Death

Death is what separate us between this world and the world after life (heaven, hell, nirvana, you name it).
It will usually leave us with mixed emotions from glad to sadness.
I’ve also lost someone I loved years ago and will always be hard to face another lost, no matter how many times we’ve lost someone we loved.

Everything in this world have its life cycle.
Death is our last life cycle as human in this world and what lies afterward, not a single person in the world know what awaits.

Should death frightens us? It’s a question to be answer by each individual’s faith & beliefs.
This quote from I Corinthians 15:55-57 should answer how do I see death:

55.”Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?” 56.The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57.But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

As for facing the death of our loved ones, hope the following will give strength to anyone who just lost their loved ones.

Be strong for yourself and your family for the departed has moved on to a better place than this world.
For the departed has lived his/her part in this world including facing the deaths of families, friends, relatives before him/her and it is now our turn to face the passing of our loved one from this world to another and also to keep moving on with our life until death came upon us.
Let cry be our last expression of love for the departed.
In the end let us smile, for the departed is now smiling upon us from wherever he/she now may be.
As we move on, let the departed keep on smiling by the way we live our life to the fullest ’til the day we are united once more for eternity.

~C.A~

I wrote this post dedicated to my friends, family, relatives who have lost, are losing, and probably going to lose someone dear to them.
My deepest condolences and God be with you all.

May Day

This post has nothing to do with May Day actually.

Thought I just write something since I haven’t update the post for months and right now I don’t have much to do. (let’s keep the latter secret okay )

Have been quite busy doing my work lately but the interesting part was a holiday to Singapore on long weekend from 9-12 April with some friends from the office.
It was free tickets for round trip (Air Asia just opened the route from Bali to Singapore so there was a free seat promo), we only paid for the taxes so there were lots of colleagues going there as well.

Met my school and college friends who now worked and lived there. But the most interesting part would be eating and walking around the city (and nation)!
By impulse, tried 3 different egg tarts from 3 different booth (One in Bugis, one in Chinatown, and the last one in Vivo City) on my way around probably just to compare the taste with my home made egg tarts. It was all good though =P~

The other objective I had was to visit McDonalds there, why you asked?

desk tag

Just realized that I was tagged by sentinel in his post about desk tag. Basically what the tagged person has to do is tell something about what his or hers desk at the office like.
Well, there’s nothing fancy on my desk (it’s called cubicle here and soon if you know the exact meaning of it, you’ll know why you will most likely be sleepy anywhere near it)…really messy even though I just got a new PC. Quad Core, 4 Ghz of RAM, Vista, Dual monitor 19 inch (although I only use one ).
Neat one ain’t it. Once the project is done and let just see who gets this power house!

desktop left desktop right

Trying out something new

Sometimes I get really bored if I don’t have anything to do, especially at home. So this christmas and new year holidays, I took most of my spare time at home trying out some recipes I found on the internet…

My first one (and my really realy first time cooking or making something on my own) was Naan Bread, an Indian thin bread. Got this recipe from AllRecipes.com.
It looks simple with the following ingredients and directions (also available on the site):

Ingredients: 7 g active dry yeast 235 ml warm water 50 g white sugar 45 ml milk 1 egg, beaten 10 g salt 615 g bread flour 6 g minced garlic (optional) 55 g butter, melted

Directions In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand about 10 minutes, until frothy. Stir in sugar, milk, egg, salt, and enough flour to make a soft dough. Knead for 6 to 8 minutes on a lightly floured surface, or until smooth. Place dough in a well oiled bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and set aside to rise. Let it rise 1 hour, until the dough has doubled in volume. Punch down dough, and knead in garlic. Pinch off small handfuls of dough about the size of a golf ball. Roll into balls, and place on a tray. Cover with a towel, and allow to rise until doubled in size, about 30 minutes. During the second rising, preheat grill to high heat. At grill side, roll one ball of dough out into a thin circle. Lightly oil grill. Place dough on grill, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, or until puffy and lightly browned. Brush uncooked side with butter, and turn over. Brush cooked side with butter, and cook until browned, another 2 to 4 minutes. Remove from grill, and continue the process until all the naan has been prepared.

I did something wrong with the yeast (Hey, I’m newbie!), I used instant yeast which doesn’t need to be dissolved in warm water but should be mixed with warm water into the mixture. It caused my dough not to rise properly, so to “fix” this I made it thinner than usual and layered. In the end it was giving pretty much the same result as the real naan.

naan dough naan done

A few days after that, tried to make a no bake cookies, which I thought easy by looking at the recipe and didn’t involve any baking. Got this recipe, again, from AllRecipes.com.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2009

December was my longest holiday this year. Out of 20 working days (public holidays not included), I only worked like less than 8 days. I took my leave from 9-19 Dec. Back to Bali just to work for another 3 days (22-24 Dec) and got back to Jakarta again on 24th afternoon. Collective leave for Christmas and New Year from 26 until 2nd January was too good to be spent in Bali as Bali was totally crowded with tourists from Christmas until New Year.

For my first leave from 9-19 Dec, had to go back to Jakarta because of my cousin’s wedding and had to be best man for him. But after the wedding, me and my relatives went for a tour de Java on chartered bus. The route taken was Bekasi – Tasikmalaya – Magelang (Borobudur) – Yogyakarta – Solo (Surakarta) – Mount Bromo – Malang – Surabaya – Tuban – Semarang – Cirebon – Bekasi in just 5 days and the only day we all slept in a hotel was in Surabaya…totally ass-torturing trip O.o
But it was worth the journey…

October’s Last Saturday’s Trip

On Saturday the 25th, I had a friend took me to try this so called fish rice. So, I rented a motorcycle (I don’t have any driving license though, but don’t tell the police about it yeah?) and meet up with him at McDonald’s on Jimbaran. So after driving passed through Extreme Toys and just right next to a gas station on the way heading to Nusa Dua, we stopped at this warung called “Sari Mertha”. There wasn’t anything stand out from this warung, you might just passed it without knowing it was there. So, we had this rice with slices of mini eggplant, steamed fish wrapped in banana leaf, bakwan jagung (indonesian corn fritters), pieces of fish meat, and 2 sticks of fish satay accompanied with fish soup. I’ve to say the soup, rice, and satay in overall was great. Not many people know about this place, most of the visitors are local Balinese.

Fish Rice Set Fish Rice

After our tummy felt pretty good, knew it by some burping and belching, we headed to Padang-Padang beach. It’s located down the south from Dreamland beach. It’s still pretty secluded and not as commercial as Dreamland (yet). It wasn’t to wavy that day and met 2 surfers who left the beach because the waves weren’t too good. Padang-Padang beach is usually one of the surfer’s beach, just like Dreamland. To reach the beach from the street, we have to walk down the stairways between 2 cliffs because the beach is surrounded by cliffs.

International Blog About Boobs Week

Not sure who created this, not sure if it’s true or not, don’t know if THAT week has passed or not, not even sure who started this thing, but please feel free to track ‘em down from the blog who tagged me. That’s the little pinguin’s blog named Sentinel.

What’s this boobs thing all about? If I’m not mistaken, I need to tell a tale about anything that’s related to boobs. Well, I’m always curious about why those thing aroused most men in the world (myself included). For those of you who don’t know what that thing is, it’s called “Glandula Mamae” in latin, and the description is as follows as I quote them from wikipedia:

The breast is the upper ventral region of an animal’s torso, particularly that of mammals, including human beings. The breasts of a female primate’s body contain the mammary glands, which secrete milk used to feed infant.

Other than speaking about the sexual related issue about boobs, I prefer to talk about its milk. We all have heard about how breast milk can be more nutritious than formula milk. You can google it if you want as I am not going to copy-paste them in here but I’ll tell the tale from what I’ve read.

One of the important substances contain in milk is colostrum, which secreted in few first days after a woman gave birth to a baby (or two, or three, or whatever number of babies she delivers). It protects the baby from various infections by giving antibodies to the newly born babies. Another benefits are it contains just the right formula for the baby’s delicate digestive system, has the right nutrients for baby to quickly gain weight, has more variety in nutrition than formulated milk, and the list goes on…

Lebaran holiday 2008 in Bali

Lebaran holiday finally came…

For those of you who don’t know what lebaran is, I quote this from a web site:

Idul Fitri, more commonly referred to in Indonesia as Lebaran, is the celebration that comes at the end of the Muslim month of fasting, Ramadhan. The Arabic meaning of Idul Fitri is “becoming holy again”.

The dates of the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, Ramadan, vary from year to year, as the Muslim calendar (Hijrah) is based on a lunar cycle of 29 or 30 days. The exact date is determined by the sighting of the new moon. These lunar calculations lead to an official announcement by the government on the eve of Ramadan and Idul Fitri so that the faithful know when to begin and end the fasting month. In 2008, Lebaran will fall on October 1st and 2nd.

Here’s the link if you’re interested to read more about it http://www.expat.or.id/info/lebaran.html

People from all around Bali, especially from the island of Java made Bali totally stuck just like other “grand” public holiday (the other one is Christmas/New Year).

Most of my colleagues were taking their leave to gather with their family in their home town, which makes the office kind a silent and quiet.

could not load type ‘projectname.assemblyname.pagename’

When doing ASP.Net development hosted in SharePoint, I occasionally found the following error when opening certain page, and the page that showed this error changes, one day it could be page A, another day it could be page B and this appears at random times. By turning off custom errors and showing stack trace I got the following error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

---

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load type ‘projectname.assemblyname’.

Source Error:

Line 1: <%@ Page Language=”C#” MasterPageFile=”~masterurl/default.master” Line 2: CodeBehind=”MyPage.aspx.cs” Inherits=”projectname.assemblyname.MyPage” Line 3: meta:progid=”SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document” %>

Source File: /subsite/MyPage.aspx Line: 1

---

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.832; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.832

I didn’t have this error in development server but constantly having this error at random times in client’s server. Doing IIS Reset or Recycle the Application Pool seems to get rid of the issue only for temporary. My guess is the assembly is not being “linked” properly after some process running in the server. I’ve placed the assembly in the bin folder of the web application but the issue always appear again and again at random time. I’ve added the assemby in web.config as well in the safe control section.

When googling about the issue I found a post that’s indirectly linked to this issue. I’m not sure if this has to do with using AAM (Alternate Access Mapping) or not but somehow the assembly at certain time “looses” the “mapping” to the location of the assembly.

So, from the post, I forgot the link to it, but it’s an old post about ASP, will post it here once I found it (it was burried deep inside google search result), I tried adding below section into web.config file of the SharePoint web application right inside the <assemblies> tag:

<compilation batch=”false” debug=”false”>
<assemblies>
<add assembly=”Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c” />
<add assembly=”projectname.assemblyname, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=uniqueassemblytoken” />
</assemblies>

This has resolved the issue for me.

If there’s any one know why is this happening at random time and the cause please let me know. I’ll updated the post.

Lovina-Menjangan (17-18 August 2008)

On Indonesia’s 63th Independence, me and my friends went to an area on north of Bali called Lovina.

North of Bali is famous for it’s marine tourism.

17 August 2008

We departed from Tuban, Kuta area at 8am using 2 cars and 5 motorcycles. The route was heading straight north from Kuta via Bedugul. The whole trip to Lovina took about 3 hours in total. After checking in at the guest house (took 2 different guest houses to accommodate all of us), we went for lunch and some did their pray first before going to Labuhan Lalang (North-West of Bali). One comment on my guest house is, it wasn’t the dirtiest place I’ve seen but 50000rp/room for two is decent if you’re going to use the place strictly to rest and not fancying anything like room service, tv set, hot water (it’s beach and you surely do not need hot water).

Our destination for that day was Menjangan Island which is a great spot for diving and snorkeling. The trip to Labuhan Lalang took about 2 hours and then about 30 minutes by boat to the island.