A little surprise from daily Kompas….

This afternoon one of my campus friends, Cornel, sent me an SMS congratulating me for the offered Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Of course I replied her and gave thanks to her. But not too soon after, one of my KKN friends, Lucy, sent about-the-same SMS to me, but with additional information that she found out the information from daily Kompas today. Wow! It makes me a bit curious to have a look at it. And as soon as I reached to my office later in the afternoon, I have a look at today’s issue of daily Kompas. And yes, my name was there, on page 40! Then I bought another issue of daily Kompas for my own log

I sent an SMS to my parents to express my happiness, but they’ve already known about it earlier today. And they told me that one of my uncles, occupied as one of the board of directors at PT. United Tractors Pandu Engineering, asked them whether the name Yohanes Baptista Dafferianto Trinugroho listed on page 40 of today’s issue of daily Kompas was my real name (since he used to know me as Ucok). That means he had read the newspaper earlier today. I am overwhelmed!

I would like to once again thank the European Commission for having selected me to be one of 38 Erasmus Mundus scholarship awardees of the Indonesian nationals for the academic year 2007. May God speed us all, the new breeds of professionals!

Die Hard 4.0

It was around 19:30 yesterday when I got back from my office and had my dinner right away in front of my dorm. I was a bit in hurry because I was going to watch Die Hard 4 which would start at 21:40 at 21 studio with my dorm-friends: Moogie and Tiyo, my ex-dorm-friend: Goho, and Tiyo’s brother: Vito.

The movie was good and I found it really exciting. It combined the thrilling-action of the legacy Die Hard series and integrated little jokes here and there through the story-line. But what makes this movie really interesting to me is that it packed the story-line with high-tech stuffs and put some computer hackers in the main roles. Awesome! But I do regret a bit of the fact that the producer didn’t pay quite an intention on the technology environment that security system designers might have ever made. Animations and eye-catching graphics at user-prompt login to restricted crucial devices? Duh! Even in some not-quite-crucial devices at the server room in my office don’t use those beautiful visions on the screen! They’ll consume much CPU and memory resources of the devices. They’re usually only black in the background and white in the foreground (or some other bi-color combinations). But CMIIW!

My overall comment? Well, John McClane said in the last minute before his heroic triumph against the main villain: Yipee Ki Yay! (I don’t know how to spell it correctly). And I said the same phrase too at the end of the movie: Yipee Ki Yay! It’s a must-see movie!