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Sing, sing, and sink

August 8th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal. 1 Comment.

Got up at around 11 AM this morning. Was it still morning? No big deal, it’s Sunday anyway. My friends and me were gonna have a karaoke session at NAV Kebon Bibit at 1PM. So I got ready and headed there. Some of them had been there when I arrived: Vebby—our event organizer, Lusida (Nyo), li’l Shierly, Yendy, and Bambang (correct me). The rest catched up later: Eva (vles), Herlina, Lisa (Bleh), Carla, Dinny, and Yunus. For that many people, we booked a suit for two hours. The good news was we got a free lunch for approximately 8 persons. I’d like Bakmi Goreng, but Vebby insisted on Nasi Goreng Ikan Asin. There’s no point arguing with her cause I was there to sing, not eat. I had lunch before at home anyway.

Enemy of the day: me

When we entered the singing room, I fired up Britney’s Toxic and sang along. Everybody was complaining but I kept singing. The next song was Dinny’s. I offered the others to pick their songs but nobody took the chance so I queued my own picks, about five songs. Just after Dinny finished her singing, I grabbed the mike once again and started to sing my next songs. Damn it, why couldn’t they stop complaining while I was singing. In fact, I sang because nobody wanted to start singing. I offered them earlier remember? I hated wasting time. The hell with them and the complaints. Well, I knew my voice was not even close to Sinatra’s but if they did hate my singing that bad, why did they bother inviting me at the first place. Gosh, people these days.

Okay, maybe that was not serious, but it was too far. Everytime I try to fly I fall. Oups! I mean everytime the mike went to my hand, people started yelling at me like I was the number one public enemy. They pushed me to eat the Nasi Goreng Ikan Asin instead of singing. Did I come there to eat? It ain’t warm anymore. It didn’t taste good either. And still there was a lot of it left. I didn’t like wasting what we paid so I tried to eat it. All of it. After eating, I sang no more. I was not really in the mood to hear any more grumbling. So I let Carla, Dinny, and the little Shirley took their chance and sang as they like. Yes, they sang as much as me, maybe much more but noone ever complained. That’s what they called fairness x(.

Here they come

My auntie, her husband, and her three children, my cousins, came from Denpasar to Surabaya. Tomorrow they’ll be heading to Jakarta. My cousins are still kids. The oldest is a junior high school schoolgirl. The others are boys and still at elementary schools. The two older ones, like playing games on my computer a lot. Guess what, from the moment they arrived, around 6 PM, my computer have been taken over :(. Both of them have been enjoying playing Ragnarok Online for a quite while. So they just couldn’t stop quarreling to take the first chance to play the game on my computer, the offline version of course. Well, they just stopped at 11 PM after their mother told them to go to bed. Finally I got my own computer back :D. Oh great, two boys are sleeping soundly on my bed. A single-size bed. Where the heck am I gonna sleep tonight? My God, what a day.

Party and Food

August 7th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal. 1 Comment.

A phone call from Yosep woke me up at 10.10 AM this morning. He told me that there would be a badminton practice. S***, I could not found my socks so I played without shoes. No problem for the first few games. But later my feet felt so d*** aching. I wished my feet skin was a lot thicker. We started the game at about 11.30 AM and finished three hours later. Some of my friends came home right away. But as usual, Yosep, Sudarwan (a friend of mine who has a giant body), and me would never go home without playing a few card games first. However, I couldn’t stay for too long because there was a wedding party I needed to attend.

Friend of the day: Jonathan

I always love parties, especially wedding parties because they mean a lot… of food. Today, I attended a wedding party with Jonathan. It’s not the party of my friend nor the friend of Jonathan. It’s my friend Jonathan’s friend’s friend’s party. Multiply used this ridiculous syntax to describe your friendship network. Yeah they didn’t want to use Friendster’s simpler way even though they had copied many features of Friendster. Multiply did offer many things on their site including Friendster-style friendship network, personal homepage, blogs, picture albums, as well as private and public messaging. To get more members, they even syndicated Friendster by sending their invitations to all your friends at Friendster automatically. If I were the Friendster’s Webmaster, I would definitely block them and maybe sue them for privacy and copyright violation. Well, to me it’s not a fair competition.

Hey what am I talking about. I didn’t finish the party part yet. Okay let’s go back to it. The party was held at the Forum restaurant. It located in Margorejo. Although it has two floors, it’s not a big restaurant and the reputation ain’t that good either. The party took place on the second floor. I didn’t count but I thought there were less than 50 tables.

We arrived at about 6.30 PM so there were still many empty seats. The invitation mentioned 6 PM, but you know, here this kind of occasion is always at last 1 hour late. A “pager-ayu” escorted us to an empty table. The place was not crowded yet, so Jonathan and me started to talk about the “pager-ayu” girls. Some of them are pretty but very skinny. We talked about their thin arms, their backless suit. Which one was the prettier and other boys-talk. Jon even imagined what would they look like when they’re pregnant. Can you belive it? Just before the bride and the groom arrived at about 7.30pm, our table was seated by a single man, a couple of husband and wife, and a family (two adults, three children, and a nanny). There was only one empty seat left and nobody ever sat on it because most didn’t came alone. What a lucky day, I didn’t see many people with high appetite at the table so I would get a handsome share :D. No hard competitors hehe.

After the marrying couple arrived, a local dance group performed an opening dance. Only one of the five that was really attractive to me. She’s quite pretty although her skin was rather dark. Well, it didn’t really matter. The first meal served was what mattered. It’s a soup. Not quite an appetizer however. Can’t wait for the main course: chickens. They looked so tasty that I snatched some without even offering the older ones :p. Nothing left on the plate but the bones. The next menu was fried noodle. Not bad. Nothing left either.

While we’re eating the dance group performed twice with Jill Xu’s song, I Wanna Be With You and Smile DK’s Butterfly. The local band also performed with the vocals of a female singer and a male tenor singer who had a terrific voice. In the mean time, Jon was busy with his digicam trying to take a picture of the couple because his friend asked him to send the pictures. At first he took the picture from our seats. Since the distance was so far that the pictures didn’t look good, I encouraged him to get closer to take the pictures. While the couple was on stage with the beautiful dancer for the last time, he took the chance to shoot. The good news was that he got the couple’s shots. The bad news was that he couldn’t get a clear picture of the beautiful dancer.

Well, maybe the next menu, “Gurami”, could make him happier. He ate quite a lot. I didn’t know exactly what was the next menu. It looked like “Tamie” with some boiled eggs of “puyuh” and pasta. It didn’t taste good for me, so I only ate the eggs. Jon too. The last menu in the main course is the ordinary fried rice. It wasn’t good either so I only took a bowl. We skipped the dessert. Can you believe it, “Es Cendol” in a wedding party?

Wow! It was already 9 PM so we decided to leave sooner because we parked our motor cycles at Plasa Marina and we didn’t know exactly on what time the parking lot would be closed. Better safe than sorry. We took the short walk, stopped by the ATM because I needed to transfer some fund, and went home. Woa, I was full. Although the taste didn’t extremely good, but for the great price, did I mention it was free, it really didn’t matter :D.

Does Sharing Hurt?

August 6th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Games, Sports. No Comments.

So dizzy so sleepy. I didn’t sleep enough last night. The Ninja game kept me awake all night. Worse, I was scheduled for the first shift on Friday. I got to get up early to get to the office on time. Well I made it. Luckily, Vebby offered me a breakfast, Nasi Kuning. It really helped.

After another lunch at Jula-Juli, there was a knowledge sharing about colors and their psychologies. Yenny, who happened to study visual communication design at UK Petra, shared her knowledge nicely. Unfortunately she couldn’t answer a question from Jonathan. He asked why did we use the CMYK coloring technique when printing instead of the RGB one. Well, as usual, when posed to this very kind of situation, I spontaneously joinned and tell them my opinion. As I predicted, I saw some people looked sarcastically at me. Maybe they thought that I was showing off but I did know the answer and I just wanted to make everything clear. It supposed to be a knowledge sharing anyway, right? This happened almost every time but I couldn’t help it. If something went wrong, I automatically tried to correct it. It’s natural.

Because of this, when I was in the high school, my friends called me Mr. Know-it-all, Walking-dictionary, Computer-brain, what-so-ever. Honestly, I don’t know things better or more than anybody else. Maybe the only difference is that I shared my knowledge more than them. I always enjoy sharing my knowledge because I also learned something when sharing mine. The more I share the more I get. Well, in Yenny’s case, fortunately she has a humble heart. I my self could never imagine if I was at her place. Having someone taken over my place like that is like he’s throwing the mud on my very face. That’s why I tried not to ask any question to her during her session. I didn’t want to humiliate someone with that humble heart.

Friend of the day: Vebby

Today my work was appraised by my boss. Productivity, quality, discipline, initiative, and teamwork got the very usual values. When it came to teaching and learning, I didn’t get that high value because I gave no tutorial or training last month. To boost the value, I mentioned that a few days ago I did share my knowledge about the Microsoft .NET with the division heads. My boss then told me I should share the knowledge with everyone, not just them, to get a point. Wow, I didn’t know there was such a rule. Well, because I had not read the rules thoroughly anyway, I didn’t argue. It wouldn’t go to the teamwork either because it had nothing to do with my job.

My boss then advised me to write and post articles to get more points for teaching and learning. Honestly, I didn’t really know what to write. The things I learned were mostly so technical that I didn’t see the chance anybody would understand. I believed that noone would be interested either. I didn’t mean that everyone in the office is idiot. But my job was so different with theirs. They had nothing to do with my job as well as any knowledge about it. Actually, there was only one person sharing the same job with me. But I believed it wasn’t efficient to post something in a public forum that would be read only by one person. Anyway, I’ll give it a try one day. Maybe they will need the knowledge later. You’ll never know.

After the appraisal, Vebby, who sat next to me, asked whether I had mentioned the .NET thing. When I explained the situation she looked a bit upset. She even inquired Jonathan, one of the heads, whether he had written my name on his teamwork list. He said yes but he didn’t know about the other heads. She didn’t feel quite satisfied with the answer and continued discussing this problem. I knew she’s such a caring person but I was affraid she would go too far so I stopped her and told her that I didn’t mind. Anyway, my average appraisal values was quite pleasing. Well, thank you Pei, what you did really meant a lot to me.

From badminton to Ragnarok Online

Today I should have a badminton practice with my friends. I was just arrived at the gym in Barata Jaya when I got an sms from Yosep telling that there’s no practice today because somebody just passed away and the gym was used to place the body. Okay, no badminton game, but I could just play another game, Ragnarok Online :D. My swordsman character finally reached the 30th level. Still much more to go. The maximum level is 99. Can’t wait until it reached the 50th level when I can change the job to “knight”. It really needs a lot of time. Surprisingly many people have reached the higher levels. Yeah they used bots to play the game for them automatically. Cheating, huh. When you’re cheating on a game, it ain’t fun anymore. You better not play it at the first place.