A Better Title

Hp asked me in a recent blog comment what bcc stood for. That made me think. In this blog alone, I already have three different names which I go by. In the title bar I am known as “The Humming Bird”. After every post and comments I always sign off with “bcc”. Yet my Stuff bar says that this blog was designed by a “Hendri Budi”.

So how come I have so many names? Who exactly am I? In this entry, I shall shed some light to how each name came out, as well as some nicknames that I used to go by and bet none of you might have known.

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Dear Diary,

A phone call woke me up on Tuesday morning.

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Dear Diary,

I randomly opened people’s blog and saw a link to this page: “Accept Jesus Christ as Your Lord and Savior and Get a Free PlayStation 2!”. I’m not sure what to say.

By the way, I think Lion Air’s website was hacked. I was looking through their news section when all of a sudden *poof*! The news headlines got changed. I was in the Indonesian language version of the website, and it looked like this.

I checked the English version too and this was what I saw.

Sincerely,

bcc

PS: No, I don’t want the PS2.

Dear Diary,

Click for larger picture

Caption probably reads:

“When You Just Need An Extra Hand. Grab ZAY Cola.

There are times when things just go beyond your control and you just need an extra helping hand. That’s when ZAY Cola comes to the rescue. With four different choice of flavours¹ (Radioactive Blue, Gooey Green, Warm Yellow, and Flashy Red) the glowing radioactive substances inside each bottle of ZAY Cola is guaranteed² to make you grow at least another hand within a month, perfect to help you with whatever you need to do, or just to grab another bottle of ZAY Cola.

ZAY Cola. Always Better Than You.

¹ Colour choice may vary within each region.
² Only with regular usage. Terms and conditions apply.
ZAY Cola is a registered trademark of ZAY Cola Corporation. Patent pending.“

Ok, I’m mean. I’m lame. I’m corny. I’m bored. I’m mean. Sorry ZAY.

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Dear Diary,

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to say “I miss you” to someone (in fact, anyone) when I actually mean it.

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Dear Diary,

Although I know almost nothing on French, I do understand how copyright information should be presented. The snapshot above, taken from a page in MSN Finances France shows that the page was copyrighted in 1899.

A little old, don’t you think so?

No wonder some of Microsoft products are buggy, albeit much better than nothing.

Me,

bcc

Dear Diary,

So the time has finally come. With Google releasing its 1 GB size Gmail to select beta testers (Google will release it to the public later on), Yahoo! Mail has increased the storage quota of the free version of its webmail to 100 MB. Yahoo! Mail also increased the size limit of each e-mail from 2 MB to 10 MB, meaning that it will have no problems receiving e-mails with huge attachments.

It is good news for people like me who are often bombarded with spam, viruses, and forwarded e-mails, since that means that the mailbox won’t get clogged up as quickly.

For example, an average of one forwarded e-mail by a certain someone in my address book is around 100 KB. She sends an average of two forwarded e-mails per day. I have an average of around 2.5 MB of other more-permanent mails in the mailbox.

Under the old 6 MB limit, she only has to send 35 forwarded e-mails (or around half-a-month) before Yahoo! blocks any more incoming e-mails. With this new 100 MB storage limit, she has to send a whopping 975 of such an e-mail (which translates to somewhere around 1.5 years) before the mailbox is full. Plenty of time for me to delete those useless e-mails or save them to another place.

By the way, take a look at these sunglasses, and this table.

Those are my first two pieces done in Maxon’s Cinema 4D. It’s a quite impressive 3D program, I would say, much better than Corel’s Bryce 5, the software used in Spectra. The learning curve, however, is so much steeper that it’s probably going to take a few months before one can master it.

Yahoo!

bcc

Dear Diary,

Mocca is an Indonesian band coming from the city of Bandung. It was only at Yogyakarta that I finally got hold of a copy of their album; I couldn’t find any at a music shop nearer to my place. It’s either because being a small band, they don’t have that much funds for marketing, or because they’re really that popular.

Anyway, their first album, “My Diary” is an interesting one. Quoting from the Mocca website, “it is story about a girl who often wrote her daily experiences into her diary. Adapting from an ordinary diary form, all songs in this album are codified”. Even the album case is in the form of a diary.

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Dear Diary,

The cryptic text above reads Yogyakarta in Javanese characters. It is a scan of a T-shirt I bought which my sister happily asked (or rather forced) me to give her.

Oh yeah, I just came back from a three-day trip to Yogyakarta, which is located to the south of Central Java. I went with my sister and mum. Right now since I’m quite tired, I won’t go into details, and most likely I won’t even do a travelogue like I did when I came back to Singapore in March. It was an enjoyable trip, though.

We went to the Borobudur temple which is supposedly one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I said supposedly because I’m not too sure whether it is actually one or not. According to what we learnt in History in Indonesia, the Borobudur temple is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But I remembered reading from another source (in English), that it actually isn’t. So right now I’ll just say that the Borobudur temple is one of the Indonesian Version of the Seven Wonders of the World. If anyone can confirm for me I’d be grateful.

We also went to the Mendut temple, Taman Sari Water Palace (the place where the Sultans and their families bathe, which is currently being renovated), the Keraton, Kota Gede (the place which produces a lot of silver products, mostly jewelleries), batik shop, the Prambanan temple, and of course, the famous Malioboro. At least it’s famous in Indonesia. We took becak (trishaw) to go around in the town in the evening.

We went to Yogyakarta on the great and wonderful Lion Air flight (those who read my 9 Days in Singapore travelogue would know what I’m talking about). We stayed at the Santika Hotel. Our tour guide (Mr. Kodar) and driver (Mr. Hariyanto) were very courteous and friendly.

Here are a few observations while I was there…

1. Yogyakarta is a place with a rich history.
2. Yogyakarta still has a Sultan, who is also the governor for the province, hence the name Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta or Yogyakarta Special Region.
3. A lot of land space in Yogyakarta is owned by the Keraton (Sultan’s Place). The people who use these land pay a rent to the Keraton, which in turn pays taxes to the government.
4. It looks like there’s a fine mix between the areas for the rich and the poor. For example, our four-star hotel is located just next to small houses near a river belonging to the less-endowed.
5. Javanese accent is cute. For example, they stress the ‘d’, ‘b’, ‘j’ in words, and when a word ends with a ‘k’, the ‘k’ is silent.
6. The Sultan’s fifth daughter studies in Singapore. According to a guide at the Keraton, she’s in the second year of Senior High School. So that means either that she’s studying in the Sekolah Indonesia Singapura (Singapore Indonesian School), or she’s in the second year of either JC or Polytechnic.
7. The souvenir sellers at Borobudur temple are very aggressive. When we exited the temple complex, one seller actually followed us all the way from the exit to the parking complex, which are separated by at least 200 m, all the while trying hard to convince us to buy his souvenir. We already said that we didn’t want to buy any, but he kept on following us so we let him do that until I finally made an excuse and said that we didn’t bring any money. Which totally made no sense at all considering we were tourists there, and there were no way we would not bring any money. But he left afterwards, so it was good.
8. The food at the hotel and some restaurants we went to were good… Gudeg (a local food) also tastes good.
9. Adisutjipto Airport at Yogyakarta is very small. It basically consists of a runway and a very small terminal of the size of probably smaller than half a soccer field. Only small airplanes like the Boeing 737, Airbus A320, and MD-82 serve the airport.
10. The runway of the airport is not flat. It has a bulge at the center part.
11. The representation of the airport at Microsoft Flight Simulator is quite accurate.

Hmm, ok, what else? I can’t think of anything else right now, I’m very tired, so when I feel like it and when I do remember, I shall add them. Tata!

Exhausted,

bcc

Dear Diary,

First, let me tell you that I’m not against forwarded e-mails. Here I’m talking about those jokes, meaningful poems or nice pictures that you forward to your friends. However, it would help if you had used some common sense when forwarding such e-mails. The experience I just had would not happen if such common sense had been used.

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