by Eko Prasetyo @ 7:54 AM
Bailed out from Padang Island Hell last friday, my series of unfortunate events have not stopped. As soon as I landed on Pekanbaru, the ticket guy told me that he couldn't fetch me a Garuda 171 ticket. Meh, I said, how come? And geh, i said, I have requested the ticket from 9 a.m the previous day. The veteran ticket fighter said the ticket requests came to him at 1 p.m, after Garuda reservation had closed. Phew, I said, so what now, I said. The dude said: We'd fetch you a 1.50 p.m ticket, that will at least flew you to Jakarta today. So okay, I said, just don't miss this one too.
One lunch and Friday prayer later, I got my ticket. 1.50 p.m, I boarded Garuda 175 and headed home.
And finally, Jakarta. 32 degrees celcius ( that 90 degrees fahrenheit) hot air and ever increasing pollution greeted me. Dodging the ever ubiquotus (is that the right spell?) taxi drivers, legal or illegal, I boarded an express bus that will take me to Pasarminggu. A DAMRI bus. Miseries were still following me, tagging along with me into the bus, adding another 3 hours to my journey from Soekarno-Hatta international airport to Pasarminggu bus terminal. I know toll highways are sometimes more jam packed than the regular roads, but that afternoon jam in the highways was way too much. Not even taking pictures with Cammy and playing Civilization 4 on Toshi helps my boredom. Caffeine overdose gave additional torture. I felt like hyperactive child trapped on 3 ft x 3 ft space. It was torturous.
And so, finally i reached Pasarminggu, at 8 p.m. No more reguler bus, so I have to take Ojek (motorcycle rider for hire) and spent 3500 rupiah more than the regular bus 1500 rupiah fare. And finally, home. Weak, tired, hungry, hot, and damp. I took a bath, and wake up the next morning with hammers hammering my head.
And it was saturday. Saturday was the day when my boss make an open house event and decides that all personnel available in Jakarta to come. Bleh. So I got up, took breakfast, bathed myself, and put on some casual clothes and headed to office. Anyway, the event was normal and somewhat good.
And somehow, I got inspiration to text-message the girls and asked if any of them want to wach Babel. One replied, so I told the office driver to drop me at Pondok Indah Mall. So I watched Babel with a girl. At least my saturday night was not so miserable. And oh yeah, Babel is a good movie, but not as good as Crash, if you ask me. And oh yeah, I printed 5 of my arts for sale on my
Online Art Shop and gaze for the first time the result of digital spells I have applied on some of the digital photos I took. They looked alright, and I was pleased !
Came Sunday, and I think I felt asleep for the better half of the day, and went to bed earlier too at night.
Came Monday, and my PC did what old PC supposed to do: restarted over and over and over and over and over again. So I reformatted the OS partition, and reinstalled the buggy OS, on Tuesday.
Still on Monday, I finally met some professional comic makers, giving them my comic project outlines, and exchanging comic knowledge. These professional comic makers don't make published comics, they make comics ordered by some NGOs. What will the comics do, they don't give a damn. For them, at least they can make comics and gain money from that. Cool, like I always wanna do.
And came Monday night. It was time to fix the ever restarting old PC. Began with reformatting the OS partition so that no more headaches would came from ghosts of discarded data and reinstalled the 5 years old OS (won't get the latest version, I heard it's so power hungry it could eat a child!). And that was as far I wanna go that night.
Came Tuesday. It was time to reinstall all essential applications, hardware drivers, and games. Applications were easier, many of them are located on another application dedicated partition, and some can even be used without reinstalling. Games were little challenging, since many of them were installed from disk images, and Alcohol 120% couldn't read all images made by the old FantomCD. An alternative route using my laptop was required, and by the end of the night, all the required games were installed.
Real challenge came when I had to reinstall the ancient Mustek 1200ED scanner driver. Had to install, un-install, and reinstall the downloaded driver because it just won't work. Installing the driver on the ancient CD didn't work at first, so I did some more fights with the downloaded drivers. I finally gave up, restarted my PC, and tried to install from the CD. It worked, my scanner finally back online. Note to self: Don't put the CD somewhere it can be lost. Ah well, thanks God, no need to waste money for a new scanner; I had decided to purchase a Canon Pixma MP780 when there were no signs that the online driver could work.
So, came Wednesday. What miseries lay ahead for me? Only God Knows !!
