New Immigration Application
I'm currently in Singapore for a Microsoft workshop. Well in fact I've been here since Saturday, but just now I have a chance to write a blog entry. 
When I'm leaving Jakarta for the flight to Singapore, I saw something really interesting at the airport. They are using a new immigration booth, just like the ones in other airports... Jakarta's old immigration booth are tall and scary. Now it's friendlier.
Well, it's not just the booth. The passport scanner and the immigration program are also new! When the officer scanned my passport, he told me, "Sir, are you sure you wanna go overseas? I won't prevent you, but some countries won't let you in."
"Why?" I asked, quite shocked.
"Your passport has expired", he said.
"What?" I'm sure my passport is OK. I looked into the monitor and it showed, "PASSPORT EXPIRED". I said, "It's supposed to have more than 6 months to go. The limit is 6 months, right?" My passport is good until December 2007.
"OK sir, let me try again". He scanned my passport again.
Now it's showing "PASSPORT ALMOST EXPIRED". "You see?" I said.
But after that, an error message popped up and before I had a chance to peek, the application crashed and the Windows desktop was showing up. The officer double-clicked the immigration software icon.
A welcome screen showed up. He typed in his user name and passport. Another error message popped up, "NO CONNECTION TO REMOTE LOGON SERVER". "Ha!" I thought.
He scanned my passport again and the expiry warning showed up again. "It must be because the month of expiry is December," I said, "I'm certain the application ignores the year."
The officer took a close look to my passport. "It does! Your passport is OK! It must be this program."
"New program, eh?"
"Yes. I'm confused with this program. It has a lot of problems. Sorry sir."
"I can see that."
The application crashed again and he took my passport to another workstation and another officer. After that I finally got the stamp.
"Did they really have a UAT for this?" I thought.