Mar 22
Idioms are quite horrors for us Indonesian, because sometimes we can make sense of their meanings only by knowing the words that build them up. Yeah, another reason is we Indonesian have different cultures from that of American.
In my case, as a novel translator, “encountering idioms” is my middle name. Hehehe… I mean, I can expect to see idioms anytime I open any page of a novel to translate. Yeah, it can be quite horrific for me. However, I was quite optimistic of mastering all American idioms when I bought my first conventional idiom dictionary. I mean a book dictionary, not an electronic one. Continue reading »
Mar 17
Actually, I’ve had my facebook account since long time ago. However, I hadn’t submit my appropriate profile, picture, and supporting application until two weeks ago. At that time, my friend invited me to play scrabble there. I was quite perplexed. Yes. It had never flashed into my mind playing a game online through a social network group like that.
I’ve been an active multiplyer since one and a half year ago. But I used it only for posting my writings and commenting my friends’ writings and pictures. I was once very interested in friendster, but then I quit it because I didn’t find Continue reading »
Mar 05
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 »
Mar 03
This is the website where people from all walks of life gather under the interest in literature. It is the place to show our works and wait for comments from fellow members. It is the place where we can discuss about hottest issues in Indonesian literature. It is also the place where we get news about book launches, literary contests, and so on.
Today, with its 1,300 something members, we can find bunches of poems everyday, lots of short stories in a week, tons of literary reviews monthly.
The good news is, members don’t stop here. Sometimes, whenever necessary, they go on their discussions in Yahoo Messenger chatrooms, personal correspondence. Continue reading »
Feb 22
I haven’t found any positively-one-hundred-percent correct answer why most of Indonesian universities’ sites do not arrange their menus in a simply usage-oriented manner? That is, why don’t they just be like American or English universities’ sites that highlight only some menus on their first page (home) and let the rest be sub menus.
As a concrete example, you can go to this site, and you’ll find that only “Prospective Students”, “Current Students”, “Admission”, “Visitors” on its first page. They are among the most frequently clicked menus. That is, they’re the major reason why other people open this website.
Continue reading »
