There are no straight answers, but it makes life interesting

For the last couple of weeks, my Lord has showed me some interesting stuff. Those that were linked directly or indirectly to some things that I dreamed and asked the Lord for. He gave me the chance to see with my own eyes:

1. The phenomenal (though I have no respect to) indonesian singer called mbah Surip. His reign to stardom was unbelievably swift and it only took weeks for him to became a class A artist (demand wise). I met that guy at the Jakarta airport, escorted by his assistant. I didn't know why I had the chance to see him until days later when he died of exhaustion and cardiac arrest. I pray that my career as musician would go to a stardom realm and then there was this one guy. For days I pondered about it but I'm sure that it wasn't a warning but a case for me to learn and prepare should my big-time days come to me.

2. Two Lamborghini at Shell gas station. It was an awesome sight and God knows that it is one of the things at the top of my wish list. Why did He gave me the chance to see them up-close? I know God wanted me to work for my dreams and He snapped me from my secure feeling.

For sometime I didn't know how to react but I decided to focus on the encouragement from the Lord and it made me stronger in facing all the challenges to fulfill my dreams.

Whatever happened in ten days

As some of you may or may not know, last time I went to Surabaya as a expecting-father and now I'm back in Jakarta as a proud father of a baby girl we named Lúthien Tinúviel Kapriandi. Yes yes...of you who didn't know, we owe the great J. R. R. Tolkien for the name. (if you're still asking after this, it's outrages!)
There are so much to tell about her arrival to this world but I felt so hard to tell since it's so beyond words. I could only tell it is amazing. It also deepen my understanding of life and our (my wife & I) relationship with Jesus.

So after we returned home from the hospital, I had another weird experience. It was the fourth day after we got back and I was looking the sky from the terrace. The day was cloudless, so clear without pollution (unlike Jakarta), then suddenly I saw a white form similar to a passenger jet fuselage, approximately 38-40 thousand feet in altitude, but when I tried to recognize the plane I couldn't see any wings or tail fin and the way it moves was so different than an airplane, it just move smoothly like having no air resistance at all. I tried to focus on that thing, thinking I probably wrong but the more I focus, the more I convinced of its shape. Unfortunately I didn't got a chance to take my camera and take pics or record it since it moved fast, although clearly visible.
I asked my wife wether there are any air traffic on the sky of the area and told me only private jets flew that route. OK so maybe I saw a private jet but I'm still unsure since I remember exactly how it moves. So I here I am, still don't know if I had a close encounter of a first kind or another case of misidentify.

Another exciting thing in my ten days earlier is, I had a chance to feel flying the Boeing 737-800 NG-the latest generation of 737-on my way back to Jakarta. It was awesome and I'm so thankful to Jesus for the chance.

Thoughts

It’s now my fourth day in Surabaya, accompanying my wife who is expecting our first child. Nothing really much I had in four days since my wife should stay at home most of the time and I don’t feel like going around the city by myself.

This is the longest duration of me staying in Surabaya and felt so far from the rest of the world. To make things further I still couldn’t connect to the Internet from my cell phone, so I’ll need to use dial up or go to internet café. But I managed to survive.

Today my wife had contractions and we’ll see how it goes.

I also have one concern about hybrid car in indonesia. We all know that hybrid cars are made to help reduce pollution from fossil fuel and sold with affordable price and given incentive from the government, but the indonesia government is so genius. They saw all the technology involved in hybrid car and categorized it into luxury item and thus put the tax so high.
The retail price soar high because of that and not many people are encouraged to help reducing pollution from motor car by buying/using hybrid cars. Way the go indonesia!!!

History and now?

I was reading about World War II at Wikipedia and I found a statistic that surprised me. Turned out that indonesia suffered pretty significant amount of casualties and included in the overall WW II casualties.

This fact has never been told in indonesia education system. So this could also be a factor why indonesians are not having a sense of good civilization, because they ignored the history of what real destruction was.

Just a post

Still haven't got a chance to post any pics, I was busy in my studio lately.

About my band, we met with a keyboard player last week and had a terrific jam session. We are going to have another jam this friday to see how things will work further.
I hope we can finally settle the line up and start hitting stages soon.

Exciting news? Nothing in particular except that if the prediction is right then in 7 days my first child will born. The 7th grandchild for my parents and the 1st for my wife's parents.


What else?

Bomb attack (again)

Another bomb attacks hit Jakarta, that left 9 people dead and several others injured. The bombs brought deaths and horror to Ritz-Carlton and Marriott hotels. For Marriott, this is its second bom attack. I would ask "whatever happened with Marriott Jakarta?"

Normally I would express my anger and condemning the calamity, but now I just don't know what to express and tired to follow any news about it.
Nevertheless, I'm extending my sincere condolences to the victims.

I pray and hope God forgive us all.

A thought and an idea (again)

I took quite sometime lately to pay attention and take notice of other people around my home or in public crowd places. The more I tried to understand, the more I felt like I'm an alien who stranded on earth and trying to live alongside humans. It's just so hard to understand humans and in my case, to understand indonesians.

Two of the common (IMHO are the most fatal) indonesians stereotype are:
1. Most of them are ignorantly walking on a thin line between brave and idiot.
2. Most of them are not interested to move into a more civilized & advance society. Modern indonesians are only skin deep.

So I came up with an idea to film and take pictures of the two things above and put them here. I hope this could be one of not so many efforts to waking up indonesians from stupidity.

Right then, camera stand by!

Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen, my opinion.

OK, I've watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or Transformers 2 on the first day it released in indonesia. It was a perfect day, my wife and I got good seats despite we were kind of late coming to the cinema.
Too bad that perfect day was screwed by the quality of the 2009 most anticipated movie (other than Star Trek that was also a disaster).
So after lots of people told how they hate the TF 2 movie, I think I'll say one or two words too.

I HATE TF 2! It's cheesy and messy in every aspects. There are too many mistakes, loopholes and they didn't give the robots effective roles. It makes me to think that those directors and the writer team were not having deep understanding of the Transformers story.

If the title is Transformers, fine! So the story is about the Transformers race right? But they put too many human interventions & politics in the movie. The role and dialog for the leading roles (that is the robot race!) is so minimal and if I can give a percentage of dialogs in TF 2 it is 70% human-human, 20% robot-human and 10% robot-robot. WHAT IN THE CYBERTRON IS THAT?! Might as well named it Sam Witwicky Adventures rather than Transformers.

Also adding the damage to TF 2 is the appearance of the Autobot twins Mudflap and Skids. Their role is so unimportant and swallow. Apparently Michael Bay didn't learn from the mistake of George Lucas with Jar Jar Binks. I hope as most of the fans are, those two characters are erased and for filling the hole they can put Wheeljack or Sunstreaker.

For the rest of the Autobots, they are so lack of their true character just as in the first movie.

The appearance of the Constructicon is also disappointing. No dialogs and appearance for individual robot. What we see was some construction vehicles suddenly combining into Devastator. I'm sure we all hoped to see a huge Devastator standing straight and charged the desperate Autobots but no. The design of Devastator in TF 2 is so so not up to its 1980s counterpart, instead they made it walking on four limbs just as a gorilla. The worse thing is, they put Devastator just to suck sand and climbing a pyramid and easily defeated by US Navy.

The biggest disappointment is the appearance of Soundwave. It was so out of character and all he was doing for the whole movie is just floating there in space. For the mission he intended to I think it'll be better if they put Laserbeak rather than Ravage.

The writer team are thinking to also put pretenders in the movie (the girl who turned into robot then to girl again until finally dead as robot?) but sadly they got it all WRONG!!! I suggest they take more time to understand what in Cybertron is a pretender shell.

But there was some good scenes like the appearance of Sideswipe in the opening scene, Optimus Prime battling three Decepticons. Yes, that's it. But in overall it is just bad!

It's just too many for me to say and I won't have time to make music if I keep saying about this movie (and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek). So there we have it, my opinion to Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen.

After two months of absence

It's Juli! Time really flies and in two months, there were many things took place on planet earth, especially in my lifetime.
My band new songs for local market is nearing release deadline.
My best friend and I finally going to make my wild idea into serious job.
I lately took flight frequently and it weren't those low-fare flights. Grew tired of railways.
Got a job as additional drummer and it threw me to three cities gig. No comment.
Star Trek the remake released. Some say it got genius story line? Not me! It's hilarious how americans can still selling crap in times of global crisis.
As a protest of the latest Star Trek movie, I decided to drop my ST style title.
Transformers 2 released and it is almost total rubbish. New fans, new fans...what were they thinking about the old time, die-hard fans?
I'm getting new experience as expecting father...still busy looking for the playard
After so many years adapting asian horror, an original american horror movie finally took the stage again.
Michael Jackson died (While I was planning to remake "Smooth Criminal" with my new project band)

What else? After two months without blogging, I'll need sometime to get used to this again.

My music memories pt XX

Not many of my friends or those who knew me, realized that I'm a music fan ever since I heard it for the first time. I love music and especially when they're good and unique.
So I was in my late elementary year and preparing to enter my junior high when 2 Unlimited released their music. Most of my friends thought that I'm a metal and hard rock freak so I didn't think they would believe or sharing the passion if tell them that I like High-NRG genre, especially 2 Unlimited.
Also happened that during my elementary graduation holiday, I took a trip by car with my older brother and my dad. 2 Unlimited tape was one of the tapes that we always play.

This is also one of not so many 90s music that I love.

ps: thanks to EricSchoenmaker for sharing the video.