Whoa, I managed to fix the problem that has haunted me for months! All right, not months, more like weeks. And it didn't really haunt, either. But I'm all about being hyperbolical right now. BTW, I just found out the meaning of diabolical today. All along I thought it had something to do with diarrhea -- my fav excuse for skipping work since it's virtually impossible to prove otherwise. (Fine, I know it has nothing to do with diarrhea -- see above, please.)

Back to the problem. It was a Micro$oft Outlook problem and quite annoying. So annoying that I decided to post a question on the mailing list. Apparently it was so difficult and rare that noone replied. That's the thing about our faculty mailing list. Everyone is always quick when it's politics or religions (or the lack thereof). Funny, because the last time I checked it was still called the Faculty of Computer Science.

Once upon a time, before Blogger, before Napster, even before Yahoo! Messenger, I had a homepage. Yeah, it was called homepage back then, websites were rarely used. I guess because they were mainly one- or two-pager kinda thing. And with Notepad and Vi as the primary editing tools, who could expect otherwise?

It had disappeared -- forever, I thought -- long before Geocities became part of Yahoo!. The ancient URL -- http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/1519 -- speaks for itself. All right, to start with, allow me to tell some grandma story here.

The year was early 1997. Netscape had just released Communicator 4, then the internet browser -- IE 5 was not even close. It was the first chat-friendly browser, for it allowed streaming without using the infant Java applets -- to date I still don't know how they did that. Chatting had once been popular among us Fasilkom guys, never mind it was done on the text-based Lynx. (Yes, boys and girls, hard as it is to take in, browsing was once a picture-less experience.) Until they started implementing register-first-to-use-the-lab policy to cope with the ever increasing number of newly admitted students.

In my ideal world Kobe Bryant was the President of the USA.

In my ideal world Voltus V was still cool and they still published The Three Investigators. Well, they still do... in Germany.

In my ideal world people did not slam others for having different views. Oh, and people did not use Java for applications. Make that Java and OWB.

The man before me smiled what I called a quarter-hearted smile. A smile one smiled just for the sake of smiling. I did not like him now, but it had not always been the case.

"Tell me something," I asked, "why are you so arrogant?"

The quarter-hearted smile hung there. "Am I?"

"Yes, you are. Look at you."