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Turning Point

December 24th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Movies, Techie Stuffs. 3 Comments.

Many things happen lately. It’s near the end of the year, so I need to prepare a better new year.

Thursday, Dec 16: A New Phone

After some researches, I finally decided to get a new mobile phone, Nokia 3205. It is a CDMA phone, with some good features: integrated camera, polyphonic ringtones, cut-out cover, infra red connectivity, and Java-based applications. I plugged in a Star One ruim in my new phone. Star One, the postpaid version, offers an unlimited Internet connection at a flat fee. It is the main reason why I bought the new phone. I need a cheap and unlimited Internet connection to support my activities: works, studies, entertainment, and online games. The connection, unfortunately, is not that good. It is slow and I often got disconnected unexpectedly. Yeah, what do you hope from a cheap connection.

Monday, Dec 20: National Treasures

I asked Bambang, a colleague, to accompany me watching National Treasures, starred by Nicolas Cage and Diane Kruger. Nicolas Cage is a well-known actor. Diane Kruger is known from Troy, an epic movies, where she played Helen, the Trojan most beautiful girl. National Treasures is a movie about a treasure hunter (Nicolas Cage) who wanted to hunt the America’s greatest treasure. He partnered with a museum officer (Diane Kruger), his loyal friend, and his father. The hunting was not easy because a group of bandits, who used to sponsored him, wanted to claim the treasure. The movie is good at manipulating and twisting the American history. Well, it was nothing like Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider, but it had nice fresh jokes, some cool actions, but almost no romantic scenes. Not bad.

Thursday, Dec 23: An Important Decision

There was a big meeting at my office today. We discussed about the new system that would be started next year. At first, I didn’t get so interested in the meeting. But it changed when the boss announced the new teams. I used to work by my-self, without a team. But the new system forced me to be in the software team. My concern was that the team leader didn’t master my field, Web development. He was a desktop applications programmer. I didn’t think it would make any sense to be responsible to someone that didn’t even understand what I did.

No, I don’t underestimate him whatsoever, but we do different things. Since I didn’t like the situation, I chose not to be in the software decision. I voted to be in the download or entertainment teams. Later, I was included in the entertainment teams. My decision shocked almost everyone. They thought I must be in the software team. Well they thought wrong. But it was not the important thing. The important thing to me is to do what I want and do it well. The decision had been made. There’s no way I will regret it. I know what is good to me more than anybody else.

A Week with Me

December 6th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Games, Movies, Techie Stuffs. 2 Comments.

Sunday, Nov 28: Timeline and Cold Mountain

Some days before, Carla lent me two VCDs, Timeline and Cold Mountain. When I played the movie, I quickly found out why she had it. Because Paul Walker was one of the actor. She has been a loyal fan of him lately. Timeline was a sci-fi movie about some archaeologists who travelled back to the past to find their leader. The setting was when English invaded Franch. Nothing special though, the story is easily followed and so predictable.

While Timeline is an under average movie, Cold Mountain is really a good movie featuring some decent actors and actresses: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zelweger, and Natalie Portman. Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) and her father, a priest, came to a remote place called Cold Mountain. There she met Inman (Jude Law) and felt in love at the first sight. Soon, there was a civil war in America. Inman and the other young men were sent to battle. Having spent quite some times in the battlefield, Inman couldn’t resist his feeling anymore and decided to go home to meet Ada. Unfortunately, every man running away from the battlefield was considered a traitor and must be killed at sight. Hence, the journey was not a walk in the park.

Cold Mountain packs many romantic scenes, especially between Ada and Inman. A must see for every fan of love stories. Renee played so well as the servant of Ada that she got the recent Academy Award as the best supporting actress.

Monday, Nov 29: Milla Jovovich Gets an Upgrade

Around 5 PM, Jon suddenly asked me to go watch the movie with him. Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse. At last, I’d asked him several times before but he always replied that he didn’t have enough money. Luckily, we arrived at Galaxy Mall just before the movie began. I got two tickets for us at a very strategic position at the top row.

The movie started slowly but things changed when Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) got in a really cool action. It got even better when Alice (Milla Jovovich) finally kicked in and killed some zombies and creatures. Gosh, Alice was much better there than the previous movie. The story told that Alice and her friend had been injected with the T-Virus that mutated them and gave them a magnificent power. While Alice still got her consciousness, her friend didn’t and turned into a dreadful monster, Nemesis. IMO, this is the best action movie since Van Helsing. Don’t miss it.

Tuesday, Nov 30: The War of Emperium

Warning: If you ain’t familiar with Ragnarok Online, skip this.

Every Tuesday, the War of Emperium took place. I decided to leave my guild temporarily and join a stronger guild this time. I made a good choice since my new guild and I could take a castle, Valkrie 3. After hunting in the guild dungeon for a while, my new guild master asked me to stay in the guild longer. It was a good offer actually, but I had promised that I would only leave my old guild temporarily and would come back later, so I refused the offer.

Wednesday - Thursday, Dec 1 - 2: Boring

Nothing really happened in this periode. Boring as usual.

Friday, Dec 3: Is StarOne Good?

These days, I really couldn’t leave without the Internet. I read news, contact others, work, study, and play on the Net. Therefore, I need my own connection to the Net. Dial Up connection is evil. It is slow and hella expensive. Can you imagine? Almost 10,000 rupiahs per hour for a connection at 56 kbps maximum . Cable Internet is also ridiculous. The cable provider need me to register with the cable television first before getting the Internet connection. What the heck will I need the cable television for since I hardly have time to watch the television. DSL, the rising star in the Internet connection, is so damn expensive. 300,000 and 1.5 million rupiahs per month for 500 MB and unlimited bandwith respectively. Not mentioning that most, if not all, Indonesian Internet Service Provider suck.

Recently, in an online gaming forum, some people suggested frequent Internet users to use StarOne. StarOne is actually a CDMA operator. It offers an unlimited internet connection for only ~300,000 rupiahs per month. It’s cheap. Unfortunately some of the users complained about its unreliability. Gosh….

Saturday, Dec 4: Social Day

Around 10 AM in the morning, some colleagues and I visited Sinta. There were Anton, Bambang, Lisa Gunawan, Jon, Yustina, and Yunus. She just had a baby. A boy. She was so protective that she asked us to wash our hands and feet before we saw her baby. Soon, Shirley Wibisono and Yendy joined.

After spending some times there, we tried to find some food while Yunus went home. I suggested Vivi’s place which was nearby. They seemed satisfied with the food and I was satisfied because I could see her after quite some times. She was pretty as usual. Lucky me, she was making some cookies and she let me have some.

After eating, Jon decided to go home while the rest of us wanted to visit Stephanie at Adi Jasa. Her grannie recently passed away. Since she would be there at around 3 PM and at the moment it was 1 PM, Shirley asked us to visit her home and wait there. While others were playing PS2, I fixed Shirley’s computer. She said it couldn’t connect to the Internet. Finally I could fix the computer and asked Shirley to fight me in Tekken 4. I lost the first fight but won the rest two fights.

Around 2.30 PM, we headed for Adi Jasa. After waiting for the church service for about half an hour, we finally met Stephanie. Honestly, she doesn’t look so sad. She maybe not so closed to her grannie. We went home at about 4 or 5 PM. Well, enough for today, I went straight home after taking Lisa to her house. See ya!

Carla’s Birthday and Dinny’s Farewell

August 27th, 2004. Published under Daily Journal. 1 Comment.

Oups, I overslept. I should work from the first shift this morning. Couldn’t sleep early last night because S, remember the Aggro, kept sending me messages. After 2 AM I decided to silence my cellphone so I could get some sleep. Well it meant my phone alarm was silenced too. Got some missed calls and messages from her but I didn’t give a damn since I needed to hurry. I wouldn’t want a bad discpline point in my next appraissal. Fortunately, I arrived at the office just in time.

Carla’s Birthday

Today we celebrated two occassions at the office. After the lunch break, we congratulated Carla on her birthday. Some cakes and picture-takings as usual. Carla looked so damn aggressive and couldn’t get her hands off Yunus :D. Well, it was her birthday, everyone let and even encouraged her to do so.

Dinny’s Farewell Party

After the second shift at around 5 PM, we celebrated Dinny’s leaving. Well was it really a celebration? We should be sad because another mate was gonna leave us, shouldn’t we? But we had prepared a feast for her farewell party, so I may call it a celebration anyhow.

At that moment, Vera—our boss, and Freddy—her superordinate, gave their acknowledgements to her. Jonathan and Eva “Iyem” gave some memorabilias of artworks and pictures to her. In turn, Dinny gave a greeting card to each of us, except Vera (she was sent an email instead) and Yustina (Dinny left it at her house). In my card Dinny wrote that I was smart, kind, whatsoever and wished the best for me. I didn’t take it seriously though since I did believe that she had written the same kind of good things to others. She just can’t say bad things about others which I can easily do.

Dinny, who quitted to go to Jakarta like Eva “entut”, was the fourth that leaved the company in this year after Devi Sisca, Wiembardi, and Eva S. What a quite development we have here. I believe that most of them who leaved the company need larger fortunes since they got their next jobs instantly after they quitted. I can’t blame the work environment since I feel we are quite comfortable working at the company. Of course conflicts did and will always happen, but I have never found a major one so far. The company really should do something to keep its employees happier to stay.