple reseller store opening in high-class shopping centres.

First success move was to open its Authorized Apple Service Provider (AASP), that is a place to service all your broken iPods and Macbook in Indonesia. The store is located at Ratu Plaza, Jakarta.

Then there is Apple AppStore for Indonesia customer. You can see that by opening your iTunes, go to iTunes Store and change country to Indonesia. Although we can't buy music and videos, but we only can buy applications and games for our lovely iPod.

And now on 11 Nov, Apple opens its Apple Online Store for Indonesia.

Quantum of Solace and Olga Kurylenko

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Latest James Bond movie: Quantum of Solace is worthed watching I told ya. Pack of action scenes, with simple story, bring a realistic spy movie. Yes, I prefer Daniel Craig to Pierce Brosnan to star 007 franchise series.

This movie is as good as Casino Royale. While previous movie brought us to beautiful city like Venice, Quantum brings us to some exotic but remote palaces like Haiti Port-au-Prince, La Paz Bolivia, and surely Europe cities like London, Tosca, and focus on Siena, Italy.

How To Resolve Macbook Problem: OS X Leopard cannot boot

Using my Macbook for one and half year now, crash it several times (cannot count anymore), installed countless of fresh OS X 10.5.

Okay, now hope my post below will save your ass and precious time.

Your Mac OS X Issues

If you have problem like below:

• Cannot start up Mac OS X Leopard, freeze on start up
• Never get into login screen, or stop in the gray Apple screen
• After booting, go to gray screen, wait a long time, and mac is shut down by itself.

It might be caused by failed update (you tried to update 10.5.2 to 10.5.x) or some system files corrupted, or some devices failed to load.