Beberapa hari lepas, seorang rakan sekerja bertanya kepada aku, “Awak tak bosan ke (hidup macam ni)?”

Bosan?

Rasa bosan itu kan perkara biasa. Kadang-kadang kita bosan, kadang-kadang tidak. Kadang-kadang orang membosankan kita, kadang-kadang kita membosankan orang. Kebosanan itu ibarat roda, sekejap kita di atas, sekejap di bawah. Ia berputar-putar pada paksinya. Rasa bosan itu adalah naluri dalam setiap insan. Ia adalah lumrah alam yang fana ini. Ia sebahagian dari alam semulajadi ini, yang harus sama-sama kita pelihara dan jaga. Alam yang kehijauan dan permai, yang terdiri dari spesis-spesis flora dan fauna, dan juga haiwan-haiwan di hutan, untuk dijadikan makan.

Lihatlah langit malam, yang dadanya dihiasi gugusan bintang-bintang, yang berkelipan, memancar cahaya yang syahdu, dalam warna yang sebenarnya pelbagai. Warnanya yang berbeza, membayang usia gugusan bintang tersebut. Oh, segarnya menghirup udara dinihari, yang sebahagian besarnya terdiri daripada Nitrogen, diikuti oleh Karbon Dioksida dan Oksigen, dan seterusnya gas-gas nadir seperti Helium dan Argon. Dan angin bayu berhembus lembut, menyapa daun-daun, yang membalas dengan desiran halus, menghijau dan penuh dengan klorofil. Membolehkan pohon-pohon selaku satu-satunya hidupan yang boleh menghasilkan makanan sendiri, dalam bentuk gula, untuk menampung hidup, yang lebihannya akan disimpan sama ada di dalam buah (seperti pokok rambutan), atau batang (seperti tebu), atau akar (seperti ubi keledek), dan membawa manfaat kepada manusia dan haiwan.

Oh, pohon-pohon menghijau, engkau adalah sebahagian daripada alam, yang fana ini. Menjadikan naluri insan, berputar-putar pada paksinya. Sekejap di bawah, sekejap di atas, seperti roda. Roda yang lumrahnya tetap sahaja berpusing, dan berpusing, pusingan demi pusingan, sehingga kadang-kadang menjadikan kita bosan. Kerana bosan itu adalah perkara yang biasa.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a really great song, “Chor Javon” by Nato. A techno song, sung in a very foreign language. At first I thought it’s Urdu, but it doesn’t really sounds like it. But the dialect seems to come from places around there. You can download it here (WMA).

It’s techno, but it sounds kind of mystical, sounds like maybe some sort of devil worshiping chants. I scrawled over the web searching about it. Information about the song and the singer is scarce, but I managed to find this page talking about it. The singer is actually Russian, and the song is in Tajik (Tajikistan). Some excerpt:

As Nato lifts the microphone to her lips and starts to sing, the audience strains to hear her voice over the noise. But no matter how they crane their necks, they can see nothing of her face, hidden behind a black veil that shows only her eyes. The lyrics, too, are a bit of a mystery, as Nato doesn’t sing in Russian, but in Chechen and Georgian [I think also in Tajik - Justin]. One thing is clear: Nato’s outfitted to look like one of the infamous “Black Widows,” the female Chechen suicide bombers.

And from one of the comments:

Actually NATO’s song “CHor Jawon” is a very famous Tajiki song. I was the hit of a very famous Tajik Pop singer Muboraksho, who passed away two years ago. The song is in Tajik langauge and set against the background of Badakhshand tajik scene. It talks about the trip of four young guys, who are about to depart. their mother and father warn them against the trip, but they go anyway and are killed on their way by a snowfall (a common cause of death in the high mountains of Badakhshan). It is a sad song and the way it is sang by Muboraksho can make any Tajik cry.

So, there you go. Not some devil worshiping chants.

Antara kebaikannya bila kau sibuk dengan kerja ialah, bila suatu hari kau tersedar kau dah lama tak baca komik Dilbert yg yang kau langgan dengan Google Reader, dan kau lihat ada berbelas-belas strip yang belum dibaca. Lalu kau baca semuanya sekaligus, satu demi satu, dan kau alami seronokan yang tiada tandingan.

Perasaan yang sama kau alami, bila kau kopek kacang goreng cap Ngan Yin yang sedap tu, satu demi satu, dan simpankannya di dalam mulut. Bila dah penuh, maka kau kunyah sampai lumat, dan telan sekaligus. Keseronokan yang tiada tandingan.

It has been almost 3 weeks since I joined this company. Changing job is both exciting, and a bit tiring. I’ve been quite busy lately, trying to understand the system here, catching up as fast as I can. Figuring out any rough edges in the current system that I hope to smooth out. The system is not that big, we are a small company, but growing, and I sense some interesting stuff coming up on the way. And finally, after waiting for a very long time, I can finally work fully on ASP.NET 2.0! Good bye 1.1 :)

They gave me a great Pentium Dual Core PC, with 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and a very sleek 19″ LCD monitor. It’s actually simple to make a geek happy, give him good machines to play with (two monitors will make him even happier :) And to celebrate the fact that I can now play MP3 from my hard disk without the feeling of breaching the company IT policy, I bought an awesome Phillips earphone. It’s the kind that have rubber tips and can totally block out any disturbing ambient noise if you shove it deep enough into your ears. Now, I’m having trouble not to be too focused on my work.

The folks here are awesome too. Colleagues are sporting and fun to mingle with. The boss is alright too. I don’t have any immediate boss actually. The previous IT manager landed another job a few days after I passed my (non-existent) first level interview. There’s one senior IT guy left and I don’t think they’re looking for a replacement manager since we seems to be doing well.

In short, I’m liking my new workplace.

Having a new environment like this makes me think about a lot of stuff. Mainly about the people who are around me, the people who has been around me, and the people who will be around me. Makes me think deeply about friends and families, about social interactions and relationships… or the lack thereof :P

I had some opportunities recently to delve deeper into some “advance” data persistence techniques. Patterns which goes by the names Active Record, Data Mapper, and Repository. These patterns are basically ways to add a layer of abstraction between your object-oriented code and relation-oriented data store (database). I won’t go into lengthy details on them, as I am not worthy, still a journeyman myself. If you’re interested to know more, do read it from the source, Martin Fowler’s Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Active Record is a great and simple way to do database persistence (you may heard about it from the recent Ruby On Rails hype), but from what I’ve read, if you have complex domain objects, you’d be better off using Data Mapper, or a level higher, the Repository. The thing is, how complex is complex? According to what? Number of classes? Relationships between them? I still cannot understand it. At what point that one should choose to use the more advance patterns instead of the simple ones?

As I said earlier, Active Record is simple, and I always believe in doing the simplest thing that could possibly work (okay, lazy :P ). I still couldn’t see this border of complexity, where’s the line that I should jump across. I guess I haven’t got enough experience to evaluate decisions like this. What a drag. Experience is such a slow teacher.