Greatly Reviewed!

I just feel that this very novel of Yukio Mishima is quite different from his other works. While the others, in my opinion, pensively tell gloomy brains of adults, this small and cute novel tells about the multi-layered thoughts of naively serious young kid.

The kid sees his mother sleeping with a sailor a few times and breaks his heart. Is he jealous because someone ’steals’ his mom? No. To him, a sailor is an ideal being on earth, and seeing a sailor sleeping with his mom and later deciding to get married with her, and therefore planning to stay away from the sea, the grand symbol of freedom, this kid–oh sorry I forgot to tell you, his name is Noboru–feels displeased.

So distressed as noboru might be, he and his gang planned to do some harm to the sailor. like what? In the name of shockability, I hold myself from telling it.

The point is, this time, Mishima is quite different from the mishima of the tetralogy the sea of fertility. He’s just being different, and difference, in this case, is not bad, indeed.

Besides being productive, James Patterson is among the breakthrough-going thrillists. Up to this day, he has produced not less than 30 novels most of which are his own thinking and typing and some of which are written in collaboration with other writers. For the women’s murder club, especially, he has worked with andrew gross and maxine paetro. hey, don’t forget those cool sequence-titling: 1st to die, 2nd chance, 3rd degree, and the newest one, which i’m gonna review in no time, 4th of july. well, those names are cliches, but James puts greatest efforts to come up with the thrilling contents.

4th of July tells about a female lieutenant, Lindsay Boxer, who has a new case now. there’ve been two murders in town. Both the victims are teenagers. they’re whipped at the bottom and slashed to death. she solves the problem with her friend, Jacobi. They find the black sedan suspected to be the murderer’s car. There’s a hollywood (scripted)scene with a police car and a bad guy’s car roaming the busy street of san fransisco before it ends with a crash. Later, we’ll find that the driver of this car got a fatal accident from boxer’s shot and sues back. a trial follows. Boxer gets a leave and live for some moment in her sister’s house in half moon bay where, again, she’s faced to a chain murder with similar signanture—whipping and slashing.

All in all, this book shows James’ mastery in thrilling people. The language is very fluid and the plot is far-from-boring: what else can excite people than a story with branched plot, there’re two cases, the chain murder and boxer’s fight at the trial. You’ll find your fingers stuck to the book, and your eyes get charmed by the chain of freshly colloquial dialogue that James, i believe, has bleed to devise.

When we hear about The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, there surely will flash in our mind the image of a bugman, a bug as big as an adult. yeah, that’s first, especially for those who have never read it but have many times heard people touching on it in literary essays and all. The Metamorphosis will surely sound x-menly to them. But if you have read it, you’ll find something way more reflective than an x-men world.

Yeah, The Metamorphosis is a gloomy kind of novella. It begins with a marvel-comic-like-for-us-in-this-age scene, a man waking up to find that he has transformed into a vermin. As the pages get turned, you’ll find a gloomy, grey-dominated world of industrialization era. It’s set in a world where people begin to be alienated by their day job. Responsibility, money, family’s welfare are all in people’s thought. There’s no more time for fun, for quality time with family, and all.and the protagonist of this novel, the newly-verminized gregor samsa, is the observing agent. Through his transformation, and thus his isolation a.k.a. ostracism, he has more time to ponder about his surrounding. with gregor’s isolation he becomes someone who can enjoy himself. And his family, who has depended on him as the breadwinner, and has been passive people with unexplored energy and skills, now turns into a group of people who would bleed themselves to take the most advantage of themselves for the sake of family.Yeah, that’s it. That’s what to expect when you read the metamorphosis. It’s far from scientific fiction. It’s novel of wisdom clad in a unique story.

First of all, congratulations to UGM’s website builder team! You rock, bro! There’s quite a lot of things that makes their site look cooler among other Indonesian universities’ sites. Let me just count them.

First, the site is somewhat light to access. Their page size is generally very small. Yet, there’s a price for anything. That is… very simple design. In terms of design, I believe this site’s design is much better (don’t compare to this site, it’s way much better, look at it’s Indonesianly classic design, batik, batik, batik–it’s the ideal Indonesian site, IMHO).

Second, its subdomains vary in terms of CMS, sitemapping and designs. Some uses wordpress, some uses home-made wordpress-like CMS, some are half-static, and so on. Well, I do believe visitors will find it quite cozy browsing through this university’s site.

Third, its subdomains (offices’, faculties’, department’s, services’ sites, etc) are very well-updated, thanks to the wordpress-like CMS, I guess. Faculties’, Departments’, offices’, and centers’ staffs can easily update their homepage once they need to do it.

Fourth, as webometrics urges, this site’s rich files are quite a lot, which means they have a huge desire to propagate knowledge to all people in the world regardless walks of life. This boosts their webometrics score.

I think that’s all about UGM’s site. Tomorrow, you’ll find me with another university’s site to review. Which university will it be? Just guess, :D.

Well, I just changed my mind. I’m not gonna start with the highest-achiever in webometrics. I’ll start from the most respectable university, at least in my opinion (this decision is subject to whimsical changes, hehehe).University of Indonesia is one of the oldest universities in Indonesia, and also one of the most respectable among state universities. If they do get high score in webometrics ranking, it should not be to nobody’s wonder.

Let’s go straight down the review: its design is quite simple. It adheres to much to the university official color: yellow. A yellow-dominated website can be great. However, since UI has no other color (except the black text and the very pallidly colorful picture), it just bores almost anyone visiting it for the first time. So, for the design, it just needs lots of improvement.

As for the service, this site is quite complete. You can find it’s profile and all introductory stuffs, you can find its button to IT-based services for students, you can find catchy links to the university’s units, such as research center and language center, which are often very important for people.

By the way, don’t forget about the fact that research center’s site is quite separated from the official university site with completely different tone of design. It’s quite refreshing.

Last but not least, what makes it not-so-nice-visiting is its English version. There is only several pages available in English, they’re the introductory pages. Many hyperlinks on the English version pages lead to Indonesian pages. And the English news page also needs more frequent updating. Anyway, congratulations for UI for being the best Indonesian university site in webometrics ranking.