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The old man let me squat next to him while continued drawing on the ground. As usual he did not speak any word. After several minutes, a glimpse of a shape appeared from the emptiness. It was a temple. A beautiful pagoda.

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“Why not you use my coffee spoon?” My father’s line sounded like a sweet surprising melody to my ears. I never heard it coming from his mouth before.
The copper spoon. A long slim brassy spoon. It appearance shows that it seems it was made for a perfect coffee spoon. It is sturdy and stirs well, easily reaches the bottom of any coffee glass/mug. My father is quite possessive about it. He never lets anybody use the spoon, though I – the only child in the house who shares his love …

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While I have been living in the U.S. for nearly five years, for some reasons, I was never around on July 4th, I was either in Asia or Europe. This year, I had gotten to taste the American experience in celebrating the Fourth of July weekend in a beautiful town of Burlington, VT. Good time with family and friends, barbecue dinner, summer picnic, and, of course, the splashiest and most thrilling part of the celebration: fireworks.
Every evening of the Fourth of July (and nights before), Americans gather at downtown or waterfront …

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Lots of updates since my last posting: J had his successful concert with students at Indian Oasis Elementary School of the Tohono O’odham Nation (it was awesome);  my 2nd phase of the Ford funded field research will soon begin; my collaborative research (with computer science dept) on Blogtracker (Analyzing Social Media for Cultural Modeling) just got grant (yay!); with these two projects up and running I decided to create the Participatory Media Lab at ASU (the website isn’t launched yet, but here is the link); I was in Germany for 3.5 …

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Let’s take a look at the drawing I made (while listening to Janet Napolitano’s lecture) a couple days ago. What kind of drawing is it? What did I draw?
pens?
hands?

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just published in The Jakarta Post
and republished in MyShinCew.com

original essay:

The recent mishap caused by the Discovery Channel which asserted Pendet, the Balinese dance, into Malaysian culture had re-opened an old wound of Indonesians who believe that Malaysian has stolen Indonesian cultural heritage, again and again. Rasa Sayange, angklung, and reog Ponorogo, among others. For most Indonesians, the act of Malaysian government in asserting these cultural artifacts as part of Malaysian culture is bewildering. Regular Indonesians would indisputably associate these three intangible cultural heritages with three different origins. Rasa Sayange of …

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I recycled my former blog post and sent it to the Jakarta Post. Apparently they liked it and it’s published on the 64th Indonesian Independence Day.
Here is the published version.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/08/18/understanding-nationalism-arranged-marriage.html
George Orwell, a British essayist famous for his book 1984, once wrote that nationalism is parallel with schizophrenia.
However, Orwell makes sure not to confuse nationalism with patriotism. While both terms are often used vaguely, he insists that one must draw a distinction between the two.
Patriotism, in Orwell’s words, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life… but …

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This is one of some lines I used in my Global Minds Speaker Series’ talk yesterday evening — it’s about cyberactivism etc….
“I found Facebook very educational. Once a friend turns it on, I go to the other room and read a book.” (Lim, 2009, hehehe).*
* inspired by Marx.

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Universities cannot escape from the financial crisis. Dramatic budget cuts on state level really impacts state universities such as Arizona State University, where I work. Worse than in some states, a conservative state of Arizona cares more about prisoners than education, that the state decided to cut nearly 40% of funding for public universities while the cut for prison system is less than 10%.

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“Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride.” – President John F. Kennedy

I could finally ride my bike again, after sometime…. a long time. The plan to do just a 10-15 minutes ride was changed. I was on the wheels for nearly one hour. It felt so good.
It was just a bike ride, but it felt like heaven. Oh well, that’s hyperbolic. Of course I don’t know how heaven feels. It’s suffice to say that it felts 7.9178 times more exciting than wandering around with a car!