let it go

We were in a kind of seminar on relationships and love languages. VCF organised it and it ran for two Thursdays. During the course of the talk, a friend was kind of skeptical about the whole thing. Turns out he was in a relationship that turned sour. He was saying he gave his love to her, but she basically played him. So now he's made up his mind about girls based on this experience.
I was trying to tell him not all girls are like that but don't feel i got the message across. It got me thinking how things in our lives can change our outlook, and attitude. How a failed relationship can make someone made certain decisions that may not be the best or the most beneficial.

They say the first cut is the deepest and it must hurt to love someone so much and find out they don't feel the same way or are not as committed. The bible has practical ways of dealing with things like this. When Jesus was giving he sermon on the mount one of the hard things he said was love your neighbour as yourself. Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hurt you. Basically don't pay evil for evil. Its a high and lofty command but difficult to put into practice.

I remember when my little brother will get mad and pick a fight with me, usually he would hit me and run away and when i want to retaliate my mom would be like, don't you dare, he's just a kid. And i'm like what! no way he knows what he's doing. I didn't like that i should show restraint and let him go. I felt its not fair but the truth is he's a kid, and kids are stupid, they're dumb that usually makes me feel better to know that hey man, do whatever you want kid, cause i know better.

There is not point to hate, retaliation, it doesn't make us feel better. We were not designed as humans to take matters to our hands, we were designed to complain to God and let him handle things. There's no point in holding grudges or keeping unnecessary walls, because love conquers all. We should not let bad experiences change who we are suppose to be and rob someone else from being blessed by us. After all we are blessed to be a blessing.

~shalom~

bario

Where is Bario? Not sure, I only know they're famous for their rice, and its a highland area. Tried to search online but there is not much on the place. I only found a blog talking about it and the information doesn't seem to be updated. Well atleast they have an airport.

There's an opportunity for me and a few others to visit Bario, basically to transport musical equipment there, help the church there set up and teach them how to use it. I'm not teaching la, don't know so cannot teach. I've not decided if i would be joining them. The time is right since its right when we have the Raya holidays and its just for a few days only. But it would be nice to go and experience Bario rice.

Currently its an effort from my church, the other kids had to raise money by way of selling cookies and stuff. I also need some money lo so i've be asking my mom for permission to go. My dad is not in town at the moment. {Working so hard} Already got permission from pastor to go so by God's grace everything will go smoothly. Of course there will be lotsa pictures.

Where is Bario? Not sure, I only know they're famous for their rice, and its a highland area. Tried to search online but there is not much on the place. I only found a blog talking about it and the information doesn't seem to be updated. Well atleast they have an airport. There's an opportunity for me and a few others to visit Bario, basically to transport musical equipment there, help the church there set up and teach them how to use it. I'm not teaching la, don't know so cannot teach. I've not decided if i would be joining them. The time is right since its right when we have the Raya holidays and its just for a few days only. But it would be nice to go and experience Bario rice. Currently its an effort from my church, the other kids had to raise money by way of selling cookies and stuff. I also need some money lo so i've be asking my mom for permission to go. My dad is not in town at the moment. {Working so hard} Already got permission from pastor to go so by God's grace everything will go smoothly. Of course there will be lotsa pictures.

{update}
Thanks to jasmine for providing some information about Bario. (editted)

Bario is a highland where revival broke out in the 70s, and it has been a land richly blessed by God ever since. The weather there is cool and water for bathing is cooolllddd. It's about a 40 mins plane ride from Miri.

Population is small, about 2000. The churches are all up on the hilltops. When my dad was there they received VIP treatment. They had a group waiting for them at the airport, served them with bario delicious pineapple juice (mmmmm...).

Life there is very simply. They hunt for wild boars and make delicious food out of the wild plants in the jungle. Apart from the rice and pineapples, there is also a salt spring where you find salt. It's a miracle as well, you dont find salt by the spring. The salt is of highest quality, selling at RM15 per kg or per packet I think.Despite the small land, it's truly blessed by God. The Kelabits have produced very intelectual professionals. Their intercessors are very prophetic but they pray in Kelabit.

Thanks Jasmine.

~shalom~

i want a mac

I mean don't we all want a mac? I know i do. I've been seriously considering the possibility of owning a mac, maybe replace my barely existing computer with a macbook. Why? Well a couple of reasons.

Macs are based on Unix. Unix is a very old operating system written in c. I'm doing a lot of c programming now so it would be easier for me to open a terminal and work straight with the vi editor or the upgraded vim editor.

But there are not many programs that run on a mac. True but there is the possibility of running windows on a mac on a separate partition so all the programs you want to run on windows can just run. There is also a VmWare solution where the windows installation can work on a virtual machine. Besides these there is a number of softwares being written for the mac.

Another thing i'm considering is the problem with viruses and spyware and all that rubbish. You simply don't get that on a mac its clean.

You've got to love macs for the visual effects and the customisable desktop.

However there are a few concerns. I watched steve jobs recent keynote on the new mac OS - leopard and it was really, really good. I'm thinking, why get a mac now and upgrade later when you can wait for leopard to come out and get it then. So this is another setback.

Macs are expensive. True, the macbook i have my eyes on costs about RM4199 but you can get a mac mini for less than 2k granted you need to buy your own keyboard, mouse and display. The new imac are a lot cheaper too except for the really big screen display models.

Hey linux is based on unix and its free why not get that instead. Ah linux, i installed ubuntu feisty fawn on my laptop and it was all good until i started to get problems with connection to the internet. I like linux, the fact that is freeware is enticing but its still not as user friendly. Of course linux would be the obvious solution since thats all we use in the labs maybe i'll give it another try.

The main problem still remains, i need new hardware, something with a dvd writer and better screens and graphics. Something that is stable and free from BSOD's something i would love to use for a long time coming. Do i really need a mac?

Oh btw heroes season 2 is out, not sure if people follow heroes anymore but thought you should know.
~shalom~

intricate webs

Today i was suppose to read for my test on Wednesday but i came across the book - weaving the web by internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee and started to read. This is unusual activity for me, reading but the topic is one that i am fascinated in. I like the idea of the internet and this was more like an opportunity to learn and heed to my mom's advice in her email - study, study, study.

I won't go through all 14 chapters of the book only highlight some of the parts i find important. Tim was the son of two mathematicians. His parents were part of the team that built one of the first computers and from a young age he has been fascinated by the idea of links. You know like how your brain can transport you to a different time and link information together when you for example smell something. For me when i listen to in awe of you by hillsongs i'm immediately reminded of the time i used to borrow mike's cd player and play the song in my room over and over all night. That was way back in pleasant courts. What makes these memories possible are the cells in our brains that make the necessary connection, links.

He wanted to create something that would show this inherent relationship so he wrote a program called enquire that made links of documents and saved their relationships without using a database or a matrix. The links were both internal {within a document} and external {between documents}. For me the mere possibility of doing this is intriguing especially now that i'm learning about datastructures where we basically deal with different forms of sorting, storing, editing data in a way that is persistent. And the simplest form of storage would be an array but here i'm not sure what datastructure he used to achieve his feat.

The first web server he wrote ran on a NeXT machine. NeXT was the company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 when he resigned from Apple computers. The server name was info.cern.ch and was hosted in CERN {Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire} which lies along the French-Swiss border.

The idea of unversality was key to the internet. The system should not constrain the user.

There was no central computer "controlling" the web, no single network on which
these protocols worked, not even an organisation anywhere that "ran" the web.
The web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It
was a "space" in which information could exist.

ZIP Ccodes And URIs
ZIP codes consists of a 5digit number. The first three numbers designate a certain a certain geographic region - a town, or part of a city or county. The next two define a very specific part of that region - say a few square blocks in a city. This gets the mail to the local post office and carriers from there use street name or box numbers to finish the routing.

For URIs or Universal Resource Identifiers AKA URLs the slashes part are used in a URI to separate its parts. The first few letters tell the browser which protocol to use to look the document whether HTTP {HyperText Transfer Protocol} or FTP {File Transfer Protocol}. So for example in the address http://www.friendster.com/ogucci, the www.friendster.com part indentifiers the computer server where these documents exist, ogucci is a specified document, in this case my profile page.

The big difference between URIs and postal addresses is that the last part of of the URI can mean whatever the server wants it to mean. The client {your browser} never tries to figure out what it mean, it just asks for it. From this there lies and obvious chaotic situation where all kinds of documents will be served to client machines so there was a need for a common formatting standard for web documents hence HTML.

The philosophy rule of HTML {HyperText Markup Language} was that HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document {A document with links, both internal and external} but not details of its presentation.

He revealed that HTML source codes were not intended to be viewed by the user and the idea of asking people to write angle brackets < b > for example was like asking someone to write a Microsoft word document in binary code format. His idea of a web browser was one that would both view and create internet content just as easy as it is to type a word document but few people shared this interest.

From his story i saw an uncomfortable relationship between getting something, especially a relatively new idea accepted in its true form as a very difficult undertaking. A lot of compromises have to be made along the way that dilutes the pure idea and lives it with barebones. This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about software engineering and inventions in general.

One quote that stuck me that i'm glad i know now is this one by Phil Gross. "Things can get picked up quickly on the internet, but they can get dropped quickly, too".

Here is one man who had an idea, that changed the world. One that stayed with him all through his undergraduate years and eventually led him to his present position on the board of advisers for the World Wide Web Consortium that oversees the general direction the web is taking. I'm also reminded of Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us who had loads of bookmarks and needed a way to manage them and access them from any computer anywhere in the world so he built a system that is today solving the problem of many people myself included with the ability to share and discover new sites and links. It just goes to show the pattern in inventions - necessity.

It was nice to see the origins of our intricately connected world, right from the first computers, through the birth of Java and the browser was of 1995/1996 and how new MarkUp languages have been introduced from the basic HTML which is still in use today.

I've not finished reading the book yet. I've only done 9 of the 12 chapters and i intend on finishing the book tonight hopefully. I'm not sure if this is the right place to talk about my tech stuff but i want to make this blog more than just a personal blog.

~shalom~

steam boat and birthdays

Ah another update. I'm starting to enjoy posting here more often. So what will it be today? Well i'm quite sad to announce that sin ying is leaving miri. She got her transfer back to KL where she loves to be. Afterall they say home is where the heart is.

She has been helping out in the music ministry at Calvary Charismatic Church, the church i attend and she's also in my lifegroup so it will not be the same with her gone.

Usually things like this calls for some kind of fellowship, food fellowship that is. And thats exactly what we did last Sunday, yeah last Sunday. It took almost a whole week for me to post it because the internet is crappy so uploading the pictures to flickr wasn't possible. Thats what you get for using free internet. But they're here now and we went for steamboat, yes the eat all you want, cook it yourself chinese tradition i have come to love, even though it is "vewy expenses". Oh well I don't know anyone who is leaving anytime soon so its ok laaaaaaaaaa.

We also took the opportunity to celebrate Samson jo... ah i forgot her name, was the first time i met her so yeah. Well we celebrated their birthdays la as a lifegroup.


So we went to Michael's. Sounds familiar.


Anyone remember the Sarawak Tribune? they were just next door


Ah the wonderful equipment that makes it happen


Where is everyone?


I see food but who's eating it.


Ah there they are.


I ate mostly meat, had a sore throat the next day but thank God it wasn't serious.


There's sin ying in the middle


It took ages before we got to this point. Everyone just kept eating


Wash it all down with a nice glass of tiger beer.


And soon this was all that was left


After all that food we settled down to good ol laughters


But sadly all good things must come to an end. We were the last to leave btw.

You know, i have the funniest parents. I got a call at 6 this morning and my dad was speaking and he said with a kind of weird surprised tone, are you still sleeping. I was kind of scared, didn't want to give him the impression that i sleep all day but come one la it 6 in the morning on a saturday. So i answered, no just woke up. The line wasn't too good so i didnt hear anything he said after that. Guess where i'm going to be once the library opens.

~shalom~