Yay!! Website Admin

Today I get the real access to the official website of the NGO I work in, Walhi Kalsel. I'm the super admin, as the manager of the website simply gave me his username and password.

From today and on, I'm not only in charge to translate the Bahasa contents into English, but also I'm going to deal with the publishing matter at the English section of the official website.

Add more responsibility for me, but another way for me to learn some other new things...

I'm a full time NGO worker now. As a facilitator for the environmentalist training, resource mobilization staff under the resource department and web translator+administrator :D

Eragon...

I've recently watch this movie, Eragon. One thing I remember as I feel a little odd in the movie is the "e" on Eragon's and Brom's palm. E for Eragon I can understand, but why Brom has the same "e" on his palm?

Never mind my question. Maybe I just need to watch the movie once or twice again..:)

Eragon, as a dragon rider has a mark on his palm. The E. Well, I started thinking to have the E as in Eragon as a logo for our Environmentalist community...E for the environmentalist..

E for the earth day. Which is today. The 37th, if I'm not mistaken. And my earth day is filled with an extraordinary training session with girls from Akademi Keperawatan Gigi (The dentist academy). They are all out today. Making great drawings, and sing a joyful jingle for their presentation of ideal environment in the future.

All training participants are girls. And today quote is "patient". These girls has a mission in disguise as they participate in the training, when we shared expectation as we involved in the training. In addition to their care towards the environment, they're looking for dental patient. Wee..hope I can get free braces from these girls :P

Welcome you girls, the new squad of Enviromentalist..the part of Green Student Movement.

The previous three posts are taken from Steve Jobs' commencement speech in Stanford University delivered on June 12, 2005. Steve Jobs is a CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios. Worth your time reading them through..

That moment, he said "I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories."

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Life-time learning...

In pursue of integrity, life-time learning is a must.

Someday, I feel like I'm quite satisfied with what I'm doing that day. Seems like I'm doing the best I can do. And it sometimes makes me stop, to enjoy 'the view from the top' as I'm reaching the fake summit. In fact, the real summit is a mountain ahead...

Ideally, in seeking accomplishment, the real the best you can do, is to reach a point a little bit beyond your competency. It really makes you proud. The time when you literally able to push yourself beyond your limit.

Stretching zone. It's where the point is. As you able to stretch, you might have to keep on leaving your comfort.

And, the discomfort it cause is worth it. The state when you go out of your comfort zone in order to be able to learn more and later on yield a better result. As Dr. Deborah Serani wrote in her blog :"Instead of withdrawing to the safety of what is familiar when they don't get immediate results, they force themselves to move forward, through awkwardness, discomfort and anxiety until such feelings subside. And when that happens, a new experience is achieved."

Believe...

From Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind...Thanks Om Dani for the book.

Today, the defining skills of the previous era --the 'left brain' capabilities that powered the Information Age-- are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous-- the 'right brain' qualities if inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness and meaning-- increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

High concept, high touch...
* Not just function but also Design
* Not just argument but also Story
* Not just focus but also Symphony
* Not just logic but also Empathy
* Not just seriousness but also Play
* Not just accumulation but also Meaning

Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. These six senses increasingly will guide our world and shape our world.

Fear not. This high concept, high touch abilities that now matter most are human attributes.

In addition to what Dan Pink had said in his book, I've translated a birthday wish from my best friend--who is more like an older sister I've never had-- sent to me at the dawn of my birthday. Few seconds after midnight...
'May your colorful life full of blessings and even more beautiful as you fill it with love for all. Follow your path, KEEP GROUNDED AND AT THE SAME TIME SHINE LIKE A STAR ABOVE THE SKY'

Whizzy mailing by setting filters.

Whizzy... I'm using the word again. This time in the context of whizzy e-mailing by setting filter to both of my e-mail accounts. Yahoo mail and GMAIL the Google's free webmail service.

Yahoo is my first e-mail account. Gmail account since 2005, invited by a friend...coz in order to have a gmail account, you need to be invited by somebody. I have Mas Jojo invited me prior to our trip as electoral observer to Afghanistan. It was around August 2007.

So, what's so whizzy about setiing filter to my e-mail? Umm, first I need to make clear that the term whizzy is according to me. A truly really is a non-techie person (was the sentence grammatically correct?). So for most people I'm not really doing a big thing. What I'm doing: SETTING FILTER, PUT LABELS, CREATE MAIL FOLDERS and let the filtered mails skip my inbox. So the e-mails from several mailing lists I joined would go directly to their own folder.

It's just a simple stuff available in the mailing service that I've recently found out as I'm trying to manage my inbox. So many unread mails in my inbox are left unread because they are buried in stacks of mailing lists and newsletters. Some of those left unread are the important ones...Yay, wish I knew this feature earlier... Never mind. Now I know.

One post per day seems hard to be accomplished these days. But I'm trying to keep on writing. Anything. Well, I supposed to practice my reporting writing too...

Not really busy in the office these days. But, as I'm entering another year of my life-cycle thing to be fixed is myself! I'm renewing my yearly vision. Adding stuffs to my longer term life plan and add the office's agenda into my plans.

So far, I love to describe the beat of my life as 'hectic'. In trying to reduce the hectic state I begin to have daily plan for myself. It works. At least in helping me remember things I need to do. What's the priority of the day. And somehow put me in a better time management to pursue my goals. At extreme level, schedules help me to stay in track. Focus.

But I love humor too...and today..let me share stories about AH BENG the Crazy Singaporean sent by Bang Man.

Ah Beng wants to buy a TV set. He goes to a shop.
Ah Beng : 'Do you have color TV ?'
Salesgirl : "Yes !"
Ah Beng : "Give me a green one, please "
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Ah Beng is filling up an application form for a job.
He supplied the information for the columns on Name, Age,
Address etc.
Then he comes to column on "Salary Expected", but he is not sure
of the question.
After much thought, he writes " Yes "
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Ah Beng goes to a store and sees a shiny object.
Ah Beng : "What is that shiny object ?"
Salesgirl : "That is a thermos flask."
Ah Beng : "What does it do ?"
Salesgirl : "It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold"
Ah Beng : "I'll buy it"
The next day, Ah Beng goes to work with his thermo flask
Boss : "What is that shiny object ?"
Ah Beng : "It's a thermos flask."
Boss : "What does it do ?"
Ah Beng : "It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold"
Boss : "What do you have in it !?"
Ah Beng : "Two cups of coffee and one cup of ice cream"
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

After taking photocopies of documents, Ah Beng always compares
it with the original for spelling mistakes.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Why can't Ah Beng dial 911?
Because he can't find the number 11 (eleven) on the phone.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Ah Beng talk to a long-distance telephone operator.
Ah Beng: "COULD YOU PLEASE TELL ME THE TIME DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
Taipei AND LAS VEGAS ?"
Operator: "JUST A MINUTE..."
Ah Beng : "THANK YOU , lah" AND PUTS DOWN THE PHONE.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

After completing a jigsaw puzzle he'd been working on for
quite some time, Ah Beng proudly shows off the finished puzzle to a
friend.
"It took me ONLY 5 MONTHS TO DO IT", Ah Beng brags.
"FIVE MONTHS ? THAT'S TOO LONG", the friend exclaims.
"YOU ARE A FOOL." Ah Beng replies, "SEE THIS BOX, IT IS WRITTEN
FOR 4-7 YRS".
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Another year passed in my journey towards integrity. In fact this year is the year I found the word INTEGRITY and intend to make it part of my identity. Many things to cherish, new friends I made, and unforgettable things have fulfilled my journey...

The life-changing point was when I joined a Training of Trainers for Environmentalist Training in Surabaya, June 2006. I was really inspired by the facilitator. I learned many new things from the training. And finally able to put vision into my life, to be a great person that makes a great facilitator. A person with integrity, whose integrity can vibe the surroundings.

Then, I almost drown into journalism. As I really enjoy writing and really passionate in being able to make great narration and trying to be good at investigative reporting when I was a journalist learner at KBN Antara biro Banjarmasin. Especially after I participate in Mining workshops for Journalist held by Pantau Foundation and Intitute of Policy Dialogue (IPD) in Balikpapan East Kalimantan, September 2006.

No longer as a learning-journalist in KBN Antara coz I choose to focus on my NGO life and the facilitation sessions I have with Walhi Kalsel and its Green Student Movement. But still keeping in touch with my journalism mentors. Love writing, and will keep on writing till...I don't know till when, till death perhaps.

The biggest event I joined this year is Asia Source 2 in Sukabumi, January 2007. I meet more than a hundred great people from different parts of the world, make friends with them and still connected through the camp's mailing list.

The latest, I made another bond to people shares the same interest. Not too many. Only with the participants, the organizers and the facilitators of resource mobilization training and the links caused by the training. Including Ika and her ideas and DJ Cirdec (as Ika invited us to his 'show' at Ruang Rupa), Togi and his designs, and Nia with her loving community.

Meet new friends and make a new connections though never meet on real world -Pak Bondan, Om Adi, Bang Man.. and stay in touch.

The chance I get wouldn't be this real if I don't have the most supportive family on earth!! Mama and Abah who truly believes in me, and the proud eyes of my little brother. Nini, my Granma that keep reminds me to stay on track...sometimes with really annoying tones but true ones.

Last but should have come first, the friends who have been with me through this journey. Almost always..both in good and bad times of my life. All the names I keep mentions under the huge family of Kompas Borneo Unlam, school and college best-friends and Rangga (despite the fact that we never meet since my last day at the facility in Mataram and it was almost three years ago)