Selah to Hagah

I was properly satisfied this morning. Nothing but a darn well written article could make your day unassumingly.

While for some reason my broadband connection at home broke last night, I could still consumed my RSS readings here, at Mt. Alvernia Hospital. Again, unassumingly, eh? Having a less than 1 kg lappy to lug around surely helped.

Perfection.

The utmost enemy of mediocrity. Or for some, the pinnacle you get once in a while in mundanity that tastes like superb dessert. Yum.

I have a fetish.

I fall very easily for a good writing — a not too long one, please. Hence my hobby, blog reading. If you’re persistent enough, once in a purple moon, on a strange planet, it’ll appear. Darn. Good. Writing.

While I’m still faithful following a couple of consistently well written blogs, waiterrant and avanoo’s, after some time, they started to get too familiar. So, upon reading these words from a site named “Gamer’s with Jobs” with title began with “Best Buy” about Guitar Hero 3, it came as a refreshing surprise:

I try to catch his eyes, to make some feeble 40-year-old-dad gesture: maybe a nod, or a humble utterance of “nice.” But, his sutra complete, his eyes have gone to his shoes. His companions pat him on the back, not with a juvenile high-five, but with an almost loving touch, they way you’d touch an aging parent on the back when asking if they’re pneumonia was getting better. They turn away from us and walk back down the aisle in the direction they had come.

Jake squirms. I put him down and take his hand.

It’s warm and soft and surprisingly strong as he squeezes mine. As we walk out of the store, I have the odd sense of being aware of my breathing. For a moment at least, it becomes a conscious act.

My first inhale after finishing the last sentence was deep in contentment.

Made my day.

That or I just want to brag about my new gadget and the fact I’m blogging this from a baby-delivering hospital

It was a long hiatus.

Many, I mean MANY, things of course had happened in the past fifteen months. I’m not even sure where to start, but the itch to write is no longer bearable that whatever block a writer might have looked silly. And I don’t even consider myself as one.

I’m looking at a fresh start ahead. A year of new beginning, some say. A time when you close your eyes, a blurry vision tries to get your attention but you’re either still pretty dizzy from trying to focus to numerous spots or just don’t want to get into ponderous zone. Not so soon, at least.

Am getting a new job. “Not software development, but still in IT,” as if you need to make it more justifiable to several questioning pairs of eyes. In fact, you don’t see any question marks but you say it anyway to clear anyone’s doubt. “Your own doubt,” no one yet ever said, though. The last karaoke session was nice. What a bunch of fine folks, missed you already, guys. And the night talks in kopitiam somewhere remote from home when everyone’s posing clownily wise. Fine folks, indeed.

In spiritual front, so far so not bad. The peak was in last May, where nobody said it would be easy organizing a retreat even for a size below a hundred. It’s not. But it’s done anyway, anyhow. God’s grace, great team, wonderful spouse. Cell group grew, too. Many thinkers now, hehehe. I myself can definitely improve my personal time with Him, quality and quantity wise.

My guitar broke! The part that holds the strings near your strumming hand (what’s its name? I ain’t no musician) were detached while playing. No accident, thank God. I need to DIY-repair it soon to record a goodbye song for my soon-to-be-former colleagues. A goodbye song, how cheesy!

House pricing is crazy. Just. Plain. Crazy. I’ll nod my head if someone says the property agents have been conspiring to overhype how gooood our economy is rising like nobody’s business. Yeah, except it’s everybody’s business! Again something to thank God about that my landlords still have merciful heart. I don’t know what next year will bring, really. Plans to make more money have yet to move into inception. Money, money, money, money$.

Speaking about making money, I’ve just read a billionaire philanthropist said “I was set out to make more money, but not to have it.” Niiice, eh? Go ponder.

Hmm, what else.. I replaced my Samsung CRT with a 19″ ViewSonic widescreen LCD. All is well, all is well Half of one of my childhood dreams materialized. The other half? What, another 19″ widescreen LCD, of course! And a big, strong, nice L or U shaped desk, with a couple of Aeron chairs, inside a sound proofed spacious home office room, closable door installed. For a guy who does not fancy cars, mobile phones, watches, and golf sticks, it’s a decent wish, no?

Ok, enough for now. I reached 500 words, not too bad for a block breaker. As parting gift, I’ll just drop a link to a very good blog I subscribed recently: Meditations on Meaning.

Until sometime (I hope) soon.

I’ve been a faithful waiterrant.net reader for about 3 months and continue to be highly entertained and educated (in a subtle way) by his writings. His last post is kind of pointing that to me (the education):

CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character
(USA Today, 14 Apr 2006)

Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver.

The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of an obviously rich and important woman. “I watched in slow motion ruining her dress for the evening,” Odland says. “I thought I would be shot on sight.”

Thirty years have passed, but Odland can’t get the stain out of his mind, nor the woman’s kind reaction. She was startled, regained composure and, in a reassuring voice, told the teenage Odland, “It’s OK. It wasn’t your fault.” When she left the restaurant, she also left the future Fortune 500 CEO with a life lesson: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

(read more insights from the article…)

Now this is not to say how a great human I am but I’m humbly glad that my parents had raised me pretty well not to have a “situational value system”, as one of the CEOs put it.

As a Christian, we’re not to judge others. Heck, this is also for other beliefs holders. But predicting one’s character is a skill needed by most people if they still live in this earth - thus interact with each other. A lot of decision making require a good observation about the other party. And observing how someone treats a waiting staff will tell you truthfully about them.

By the way, my sis is also in F&B industry. Maybe this is why I tend to see waiting job at a slightly different angle from many of my friends. Not to say that they treat waiters badly, though, it’s just “different” I always see my sis in the person who attend to us whenever we eat. The thing that I still can’t figure out to do nicely is tipping well. In Singapore we have 10% compulsory service charge and in many restaurants you’ll be attended by more than 1 waiters. So, you don’t have a clear gauge of how much you should tip. Well, I know it’s a lame excuse and I should add that 5-10% more on top the compulsory 10% already

Thanks for the tip, Waiter.

Yeah, right, Bilingual Blogging. I fulfilled my own ‘prophecy’ to be stuck at last November post. And now I’m talking about blog “roadmap” *grin*

Ok, to cut the story short, here comes the updates:

• I only managed to post 1 more entry in my other blog which was in January. And it’s not translated in English.
  Lesson learnt: write in English first, it is much easier to translate to Bahasa.
• I shifted house. That’s recently. Thank God, another miracle: no agent, friendly Indonesian owner, good location, also the first house (and would be the only one had my wife not insisted to look around for more) we visited.
• I and Siska cleaned the previous house. “What’s great about that?” yeah I hear you mumbling. It was an achievement. Big one. We were quite worried that we won’t get the security deposit in full if the house is not clean (having moved around from one house to another in these 5 years, I’ve never gotten my security deposit returned in full - which the landlords were not to blame ). I can’t stress this enough that the previous landlord’s wife is a super-duper-tidy and neato person. When we first came in, the house was literally-amazingly spotless. At first, I myself couldn’t believe that we could really teamed up to clean it back. It’s clean now. Very very clean. Total hours spent: from 1pm - 11:30pm. Rrreally proud to be a great husband and wife
• Going paper - that iPAQ jammed again! But it’s about time I do retro. Not bad at all, my schedule is even more manageable.
• Working real hard.

Along the way, I encountered some ideas, were occasionally thinking outloud, and started to have plan which I will humbly lay down as the Blog Roadmap ™:

• Blog more about my not-fully-exposed techie side, starting with:
  • Blog about Blogging & Blogosphere.
    This will be in tutorial format particularly targeted to my dearest Friendster pals who are I think still clueless about the subject. (in Bahasa)
  • Blog about Firefox and its fabulous selections of extension.
    That’s because soo many people still use the way-too-obsolete IE. (in Bahasa)
• Going Linux.
  Yes.. I’m leaving you, Windows. I’m gonna wipe out my gaming partition and replace it with Ubuntu for the sake of leaving you heh. Basically because: Windows is expensive and Linux is NOT. There’s actually another “noble” & hidden agenda which I’m not too keen to explain now. So, yeah, I’ll go fully Linux in desktop mode. I was thinking to wait another 2 months to let Dapper Drake released but after scolded by Mr. Rahardjo to “just get it done”, I’m willing to take the Flight 5. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this entry from Kororaa Live CD which I downloaded last night to test Xgl (impressive, see the screenshots & video)
• Pet projects.
  This has actually been a target since last year (or even earlier). But since I used WinForms extensively in my current job, I started to see this materializeable. The issue is of course I’ll be unlikely to use .NET anymore if I were to stay in Linux. Some planned projects:
  • Praise & Worship Song/Lyric Library.
    As a worship leader, one of the tasks that sometime takes time is choosing songs. There are already good softwares like OpenSong or other commercial grade ones but all of them come with 1 issue: copyright. Well, I’m not intending to outrightly condone piracy or copyright infringement, but to be real honest, we keep being stuck on, imvho, unnecessary limitation. More often than not, most ministers already have their own private song/lyric library which I believe will fall into fair use category - or at least “personal usage” category (if there’s such category ). So my mission is to let this “private” collection to be shared in p2p manner, preferably via anonymous network like Tor, while at the same time carefully design so that it really is within that “fair use” (or at least that “personal usage”) category. More about this in its own post sometime in the future.
  • Private recording.
    I sing and I play guitar. How good is of course in the ear of behearer But it’s simply because I feel it’s something God has given and not to take for granted.
  • Money making
    There are 3 ways I’m currently looking at:
    • Pro blogging, i.e. get revenue from ads, etc.
    • Create a demandable & profitable shareware
    • Create a web application/service that is buyable by either Google or Yahoo.
      While they’re still in buying spree mood, there’s no better time than now to get involved in web 2.0 wagon.

That’s it. Now, for a start, this post must make its way to Bahasa translation. Quickly.

It’s been way too long since I last blogged. One of the reasons was because I blogged more in Bahasa in my other blog - not that it’s that often, though. The other was the obvious: the comfort of procrastination (or simply: lazy).

After much and long being a reader of others’, I decided to blog in both languages. This is kinda expected, I guess, that eventually most bilingual bloggers will blog in both. I have no idea about the trilingual (or more) ones, though. So, this is my first attempt. Hopefully the percentage of former reason was greater than the later, otherwise this can be one of the last posts before entering hibernation (again) as well..

Actually, I tend to think that the audience of my two blogs is different. In gete ngeblog, I often only passed information I consumed from del.icio.us and other blogs to my friends who are, er.. less tech/comp-literate. While in here, I didn’t feel that I was adding more value by repeating what others had said. Of course I’m aware of the ‘trend/popularity setting’ effect by trackbacking etc. etc… so, yeah, it’s more to the laziness, too.

Although I always dislike and skip links-collection-only-blog-entries, this time I think I can’t avoid to do the same. Trying not to bore you, here are what I find interesting recently:

• The Dilbert Blog
  Scott Adams, Dilbert’s author, recently started to blog. I wasn’t really aware that his witticism is enviable. I like it most when he explained why some of the strips were edited not the way he initially wanted them to be. Lots of insight. He even gave a free ebook titled “God’s Debris” in his last post. Quite fun, although I must agree to many Amazon.com’s reviews that it doesn’t really deliver its claim: thought experiment. To me, at least. But it’s short (128 pages) so still fun.

Uh oh, only this for now - my eyes are heavy. The rest will have to be continued next time. So will the Bahasa post.