In a few days time, I will be starting yet another holiday with my hubby. As I want to be able to immediately blog about some of my trips and my culinary adventures, I wanted to take a laptop with me during my trip. (more…)
In the earlier days, my hubby used to take the back road, Kemang Timur into Kemang Timur V (formerly known as Duren Bangka), crossing Mampang Prapatan into Duren Tiga Selatan in order to get to the office. At one point, he just lost patience trying to claim his way in the midst of the arrogant and aggressive motor cycle drivers. Since then, he’d been taking the main road, Warung Buncit, but still turn into Duren Tiga Selatan taking the rest of the old route.
One day, we left a little too late from our home since our security guard was on leave and therefore we had to wait for our housekeeper to come in. (more…)
Written by Fanny Arendarczyk, an Indonesian woman married to a French man.
(Note: Bule is the Indonesian term referring to white-skinned foreigner)
Recently I was involved in a discussion on the scandalous Miss Indonesia 2009, Karenina Halim, who will represent Indonesia in Miss World 2009 without speaking fluent Indonesian. Someone pointed out that the juries – like many Indonesians – ‘worship’ white and half-white looking people, and call them beauty. Another person mentioned that the worshipping is the product of “the mentality of a colonized nation” referring to the 350 year-long Dutch colonization in the country that ended in 1942. (more…)
Since 2005, I have converted from being a Windows user to being a Mac user, although not entirely, as I still use Windows at work. I have been very satisfied with Mac, it has proven itself as more ‘superior’ many times. For example, when I just joined my previous office, as it was still being set up, I did not get a laptop immediately. I had to work using my private laptop (an iBook G4) for a few weeks. When I typed in the wireless network key, not only did it connect to the internet, but it immediately detected every available network printers, and I could print with no problems at all.
My iBook became fuller and fuller (it only had 40GB of hard disk space), as I have accumulated more and more files, pictures and songs (I have up to 8 days of songs at the moment, back then it was probably about 4 days of songs, a total of almost 10GB). I decided to get another one with a larger hard drive space and higher specification (plus, Leopard and Intel-based Macs just came out). What also intrigued me to getting a new one was the fact that I could also install Windows on the Intel-based Mac, because some applications that I do like can unfortunately only run on Windows (a small example being the Windows Live Writer, with which I update my blog or the computer aided translation tool, SDL Trados). So after careful consideration, I got myself an iMac with 300GB hard disk space and 2GB of RAM. That was more than a year ago.
After having bought that iMac, I looked up all sorts of articles, reviews and whatnot about installing Windows as a virtual machine on a Mac, and what application I should use to do this. After careful consideration, I decided to use Parallels Desktop, and I don’t regret it at all! It took me quite a while to actually install this (I bought Parallels Desktop beginning of June) since I had to muster up my courage, but now I am really happy that I finally did it this weekend.
Installing Parallels Desktop on the Mac was of course quite easy, but the installation of Windows and subsequently Office and some other Windows-based application was what worried me. And it turned out that I worried for nothing at all! The setup process was so easy, as easy as one two three. It was just a matter of following the step-by-step guide from Parallels, and voila! Windows was installed, and installing everything else after that is just as easy as installing it on a ‘real’ Windows computer. Here is a screenshot of my desktop now.
When I just arrived in the office yesterday morning, I did my usual routine: unlocking my mobile drawer, plugged in my portable speaker, set up my iPod and pressed ‘start’. The iPod started to play songs, picking up where it left off on my departure yesterday. The first song that came on was ‘Scarborough Fair’ which is one of my favourite songs.
While I set up my laptop, I listened carefully to the song’s lyrics:
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For once she was a true love of mine
I wondered what the song meant, especially the ‘parsley, sage rosemary and thyme’ part since I thought it looked a bit out of topic. 
When I did a Google search on ‘parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme meaning’, many results came up but I liked this explanation the most. According to that article, parsley represents something that takes away the bitterness, sage symbolizes strength, rosemary represents faithfulness, love and remembrance, and thyme symbolizes courage.
So, if something that happened in your past leaves you with bitterness, make some parsley soup. If you are facing some challenges in your life, strengthen yourself with a turkey sage chowder. On your wedding anniversary, whip up some mini rack of lamb with nutty beluga lentils and sauteed garlic spinach (yes there is at least 1 tablespoon of rosemary required to make the dish). And when you must do something which the whole world seems to be against, equip yourself with braised lamb shoulder with carrots and fennel. 
