Simcity

29 December 2014

Last week, most of my times were spent with families and relatives while continuing the procrastination of playing games, watching HIMYM, and doing some coding.

On Monday, I started the day with lots of Simcity 2013. In the afternoon, there were BAW meeting over Skype although the Internet connection was bad (only in my laptop, I don’t know why); and after some trials, I managed to get through using another laptop, but just right after that, the electricity went off and left me with no internet. Hence, I continued playing Simcity 2013. After it came back, I rejoined the conversation, which was ending. That day, I also watched the final episode of The Legend of Korra and did some research on scholarly articles for our topic of BAW.

On Tuesday, I passed the day by playing Simcity, doing some work on BAW, watching some movies (including Stand By Me Doraemon, which was said to be leaked from cinemas, but nevertheless it was a very good movie, that made me recalls every good moment that I had during my past reading and watching Doraemon), and reading some stuffs online.

On Wednesday, I spent most of the day coding: merging Raun “streamlined” branch to “master” branch, fixing some bugs on “Plan!”, and adding GUI input for the URECA project. Besides that, I watched Frozen on this day and I thought that this movie resembles Tangled (2010), and this movie is a musical, which was quite different from other Disney movies. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie. Besides all of these activities, I continued developing my cities in Simcity: there is one city which consists of layers of a big circular road. In aerial view, it was amazing, but in practice it was not that efficient since it increases the traveling time to many corners of the city.

On Thursday, I and my family went out early for a trip to Samosir Island, located at the heart of North Sumatra, and in the middle of Toba Lake, the largest lake in Indonesia. It was a tiring road journey there. We left our home around 6 am and only arrived at the hotel there around 3 pm. The journey involved 4 regencies (Deli Serdang, Serdang Bedagai, Simalungun, and Samosir) and 3 cities (Medan, Tebing Tinggi, and Pematangsiantar). We stopped at Prapat for lunch before queuing for ferry to Samosir Island. In this queuing, I watched a lot of HIMYM.

After arriving at the hotel, we rested for a while before going around to play some table tennis for the first time, and with no trainer. At first I tried shakehand grip but it was too tempting to go full power and had the ball out of control. Then, I was more comfortable with penhold grip, which limits the power but made the ball controlling easier.

Next, we went for swimming at the hotel’s swimming pool. Since it was raining, the water was very cold. And I stayed only for a while before going for the hot water shower. :) After dinner, with lots of noises of firecrackers, I spent the rest of the night watching HIMYM before going to bed.

The next day was mostly spent on touring on the hotels around our hotel, comparing the view, rooms, and price of the hotels. Well, I can safely say that there is nothing to do here in Samosir except enjoying Toba Lake’s view. Lunch and dinner were on Hotel Carolina which has decent meal and pretty good Wi-Fi connection here.

On Saturday, after a decent big breakfast, we started the journey back to Medan around 10am. Queuing the ferry, I spend the time on HIMYM again. At the ferry ride, we’re entertained by Bataknese Christmas song played on the ferry’s speaker. It was around 2 pm already when we arrived in Prapat, but we went straight to Siantar for lunch and when we arrived there, it was already 3.30 pm. After lunch, we went straight back to Medan, but there was this traffic jam for hours which apparently a traffic accident has occurred (and judging from the remains of the cars and motorcycles, it was a deadly one). The journey back continues, but I had this unwell feeling starting from Prapat and hence I can’t sleep. I almost finished all 6 Coldplay’s album before arriving at Medan. And when we arrived at Medan (around 9 pm), I were so relieved that finally I’m back. I had my dinner, watched some HIMYM, and went to bed.

On Sunday, the day started badly by me waking up at 10 am. Without alarm, I never slept until this late. After a very late breakfast at 11, we went out for lunch around 2 pm at Centre Point’s Imperial Chef. After some shopping, we went back and I started doing my URECA project report while experimenting with nodejs (and deploying it at the cloud, which was not as easy as running it locally). For dinner, we went out to Pecel Lele Mbak Bolek (at Jl Wajir) and it was a satisfying one :) After dinner, we went back, I continued the URECA report and stopped when I were stuck with HIMYM until I went to bed.