Jenny’s Journies

Tuesday, 13 February 2007 @ 1:17pm.

Though it has raineded today, Jakarta has thankfully received a bit of a break from heavy rains during the past few days. This has allowed people to begin the difficult tasks of clean-up and rebuilding. My friend, Erick, is a photographer and you can visit his site at http://erickdanzer.com/galleries/jakartafloods/ to see images of the floods aftermath in different parts of Jakarta. The rest of his site has amazing pictures from all around Indonesia on a variety of different themes (e.g., markets, ceremonies, children, protests, etc.).

I don’t really remember what I was looking for online, but I came across this fast fact and thought I’d post it…

Distance to Jakarta from Other Parts of the World:

London, United Kingdom to Jakarta : 6,557 miles (10,552 km)
Paris, France to Jakarta : 6,483 miles (10,432 km)
Rome, Italy to Jakarta : 6,038 miles (9,716 km)
Stockholm, Sweden to Jakarta : 5,812 miles (9,353 km)
Berlin, Germany to Jakarta : 5,979 miles (9,622 km)
Madrid, Spain to Jakarta : 6,885 miles (11,079 km)
New York, USA to Jakarta : 9,400 miles (15,126 km)
Los Angeles, USA to Jakarta : 8,790 miles (14,144 km)
Vancouver, Canada to Jakarta : 7,944 miles (12,783 km)

If you don’t already know about Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, I highly recommend it. Go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ and click on the language you prefer. Then you can search for just about anything. There you can find factoids like Filipino-American Friendship Day:

Filipino-American Friendship Day, July 4, is a day in the Philippines designated by President Diosdado Macapagal to commemorate the liberation of the islands by joint Filipino and American forces from the Japanese occupation at the end of World War II, in 1946. Originally, the islands’ Independence day, Araw ng Kalayaan, was on this day but Macapagal moved it to June 12. Filipino-American Friendship Day was created in its place, July 4 being the United States’ Independence Day.

Universal Time Coordinated (UTC):
UTC is the time as maintained by the U.S. Naval Observatory. Because of variations in the Earth’s rotation, UTC is sometimes adjusted by an integer second. The accumulation of these adjustments compared to GPS time, which runs continuously, has resulted in an offset between GPS time and UTC. After accounting for leap seconds and using adjustments contained in the navigation message, GPS time can be related to UTC within 20 nanoseconds or better. (http://www.magellangps.com/en/about/aboutgps/glossary.asp)

And why is this important? Well, I can’t seem to figure out how to change the date and time stamp on this blog. As such, the time that I actually post will be different from what is written on the page because of different time zones. Hope this isn’t too confusing!