Greatly Reviewed!

As an Umberto Eco’s novel, Baudolino is quite different. It’s different in the way that it’s somewhat light. It is full of actions, and relaxed and grin-making narratives. It shows us about, still, Medieval Age, but not in terms of its thoughts and other cerebral discussions. It relates the “Umbertonian” realities, events, people, and issues in the Medieval Age with … well … as usual … a sense of thriller–this time is a closed-room murder of German Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

Baudolino is all about a person named Baudolino who admits to have been made a fostered son of Frederick I Barbarossa. It is told (by Baudolino himself) that he can speak any language in the world after listening to people talking with the language a couple of minutes. Continue reading »

The Other Side of Me by Sidney Sheldon is a cool kind of memoir. First, because it’s about the other side, the not-known-by-all-people side of a famous figure, that is, Sidney Sheldon himself. Yeah, it’s true, bro. It does not tell about Sidney Sheldon’s life as a writer, I mean as the author of around twenty something thriller novels some of which has been made movies and miniseries. Instead, it tells about Sidney Sheldon’s life—and almost death—as a scriptwriter, directors, Hollywood motion picture studio readers, and that sort of things. He wrote the stories of I Dream of Jeannie. Hart to Hart is HIS TV series. He worked once in MGM—the roaring lion movie studio, :D.

Second, because you can learn a lot of lessons from his life. If you’re a writer, you’ll learn about being stubborn with you ideals, that is, being a great writer. Or, you’ll also learn to use opportunities at hand as good as possible, not to let it go, even a bit, Continue reading »

When Ben Okri published his Booker Prize winning novel The Famished Road for the first time, readers in the UK and the world was shocked to know how a person can see spirits, how a person can slide into the realm of spirits. For most people raised in Euro-american settings, such realm as the realm of spirit is a news. However, through The Famished Road, Ben Okri “campaign” the existence of such realm, at least, in the eyes of African people—well, actually not only African, but also Asian people, or more exactly, Southeast Asian people.

In The Famished Road, Okri tells about a boy named Azaro who finally realized how actually he is an ‘abiku’. In Nigerian belief, an abiku is a ‘childish’ spirit who likes being born to a mother only to die while still very young and later chooses to be born again, still to the same mother, and only to die while still very young. Continue reading »

No pain no gain. People often say so. Or, we can interpret it as “No money no gain.” Yeah, you can say so. Even in Sankrit, we have “Jer Basuki Mawa Bea”, meaning “to gain success, you pay some fee”.

However, to some extent, this is slightly wrong. We can say that it is no longer a necessity today to pay “lots” of money to gain something. We do need to pay, but not a lot of money. Let’s take an example from website building now. Thanks to advertisement, the core of capitalism, we can learn to manage a website (whether mainstream media or blog) without paying a lot of money. Due to the sponsorship that WordPress and Blogger receive, we can blog for free. We do need to pay, but not a lot of money: only for internet connection and electricity, right?

In terms of mainstream media website (or you may call static website), we can also find some services that might help us learn. We can go to Geocities if we want to. Continue reading »

You know what? The word “webmastering” seems to be quite dilemmatic here. A friend of mine made fun of my using of “webmastering” as one category in this holy blog. Well, to him, as far as I’m concerned, the word is too holy for me to use. Okay, okay, although quite practiced with Macromedia Dreamweaver (hehehe…), I admit that I know relatively little about cPanel. Oh no! Listen up, bro:

To me, this very me, webmastering is as mundane as any other words you might conceive. Okay, then, if you think that webmastering is involves mastery of such things as “how to boost PR”, “how to make your site coo,” “how to modify WordPress CMS”. No problems. That’s the core of webmastering. But you know what, there’s another aspect of webmastering called “content aggregation”. Continue reading »