Realized I have been blogging a lot about dine and wine lately, because well, I have been going to so many good-food places in the past one two months, and I guess I'll share with you all.

Today, I went to to Crystal Jade La Mian Xiao Long Bao at Ngee Ann City for dinner, celebrating a friend's birthday. Ordered Xiao Long Bao (Shanghai-style dumpling) and La Mian (obviously) and Red Bean Pancake for desert. Tastes good, with a nice ambience, though a bit noisy, coz it's fully packed, and a bill that came up to $64.81, and if you pay by Citibank card, you'll get $5 voucher for Crystal Jade Cakery and a free trip to Hangzhou !!!!

Ah, I love having good food, especially after one whole day walking like zombie, brain processor seems to be in power-saving mode, rather slow, not enough sleep last night.

Eh yeah, if you wonder, that trip to Hangzhou is a lucky draw lah, not for everyone, hahaha...

The theme for today is to give thanks. I am reading a Selwyn Hughes book, in a chapter that's titled making gratitude a habit. As I was reading that chapter, three songs came up one after another from my iPAQ that wraps around giving thanks and showing gratitude to God, two from Don Moen, and one from Ray Boltz, which I am sharing with you below. Titled Thank You. I've bold-ed part of the songs that I want to emphasize. Enjoy it.

Title: Thank You
Artist: Ray Boltz
Album: Concert of a Lifetime (1995)
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Windows Vista Beta 1 Wallpaper [1280x1024 or 1400x1050 resolution available]

If you have TODAY newspaper dated 3rd August 2005, you can read the full story there. If you don't have, here is the summary. There is this lady who suffered mental disorder, claimed to hear "voices" to put her money into mailboxes. So, she went to the bank, withdrew $3,000 and put $50 note into each mailboxes in her neighbourhood. Not long after, people who checked their mailboxes found, besides the usual bills, a $50 note.

Two good samaritan helped her report to the police and put up notices in their neighbourhood to ask residents to return the $50 note they received. Until the news was written, only $300 from $3,000 were returned. Others kept the $50 note, and some worse even try to fish out $50 notes from other's mailboxes!!!

I was wondering, how can they dare, have the peace to use that $50 money from a lady who suffered mental disorder, and someone who surely needs a lot of money for her treatment. Shows how far humans have fallen from God's original design. I can't understand these people, who instead of helping her, they took $50 from this poor lady. How can, how can they ???!!!!

Some of you may have read a mini-debate between Asen and I about the feasibility of having MRT in Jakarta by next year. There's nothing wrong with it, it just so happened we have different opinions, each taking one side. It's a healthy debate, but if you think further, what spawn this debate? Why two persons have different opinions, and look as if one think positively, and the other one seem to think the other way.

On the surface, it may seem that way, but if we look deeper into each person's mind, we will find that there's something that underlay these different thoughts, and that is DOUBT. We all honestly doubt Indonesia's capability to build such a massive Mass Rapid Transit in two years, but why different thoughts and opinions? To answer that, we shall try to answer, what is DOUBT anyway? When reading/thinking something uncertain, there are two extreme responses of human, one side is belief, and the other side is unbelief. Doubt, is a state of human mind that wary in between these two extreme cases. Doubt is normal, and when in doubt, human tend to gravitate towards one side which he allow his mind to choose. On a scale from 1 (unbelief) to 10 (belief), Asen, with his reasoning behind it, put himself, maybe at 2 on the scale that he truly believes that having MRT in Jakarta in 2007 is simply impossible. As for myself, with my wishful thinking, maybe put myself somewhere at 6 on the scale, thus the "debate" that create this positive/negative thinking phenomenon on that post.

As I think further again, for this case, positive thinking are not any superior to negative thinking. Positive thinking in a lot of situations are good and very recommended, but against an impossible news, to some people, having negative thinking and not having any high hopes could be better. Everyone entitled to their own opinions, but MUST respect other's opinions.

I hope I have not lost you until now, and I would like to close this post with what Paul said to the people in Phillipians 4:8: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." For me, when in doubt, instead of concentrating on the impossible side, I choose to look at what's possible side of the story. I'll usually gravitate towards rating scale of 10, even though for something that seems "hopeless", because I believe, miracles do happen, and in fact, miracles only happen in hopeless situations, or else, it will not be called miracle, will it?

Man plays computer games for 50 hours -- then drops dead. A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

What the ???!!!!

 
I just had my dinner in Clementi, when I spotted this new stall in the hawker centre. To display their menu, they installed BenQ 19 inch LCD monitor in front of their cash register !!!! It shows a rotating slides of presentation (menu in this case), selling their main dish, a $6 Fish and Chips. Kinda ex, probably to fund their LCD monitor, hahahah....

First it's Vero with her O2 XDA Mini end of last week, followed by Eric's Sony Ericsson K750i on Tuesday, then Bayu's Samsung E730 on Thursday, then followed by Emmy/Ruby and myself with two units of Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 digital camera last night. The picture above shows two boxes of FX8 with one unit in the picture. The other unit? Of course used to take the picture above.

(Click for more and photos ...)

You went to a restaurant, ordered your food, it came out not long after you ordered, looked very yummy, happily eating your meal when suddenly you saw a dead housefly mixed in your meal. What will you do? Will you call the manager? Will you call the waiter, send it back and ask for replacement? Or do you happily took the housefly out and continue eating like nothing happened? Or report this to Ministry of Health/Food authority?

I'm sure in one or more occassion, we encountered such situation, and this is not the question of, what you should have done that time, but what did you do that time? So, what did you do?

I was surprised to find out that Gmail now supports Bahasa Indonesia !!!!
Try it out, go to Settings, change your language, click Save Changes, and voila (Read More)

Now this is impressive.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/07/28/blind.gamer.ap/index.html

My hendrikch.info domain name is going to expire on 2nd of September 2005. I have been changing my website URL for the past so many years until other people also lost track of them. I started with http://hch.cjb.net, then tried http://www.hendrikch.tk, then http://www.chimit.com, then now http://www.hendrikch.info

Now that chimit.com is taken, hendrikch.info is expiring, and hendrikch.tk gives one full page of 15 seconds advertisement, I was thinking if I should settle down with a more permanent paid-domain name, at least for a foreseeable future? Will USD$8.95 per year worth the money? The best choice would be http://www.hendrikch.com I guess. I can have my email as me@hendrikch.com or hendrik@hendrikch.com that looks good too. What do you think?

I will let you know once the time is near what is the end URL that everybody should be using to come here, so you can have a chance to update the link from your blog to mine, and to update your favorite/bookmark as well.

GRIIS youth hold an outing in Sentosa Siloso Beach on Saturday from noon until evening. The theme of the outing this time is to celebrate Indonesia's independence day, so the games played much resembles games played back in Indonesia during our independence day celebration. About 40-50 of the participants were divided into six groups, playing so many games in a space of few hours.

We started to divide the participants into groups. I was put in group 1 with, in the first picture from left to right, Jenny, Selvi, Audrey, myself, Doan, Ari, and Fred. The first game was crackers eating competition, followed by walking castle, then tug of war, then flag moving from one end to another, then table tennis ball carrying using spoon, then dodgeball, then building sand castle, and lastly water bomb. Out of the original plan was soccer, and throwing Jo and Angki on their birthday into the beach, hahaha...
(Click for more and photos ...)

I am attending full three days of Microsoft TechEd Asia 2005 at Suntec City Convention Centre starting from today until Friday. The session starts from 8.30 AM all the way to 6.30 PM, having eight topics running in parallel in eight different seminar rooms. The topics covered are very interesting, including among them Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Windows Vista, Windows Mobile 5.0, Exchange Server 2003, Windows Presentation Foundation aka Avalon, so on and so on.
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Day 2 is here. Woke up at 6.45 AM (that's much earlier than I usually did when I go to work ) and reached Suntec at 8.15 AM, just nice for breakfast before the first session of the day starts at 8.30 AM. Today sessions were more of the same like what I had in Day 1. Sessions, sessions, sessions, and more sessions, with some break, lunch, and some quizzes in between. It was fun, but it was really tiring siting through all those sessions, and to really pay attention to those speakers. The last session at 5 PM was really interesting one. They literally taught you how hackers hacks your network. It's scary how many ways and tools hackers have in their disposal to break into our computer. At the end of the session, they, of course, taught us, ten easy steps how to secure our network and machine. I'll share this in a separate following post.
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While MSN Messenger 7.5 just came out, 8.0 is already being worked on and heading towards beta by the end of the year. A third party source whom is said to be from Microsoft has provided us with this information. Here's a list of possible and rumored features Microsoft is contemplating on going into the IM client:

• Change of Messenger Skins
• Real-time Emotions
• Messenger Built Internal Windows Media Player 10
• Pause/Resumed File Transfers (File Blocked Extension Applied)
• Detailed File Transfer (Download/Upload Speed)
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Again today I arrived at 8.15 AM for breakfast, and went for the first 8.30 AM session. For the last day, instead of having eight simultaneous topics, we only have five to choose from. The other three have been changed to Hands-on Lab. The topics I attended today mainly focuses on Security in current Windows version and how existing issues will be addressed in Windows Vista. I also attended 45-minutes Hands-on Lab on Visual Studio 2005 that I completed in 25 minutes .
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I'll start with a question. Are you currently running your Windows using Administrator account? Are you reading this blog using Administrator account in your machine?

I guarantee most of us will answer Yes to that question. Why are we running our account as Administrator in our machine? Because everything will work that way, right? And yes, everything includes spyware, malware, viruses, trojan horses, keyloggers, and their family members will work in Administrator mode as well, should your machine gets compromised. Who dare to say that their machine is completely clean now, eh? The fastest way to stop viruses is to reduce the account privilege that you are currently using down to Users, NOW. You don't need to browse the web or read your email or type documents using Administrator account, do you? You need Administrator account to install applications, but you don't install and uninstall applications every single day, do you?

The best practice from Microsoft experts are to (Read More)