If you are looking for some free popular music sheet, check out mr. Piano; he has a good collection of scanned music sheets.

And you can find the music sheet to Cold Play's  haunting "the Scientist" here. It sounds nice even in my cheapo casio keyboard.

I had the best Thanksgiving dinner; it was not near anywhere "authentic"; the dinner came out from a box (whole turkey + all the stuffings) and the kitchen was handled by furiners who had no clue on how a Thanksgiving dinner looked like (I did, but I never cooked for Thanksgiving either).

We reheated the frozen Turkey for one hour and it came up barely OK. The heated mash potato was too mushy and the stuffing was ordinary.

We did however, had the essential ingredient for a great dinner; the people on the table. The dinner table seated 10 people; none came from the same country; with no American present; we were the poster child of modern reality. We were family that night, bonded by a sense of comradarie of being in a foreign land, counting our blessings having each other and mourning distances from our family. Everybody was at ease with each other and laughters flow even faster that the excellent wines.

We were given lemonade, and made a Sprite out of it.

No wonder the Ottoman Sultans built harems. Turkish women; wow.

I had one sentence for last year's Thanks Giving last year. This year I have more things to say :)

I am thankful:

• for my family and for their continued good health. I couldn't asked for more caring and interesting family. 
• for you my friends, for without you, I would be lost.
• for the chance to work with people in SilverKey with all its challenges and rewards in fulfilling its great promise. I don't have a job, just one very meaningful and interesting work to do.
• for Chicago, for its marvellous Summer and maddening Winter, for the Blues, the food, the people I meet and friends I make along the way and for the joy it provides.
• for White Sox winning the World Series and the opportunities to spend the time with good friends in following the tense post season games together.
• for the nomads and the stories of adventure and discovery they provide.
• for the rednecks and the ideas, point of views and frankness rarely found anywhere else.
• the opportunities coming my way in the near future; this nomad is about to leave his base and discover new places and people one more time.
• for not being a husband and a father yet.
• for getting negative results on my AIDS tests year by year.
• for the ability to run.
• for "The Fate of Africa" and "Blueprint for Actions" for their insights and wisdom.
  

Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
You never get to stop and open our eyes
One minute you’re waiting for the sky to fall
The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all
Lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time

These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This fragrant skin this hair like lace
Spirits open to the thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste

Lovers in a dangerous time

I had wine for breakfast and went shopping for Sushi dinner for 8 people tonight.

Sushi is a chick magnet.

When I build a house of my own, I'll install a commercial grade kitchen.

SilverKey has just advertised 12 openings for its new developments teams in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt.

If you are visiting us from the ads, let me tell you a little bit about SilverKey.

SilverKey was founded in February 2003 in Chicago by Adam Brand and I (Dody Gunawinata) with a singular vision to develop software and solutions for small business around Chicago. From the beginning, we have designed SilverKey as a network company where we have offices around the world that collaborate closely with each other in creating creative solutions to business problems. We have so far in our young age (almost 3 years of existances) completed 54 projects, big or small through our offices in Chicago and India. SilverKey India was established in January 2004, one year after SilverKey was founded by another SilverKey principal, Ritesh Talwar.

Right now we have 18 people working in SilverKey in various capacity. We shall exceed 30 people soon.

This year we are working furiously to open 4 more new locations in Colombia, Morocco, Egypt and Malaysia. Our 12 openings for Egypt is part of this effort. We plan to have Egypt office open and operational in late December or early January.

Culture

We have a flat hierarchy in SilverKey and very little paperwork and bueraucracy. Everybody is technical. You are either a developer or a designer (For example, I am a software architect, Adam is a network admin and Ritesh is Flash designer, etc). Some of us also does the business side of SilverKey. We are good at business and we can argue with you about the merit between Java 1.5 generic systems and .Net 2.0 generics.

SilverKey has also a young culture; Adam and I are 27 and the rest of SilverKey falls in the range of 23 to 29. And we are very diverse; we have people from Northern Ireland, USA, Indonesia, Canada, Egypt, Morocco, Colombia, Malaysia and Germany. Yes, we are young and international.

This technical culture in SilverKey also makes us very aggresive in using the latest and greatest technology to achieve what we want to do; SilverKey is very good at learning and absorbing technologies and design simple and yet effective systems to solve real world problems. Check out our nomadlife community at http://nomadlife.org for example. 

Technology Foundation

For software development, we are using .Net Framework 2.0 and C#; our office in India is using Flash for its animation work. Ruby will soon be incorporated as part of our technology foundation. Sorry, we don't use Java; we find .Net Framework as a far richer and more productive environment compare to Java.

Our Plan for Egypt

We are planning to have Egypt as one of our major development center and we are investing accordingly. You will have great tools (highly powered workstation with large screen LCD), challenging projects and smart people to work with (we are only hiring really smart people; yes, we pay accordingly);

When you start with the new team, you will be working immediately for a 15 months long project for one of the largest and diverse organizations in the world. We are developing the project using .Net Framework 2, BizTalk 2006, SQL Server 2005, Windows Workflow Foundation and Atlas. These are weeks old technologies;as I told you before, we are really aggressive in our adoption of technology.

You will be working in small teams of smart people, in Egypt and around the world; which will help you to accomplish things faster.

So ...

If you are excited about creating great things in life and working with smart and passionate people, send us your resume (egypt@silverkey.us) and we'll talk. I will be personally attending the interviews in Egypt starting in late December. You can email me at dody@silverkey.us if you want to know about SilverKey. Talk to Taher at taher@silverkey.us for anything specific about our Egypt office.

Sigh, the shitty weather in Chicago makes me miss my home of 4 years, the raw yet metropolitan Brisbane with its 60 degrees Winter. "It's great here. All you need is a jumper, Babe". I couldn't relate to Sydney or grew to love Melbourne. They don't have the open sky feeling Brisbane has;too crowded;too trendy. Try kayaking in a quiet Sunday morning in the river snaking through the city and you'll know what I mean.

Brisbane all year is Chicago in the Summer. It's Austin without the heat.

And the two stories house I lived in had backyard with roses and you can have dinner outside with stars as light.

I'll be back, but not yet. Africa is calling and soon the five continents tour would be complete.

"AUSTRALIANS will greet with relief and gratitude the news that bombmaker and terrorist leader Azahari Husin has died in a shootout, after being cornered by Indonesian police in East Java on Wednesday." (Courier Mail)

Courier Mail is a Brisbane, Australia based newspaper and their editorial on the death of the Malaysian Husin pretty much sums up the accross sigh of relief in both Indonesia and Australia.

This success is a joint operation between Indonesia police and the AFP (Australian Federal Police). The AFP supply the high tech surveillance tools and expertise, the Indonesian supply the humint on the ground and the raid force. The counter terrorist police unit that performed the raid, Detachment 88, is funded and trained by US State department ATA (Anti Terrorism Assistance) fund (16 million dollars in 2003).

This is the kind of pragmatic close cooperation in combating terrorism that needed to be replicated around the world.

"No welfare check, no matter how large, will satisfy young men who desperately need the sense of self-worth that comes from holding a steady job and providing for their family. But in France there simply isn't any work to get, especially not if you're young and foreign. In addition to heavy tax burdens, employers are hobbled by countless regulations that discourage job creation. The overall French unemployment rate is 10%; among young first- and second-generation immigrants it's three or four times as high. By contrast, in the cold, capitalist United States, the unemployment rate is a mere 5%. And while the U.S. economy is roaring ahead at 3.8% this year, the French economy limps along at 1.4% growth.

Lack of economic opportunity is not, of course, the only reason why France faces growing insécurité from a surly underclass congregated in dingy banlieues (suburbs). France, like most European nations, defines itself in ethnic, cultural and religious terms that can leave non-Caucasian and non-Christian outsiders feeling excluded, however long they have lived there. Foreigners find it much harder to become "French" or "German" than "American." Thus the growing European problem with Muslim residents who are so estranged from the mainstream that they are attracted to extremist ideologies.
"(LA Times)

If you want to be a "socialist" country, be a great generator of jobs otherwise you will fail. A country with plentiful jobs is a compassionate country.

and it's 72 degrees in Chicago. That's fucked up. Bring back the rain and cold wind dammit.

The horror.

I spent the weekend nursing a mild cold instead of chasing skirts in the unbelievably pleasant Chicago weather. Instead I finished about seven Web Griffith war novel in two days, speed reading the kinetic stories only he can manage to serve to his avid fans; I would have paid more attention to my high school history lessons had most of them been written like these novels.

Soon it will be November and my last Fall in the US is ending. Soon  all of this will be another chapter of what so far has been an interesting life. I am used to it; I'm not sure one is supposed to. 

A good friend mentioned the other day about the importance of being anchored in life, having one place that one can always return to when the world is crashing down and burning around you, a safe refuge when you are down and tarred and feathered, a place where you can start again from scratch for your second, third or tenth chance to get at your dream. Wise words, but what I'm doing is building a web, an intervowen pattern of silks connecting places and memories from different times and people and hopefully the result will be strong and flexible to deal with situations you don't wish upon your worst enemy.