London Skyline Time-Slip Photos

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7355753.stm

This fascinates me for more than one reason: It's a neat and original idea, it's in my dream city, and looking at it makes me love life. I'm loving life so much right now to the point of regretting not savouring every minute more intensely, although I already fairly do day by day.

Time-slip. That's a fact that we take so much for granted, since time is always slipping away. When you look at these kinds of time-slip photos, fast forwarded ones, it makes you realise that life is indeed too short.

So the idea of the project is that it takes pictures of London skyline every 5 seconds from a few angles, which results then can be viewed from inside the 'drum' that houses the cameras. You basically can rewind through the photos by walking around in the drum - around the available monitors, or just closer and further from them, to change the image. I SO hope to visit it, but well, I guess I must make do with watching the video above.

What you DON'T do

We may feel that we'd never do anything to hurt anyone... But, the scary thing is, we can hurt people by something we don't do!

My friend is hurt because of things her friend didn't do. That friend of hers doesn't even think that he's wrong. I got hurt because my colleagues forgot to include me in an admittedly trivial thing. A lot of us hurt our secret admirers - or even our steady partner - without even knowing it. We might hurt a kid by spontaneously showing more affection towards her cuter sister. We might make someone doubt themselves by not giving compliments to their artwork. We might dampen our inferior's spirits by only correcting their mistakes and never praising their jobs well done.

Hurting people is easier than we might think, and we've got to be careful.

Green Festival

Today I visited the Green Festival, an event to raise awareness regarding our suffering Earth. The overall event, design and management were quite pleasant, as hinted by the entrance gate:

It was however Benny & Mice that attracted my attention in the first place. They were in the main picture of the festival's headline reportage in Kompas, our nation's leading [and my personal favourite] newspaper. I never miss the cartoon every Sunday! They're pretty much the only Indonesian I'm a fan of. Witty, wacky, and funny, they poke fun on anything in Indonesian culture. And they do it oh so precisely!! They're the epitome of Sunday morning to me - still hazy eyed, sipping warm coffee and unshowered, reading Benny & Mice before everything else on Sunday edition of Kompas. Here I am with my heroes:

The green exhibition itself is arranged in a one-way multiple rooms, divided in sections as a house would. Each room describes things we could do to save energy in our bedroom, bathroom, etc. It's all neat and interesting:

Finally, I of course HAD to take a picture with the mascot, despite having to wait in line with just about everyone else:

There's even Starbucks there!

Graduation Day

I feel really overwhelmed about my students' Graduation Day right now. It's 7 weeks away, and I feel like I'm not going to finish the preparations on time. Everytime I finish something, something else would come up for me to worry about. Right now I'm really nervous about the decoration. What would I do to spice up the plain multifunction hall? It seems like a lot of work, and quite frankly I didn't think much about it before. I was too busy preparing the ceremony, music, photo slideshows, souvenirs, costumes, and it scares me because new things keep popping up!! Is this a kind of a panic attack? Not to mention that I actually don't want to let them go, since I've come to love them so much!

If any of you knows any good, fun, or unique graduation ideas/songs/whatever, please don't hesitate to comment here!

Work Hard, Play Harder

Everyday I feel tired and worn out at the end of the day. Weekend's my time to relax and rejuvenate, so that I can come back fresh on Monday. Right?

Wrong! Every weekend's end I feel that I've wronged my body. Today was the worst - I still felt exhausted when time forced me to leave my bed and go to school. I barely could open my eyes, let alone concentrate on anything. Hangover from the weekend is a killer! I was literally dying, I could just drop and fall asleep in the middle of the school. My kids gave me energy to go on, but my whole body complained. My legs hurt - that uncomfortable feeling that doesn't get better even when you relax your legs - I lacked of focus, having headache, and longing for a nap so badly.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, or getting overboard... well what can I do? I've only got 2 weekend days in a week!

Mallhopping

There's a plethora of malls in Jakarta. In fact, we don't seem to have much choice to spend our holidays! Want to eat? Go to the mall. The cinema's in the mall. Shop, in the mall, obviously. There are even play arenas and art exhibitions in the mall. Everything you want, conveniently located in 1 luxurious building.

I went with my family to the newly opened Pacific Place, to make use of their 25% off food promotion [with ANZ card, until early May]. The design is much like Senayan City, some corners look exactly the same, I felt like I was lost in a fabricated heaven. I mean I love these places for being so comfortable and luxurious, but with malls popping up here and there looking identical, I feel like I'm being swept away in an uncontrollable spiral downward the hedonistically consumptive lifestyle.

Then we went to Citraland to find a new faucet. That's right, our kitchen sink's faucet was broken this morning. It's also packed, I couldn't believe that there are so many people in each mall every weekend! Not much else to do - no nice parks to stroll through, no stylish museums to visit, no public libraries to enjoy... there's virtually nothing to do. Nothing nice anyway.

Then off with my friends, to eat dinner and watch Three Kingdoms. We went to eX and it's crowded once again! We almost didn't get seats for the show, but managed - although it was a bit too close to the screen for comfort. Luckily the film was enjoyable.

But hell, I spent the day mallhopping.