Riuh Rendah di Istora

 

Minggu lalu, sehari sebelum perayaan kemerdekaan, Indonesia raya berkumandang di Istora Senayan, Jakarta. Hendra Setiawan dan Muhammad Ahsan dinobatkan sebagai juara dunia untuk ke dua kalinya setelah tahun 2013 di Guangzhou, Tiongkok. Terus terang itu adalah kali pertama saya melihat sang merah putih di kibarkan di arena olah raga diiringi lagu Indonesia Raya. Haru dan bangga mendominasi Istora malam itu.

Kalau melihat sejarah, Indonesia merupakan sebuah kekuatan besar di olahraga bulu tangkis selain Tiongkok, Korea, Denmark, Malaysia. Saya masih ingat waktu saya masih duduk di bangku SD dan masih (sedikit banyak) ingusan, jalanan kampung menjadi ramai oleh anak-anak yang bermain bulu tangkis ketika ada turnamen-turnamen besar sedang berlangsung semisal Thomas-Uber Cup, All England ataupun Indonesia Open. Saat itu turnamen-turnamen tersebut masih sering di tayangkan di televisi nasional dan menjadi salah satu tontonan favorit keluarga di kampung, waktu itu.

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Little Things Matter

Gratitude by @hurricanemaine on flickr

Recently, I went to “Tech A Break”, a tech talk event held by Tokopedia. There were three talks on the event: Big data on Hadoop, Tokopedia’s release process and meteor.js. The event was great, but there’s always room for improvements.

After the event, my friend told me one interesting point about it. It was not the the talks, the foods nor the venue, but it was about how Tokopedia appreciates the speakers by giving them a memento as a token of gratitude for sharing to all of us. It was interesting because he rarely saw that in other tech talks. He argued that it would make the speakers feeling appreciated and also encourage the others to share their knowledge in the following events. Point taken.

Introducing nauvalatmaja.com

Finally in the twilight of 2014 the very domain of nauvalatmaja.com is up and running since December 30. It is yet another personal blog, which will have kind of different contents than this one, more technical I’ll say.

So, why another blog? It just occur to me that I want to write/share more technical stuffs and this blog is not really serve the purpose. Most of the posts here are my random thoughts about anything, I did wrote geeky and technical posts here and some of my friends did mention that the content were too heavy for this blog whenever I ended up publish those kind of posts.

Productive with less distractions

For the new blog, I use DocPad alongside with GitHub Pages as the main stack of technology. So, why not WordPress, Blogger, Octopress or Thumblr? My main requirements for the new blog is being dead simple in workflow and be able to be used offline. I’ve used WordPress for years and to me it still to much of a workflow. For writing a post I need to open the page, click the new post button and write the post in the editor. It is still not yet done, I have to take care about the text formatting myself, add tags in the editor’s side bar and other related info before actually click the publish button. Moreover, those blogging platforms don’t satisfy my requirement for being usable when i’m offline.

Sampah#15: Doing the math

The midnight crowd

Somehow saya teringat tulisan saya 6 tahun yang lalu pagi ini. Yang pasti, selama itu pula saya melalui banyak hal: susah, senang, sedih, capek dan seterusnya. Ketika mengaca kebelakang saya mulai berhitung-hitung, what have I gained during the years? what have I lost? Kalau ditimbang manakah yang lebih berat? I did the math but i’m still unable to answer that.

Ada banyak hal-hal yang saya bersyukur diberi kesempatan untuk mendapatkannya namun ada pula hal-hal yang membuat saya berandai-andai. Andai dahulu saya memilih ini daripada itu, andai saya kesana daripada kesini. Dan tak sedikit pula hal-hal yang hilang selama kurun waktu itu yang membuat saya merasa kehilangan.

Namun itulah proses sebuah kehidupan, ada yang datang ada pula yang pergi. Roda kehidupan terus berputar kedepan. Jadikan semua yang telah berlalu adalah pelajaran untuk masa depan. Well, the takeaway is to move on and don’t be the prisoner of our past, I guess.

Anyway, happy blogger day 🙂

FirstTimeSeries#2: Solo travelling, the perks and the hurdles

So far, I never did a more-than-two-days solo travelling. Well, I almost did once when I visited KL during new years eve in 2012 but I teamed up with a friend there. And finally I got the chance to do it right before I went home earlier this month. It was a five day-ish trip to The Netherlands, to Holland to be precise. The trip was awesome, I loved the cities’ architecture. the canals, the windmills and the bicycles.

The iconic I amsterdam at Museumplein, Amsterdam

I ended up visiting six cities during my trip: Amsterdam, Delft, Kinderdijk, Den Hague, Volendam, Edam and Marken. Everybody knows Amsterdam, the busiest metropolitan in The Netherlands. To my surprise was that this city was awesomely beautiful. The old houses by the canals having the signature architecture of the time are simply great achievement both in art and engineering. A trivia, the canals in Amsterdam are filtered once every three months to keep them from having foul smell. Another interesting spot in the city is of course the red light district. Ladies over red-pink-ish windows and weed’s smells are over the place. According to James, the guide from the city free tour (I recommend you to do this tour on your first day of your trip), the district itself is partitioned into several areas, which served different segment of customers, yes they are so business minded. 

Pulang

Hari ini sayang aku akan pulang
Berlabuh di dekap cintamu
Karna pelukmu akan selalu
Membuat diriku jatuh cinta

Pulang by Andien

This beautiful song reminds me to many good memories (and some not so good ones also), especially when it comes to this particular event, going home. Yes, in the next 48 hours I’ll be at a place that I can call a home.

There were many interesting things happen during my travel to come home. Once I got to catch a plane, a ferry, a train in a day. It was thrilling, but fun! Last year, I got a chance to be in the same flight with groups of our TKI returning home, and have a chat with one of them and helped her with some paperworks for the immigration. She reminded me of my mother. I think if my mother were in a flight, she she will behave similarly as she never been in a flight. Well, we have something in common tho, we are villagers. Let’s see whether I will see something interesting again this time.

Ps: there will be rough road ahead but that’s the challenge.

Le 30 Aoūt, à Charles de Goule, Paris

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Lent’s sing the song together shall we 🙂

Why no updates?!

Since this is the first post after Eid, first I would like to say “Minal aidin wal faidizin, mohon maaf lahir dan batin” 🙂

It’s obvious that I have a problem with consistency, you can guess from this blog. Actually, I have a load of drafts and yet not a single of them is nearly finished, or even in a readable state. Shame on me! I could find tens of excuses, but they won’t change the fact that I only wrote 3 post since the beginning of the year. Probably the most valid excuse is I’m really good at procrastinating (if it is an excuse at all).

Untitled by by @thomasleuthard

So what’s next? I guess regular blog updates will be a good exercise for my issue. 

Anyway, I just got back from a sweet five days escape to The Netherlands tonight, and did some bug fixes for my personal project. Seems like a good starts, doesn’t it?. I will write a separate post about my trip and another post about my project (when the appropriate time comes).

Sampah#14: Fear

A Gargoyle at Notre Dame

Humans, by nature are afraid of the unknowns.

And me too, at some point I am afraid of them. Strangers, new places, and even the future. Unless I shut my self in in a room, I can’t avoid them. So be prepared and face them! Learn the unknowns so they become known. Keep mind open to see hidden truths and unpredictable events. And at the end there will be a path to walk on, a light to aim for, and a place to long for.

#noteToSelf

Winter Trip, leftovers

Musim telah berganti, dari musim dingin yang hujan melulu ke musim semi yang cukup hangat. Sudah lama tulisan ini ada di draft list, namun belum sempat menekan tombol publish alasan. Musim dingin lalu sangat mengesankan, I did go to travel around!. Saya bergabung dengan teman-teman dari Twente berpetualang ke beberapa negara tetangga: German, Austria, Hungaria dan Cekoslovakia. Banyak hal-hal menarik yang kami jumpai, bangunan, arsitektur kota, pengalaman di kereta, dan tentu saja orang-orang nya.

Behind the scene

Highlight dari perjalanan kemarin menurut saya adalah Salzburg dan Prague. Kedua kota ini sungguh indah. Salzburg adalah sebuah kota kecil di Austria yang tenang dan dibatasi oleh barisan pegunungan yang tertutup salju ketika musim dingin tiba. Di kota ini juga Mozart dilahirkan ke dunia. Kedua rumah Mozart pun diabadikan sebagai museum yang berisi barang-barang peninggalannya dan keluarganya. Dan kalau anda penggemar film musikal the sound of music, di kota ini lah film itu dibuat.

All England, Badminton and Indonesia

My friends often ask me what is the most popular sport in Indonesia, and without hesitation I definitely say soccer football, and then, without fail, I mention badminton as the second one. And following the question, usually a long explanation, description and argument about it comes along. PSSI and its issues, corruptions, incapabilities, the hopeful young talents and the future they have; PBSI and its reformation of management which brings better result immediately.

And today, 09 March 2014, is a big day for Indonesian badminton because two Indonesian pairs won two title at All England SSP, Hendra/Ahsan won the men double (MD) title and the ever dependable Tontowi/Lilyana created another history by winning mixed double (XD) three times in a row, a hattrick! The last Indonesian MD pair to win All England title was Sigit Budiarto/Chandra Wijaya in 2003, 11 years ago.

Lilyana Natsir and Tontowi Ahmad at All England 2014, @ http://flic.kr/p/kPY2nC

The final today was superb, all matches were indeed very high in quality. The titles are shared among three nations, China, Indonesia and Malaysia. China as expected came very strong in women division with all Chinese finals in both women double (WD) and women single (WS) discipline. Wang Xiaoli/Yu Yang won over Ma Jin/Tang Yuanting in an intense three games matches. Wang Xixian finally bested the olympic gold medalist Li Xuerie. Malaysia as always is represented by Datuk Lee Chong Wei who neutralized Chen Long of China for the title.