life's like this - avianto's journal

It was a great party! Blogger Party 2007 was a successful and memorable event. Thanks to all of the committee, workers and sponsors and of course, big thanks to all blogger who were there or supporting the event from afar.

It was a blast. Words could not expressed how I felt there. Met lots of people, some I already met before, some I knew since ages but never met and some were new. We should do this more often, eh?

Blogger’s power

For Indonesian blogger, this event was a moment of recognition and acceptance. The Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Muhammad Nuh proclaimed 27 October as a “Indonesia National Bloggers Day” and I believe it made Indonesia the first country in the world to have a “National Bloggers Day”. He also promised to value freedom of expression for all blogger in Indonesia. Hmm, should Indonesia offers asylum to repressed blogger all over the world too?

With great power, come great responsibility (Uncle Ben to Peter Parker aka. Spiderman)

So the freedom was granted and the blogger was recognized highly… Now, how Indonesian blogger will respond to that?I believe Indonesian blogger are those rare people who understand and value great power and will use it wisely and full of responsibilty. Without those value, all of this will be vanished in vain and nobody wants that to happened.

Lighter side

On the lighter side, I was enjoying the event so much. It remind me years ago when I started this journal as a mere media to express my thought, opinion, dream and experience without restraint. I never dreamed that one day, blog became a giant snowball and brought down freedom of expression into personal level, especially in Indonesia.

The joy of meeting people I respect and read their writing every day was unbelievable. I felt like I knew them for so long, I could jumped in and started conversation right away with them. Amal said to me that day: “We already know them by their writing and that was a good start since we value and respect them by their mind and not appearance and any other physical attachment.”. I believe he was right on the spot and as an admirer of human’s mind, I think blog is one way to empower a human being to achieve the next level of thinking.

I enjoyed the party too much, I forgot to take out my own camera. Ouch. I know, it was blasphemy not taking any picture during the event but what can I say? I was enjoying the event so much, I really don’t care about taking photos. Anyway, those who want to see the picture could see hundreds of them at flickr.

So thank you to all of you, sorry for not put all of your blogs in this entry - there are too many of you! You know who you are, thank you so much for brought back my faith about Indonesian people. You are the greatest people I’ve ever known, all of you.

What’s next?

Blogger Party 2008, of course! Between them, I hope there will be many meeting and hangout among bloggers. Maybe not just for fun, maybe for business, profit and hopefully for the greater cause like peace on earth or whatever.

Hopefully, Indonesian blogger are realized they are now have a great power and great responsibility. Blog is not just a ‘momentary trend’ as one of the so-called expert said some years ago. Blog is the people power, the power dreamed so many years ago by the fighter of freedom.

Well, for me… it was a challenge. A challenge for a better writing and opinion. In the end, this journal will be one of my legacy and I want to have a great legacy.

Sidenote

Some promises were made. Actively contribute articles to 3GWeek for mas Budi Putra, continue my hiatus podcast for mas Rane and of course, writing more quality content for all of you.

Thank you all. I’ll be just around the corner if you need me.

Finally, using my own design again for this journal. Actually, I’ve been working with this design since around 4-5 months ago and didn’t had time to finish it. Some bugs are still lingering around, let me know if you found them. Rusting Red I named this layout “Rusting Red”. This layout relied heavily on Blueprint CSS Framework, which is a great CSS framework - safe me hours of tweaking. Some new features here: Adding Twitter, flickr and del.icio.us widget on the right sidebar. Search now performed using Google Search. No more CAPTCHA, using “Preview before Submit” method now. Thanks to / Read more …

Short announcement, I believe most of you already knew it anyway. I’ll be whirling around Blogger’s Party 2007 tomorrow, starting from 10.30 until 15.00 at BlitzMegaplex. So, if you happened to be there, say hi and hang out together. Until then. / Read more …

Since I started blogging again a couple of days ago, this blog was under spam attack very heavily. I tried many setting of the default spam protection and somehow it wasn’t stopping the incoming flood of spam. Sometime I set things wrong and then some of you were complaining that you were not able to leave any comments. Sorry for that, it was totally my sloppy mistake. First Thomas advised me to use Akismet plugin. It worked quite good but it was not eliminating all the spam and for me one spam was too many. And somehow in MT4, there / Read more …

It’s been exactly two years since my last entry. It was too long, wasn’t it? Many things happened in two years. Especially in this information age. So where was I? The story so far I won’t bother to tell what happened in the last two years, some stories might shows up from time to time in my next entries, but for now, let me simplified it by saying “It wasn’t what I hope it would be”. But the last two years was not a complete disaster. Not at all. It was a very appreciated learning experience. Some experiences taught me / Read more …

I just notice (Thank you, echa, for notifying this) that my commenting system was broken. Kaput. Blew up. It supposed to block spammer but instead of blocking just the spammer, the setting blocked everybody, including legitimate comment. Well, this preventive measure should not be here if I wasn’t received too many comment spammer. So yes, blame it on the spammer and of course, my lousy programming skill if you must blame me ;). I’ve made some modification (again) and hopefully this time it will worked like it should work. So if you can’t write any comment, send me email and / Read more …

I know it is not spring yet here in Germany, still -5°C or so outside, but I am put a high hope for the incoming spring. So, here it is, “life’s like this - avianto’s journal” Spring 2005 Edition, code named Grass 1.0. What’s new? Except the graphic itself (pull it out quickly in an hour or so), there are nothing originally new but I add the new section called Linkages, which was previously known as “Recently Reading” column on the sidebar. I thought you are busy? I am. This update was not even in my time schedule. I was / Read more …