I’m gonna USE my gym membership this time!!

As I have promised! This is the story of my gym-time, revisited!

I rejoined the gym and this time I’m going to make it work. I do mind living unhealthy lifestyle, and I cannot imagine what will happen if I do not change this habit as soon as possible.

So I’ve joined my old 7/11 Gym, a decent place to start a new life. I know the guys who work there so I can get a discount for my renewed membership =)!

7/11 Gym is located exactly across the campus, approximately 15 minutes walk from my apartments. It has all the necessary equipment to do a serious body building to light aerobic exercises. The only downside is that this gym do not provides a decent cardio exercise, but that won’t matter since my training is more focused on an anaerobic ones.

Turns out many of my friends do their work out here, and its fun! I get to ask and train with the pros since I know most of them, I even get major discount for a vitamin supplements purchase here! I met a new people also, and we talked about many things which make exercise more fun.

I’ve been exercising for almost a month now, almost every day at 5 pm. I also followed a more healthy diet and life style and turns out it’s working for me.

My ultimate goal is to get more energy and feel better. There is a lot to be done and achieved in life and hell I’m too young to be tired!!

My gym, I will never leave you again!

Long time since last post!

It has been a very long time since I have posted, so I thought I would try a bit of an update =)

What can I say? I‘ve been very busy =), but it feels great to write again though!

Since my last post, I was unable to take a break from my work in campus, in the form of a semester filled with plenty of assignments especially our final planning and layout project. Living without having to go through a day of work was impossible. After 6 months I’ve finally decided to post and we’ve actually finished the final planning and layout project assignment. There are many unpleasant things but there is also some great memories that we had. The most memorable events that occur during the 6 months period did come upon seven ” Wow!” moments for myself.

1. Me and my PLO team celebrate the ‘success’ of our project with a series of parties! It was fun and we even planned to make it a routine!

2. I haven’t moved from my apartment since my last post, and, of course, I am still at my present location.

3. A couple of freshman is now living next to my apartment. They are nice to me and I helped them get through with their new campus life.

4. I’m joining the gym again! Yay! =)!! This time I’ll make it a serious deal, I even write another post on it so go on read em!

5. A campus mentor was suggesting I put more figure eights in the hips for the turn during the weight shift. And the sorta ”DUH!” moment I had was like oh yeah!

6. I’m addicted to a healthy lifestyle, not sure since when or who give it to me but it just feels great to do exercises and to wake up every day feeling really healthy!

7. I made new friends at the gym, many of those are from my campus (given that the gym Is located near from campus and students flat).

Overall, it’s a win in my eyes, as I’ve bumped into and registered these moments for the future. And I have my friends, lectures and mentors to thank for it. The discoveries I found on these assignments, dying moments, busy time, the parties (LOL), gym time, and new life style are invaluable.

It has been an ups and down the past 6 months but we did it! And we won!

To all my friends! Thank you guys!

Geeky reasons to play a game

My short holidays are over and it’s time to review it, bottom to top – one at a time ;p
Many good stuff happens on my short holidays, some of them are very good, with abundant blessings — awesome one might say. Hence, the emotions and all has make it difficult to describe it in words so I might start on the most simple and somewhat joyful activity I’ve done (you’re a lazy blogger lix, admit it ;-p).

So I played this particular game a lot, it’s Soul Calibur IV on X360. And now what’s interesting is that I don’t even know why I played it – a lot.

I’ve never been that into fighting games. I have a hard time getting past the fact that:

1. Basically, you’re fighting in a 2D world — forward, back, up, down — which I mean, come on, I have actually played Crysis, so it doesn’t exactly feel state of the art.

2. Real mastery seems to involve memorizing a hell of a lot of special move combos, which pointless.

Nevertheless I’ve been playing a lot of Soul Calibur IV for some reason.       
            

I think it’s partly because the environments and the characters just look so unbelievably beautiful. I suppose it’s a trade-off — the more pre-rendered animations and non-destructible, non-accessible areas there are, the prettier and more detailed they can make everything look. And everything does look damn pretty.

And it’s easy! I am the lowest, most bottom-feeding species of fighting-game player, lower even than the lizardmen on 6th floor, so I mostly resort to a lot of random button-mashing, punctuated by occasional blocks and one or two actual power-combos that I’ve bothered to figure out. But even that, which is
pathetic, gets me pretty far.

But now I have a dilemma. Up till now I have been playing as various Ladies, mostly Xianghua, because let’s be honest, the stuff they do with breast-physics-modeling in this game is beyond anything anybody has ever done anywhere, in any medium, in the history of entertainment. But unfortunately Xianghua is not exactly overpowering in a fight.

Now take  Algol, I don’t really know who Algol is, but dude is about 3 meters tall, and he’s so powerful his feet don’t even touch the ground when he walks half the time. He doesn’t even bother to carry a sword, because different weapons just sprout out of his body at odd moments when he needs them. Algol is trouble in a fight. He’ll ring you out in about 5 seconds if you even look at him. That’s who you want to be.

Unfortunately, he has no breasts. It’s a dilemma. 

Now, have I freaked you out?

 

I’ll post more on my holidays activity later,

Cheers!

a care free joy

“Doing the world is doing what you are. Practice is realizing what you do, actualizing the world.”
-excerpt from St. Nadie in Winter by Terrance Keenan

Is there anyone who has not thought that joy must be carefree, that it is freedom from burdens of life, of self and others? It is not carefree. It is full of cares. It is everything.
It is the windows of the heart thrown open willingly to the manyweathers of the world.

A certain moment often offers a certain joy and through that we learn to distinguished certain moment of truth and a certain moment of lies. What we need is just a little bit of trust.

What is trust? Trust is not faith, though we often use it that way. People without faith can trust enough to go to sleep at night. Lying in bed, thinly clothed, closing eyes, letting go … in this world? What else if not trust? It takes other forms.

Trust is fallible. There may be monsters under your metaphorical bed. Most of us trust that we are normal. What could normal possibly mean?

Normal is the root of all war, to point that out let me tell you what makes a war’s a war. How many wars have been fought to destroy those who are not normal according to someone’s arbitrary standards? This I presume, happens to all of us on daily basis yet we rarely seen it coming.

Is such trust misplaced? Trust, commonly used to implies a value but it is actually an action (rather than “we trust goodness” we tends to “act accordingly to just”). And when we can act accordingly we can trust appropriately. We learn to trust ourselves and willing to let go to sleep tonight, and then we let go to wake up.

And such actions sometimes bode not very well in the end of the tunnel, when we trust someone or being trusted by someone, chances are things could get really bad. Either they or us that betray each other in a misleading moments of our life time.

The question is, what will you do when that trust is broken? Will you accept their apologies? Or in vice versa, will you bow down and ask for forgiveness? Is it really possible to patched that broken trust?

As I consider myself as a dramatis personae, a man attached to a strings,
I know I do some bad things and I have broke many people’s trust, many strings of trust including the one that was held by someone I love.

I know I will die. So do you. Can you live with that knowledge? Do you have a choice? Is mortality a gift? A pointless question. Still, another day of life, what luck! Still have time to make up for everything, so here we go..

For her, the center of my universe,
I’ve lost something important because of small things
The door to you vanished without a sound
The more I wish for your happiness
The more selfish I become
But still, I want you to stay, and I always did
When my wish comes true, I’ll be crying
At the center of my universe, that’s where you belong.

I’m sorry, if the joy once we had is a care free joy.

All my mistakes. I know I will die. I know I live. So I’m gonna breathe them all.

moving at a speed of life

I have been really really busy in these past weeks. Well, to really point that out at a micro level precision let me describe what a normal week for me is.

A normal week for me usually consists of school, assignments, laporan praktikum yang menggila(!duh!), essays, exams, small group, weight watchers (lol), gym time, and maybe a little study time in between. And let’s not begin to talk about weekends! All the time I couldn’t fit into the week, I try to make up for on the weekend. This is just not possible.

I’m always busy, and I think my grades are going to suffer because of it. I need to manage my time more carefully now. Granted, being busy is a good thing. But the most important thing to me right now is my grades and my school. I HAVE to get at least a 3.0 GPA this semester to fulfill my target. Most of my grades are, well… let’s say mediocre;
I got an A on my production process, that’s as predicted before ^^ and another A on my english (dude only two a’s..). Got 5 B’s, those happens on my calculus, engineering mecahanics, iti100′s (some thinks I should be proud of it lol, “bu B” OMG) and in some insignificant courses haha. The rest is pretty… let’s say again mediocre. Yep straight 16 C’s (OMG). Yes! Refer me as the infamous mediocre personae.. Well, since life won’t forgive mediocrity this is the right time to change. Now or never lix, take some action asap.
This semester though, I have a pretty good feeling that I’ll do good to achieve the target. I’m pretty sure did good on the production process once again yesterday. Some technical difficulties on mechatronics and yet there’s still some “ke-fanaan” on operational research exams (one that I regret so much). I’ve been getting mediocre grades in almost all of my Fundamentals of Industrial Engineering courses (the iti’s), but I have a few extra credit points that I think I will benefit from. No worst class for me this semester.. no meticulously cluttered courses that will ruin my day. But the fact that I’m not really prepared for the operational research exam makes me reflect on how good my performance was right now. No, failure is not an option actually. The thoughts of getting smacked on OR never comes up before and I have studied hard before, I really hoped for the best for this course. Oh my..

Moving on…
So I have to start focusing more on my next exam, that is the famous pim’s or p3 haha (wth). The fact that I’m writing this blog on my exam week give me a good point of view adjustment on how my performance should be. Raise up the standards and fly high.

Morale of the story:
“Life will never forgive mediocrity lix”
UTS! Here I come!

Good Luck!

GOOD LUCK!!
You know you know your stuff…
Dont stress any more! You know your stuff!!
Don’t study after lunch on Monday, get a massage, get your stuff ready to bring to the exam, and TRY to get to bed early…
Have your mom call you in the morning, just in case you over sleep…
RELAX!! You know that you’re smarter than the guys drooling next to you… Let me know how it goes when you recoup from your hangovers! :p

my new rig

My CPU got fried a month ago, can’t tell you how this is actually happened. Just a brief blackouts followed by a series of UPS failure and a very short BSOD’s* that leads to a despairing moment of heart failure. Alongside with the procs, the motherboard’s also gotten fried up. To resolve the matter, I quickly take my rig to the nearest psu vendor (yes! I thought it was only a power supply failure) but it turns out more than just a psu.

Guys at asiatech** informs me that the northbridge chip is overheated and/or overloaded (how can this be?) by sudden jumps from +12v core voltage in cpu slots (ah, an overclocking drama wasn’t it?), that preluded by the cpu failure when it gotten fried up deep. The vendor give me some alternatives, firstly to change my old mobo and procs with secondhand mobo + procs sets that is equal to my old rig’s config. Why is it secondhand? Because nobody seems to be selling a socket 478 mobo anymore, well my rig’s about 2,5 years old anyway.

I followed the advice of my brother to upgrade it instead, and since building a new rig from scratch cost me heck a lot of rupiah I built it based on my old rig. Anyway this is the specs:

• Ellen II Duplex Aux Casing, love it the way it is .
• EPoX MF4 Ultra-3 motherboard with NVIDIA NForce 4 Ultra Chipsets – Well this isn’t the greatest NForce hardware available but certainly the most feasible solutions for my budget, it features SATA-II, DDRII Dual, PCIex, Gigabit Lan’s, 8 channel hd audio with s-pdif out and in. Pretty good nForce boards actually.
  
• Simbadda PSU 380Watt (OMG) – “Dude, why simbadda?” You might ask that. Well first it’s cheap and pretty stable.
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ – Pretty nice at entry level . Succesfully overclocked to 2,6Ghz
  
• 1 GB Corsair PC5300 DDRII 667Mhz – basics. Will get a dual channel upgrade next month
  
• Elite GeForce 6600GT 256MB – pretty standards, can I play crysis with this?
• 360GB SATA-II 7600.11 Seagate Barracuda – fast at approximately 80MB/s sustainable speed.
  
• Asus QuieTrack 16x DVD + Cd-writer
• Philips Media Center Card

This new rig is pretty fast, but…

There’s some problems, it seems that my old drives isn’t compatible or whatever because it seems to be getting some difficulties booting from my old 40GB’s drives. Will fix em after uts though.

The vga performance is pretty fair, I can get 100fps in ofp and 35 in FFUR with many objects and smokelets at the mission editor.

The Procs is good, industry’s first dual core on die runing at 2,2Ghz and performing better than 4,2 Ghz Procs in the market nowadays.

My new rig, don’t get fried up again please.

Glossary

*BSOD = Blue screen of death – cmon windows user embrace this awesome phenomena of itchiness and despair lol

**closest rig vendor in 2km radius

Never Let Me Go

A couple of days ago I stumble upon a very enchanting book at the local book store. Somehow the image shown in the front cover of the sci-fi novel is very interesting. Depicting an image of darkness covered in vibrant colors, a deceptive simplicity that reveals an extraordinary emotional depth. I took it out of the shelf and hours later I found myself carried away by such complex and devastating storyline which the author successfully visualize.

When I got deeper into the storyline I began to draw a horrible conclusions as the novel revealing more and more of the inevitably tragic storyline. Yes it is very tragic, a beautiful tragedy.

Set in an “alternate” England in the late 1990s. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are students at Hailsham, a very exclusive, very strange English private school. They are treated well in every respect, at a first glance there is nothing more than a romance story between the three of them. But as the story flows there is a surprising chain of events that forces me to draw a wild conclusions. And the truth is, it is very wild.

As they grow older they come to realize that there is a secret that haunts their lives: Their teachers regard them with fear and pity, and they don’t know why. At this point I began to realize the whole meaning and yet the story has just begun.

Maybe it is a sci-fi novel, but as to me it is simply a brilliant and pure literature. Somehow reminds me of 1997 GATTACA. One of the best movies I have ever watched.

It is not a sci-fi novel that evolving on how a man can be cloned, It is a story about friendship and the themes of love and loss that will resonate with anyone who has ever been part of a something larger than themselves.

It’s about why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

A tribute to Kazuo Ishiguro

The birth of a dramatis personae

I suppose it’s good to start this blog with a statement of purpose. I’ve been a blogger for quite some times, 3 years ago I wrote my first ever posts on my blog that turn out to be quite disappointing. The infinite universe of crap that had never been updated nor fixed and thus became another trash in this vast parallel universe. Years later, a dramatic measures that could have been done in the past is finally executed with me buying a hosting and a domain for my new web. Yet again, the epitome of my laziness and inconsistency has wasted my $19,99 hosting bucks to almost nothing. What a man can do best after a series of failure? Of course, make a new one! Forget the craps in your old stupid blogs. Why there are thousands of free web hosting offers, go get yourself one and maybe you can change the world – just maybe. So here I am, with long posts containing a simple book review as a decent starting point. I decided, given the plethora of free web hosting space out there, that it might be wiser just to start my new blog, and let you, enjoys it in your own way.

So, what’s exactly my purpose? My purpose is simple: This blog will tell you all about me, a dramatis personae’s point of view of his own theatrical-like world, a summary of virtually everything I have ever seen or taste – the sweet and yet the bitter. My posts maybe a bit biassed and written in a subjective manners, one that could be explored in a long chapters of my life.

….
My life, my name is Felik and I am currently a university student. Having graduated from high school on 2006, I continue my study by taking a bachelor’s degree of Industrial Engineering at Universitas Katholik Parahyangan Bandung. I’m an Indonesian, grew up in Jakarta and now living in Bandung. I have a passion about music, I love classical music. I need to be wholly immersed and completely absorbed in whatever I was doing.

A warning for readers: There will be the occasional curse word on this blog. I’m operating on the assumption that we’re all grownups here, and nobody’s sensibilities are going to be wounded too badly by that. There won’t be any descriptions of graphic violence or whatsoever. If you can handle late night cable television, you can handle this dramatis personae

Best regards,

Felik Makuprathowo.