Blogger jadi Beda!

Udah lama nggak ngebuka www.blogger.com sama sekali.
Gara-gara ngebuka blognya oom Enda, baru tahu bahwa www.blogger.com selain punya tampilan baru, juga punya sejumlah fitur baru, termasuk template-template keren.

Keren lah. Udah bosen ternyata gue pake template dari Zen Garden (yang walaupun keren abis nggak bakalan cocok gw pake kalo nggak dikonfigurasi di sana sini dulu). Ya udahlah pake template ini aja. Template seribu ummat jangan-jangan. Blom sempet di-modifikasi, kecuali nambah link "Other Blogs" di sidebar.

What have been I doing in April and May that kept me from posting to my blogspot?

Blame these things:
Friendster
This cyberwonder has recently occupied me (among million other netfreaks). Inviting friends to join friendster, sending requests to add new friends, writing out testimonials, reading lunatic bulletin posts (and insanely passing them to my other friends), and other friendsterwise activity are all contributing to my exhaust my leisure time at work. Or better, not necessarily in the official break hours, but also at times when I feel so bored I can't do my tasks effectively. When I lack motivation to meet the deadline, I find checking my account at friendster very refreshing. You are probably familiar with that feeling ... drowsiness, dead brain-like situation that recurs everytime I finish my lunch break. Caffeine-addicts may brew a cup of coffee and sip the black liquid to force the eyelids to stay open and the brain cells to stay alert. But too much coffee makes my heart beat too much faster. To avoid that unusual rising in blood pressure level, I simply tap my email address this_is_umar@yahoo.com and my password into those two fields in the index page of www.friendster.com and start the effort to regain my top performance at work.

Messaging
I pity anyone who works at an office without privileges to access the yahoo messenger (or the likes). For if there's one thing that keeps in this office is the luxury to run this amazing program that lets me to communicate with others over this vast network. Since my office won't pay my handphone bill or reimburse those prepaid vouchers, I stay away from chatting on the handphone. I use the yahoo messenger! instead and contact my buddies with the national motto "the friday fun starts on monday".

On mondays, my fellows usually review the past friday's activities: that rendez-vous on a cozy sofa at Tokyo Lobby Cilandak Town Square, those drinks, the nobrainer chats, and the goodbyes at 1 am. Most likely the caffeine stays longer than we expect. That's why to waste those insomniac days we move to the closest place (usually to a friend's home) to continue the iddle babble. What I like is sometimes we don't just talk shits, we do communicate like noble adults, with fears, hopes, sorrows and joys.

Webwork
Probably this is the only reason that normal workaholic-type people would accept: I learn how to build applications (currently read web applications) in this amazing framework called Webwork. This framework was just recently launched. That makes it even more difficult to learn how to use it. No book on webwork is available yet and worse, my partner in extreme programming left this company before I thoroughly understand all feature that Webwork (and other components it incorporates) offers. Thank God I have come to understand and make use of most of the common features. So long unreadable jsp codes and welcome MVC framework.

Next time when you find this blogspot abandoned for unusually long time, you can take a wild guess: Umar is either checking out his friendster's account, busy chatting in the ym! conference, or building things using Webwork.