look at mohammed.

Lihatlah Muhammad
Masjid dikencingi orang Badui
Dia tersenyum memaklumi
Padahal kalau dia menghendaki
Dicincangnya Badui seperti adonan bakso sapi

Lihatlah Muhammad
Dipersilahkannya Masjid Nabawi
Dijadikan tempat misa umat Kristiani
Dijamunya tamu itu sepenuh hati
Demi kedamaian hakiki

Lihatlah Muhammad
Bersahabat dengan Nasrani dan Yahudi
Seperti tangan kanan dan tangan kiri
Dalam sistem hukum yang manusiawi
Selama tanpa pengkhianatan yang merusak sendi

Lihatlah umatnya
Mengucapkan Selamat Natal saja dianggap hina
Menganggap sosialisme dan komunisme sama seperti neraka
Yang berbeda pandangan dianggap sakit jiwa
Diobrak2 dengan fatwa dan kekerasan massa
Penindasan atas nama Pancasila

Lihatlah umatnya
Masjid dijadikan kuburan
Hanya dibuka untuk sembahyang
Dibangun dari mengemis di pinggir jalan
Mendirikan rumah Tuhan walau sejatinya meruntuhkan

Lihatlah umatnya
Picik beragama
Karena semakin bodoh maka semakin percaya
Jumud pada norma dan dogma
Merasa saleh dengan jubah dan peci di kepala
Dan gelar haji di depan nama

Lihatlah Muhammad dan umatnya
Muhammad menangis
Umatnya tertawa
Muhammad meringis
Umatnya foya2
Muhammad reformis
Umatnya statis
Muhammad pragmatis
Umatnya fundamentalis

Di Pengadilan Akhirat
Muhammad akan menuntut umatnya
Yang sangat dicintainya

A really nice Indonesian-written poem, criticizing on how most people practice Islam in Indonesia nowadays. It is sad how people over-glorify their religion, forgetting the essence of humanity and God himself. It seems the religion itself is more important than the whole concept of God and humanity. Taken from here.

cherish to the third and fourth

Well, it turns out that i couldn't continue my story on Cyberjaya. Wasted too much time today. But anyway, yesterday I went to KLCC and bought the third (Dream Country) and fourth (Season of Mists)volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The third volume is thinner and more like an interlude to the next volume (it is even mentioned on the introductory page). The main shit is on the fourth volume. It tells how Dream went down to hell (once more) to save his long-lost-mortal-love interest, Nada, that he himself damned to hell. And Gaiman put some surprises in the story that really makes this volume interesting to read. You'd better read by yourself tho +P.

cyberjaya trip pt. 1

On monday, Kemi, Iib, Lutung, and me decided to visit some of our friends on Cyberjaya. It is a new city in Malaysia which most parts of the city are still being built. Said that it's going to be one of the most high tech city by the year of 2020.

We went there by trains, and it a quite expensive journey for travelling by train. The ticket fare is about RM11 I think.

Me buying tickets.

The train that we rode there was one of the fastest train in Malaysia, it is the train that interconnecting Kuala Lumpur to the international airport at Sepang. So yeah, that what made the fare so expensive. It is fast. Even there is another faster train, it is the train that directly going to the airport without stopping anywhere (our's still stop at several station, including Cyberjaya). People say that it is the fastest train in South-East Asia. However, the ticket for that train is unbelievably expensive, around RM35. Bah.

After we arrived there, we went by bus to get to Haris's apartment because he was so unwilling to pick us up at the train station.

Look at our faces. WE have the rights to sit there.

So we arrived then at Haris's cribs. I met Syafiq, a very friendly Malaysian friend of Haris, whom I met before on Tiesto. But he was very different from before. So it felt like I was re-introduced to him once more. After breaking our fast for that day, we mostly spent time doing NOTHING except playing cards for like 2-3 hours. But it was fun tho, I taught Lutung and Haris new card game. Seven spades, mmm.

Haris bought this blueberry flavored cigar. So I tried one, and darn, it is a really really shitty flavored cigar. Passed it to my brother, turned out he didn't like it as well. So it ended up on the ashtray, halfway smoked.

This is Iib.

This is Haris.

This is Lutung.

Who the hell is this?

That's it for now, tommorow I'll continue my story. I'm just too sleepy to continue writing for now haha. Cheers.

supastylin;

About a week ago, I, Kemi, Iib, Norma, and Eva went to see a Groove Armada rave party. We were in front crowds, we could see everything that happened on the stage clearly! It was so cool! Among the line up there were, DJ Blink (winner of Heineken Thirst '05), Cosmic Space Monkeys (Heineken Thirst '06), Futon (a Thai band with ex-Suede's drummer in it!), and H.A.Z.E. University (didn't watch that one tho), and lastly is Groove Armada themselves.

Personally, I think it was cooler than Tiesto when he went here back on February. But, well I think it is more to my preferences tho. Btw, I grab this pic from the Heineken Music website. Can you spot me there?

so long, you will be missed.

You will be missed Steve Irwin.

It was quite a shock when i heard the news that Steve Irwin, the famed crocodile hunter, had just passed away this morning. It was reported that he was struck by a poisonous stingray barb directly at his chest, spread to his heart quickly and killed him before he got into the nearby hospital.

He performed many death-defying stunts with many deadly animals on TV, say, the kins of poisonous snakes, sharks, poisonous spiders, and the animal that made him famous for, crocodiles. When I was a kid, I always wonder whether this guy is invicible or what, because it seems he always survived from a snake bites, or jump out of a crocodile's bite. I watched many of his shows. I once loved the show back then.

Sometimes, I think that this kind of earning your living is not worth the risk, it's just plain dumb to risk your life, just to get famous. I mean, why didn't he get another safer job? Well, maybe the pay is not that big when you're not famous, but still you're not risking your life.There is a thin line between brave and dumb.

Some months ago, my brother watched the making of an episode of The Crocodile Hunters. He said that he brought his own animals, and then let it out, so he could catch it and show it on TV, as if as they are really wild animals. I thought he was a fake.

But then, when I heard the news I was quite surprised. The man I thought was a fake died while filming one of his documentary. Man. Obviously, he wasn't a fake. Even though he was famous, he still did his own stunts with the animals. And now, suddenly after all of those crocodile and snake bites, he suddenly passed away. The Great Crocodile Hunter is also a human after all. And he will be missed, for showing all of those stunts and accompanying me growing up.

get ready for 2.0

If you've been regularly browsing through the net in the past few months, you might notice that some of your favorite sites have been undergoing a lot of beta tests. For example, Hotmail, some of you might got an invitation to the new Hotmail Live, which is one of the component of Windows Live, Microsoft's next big-project to unite Internet users all around the world. Differing from normal Hotmail account, these Live account has a pretty neat new layout and functionality. Basically Microsoft has been improving its usability so it will be more easier to use, even for those computer illiterate.

Or try to visit GoggleIG, it's Google's customizable homepage, means you could set what do you want to see there, ranging from news, gmails, weather forecast, jokes, etc. You even can add components from external site such as digg. This component later can be easily dragged and dropped to match your layout. This way your browser homepage is only full of stuffs that you want to really see.

There are many other websites that are undergoing such changes, mostly on their user-interface. You might also realize that those interfaces are more dynamic than their previous static interfaces. They are also starting to abandon Flash-based interface to provide interactivity, instead they are using AJAX as they are faster and more resource friendly to your computer.
According to Wikipedia:

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

In short, the implementation of AJAX on their website brings more interactivity to it, and you don't need extra program (i.e. Macromedia Flash plug-ins) to run it on your browser, because it only uses javascript and stuffs that most browsers are capable of.
This greater interactivity is bringing websites to the next level, some may say it is the coming of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? It will take more than a common Internet users like to really describe it. Generally speaking, Web 2.0 is the next generation of website that let people collaborate and share information online in perceived new ways. Examples of Web 2.0 are Hotmail Live and GoogleIG that have been mentioned above. But of course there are dozens of other Web 2.0 websites. You might find your own description by visiting Web 2.0 websites that are pictured in this diagram. Tell me what do you think about this. I think this will totally expand the functionality of websites, as they can be considered now as a dynamic application that is accessed directly from the net, instead of just boring static presentation of lines of text.

Some of cool Web 2.0 that you might want to visit:

• meebo - an AJAX messengers, supports MSN, Yahoo!, and AIM messengers.
• GoogleIG - Google's customizable homepage.
• Facebook - a social networking site based on colleges and highschools.
  
• Last.FM - a social networking site based on your music preferences.
  
• Yahoo! Widgets - AJAX softwares that you can put neatly on your website.
  

new dashboard confessional album!

Dusk and Summer coverart.

New Dashboard Confessional album is going to be released on the 26th of June! It's title is Dusk and Summer, check it out here. You can listen to the first single, Don't Wait, on their myspace page. The song is pretty nice, me thinks :).

the war that end all wars.

Raiden in his ninja suit.

The new Metal Gear. Rex/Ray?

Metal Gear Solid 4 is the last installment of the Metal Gear series, which (should) ends the Solid Snake saga, well, that's if Konami doesn't make anymore spinoffs tho. Anyway the new trailer on E3 is damn gorgeous, check it out here.

Me, myself has been a fan of the MGS series ever since from the first game on PS. It offers one of the best gameplay of its genre, and great cinematic sequences and story, you'll be playing more to unfold exactly what's going on in the game. The story was not like cheaply written, it has the quality of the best conspiracy movies Hollywood can offer, and that makes the game a must play.

I've never owned a PS2, which MGS2 and MGS3 is released into, but hell, I finished MGS2 on my friends PS2 during the school holidays , and for MGS3 I rented a friend PS2 and finished it. All for the Metal Gear love! :D.

paperworks.

My second post on blogger.com actually, my first one was back in 2004, but then i moved blogging somewhere else. So here I am, back again on blogger.com.

Yesterday I've updated my Nokia 6680 by installing Lifeblog, it keeps log of your phone activities, it tracks your ingoing and outgoing sms'es and your picture, so if you take a picture, Lifeblog will log it. What's nice is you could easily post the logs on Typepad, and what's crap is, you have to pay $4.95 for the basic subscription. But oh well, my geeky curiousity was killing me, so i subscribed for the 30 days trial membership. So yeah, i took a picture with my 6680, write something on it, and send it directly using GPRS, and voila! I posted my first post using Lifeblog!

But hey wait, I think I've done this moblogging thingies back then using Friendster Blogs, and it's FREE! You just need an email-capable phone and an outgoing e-mail server (SMTP), which you could get it easily if you have a gmail account (smpt.gmail.com), also you need to setup your phone so it could send email directly from it (I won't explain this :P, refer to the manual please). When you have all of those, you could check for the mobile blogging options on the Friendster Blog control panel. And it turns out that blogger.com has that moblog (mobile blogging) feature too, and i think it has better features than the Friendster's. So here I am giving my best shot on blogger.com .

Oh, check out www.last.fm , it's a MySpace-like and Friendster-like kind of community site, but it tracks your recent MP3 player playlist. It uses plugins that can be installed on your Winamp, ITunes, or Windows Media Player, even you could track recent songs that you've played on your iPod. It will create a statistical data and charts of songs that you've played, and compare it to others and meet you with them. It's like having a music-specialized community group where you could meet up people who share the same music taste as yours. So signup and add chromeragnarok as your friends :).

By the way, next week is my final testpapers, starting by English and then Maths A, Computer Science, Economics, and Maths B. Oh well, I'm going to finish my foundation once and for all, I'm really sick of it, and I'm longing for my home (which I'm going to see in another 3 weeks)! Wish me luck on my study! Thanks :D.