Music for My Soul

I usually play particular songs for different states of my mood. Whenever I felt angry, distressful, or disappointed then I’ll play songs from Kenny G. But not all of his songs fits my weary condition. I usually listen for these songs of Kenny G:

• The moment
• Morning
• Theme from dying young
• Loving you
• Forever in love
• Sentimental
• Silhouette

Whenever I heard those songs my soul becomes calm again. I feel relax. It feels like there’s a calm strength fill my mind. And usually, I gain new power to do cope with my problems and do my activity again.

But it doesn’t mean that whenever I play those songs it means I’m in a weary condition :)

Steps in dealing with procrastination

Procrastination is an evil thing. It comes like a disease, but in a convenient form, yet very disastrous. All of us may have suffered this disease once. Me myself has been dealing with this disease ever since my undergraduate study, and yet it still come tempting me. I've read several book in dealing with this disease, unfortunately it can only help for several weeks. I think I need to always be reminded about this. Lucky me, I've just found an article about the cure, I'll summarize it here (with my own words):

1. Try to identify the cause of the procrastination.
2. Plan to do your activity on a certain period of time.
3. Prepare to do your activity, by preparing things you'll be more motivated on doing the activity.
4. Just do it.
5. Reward yourself for things well done on time.

This article has helped me in motivating myself again against procrastination, and I hope it will help you also.

Pay attention to the detail

I've been struggling with an anomaly in my code for several days now. I've tried to rewrite the code, change some more variables, add the number iterations but it doesn't work out. But then after re-read the paper again I realize that the problem lies on the number of intervals length, I used a very small number of intervals where actually it need a little more number of intervals length.

How I can miss such information? It's because I thought I've understood the global flow of the algorithm and didn't read small information written at the end of the paragraph. D'oh!

Lesson learned: don't assume you've already understood the program, until you read the whole paper thoroughly and in detail.

New Year's Resolution: Current State

I don't know why, but it just came into my mind about nine (yes, it's nine!) new year's resolutions that I made on the very first day of this 2010 year.

I'm trying to count how many of them have been realized or at least being attempted. Well, though the progress is not aggressive I'm happy to say that all of them are being proceed. Some is 50% done, the other is still 30% done, but at least they're all started to improve day by day (well at least week by week). I don't want to make a speculation, or even planning an "alternative" resolution in case of some of my resolution are not able to be achieved (on time). All of them are important, so they're all have to be achieved. Though I still have 8 more months to go, I realize I couldn't waste my time again.

So I have to focus to speed up the progress. Stop at doing unproductive activities. Eliminate procrastination spirit. And just do it!

Tembok itu ada untuk sebuah alasan

Salah satu buku favorite saya adalah buku yang ditulis oleh seorang profesor di bidang Virtual Reality yang telah meninggal dunia bernama Randy Pausch. Buku yang ditulisnya berjudul The Last Lecture, dan isinya adalah mengenai mimpi-mimpinya masa kecil dan bagaimana akhirnya dia berhasil mencapainya. Buku ini merupakan rangkuman dari kuliah umum yang dia berikan untuk terakhir kalinya untuk mahasiswa dan koleganya di Carnegie Mellon University. Sebenarnya, apa yang dia sampaikan ditujukan untuk anak-anaknya ketika dia sudah meninggal dunia kelak (dia sudah divonis menderita penyakit yang membuat dia tidak akan hidup dalam waktu yang lama).

Banyak hal-hal positif yang bisa dipelajari dari buku tersebut. Tapi yang paling berkesan bagi saya adalah cara pandangnya terhadap sebuah masalah (dalam buku ini dia menamakan itu sebagai tembok penghalang). Dia menyatakan bahwa, tembok penghalang itu ada untuk sebuah alasan.

Saya menyimpulkan ada dua cara pandang terhadap tembok penghalang itu. Pandangan pertama yaitu dari sisi pesimis, bahwa tembok penghalang ada supaya kita tidak berjalan terus. Pandangan kedua yaitu dari sisi optimis, bahwa tembok penghalang ada untuk melihat seberapa besar kita menginginkan sesuatu.

Saya cenderung mengambil sudut pandang yang kedua. Bahwa tembok penghalang itu ada untuk melihat seberapa besar saya menginginkan sesuatu. Apabila saya sudah menetapkan sebuah tujuan, maka kendala apapun yang ada, saya tidak akan menyerah. Dan berdasarkan pengalaman saya selama ini, cara pandang ini sangat baik sekali, karena seringkali membawa dampak yang positif. Memang pastinya tidak mudah, karena kecenderungannya, setiap kali menghadapi masalah inginnya untuk "menghindar" atau lebih mudah "mundur". Tapi, dengan semangat yang tidak mudah melemah, segala sesuatu pasti bisa dicapai.

Ganbatte kudasai :)

The Mist

Last Saturday I was so bored so I decided to watch a movie titled The Mist.

It's a story about horrible creatures (product of military experiment) invasion. The lab where the creature was created was somehow leak and all the creatures went out to town preying human flesh. The terror begun when a mist surrounded the town, and from that mist all the creatures showed up to catch and eat human flesh.

Almost all people in town gathered at a store. At the end, a group of people consists of a father, a son, a young woman, and a couple of old man and woman managed to escape from the store and tried to travel as far as they could, far away from the mist. In the middle of their travel, the car run out of gas. So the man killed all other person in the car, he thought it's better for them to be killed by a gun instead of eaten by creatures.

But, not long after he killed other persons, a bunch of military personel came to rescue. And all he could do was crying, regreting what he's done. May be it will be different if he didn't act stupid and encourage other person to strive until their last and not surrender to death.

Moral of the story: Even in a very bad condition, there will always be choices. Pick one that give more chances to step ahead.

Mindmapping Myself

After several occasions occurred lately, I felt that I need to re-organize myself. First, I have to re-define what's the most important things in my life, and focus my energy on that. Second, I have to list what's the least important things in my life (that I kept doing), and throw those off my life.

I finally noted down five most important things in my life (sorry I can't write it here, it's confidential :)). These things also have several related things, so I need to depict them in a tree-like structure, and also such a ways that is easy to memorize. I remember a methodology that can be used to draw something that resembles to how human brain works and will help us to memorize something better, that is Mindmapping (I'll not explain about this, yet).

I use Freemind program to draw a mindmap of my life (plans, priorities, etc). I thought that it will be just a two level "nodes", but it grows to almost five level with lots of branches. But it's kinda fun, I can memorize all that I wrote.

Creating the mindmap is easy, the hardest part is to conform with what I've written. I have to, and I must, because it'll help me to be a better person.

NB: This post has nothing to do with the upcoming 18th July 2008.

A Motivation

Today I got a visit from my seniors at FMIPA UI. Well actually I've never met them at campus, because they graduated long before I entered FMIPA UI, but I knew them from our Christian Fellowship mailing list in which I'm one of the moderators. They're husband and wife. The husband graduated from Department of Chemistry and the wife graduated from Department of Biology. The husband has just graduated from his Doctoral study at Tokyo University and came to this village (Laguboti) to visit his parents.

They were in my campus for about two hours, and almost all the conversation are to motivate me. One of their words that I'll always remember is "keep on trying". Yeah, I've almost lost my faith and start giving up, but their motivation is such a relief for me. This can be applied to all aspects in my life. I'll keep on trying. Thanx Bang, thanx Kak.

A Good Lecturer?

This post was inspired by a small chat between me and my friend. She was just followed a physics class in a private university in Jakarta. She said that the lecturer (junior lecturer) is not good because he couldn't teach well. He taught as if he taught for himself and don't care whether the students understood what he was talking about or not. My friend said that most of the students didn't pay attention to the lecturer (even worst, she saw several students were playing card in the class!).

I then argued her that each lecturers have their own style of teaching and can't fulfill all students' expectations. There are lecturers who are talented in teaching but there are some who aren't. But one thing for sure, all lecturers do want their students to be succeed in their study and will do their best to reach that goal.

A lecturer at the Dept. of Physics in University of Indonesia named Terry Mart wrote a good article about a good lecturer. He said that, "A good teacher is a bad teacher". Confused? Well, the point of his article is that a good teacher is a teacher who can make his/her student to study well, and it's far better than a teacher who can teach well. I suggest you to read the whole article (in Bahasa Indonesia).

Mestakung in Action

I believe that many of you have already heard about a concept named Mestakung. The idea was originated from an Indonesian Physician, Yohanes Surya. He said that, if a 'thing' (could be a person, sand, etc) is put in its critical point, then the 'thing' will get a support from its surroundings (universe?) so that it could reach its ideal point. For example, is someone is being chased by a dog, then he will be able to run faster than he used to be.

Most of people thought that the concept was some kind of a New Age movement that focus more to ourselves than to God.

Well, I think it could be true and false depending on how we implement it. But, on my point of view, the idea of Mestakung  is not entirely bad. The key here is "putting ourselves in a critical condition". In that kind of condition, we'll do our very best to escape from that condition (universe is giving supports?). But of course, we must not rely only on ourselves. After setting our condition in a critical state, do our best to overcome it, and always depend on God.

I've seen many example of people demonstrating this concept without knowing bout the concept. Take my friend for instance, he wanted to take an English test. If he always delay the registration, he knew that he'll never take the test. So he just registered to the test center (putting himself in a critical condition), since he fully aware that the test fee is not cheap, he do his best in the test (and thus come the supports), but still he rely on God (without Him we're nothing).

That's all I can share about Mestakung, if you need to know more about this concept, you can order the book from here.

PS: I'm not affiliated with either Yohanes Surya or Gramedia.