GRIIS young adults and teen fellowship gathered for an outing at Singapore Botanical Garden yesterday afternoon. We started about 3.15 PM, we sang songs, we listened to sharing and God's Word, followed by fun games and dinner. Here are some photos and videos that I took, all using N95.

The first game was "Tree, Squirrel, and Hunter". If it was to be inspired by Enchanted the movie, maybe we would have called it "Tree, Chipmunk, and Evil Queen" haha... :p Those squirrels who didn't get tree to live in during those games were punished to dance as the rest sang along.



Those who get punishment after the first game.

It was shortly followed by sharing, first from Jo who will be leaving for Denmark this month, and Ezra together with his brothers and mother back to Jakarta.

Short sharing from Ezra before he left Singapore, for a long time


Kau sahabatku, kau saudaraku, tiada yang dapat memisahkan kita

 
Sing-a-song in a beautiful garden


Outing is never complete without a group photo
The turn-out was about 75 to 80 persons. I personally was very thankful for the weather, that it didn't rain.

Get all the photos in my album. http://hendrikch.smugmug.com/gallery/3917523/

The first year was a dream come true,
The second was practically a nightmare,
The third was a reality,
What will the fourth year turns out to be?

I'm not sure if anyone of you using blogdrive.com for your blogging platform, but I was a former user of blogdrive.com, and somehow today the domain name has expired, and all <name>.blogdrive.com blogs are gone. A couple of people has already noticed this issue and has asked questions, trying to find answers to their missing blog.

After blogdrive went offline briefly yesterday due to domain expiration, blogdrive users can now rejoice after the service is back online. So far, there hasn't been any explanation from blogdrive on what happened yesterday. For me, I quickly logged back in, and backed up all my posts there. I have about one year worth of blog posts there from April 2004 to May 2005. I'm sure LOTS of blogdrive users will start running away now. If you happen to wanting to move from Blogdrive to Wordpress, this post may help.

you start to talk nonsense, when you start not making sense, when you can't construct a proper English sentence. *haiz* Today afternoon, I was in a conference call. Midway through the meeting when I was talking, the moment I stopped talking, suddenly 3 persons over the phone gone quiet, the other 5 in the same room as me looked at me, baffled. Few seconds later, my boss told me, "Sorry, we didn't quite caught what you said. Can you repeat that?" I repeated, and somehow whatever I said didn't make sense to them. After the conference call, there was at least one occurrence when I talked to my colleague, and he gone, "huh?"

Tomorrow, I am supposed to attend a meeting at church in the afternoon, followed by young adults fellowship, before finally a drama rehearsal for Christmas Gospel Rally that's coming up in a week time. Looks like I may not be able to attend them, we'll see tomorrow.

One of the cool thing about N95 is its GPS ability. Couple that with mapping application like Nokia Maps or Google Maps, it's a killer. You know how far you are from your destination, you can roughly know where to alight from the bus, since you know your destination and you know exactly where you are. You don't need to be afraid of getting lost (maybe not in Singapore, but certainly you can in Jakarta). Last month, as I played a lot with Google Maps, unknowingly my data charges shot up. I used about 9 MB of data, for about S$27. That's very expensive. I repeat, very. Come to the rescue is Nokia Map Loader. It's an application, clearly from Nokia, to load selected maps around the world to my N95 phone, so I'll have the maps ready in the phone without having to connect to Internet to download the maps. Cool stuff. I have loaded the map of Indonesia (I think only Jakarta is available), whole of Singapore, and Malaysia.


Nokia Map Loader

I was quite surprised, when I search for road names in Jakarta, the result appeared. The map of Jakarta is complex enough, but the 5.2MB download includes all the road names, complete with postal codes. I'm impressed.

Reached home today, turned on my PC, and Windows Update notified me that there's Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) ready for download, together with at least other ten security-related fixes. If you happen to use Office 2007, go and get the SP1 now.


Windows Update installing Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1

Do's and Don'ts of Blogging. This week, I was asked to provide some opinions about blogging that will be published in church's December newsletter. In the questionnaire, there were a couple of questions, and one of them was: "What are the Do's and Don'ts of Blogging?" Since, it was for a newsletter, I made it short, but here I would like to outline them even further. Feel free to add and comment on what you think.

Do's:
- Do know what you're blogging for. Be it personal, stories, photos, sharing, anything. If you don't know what you're blogging for, it'll most likely take out the fun in blogging, and you'll stop blogging after the first excitement wears off.
- Update frequently enough, but it doesn't have to be everyday. Quality is more important than quantity. I have seen people update their blog twice a year. If you don't update enough, people will tend to forget that your blog exists after a while. Of course, don't blog everyday about what you eat, what time you wake up, you get the idea.
- Be tactful on what you write, your blog can be read by everyone around the world, and I mean everyone, and searchable by Google.
- Do respect your readers, respond to their comments. Have a conversation with your readers.
- A bit technical, but have RSS for your blog, it'll help people to follow your blog updates.
- In summary, use your blog for the blessing of others.

Don'ts:
- Don't slap advertisements all over the place to earn money. Blog is to share, not to earn money.
- Don't care what people think of what you write, it's your blog, not a magazine or newspaper company. Still, be tactful of what you write.
- Don't share other's personal lives without asking permission, thus violating their privacy.

Any comments? Anything you want to add?

I'll be on vacation, going home to Jakarta from Wednesday, 19th December 2007, and I'll be back on 6th January 2008.
I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Time to prepare resolutions for 2008.