denniland.com

What’s Wrong With the Search Engines?

August 17th, 2004. Published under Games, Techie Stuffs. No Comments.

Today I checked this site access log. Great, the Google bot finally showed up in the list. Then I performed a search for this site on Google. Darn, still no results. Maybe Google had not indexed my site yet. At least Yahoo and Altavista already did. Well I’ll check to make sure. What the!!! My site disappeared from their listing. How could that happen? Arrrggghhh… I didn’t do anything stupid to this site lately but why the heck did the search engines not list my site? Bah, I couldn’t find any clue :(.

This site gets slower, it must be because I write blogs almost everyday. My blogs are all shown at the homepage so it will take a while to load the whole page. Do search engines hate this? Well I hate this, maybe they do too. Now I display only the last seven blogs at the homepage. It should be a lot of faster now to load the page. The older blogs can still be reached from the Archieved blogs section, so it won’t be a matter. I hope the search engines will like this new design.

There was no badminton practice today as the gym was closed temporarily. We are celebrating the Indonesian independance day today so most activities are suspended. It should be a holiday too but my office moved it to yesterday so I got to work today. No badminton meant more time to play RO :D. My magician was up for 6 levels today from 26 to 32. Not bad. I did the first few levels solo. Upon reaching level 30, however, things started to move very slowly, so I tried to make a small group to help me level faster.

My first group-mate today was an archer. He was at some levels below me but it was really not a big deal. I only needed someone to hold back the monsters for a second while my magician was casting his deadly spells. Although the magicians’ spells are so powerful, they need time to cast. If the magician is hit during the casting, the spell will be cancelled. That’s why I needed somebody to cover me. Later the archer introduced me to his friend, a thief (not a real thief of course, it is a profession in RO like archer or magician). We teamed up together and kicked the monsters’ asses.

Everything was great until an acolyte offered her service. My teammates gladly welcomed her as she could heal their wounds. I personally had no need for acolytes since magicians are seldom to get hit. Unfortunately, the acolyte had a bad intention. She tried to break our team apart. She only healed the thief’s wound. She even tried to seduce the thief to leave the party and started to go duet. Her sheme succeeded as the thief followed her will. This made the archer really upset and he started to bother them by kill-stealing the monsters they were engaging. The thief didn’t like the action and they started to insult each other. It wouldn’t do any good to me so I decided to leave the broken group and started soloing.

Some times later the archer asked me to rejoin because the acolyte had left. It looked like the archer and the thief had been in peace once again. Hahaha, I know it’s only a game, but it’s really funny when the emotions are involved.

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.