Am I stupid or what? There's a book out there, and I contribute to it!

Biarkan Aku Mencintaimu Dalam Sunyi - Kumpulan Cerpen Blogfam.

Down the authors list you will find the word 'Hafiz', which is indeed me. So, why wait? Go grab that book!

On a side note, I have been really, really, terribly inactive in blogfam forum lately, due to work, and school, and business, and everything. Argh, my bad! I will try to be active again.

For a Mother.

The most hardworking person I've ever met, even to this day, is my Mom. Ever. I've been working a lot lately, but this is peanuts to what my mom does everyday. She's a stay-at-home mom, but the amount of work she's done is incredible.

And I mean it. Incredible.

I'm not going to delve into the details; I think it's enough for you all to know how much I am amazed to her feat. Amazing just doesn't cut it. There's no word for it. I'm running out of expression.

Why am I suddenly talking about my Mom? Well, the reason is because today my emotional burden gets a bit heavy. My heart hurts, and everything. I wanted to post something melancholic, something tragic, but then, I think about my Mom.

It's so very rare that I saw her feeling sad. Really. Angry, perhaps, and happy. But not sad. She's just so unbelievably strong.

And again, compared to her burdens, my pain is nothing. I am hurt from so many things. But my Mom is very strong. Here I'm hoping that her blood, running inside me, will somehow share me such a strength.

I love my mom. I really do. I may as well kick myself hard in the ass if I don't.

Save Rolling Star from Its Own Cover Art!

January next year, YUI will release her new single, "Rolling Star". All is well in the YUI fandom, the song rocks and everything. But underneath all that, many of us are suffering. The reason? This piece of disaster from Sony, the supposed cover art for said single.

Oh! Mi eyes!

Now, let's bring rationale back to work. We know it's ugly, but why exactly? Let's find out what this picture is trying to convey (and see why it fails so miserably at that).

First, the picture of YUI on the cover. Generally, YUI's image is a simple, lovable, care-free acoustic guitar-carrying singer-songwriter. The YUI you see here is different: leather jacket, electric guitar, rocking pose. To me, this is kind of an expansion to YUI's image in LIFE, one of her previous (and famous) single (although YUI used an acoustic guitar in LIFE).

This contrast is probably inevitable, though, because Rolling Star itself is a rock song (which is something rare in YUI's work). Therefore, we can conclude that the picture is trying to say: this is a Rock song. Which works, kind of.

Now let's go to our second point: Typography. This is where everything starts to go downhill.

To be fair, the text is readable (although a bit too distracting because of its size). It is easy to tell the difference between the title and the artist name. But the typeface selection is horrible! It does nothing to support the rock image, because the only thing it says is 'plain'. Now, if this is the cover art for a more laid-back, acoustic-based song that YUI used to create, the typeface would meet a warmer welcome. But not on Rolling Star.

Typography matters. A lot. And the lack of attention to it is what I think kills the cover. Maybe Sony had their own logic behind this. Maybe the plainness of the text is their way to say,

"Hey, all YUI fans! Never worry! Maybe YUI had a change of image and style in this song (like you see on her pic), but she's still the simple YUI that you all adore. Really! Just look at the cover-text!"

But so yeah, Sony should just eat their contrasting rationale. To me, this cover screams "MS Paint." It just doesn't work.

And so, armed with old, trusty Photoshop 6, a copy of Rolling Star PV and BS Player, I'm ready to roll. My mission is simple: Give Rolling Star the pride it deserves.

Damn straight rock'n.

<3, Hafiz.

The prayer I've been looking for so long.

Ya Allah, jadikanlah aku hambaMu yang banyak bersyukur dan banyak bersabar. Ya Allah, jadikanlah aku kecil dalam pandanganku dan besar dalam pandangan orang-orang.

Dreampowered.

Literally.

I woke up this morning feeling really good, mostly because of a good dream I just had.

If I had this kind of wake-up everyday, I might just be invincible. Seriously. This is a really great kickstart to fight the day today. I'm happy.

I felt so good I came up with a new, completely unrelated, thought:

Interesting things die when crammed down your throat.

Ain't I right? Think of school. School is chockful of potentially interesting things: literature, mathematics, physics, everything. But then, I asked myself, how come I mostly ended up hating them?

Because they were crammed down my throat. Had I were pursuing them independently, my love would be pure. And I could just be a math geek right now. But I'm not.

A friend of mine just borrowed this PC that I used..

..and when he's done he said to me, "Thanks, dude."

And the first thing that my heart responded was, "No, no, I thank you! Thanks for being here."

Me and USA

Reading Kappa, I had this one question that keeps bugging me. What kind of American product that I've been used day-by-day? What would happen if America just collapse?

First concern is food. Hmm, I mainly just ate whatever my mom cooks, rice and stuff that I'm pretty sure is produced here (rice is probably imported from somewhere, but not America--I guess). I don't really dig McD's or Starbucks or the likes, and only rarely drinks Coke etc. So, I think I will survive if suddenly there's no Uncle Sam.

And then, clothing. Well, I don't know where my clothes came from, but I guess they're either local product or faked-brand product from Taiwan or whatever. I don't wear American-brand shoes. I guess in this case I'm pretty safe as well.

What about PC and stuff? Well, this is one big concern. I use XP, Firefox, and various other programs, mostly from American software manufacturers. If they one day disappear, well, at least I still have the copy, but if I am not allowed to use these American apps, hmm, I think I won't survive long. Will have to find another job, methink..

Next, music. I listen to YUI these days, and she's Japanese. The American band I listen to would be Dream Theater, but whatever that is, it won't matter much if I can't hear American songs again. Oh, and I do not own iPod.

What else, what else? Transportation? I use a Honda motor, running on gasoline made by.. I don't know. Probably not the American. But if it's true, well, I will be pretty much crippled. I need my motor.

I'm running out of ideas. I guess that's the conclusion for now: without America, I will probably have to find another area of interest, since computing (and Internet!) will not be available for me. Hmm, I guess I'm good at farming (at least based on my Harvest Moon saved games!)

But, wait a second, my copy of Harvest Moon is translated in the USA! Zing!

When I try to get something, I tend to lose something..

Months and months of learning web design, XHTML, CSS, typography, accessibility, and (recently) entrepeneurship, finally had me..

I think I lost most of my ability to write code.

But I'm not really good at programming to begin with, anyway. So heck. The only problem would be this: I'm now working on a coding project. Which, of course, is ironic. I'm just pretending to be a cool programming-wizard here hehe.

But I guess I somehow get to be working on web-based layout as well. Sweet :)

Well, back to work for me now :)

Hafiz Rahman: Heartbroken Daily

Yes, baby.

Help.

I am not well.

I'm done being emo.

I am grateful for this.. but I really have to tell the whole story.

Last Saturday, I found myself being invited to this university-scale meeting on an INHERENT project. If you haven't heard of it, INHERENT is this project where pretty much every national University in Indonesia is to be connected with a (relatively) high-speed backbone line, pretty much making a gigantic WAN comprised of universities around the nation.

The connection itself is done already, with benefits we've all been enjoying here in Brawijaya. Said benefits, of course, is not the joy of scientific discussion or knowledge sharing with friends from other universities; rather than that, we reap the obvious benefits: we're now getting our mp3s from multimedia.gc.itb.ac.id.

Hehe.

Anyways, the meeting itself was pretty much about doing some web-applications that would revolve around this INHERENT thingie. And this was my first time to be involved in a project meeting like this. Needless to say, it sucked.

First of all, it's too long (not to mention that it started one-and-a-half hour later than the scheduled time). Second, there's a bunch of wannabe-geeks trying to look and sound smarter than others ("When I'm in Kentucky...", "Back in my days in Aussie.."-kind of talk etc), which was sad because it's pretty obvious that they're not really into this web-app thing.

The most obvious evidence is this:

• The number of time AJAX is mentioned: Zero.
• The number of time Web 2.0 is mentioned: Zero.
• The number of time Ruby on Rails/Django is mentioned: Zero.

This is 2006. Are you sure you're talking web-apps? This is so laughably impossible.

Well, enough bashing. I would simply say that in the next 30 days (or less), I will probably have to concentrate on this project. Which probably means pending on other projects. Oh well. I hope the money is worth the effort.

By the way, yes, haven't I mentioned that they didn't even make it clear about how much we will all be paid? This is the third reason why I didn't like being involved in university-, or goverment-scale projects. If only I didn't need the money..