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

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.”

I then googled some news and got another shock reading one of them:
Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans

Please read John Scalzi’s writing below and open the link to read more thought provoking comments, e.g:

“Why is is so hard to remember poverty once you get past it, if you get past it? Why is it so hard to empathize with poverty if you have never had it? What the hell is wrong with us?”

This post makes me ponder really hard and difficult to hold my tears. Life’s full of ‘inconvenience’ (an understatement, I know) and surprises. I really think people do need God - sometime obvious, often too subtle.

Being Poor
John Scalzi - September 3, 2005

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

Having read the actual article from Christianity Today Library, this sounds a strong resonance in my heart:

“I will admit that I did not like seeing caps in church. But you are our leader, and I was willing to follow your call. You had the right to talk to the boys alone, because you are their pastor, like a coach has the right to talk to his ball players. You have made the call, and we need to stand by it. I agree with what you have done, I respect you for taking a stand. I’m with you.”

However, apparently some CMS commenters chose to only stop at discussing the attire issue per se. But again, as Kevin has said, “Sometimes something as simple as a hat isn’t so simple.”

Still I think, the most important is to choose to do God’s will. Unfortunately (or fortunately - depend on how you think of it ), we don’t always know the 100% perfect cut of God’s will ourselves. That’s why He puts mentors in our life, I believe.

Read the actual article: War of the Baseball Caps

One of the struggles I overcame recently was gaming. Video games. It’s been 25+ days since the last time I touched my PlayStation 2 console. “Yeah, right. 25 days.” Well, we’ll have to see longer, of course. In any case, it was a great deal, no, huge deal to me. Why? Let me share a little background about my former hobby.

When I was 8, my dad bought an Apple ][ PC . Of course, being a primary 2 schooler, I only used it to play games. Two years later we had our IBM PC/XT compatible. More gaming was done, in intensity and number. Not long after that, we had a Nintendo Famicom. Well, I’d never really liked video game consoles too much, so PC/XT was still my primary gaming machine. In this machine I played my first serious game (game requires more than 2 hours each time played). After that, not many progress happenned, i.e. my dad stopped buying new toys for some reason. So while my friends got their PC/AT 286, I was stuck with my PC/XT. Still, games back then supported both platforms although more and more left PC/XT. Until one day we had a 386. Wow. This machine was simply the one that built my addiction and passion for gaming. This and the later Pentium 100 - I was simply sucked into gaming. Literally hours was burned during those time including one time I missed one mid-term exam due to a soccer game. Then for some reason, I got stuck again with this Pentium while the rest of my friends played with Pentium II and 3D graphic cards. But it didn’t reduce my passion for gaming, it’s just piled up until one day I touched multiplayer-networked gaming, I spent a lot of my after-hours in office playing Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament. My wife could share some of her thoughts back then when I used to fetch her from office - sometimes grudgingly

My latest addiction was a game series called Winning Eleven, another soccer game, started about a year before our wedding, ended just recently. This game was so captivating that I never got bored playing. It’s simply the only serious game I played for the last 2-3 years. Again, my wife would definitely be able to share her thoughts about this This was my “game of the century, decade, whatever”. I literally burned most of my evenings for hours in playing more than 50 total league seasons (each season consists of 50+ matches, each match takes 12-15 actual minutes). I can roughly average it to about 2 hours per day, continuously. Mind you, I was (and am) married. I played when I was in good mood, I played when I felt ‘blue’, I played anytime, anywhere, with anyone.

So, it was a big deal when all of a sudden the urge to play was not there anymore. After YABS retreat last May, God dealt with me for a lot of things, including this area of weakness of mine. I thank God for this.

At first, I thought I was going to endure for a couple of weeks and then lost it back to square one. After all, it’s my passion, and I have a not-so-good track record in conquering bad habits. And this “passion” things, without my knowledge, had been rooted deep in my thought. If I can recall correctly, it was my former boss who coined this term inside my head. Back then, my boss noticed that I was not too ‘happy’ doing my daily jobs (as a web developer) compared to when I talked about gaming scene. “You should pursue your passion. If gaming is your passion, you should go for it.” In the sentence itself, it doesn’t have anything wrong. It’s just when thrown to my addictiveness, it started to root and bore its fruit greater than I thought. It’s not that I disregard my former boss, on the contrary I myself still hold my utmost respect for my him, a lot of good things learned from him although he may have a different belief.

But still an impact it was to me. I was never really be able to let go gaming, even though I know it often did me harm rather than good. “It’s my passion.” I can’t give up my passion. Christ is my passion, I can’t give up Christ for whatever sake. And so it was always in my mind for sometime.

Fast forward to recently, before the retreat, I was in the car with my cellgroup leader, Bambang, driving me and my wife home. He’s quite a busy man, being posted in a fairly high position in a well known MNC, it’s not that often he could attend the cellgroup and share a car with me. One of the very short topics we chatted about that night was my “passion” for gaming. One thing that came out of his mouth was “Tsk, tsk, GT.. being this ‘old’ and you still like to play game! ” That’s all. Nothing religious or spiritual about that. All were said in chatty and joking mood. I simply grinned and replied “Yeaah.. what to do, it’s my passion after all.” And that night and the following nights I still continued my league season in my PlayStation.

Now, in retrospect, one thing that comes up into my mind is these 2 sentences from these 2 different guys. The first ‘planted’ a risky thought in my head, much without my awareness: “It’s my passion. You must maintain your passion.” The second one, also without much of my consciousness, pulled the trigger to take away the thought: “It’s nothing. You can live perfectly well without it.” This is another thing I’d like to share about: submission, authority, and annointing.

I am by no means a bible scholar, there are a lot of books, articles, studies that have already covered these topics very well. In here, I’m just sharing this as a typical working guy, doing his daily secular business while at the same time also pursue excellence to know and love God more.

I have always been a strong believer that in order to achieve a certain degree of success, one must be in a submission and authority. Although Paul described it more clearly in Ephesians 5-6 using real life examples, somehow I experienced and applied it more in the spiritual contexts.

When I first became a Christian, I immediately submitted myself under a mentorship (under an ‘authority’ if you could call that is) of my spiritual brother who led me in my sinner’s prayer - which was also happened to be my best buddy in highschool. He’s not even a year older than me, in fact just he’s just about 7 months older. In everything else we talk quite in the same level (we’re in the same age after all). Spiritually speaking, however, I will ‘ensure’ that I position him as my mentor and me as his ‘mentoree’. That’s a state or position I consciously choose. All this happenned quite naturally in me. After all, I also saw the same thing was applied in his life to his mentor, and his mentor to his, and so on.

On the other hand, I also saw several other ‘incidents’ where ones tried to ’step out’ of their areas of submission. I’m here far from any intention to form any judgement or anything else, but to simply put it, they seemed to be ‘out of radar’ from the whole corporative vision and movement in general. Of course there are processes and many other things which are out of the scope from what I’m sharing here.

Back to topic, continue to my years in Singapore. God rekindled the fire in my heart to serve and pursue Him ‘again’, I was put to join Bukit Merah cellgroup under Bro. Chandra’s stewardship. Again, naturally he and his wife became my and Siska’s mentors. A lot of priceless lessons had blessed us in various aspects through our act of submission. The same thing also happenned in YABS, Bro. Erwin immediately become our mentor, also quite naturally. A little bit different experience was when we’re told to join our homogenous cellgroups and thus were to be separated from our current ones. A that time, I and Siska were not too close to Bambang and Helen. But out of submission, we did our first cellgroup sessions with only the three of us (Helen was away) and indeed it felt a bit ‘awkward’. But we fervently continue to meet. Today, we’re minimum 10 persons each meeting and has splitted into new cellgroups.

Along the way, I recognized the importance of how I need to be submissive, even when I barely known how or who my appointed leader was, especially when I learned that among his busy schedule, he allocates quite some time in his mornings to pray. Although not said, I know for sure I and Siska are in his intercessory list. This alone worths reciprocal prayer from us and in fact, not much to my awareness, I began to revere him more and eventually I consciously placed him as a mentor where I’m in the area of submission to his stewardship.

I believe, when I choose the act to be in a submission under a specific authority/mentorship, God’s annointing really flows smoothly from top to bottom. That’s how a simple-chatty sentence like “this old and yet still play game” has a great impact that God could use to transform me. I mean, it could be a different story if I didn’t really choose to place him above me as mentor and place myself under submission; or, if it was from my other friend whom I didn’t consciously choose to submit under his ‘authority’.

So, what I can conclude tonight are:

• We need to be under a submission of some authority/mentorship
• We need to choose to be under that submission
• We need to act and choose (consciously and continuously) to place our mentors above us spiritually
• When we choose to do that, God’s annointing will flow smoothly from top to bottom
• We need to pray for our mentors, especially so that they will do the same

The problem with diamonds isn’t their scarcity, but their abundance.

A friend of my wife was asking for some articles about diamonds and its overly priced facts. I myself has known the ‘truth’ since 2003, which was about 6 months after I bought my first (and last ) diamond ring for my fiancée back then. But I don’t have any regret. After all, this was for a lady I will share the rest of my entire life with. Still, I’d consider myself lucky because she shares similar opinion since I revealed the ‘truth’ to her.. (or maybe not that similar )

Here are some articles from my ‘research’ (googling around):

• A Perception of Rarity (part of “How Diamonds Work”)
  Some diamonds, like the Hope Diamond, are extremely rare. However, most diamonds are much more abundant than we are led to believe.
• Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
  While those who attempt to sell diamonds often experience disappointment at the low price they are offered, stories in gossip columns suggest that diamonds are resold at enormous profits.
• Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring
  from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One
• The Diamond Invention
  A whole book about the subject, long but very comprehensive.
• The New Diamond Con (August 3, 2000)
  The problem with diamonds isn’t their scarcity, but their abundance.
• Is a diamond’s price a true measure of its value?
  (contains a little note about Epstein above)
  … but I bet if your wife knew the real story she’d prefer her next gift to be a nice socket-wrench set. Diamonds are a con, pure and simple.
• Africa’s Diamond Wars
  Across vast stretches of Africa, diamonds fuel war.
• The New Diamond Age
  Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.
  “It’s too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless.”
• The cartel isn’t for ever
  With its near monopoly as a trader of rough stones, De Beers has been able to maintain and increase the prices of diamonds by regulating their supply.
  … Consumers believe diamonds are valuable largely because of decades of clever marketing by De Beers and its clients.
• Diamonds Aren’t Forever
  This one has nothing to do with De Beers et al… but still a good read.

Click here to download CSS Cheat Sheet (Rewritten)

PS: I rarely blog so I wonder how popular this post will be ^_^ If you’re happened from Indonesia, please drop a note. Furthermore, if you’re from Bina Nusantara University, a big HI from me. Ultimately, if you know me personally, hehe yes you don’t know I’m blogging :p