No More Night

I want to share a video I found long ago in YouTube. It's a video of David Phelps singing "No More Night".

I have sung the song in choir format in Sunday Services and a concert with my church choir in GII Dago. I really love the song for the message, the beauty of the music, and the feeling it gave when I sing it. It helps a lot in difficult times.

Now I love the song even more with the beauty of David Phelps' voice. It's wonderful!

So here goes:

Lyrics to No More Night :
Words & music by Walt Harrah


The timeless theme, Earth and Heaven will pass away.
It’s not a dream, God will make all things new that day.
Gone is the curse from which I stumbled and fell.
Evil is banished to eternal hell.

No more night. No more pain.
No more tears. Never crying again.
And praises to the great "I AM."
We will live in the light of the risen Lamb.

See all around, now the nations bow down to sing.
The only sound is the praises to Christ, our King.
Slowly the names from the book are read.
I know the King, so there’s no need to dread.

No more night. No more pain.
No more tears. Never crying again.
And praises to the great "I AM."
We will live in the light of the risen Lamb.

See over there, there’s a mansion, oh, that’s prepared just for me,
Where I will live with my savior eternally.

No more night. No more pain.
No more tears. Never crying again.
And praises to the great "I AM."
We will live in the light of the risen Lamb.

All praises to the great "I AM."
We’re gonna live in the light of the risen Lamb.

Web Hosting

I need to create a website for a small business of my friends’. Alas, I know very little about webhosting, domain, data transfer, design, and all other stuffs related to it. I have tried to look for local (by local I mean Indonesia although I live in Netherlands at the moment) webhosting services but got confused with the many offers. You know, having too many options is as confusing as having too limited options.

I heard about a website that provide web hosting articles and I think it will be quite useful. Some of the articles available are about choosing a dedicated host, domain parking, overview of many type of control panels, et cetera. There is also categories of articles, such as about one of the most well known control panel: Cpanel.

So, let’s take a look at this website to learn about web hosting :)

Google's New Feature

I just noticed this new feature in Google search. I don't know if it's been there for quite sometimes, but since I use Google a lot, I don't think I miss it at the first go. Its name is SearchWiki.

Quote from Google:

Customize your search results with your rankings, deletions, and notes — plus, see how other people using Google have tailored their searches.

Please remember that your SearchWiki notes will be visible to other users, identified with your Google Account nickname.

For every search, each links is now given three new buttons, namely Promote, Remove, and Comment. At first, I assumed Promote would be used if you find a link useful and wanted other people to know it too, Remove for the exactly opposite reason, and Comment if you wanted to leave comment (d'oh) about the links.

When I tried clicking on Remove, the link is removed from the list. If you want to restore it, you can find it at the bottom of the page.

When I clicked on Promote, it brought the link to the first rank and subsequently another button appear in place of the cross Remove button. The tooltip still mentioned Remove, but if you clicked on it, it would just return the link to its previous normal rank.

This is a new way of Google to let user customize their search results. This is probably because the Information Retrieval technology used by Google (and every other search engines) will always produce non-perfect recall, precision, and ranking system. Hence, I think providing this kind of feature will help in mitigating the imperfectness of those measures.

The other good thing is the customization is shared among users so that users can also benefit from input from others. For example: I can see what other user think about a link in search result, and can feel more confidence in that link (as being recommended).

Notes: You can only see the new features if you log in to Google account

Updates:
Here's a video from Google's official blog about how to use SearchWiki:

ShopWiki - Shopping Search Engine

What do you do nowadays if you want to buy something?
Probably you'll do some searching in the internet by using web search engines. If you're lucky, you'll find an online store that sell the product you want with a price that you're happy with. However, if you stumble upon many online stores offering the product at different prices (it could be very different), you might not feel so lucky any longer. That kinda thing brings confusion.

Now let's see this website. It claims itself to be a shopping search engine that make use of web-crawling technology in combination with consumer-written Wiki. Web crawling technology is the same technology use by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!Search, etc. Thus it can crawls a huge number of online stores. This brings benefit as users can compare prices of a product from several stores simultaneously. For example is specialized bicycles.. or Apollo bicycle.

ShopWiki present the search result as a list of products related to the keywords. The good thing is for each entry, a pic of the product is presented, along with the name and description. The lowest price of the product is given from the many stores that sell it. If you want to know more data of the different prices, you could point your cursor to one of the entry and a bubble with pop with a list of lowest prices from several shops. Here's a snapshot of the search result:


I think this shopping search engines is very helpful and user friendly :)

India Translation Service

I came across an India translation website and I was reminded about the need of proper language use in building relationship.

I have written about a request from my sister for translation of some Indonesian words to India language for her work/assignment as visual communication designer. I only needed a simple translation tool for that.

What if you need to translate not several words, but paragraphs? whole documents?
That's the time you need a translation service.
If you have a business and you want to reach a market that do not understand your language, what will you do? Say, you speak English, you produce Batik, and you want to sell it to India. Well, English is commonly used in India, but I believe there are many other people that do not know English. Moreover, isn't it nicer to build a relationship with your prospective customers by using their own language?

Like villagers in many countries, that have diverse traditional languages and might not understand English that well, certain areas in India face the same thing. Hindi is a language spoken in India as well as Urdu is. Punjabi is a language used in the area of Punjab (well, at least now we know how the famous Raam Punjabi got his name :D).

Back to the topic, that's the reason IAFL (I can't find what it stands for from the website) provide a translation and interpretation service, They claim that it's best to give the work to professional because poor Urdu translation, for instance, will lead to decrease of credibility. A very sound argument, I would say. In fact, there are many things to be concerned about translation. It's not only making the native speakers understand, but it should also use the style of the original and be culturally appropriate.

Talking about the business model, it is not wise for a company to have many language experts in house. A more feasible (and effective) way is by using a service from a company like IAFL.

I think for a global-minded business people, a translator/interpreter is necessary in terms of reaching people in their respective comfort zone, namely their language. That will help them to be able to relate more to whatever it is that you want them to know.

Push-up

I found this post very nice and I'd like to share it. I found it through the post in Pandu's blog (this is like share it forward, hehehe)

Thought: What will we do with the grace our God has given us? *I myself need to do some reflection on that* :)

Travelling and Accomodation

Since my last travel to Spain and Italy last summer, I haven’t done any travelling. I would love too, but my courses’ assignments and other works are very time consuming. PPI Delft actually planned a travelling activity “PPI Delft goes to Berlin” but since only very few people responded to the registration, it was cancelled.

Hmm, Mai is still in Zurich for her exchange program. I would like to visit her (and force her to be my guide off course, hahaha). I should do that before January though, otherwise she’ll already be back in Delft.

Talking about travelling, I’m sure that new students (Vel? Ron? Niss? Mel? hehehe) might want to do that, probably as cheap as possible :D Accommodation contributes to the expense greatly, but the cheapest alternative is not necessarily the one you’re satisfied with. Let me share some useful information on that.

Couchsurfing.com might be your first alternative to find accommodation. Mai is the one introducing the website to me when we planned our trip to Leuven and Brussels last year. She contacted some members who offer a couch or a room to sleep in the cities we’re interested in. We got the rooms but we needed to bring our own sleeping bags (there were four of us). The rooms were free of charge (that’s the beauty of the couchsurfing concept) but we, as nice people (yes, we are :D), prepared dinner for our hosts. It was an interesting experience. It might not be easy to get room though. Mai needed to contact many people before getting the offers (probably also because she’s been well reviewed by other members from her previous couchsurfing).

Last January, when I travelled to Prague with some classmates, we found accommodation through hostelworld.com. The prices of the hostels were cheap (probably because it’s Prague). The first hostel we booked was okay, but crappy in its service. We checked out on the second day and found another hostel that was slightly more expensive, but superb in its service. You can read the rest of the story in my previous post.

If you prefer hotel to hostels, you can try finding good rates through hotelscombined.com. My Dutch friend once told me he used this website to find accommodation for his travel to Indonesia. He went there with his family. It can help comparing hotels in one go. That’s helpful, I would say. I tried to search for hotels in Bandung, and it shows me an impressive list of hotels to choose from :D Perfect for planning a honeymoon, hehehe.

So, if you’re on a tight budget and want to experience something new, you could try couchsurfing.com (but you should be careful in choosing the prospective hosts). If you’re looking for student accommodation, try hostelworld.com (not necessarily the cheapest and you have to make sure it’s comfortable enough). If you’re looking for a good hotel and need to compare for the best value for your money, try hotelscombined.com. These could spare you the trouble of searching the accommodation manually.

Medical Alarm

Hey, this is interesting. I stumbled upon a website selling customer care service and products related to safety. They sell some kind of Medical Alarm Systems, one for inside the house and one for the outside. I am always interested in stuff related to medical (thanks to my parents who work as nurses and sorry for them that none of their children pursue a career as a doctor. Well, they don't complain though :D)

The interesting feature of the inside-the-house system (they call it Tele-Assist) is Fall Detector. Imagine when your grandmother is at home, alone, and you know that she’s not in her fittest state as she’s ever been before but you couldn’t be around. The product has a panic button, which alert the family, doctor, or emergency help when pressed. But if somehow the wearer cannot even press the panic button, the fall detector will alert the company’s operator, who will act accordingly once (s)he has assessed the situation. It is wonderful how new technology (like the detector) can help people.

For outside, they use Mobile GPS in the form of a watch. They claim that the device will connect you to help no matter where you are in the world. It will send your GPS location to a trained professional in case of emergency. I think this is very useful. I can imagine how hard it is to create such complex connection of medical alarm system with other actors in the environment, such as the doctors, emergency ambulance, et cetera. It is difficult especially in developing countries, for instance my home country. I don’t know how they could do it if a customer actually travels to Indonesia and goes to some rural areas.

Nevertheless, such technology implemented in this medical alarm system is admirable and could really help. I only hope that the infrastructure in Indonesia could get better to actually make use of such technology in a large scale.

Oh ya, I found their video in YouTube, here goes: