Year: 2012

Apakah Blog Masih Relevan?

Kita lihat masa sekarang banyak sekali layanan jejaring sosial betebaran. Mereka adalah tren baru dan gaya masa kini. Teknologinya paling terdepan. Sebaliknya blog merupakan media kuno yang sudah ada semenjak web dikenal orang. Perkembangannya ya begitu-begitu saja, tidak sepesat layanan “jejaring sosial” (walaupun terkadang blog juga dianggap sebagai salah satu jejaring sosial). Pemakainya jangan-jangan cuma orang-orang tua 40 tahunan ke atas. Belum lagi, beberapa jejaring sosial tersebut memiliki fasilitas serupa weblog. Di Facebook misalnya sudah menjadi gaya untuk menulis nasihat, hikmah, atau sekedar puisi di notes dan disebarluaskan ke seluruh friends yang ada. Pada grup pun ada fasilitas doc yang bisa dijadikan catatan bersama. Twitter sering disebut-sebut sebagai sarana microblogging. Kecepatan pesebaran informasinya katanya melebihi kecepatan gempa. Google+ apalagi, dengan jumlah karakter nyaris tak terbatas pada satu posnya, ia nyaris bisa digunakan sebagai catatan web seperti blog. Hal ini menimbulkan pertanyaan, masih zaman kah blog? Masih relevan gitu? Jawaban singkatnya : SANGAT MASIH LAH!! Memang, banyak orang yang sangat nyaman dengan jejaring sosialnya. Nyaman bisa menspam umpan berita teman-temannya dengan ocehan mundannya. Nyaman juga bisa berbagi …

Weekly Photo Challenge : Today | My Own Room in Cartoonish

This week’s theme is very surprising and frightening. Shit just got real when the challenge is like: Today! This week’s theme is a bit different (but you like that, don’t you?) – it’s about TODAY. This day. The day you’re reading and reacting to this post. No rules or guidance on what to post other than the photo must be taken today! Don’t cheat, don’t go into your photo archives on your computer, don’t link to an old post. Get your camera out, right now, and snap a picture to share with everyone!  Well. The problem is, I read the post challenge on Friday 23.25 so today is a very small window (only 35 minutes to come up with something) considering I haven’t taken a single photo today. Post a photo on the day you read and react to the photo? On this dark night with my phone camera? Well, it can’t be done except I take pictures of my own room. Hey, that’s it. I just need to take a photo of my own room. These photo is …

Firasat, Keteguhan Hati, Doa, Istikharah, dan Ikhtiar

Kamis, 17 Mei 2012 merupakan hari bahagia bagi Mas Yulianto sesepuh kami di ADK angkatan 2008 dan mantan ketua ADK 2008. Dengan semangat menggebu-gebu kami serombongan sahabat kampus menyambut hari bahagia ini. Empat mobil dikerahkan menuju Cilacap. Sebenarnya katanya ada tujuh mobil tetapi yang tiga sampai kami pulang tak tampak batang hidungnya. Entah kemana rombongan anak matem itu. Perjalanan cukup melelahan. Berangkat saat matahari membuka matanya, kami tiba di Cilacap saat dzuhur mengetuk pintu. Enam jam di jalan dan melewati jalur berlenggak-lenggok membuat saya terkapar saja.  Tiba-tiba sudah rehat sebentar di Masjid Raya Ciamis. Sisa perjalanan hanyalah tinggal sejarah saja. Pesta walimah yang diadakan cukup sederhana, hanya menggelar tenda tarup di depan rumah tanpa diiringi organ tunggal. Akan tetapi, seperti walimah pada umumnya makan yang tesedia sangat menggugah selera. Saat mengambil jatag, semua menu dicicipi. Sayangnya karena isi perut sudah tidak ada, tenggorokan saya jadi trauma menelan makanan karena kelelahan, saya kurang nafsu makan jadinya. Hanya sampai teman-teman beranjak ke masjid lah saya bertahan memegangi piring makan saya. Setelah salat jama’ dzuhur dan ashar, kami membuat forum “interogasi”  dengan …

A-Z Archive: V! Challenge ~ Various Effects

Letter V. What are your theme with letter V? At first, it seems hard to find a picture beginning with letter V. But after squeezing my head, I found some picture that will fit the theme. Various pictures. It also begin with V. What a fitting theme for the letter. This is a collection of V picture and I applied some Picasa effect on it. This picture was taken in front of my rent room. One day, when the morning still dark, I notice that the dawn sky gave this rare violet color. This picture then enhanced with Orlonish effect of Picasa to bring out the silhouette. The scenery that time was priceless and I think the picture is priceless as well. But, if you look at the scene on daytime, it is a very ordinary view actually. Yeah, that’s why I love silhouette picture. They change something ordinary to acceptable or great. Well, the scene at that time was nice though, at least for me. This is my high school’s principal’s car. I don’t …

Travel Theme: Street Market ~ Pasar Simpang Dago Bandung

I tell you. There is no term as “street market” in Indonesia. Why is that? Because, taking half of the street or the sidewalk and change it to shopping center is everyday phenomenon here. Not only that, you can find such thing almost everywhere. By everywhere I mean almost on every road segment on the country. At least you can find one of the so called “Pedagang Kaki Lima” five feet merchant on a segment of a road. Well, not in a tool road and highway of course. Pedagang Kaki Lima called like that because when Dutch still around, they instructed us to build five feet wide sidewalk for each street. Gradually over time, some merchant made their own shop on top the five feet sidewalk hence “five feet merchant”. Because we can see it everyday, Indonesian doesn’t think a street market as something special. So, when we make vacation on some tourist site, we never think to take picture of street market there. I am no exception. Now, when Ailsa invited me to join her photo …

Beautiful Landscape of Mutun Beach and Tangkil Island – part 3 of 3 : The Island

Summer. What does summer mean to you? Maybe most of you will think summer is hot or summer is life with glimmering sunny day or a time that you can go outside more. But, here in tropical country there is no season like that. Oh, maybe there is always season like that every day in a year. So I never exactly experience a summer day before.  For me, maybe summer means play. Summer means travelling. Ultimately, summer means beach and sea. Pictured above: The Beach on Tangkil Island Continuing the other two part, here I will present you the island of Tangkil in front of Mutun Coast, Lampung. If you don’t read the past part, head to part 1 : the Coast and part 2 : the Sea or you will regret it.  Mutun Coast and Tangkil Island both are a famous beach travel site on Lampung, Indonesia. The Sumatrean beach near Sunda Strait give you a nice sensation of calm sea and wind. It’s a perfect place to do a summer holiday or summer camp. Tangkil Island …

A-Z Archive: U! Challenge ~ Umbrella

This week is letter U. U can be ukhti, unicorn,  underwear, or umbrella. But I don’t have yet saw any unicorn and I will never post my or anyone underwear here in this blog. Because I haven’t married yet, posting a photo of ukhti (religious muslim women) here will probably make me suffer in real life with gossip, rumor, jealousy, and dead sentence roaming around me. So probably umbrella is the best choice.

Travel theme: Summer ~ Monas

As you probably know, here in this tropical country like Indonesian, there is no such thing as season. There is no summer, fall, winter, or spring. We originally have two season: rainy and sunny. We originally have two seasons actually: wet/rainy and dry/sunny, penghujan and kemarau in Indonesian. Penghujan is April to September, when there’s mostly rain (and prob.flood) in that time. Kemarau is October to March when there’s mostly day with bright sun in that time. But due to global warming (maybe), now we face the same phenomenon all time of the year. Random weather. So, when Ailsa invite me to join her photo challenge themed summer, I was blank. Even the official one give that theme one week later. I have no experience in summer yet. But It is a travel theme, isn’t it? Then, I decide to post a photo about my trip to National Monument, Jakarta. Jakarta is very hot, an embodiment of summer, maybe. National Monument (Monas) is our country proud of independence.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Hands

Hands, it is this week’s photo challenge. It seems the theme is getting hard and harder every weeks, doesn’t it? Hands can be instrumental in a photo – they emphasis, they hide, they reveal. They can be the star of the show, or just a prop to help the main attraction stand out better. Okay, it is true. But the problem is It is never crossed in my mind, to take a photo of hand. I have no idea how to take a nice picture of hands. Hmm… Crawling my database, I just got these three picture. Not gorgeous, but hope you like it.