According to Site5 customer service, hardware issue that the server experienced is extremely rare. They had to restore backup and it was a lengthy process, there is also a network issue that caused the restoration to fail at the first time. The restoration finally done today and server is up again. They are also offering one month credit to my account as an apology.

To my surprise, Site5 is pretty responding regarding this issue. They update the forum frequently and for users that didn’t bother to check the forum often, they sent an email everyday regarding the status of server, explaining what is happening that day. Despite the outage, I’m actually quite happy with the customer service and Site5 itself for a reliable service so far. Hopefully, this won’t happen again in future.

View larger resolution on my Deviant Art

It’s a mark of another step closer to my dream, a mark where I’ll held more responsibilities and a mark of improvement to be an even better person.

Thank you every one for every single support you gave me, especially some of my precious clients which grow together with me all these times, all of my friends from all communities I participated in, my family with their never ending supports, and every one around me – thank you all. I sincerely apologies for any disappointment I have caused – if I ever.

I hope I will get better this year and I hope for all your supports again in future.

For this moment, I also want to specially thank a good friend from Kaskus W3 Community, idiotnesia. He created my birthday thread in Kaskus last year, but it’s so sad that he passed away later that year due to his illness. His contribution to the community is priceless, as well as the good time the community had at that time – me included. I specially thank you from the deep bottom of my heart, you will be remembered forever my friend.

Thank you.

Well, A little flashback to last year.

As far as my freelance career is concerned, I have improved about 158.18% compared to 2009 in earning. I have worked on small fixing project, PSD conversion project and even on a full featured website for medium business.

And on the art part, I still doing it as a hobby and improved a little over the year. Here is the compilation of my year by year progress.

Now a target in 2011:
- I will create a product and sell it in a marketplace (most likely a WordPress theme)
- Improving my work hours and balancing it with my hobby, learning something new if possible
- Buying some stuff that I was drolling on but couldn’t get one yet

So that’s all. Happy new year again! Enjoy your holiday!

And as usual, Google also celebrate it by changing their logo.

That’s not ended here. One Manga will also close in a week time. One Manga is my favorite online reader site, though the quality is not as good as the one hosted in Manga Toshokan, it is much faster to load. Now they still have a good time updating any manga they had until the closing end. That’s the final week for them.

Two of the big sites have taken down for now or continue with lesser series, now there is also another big name that likely to follow them. Manga Fox for example. They still have majority of the series now, but the big three (as you might now, the big three is Bleach, One Piece and Naruto) is already taken down. So it seems that’s only time until the other series follow.

Ok, don’t get me wrong. I love manga, I always read them whenever I have time, I read scanlation manga, and whenever my favorite series published in my country, I buy them. I read both, scanlation and published manga. I love scanlation because they have updated series, so I don’t need to wait for months before it published in my country just to know the continuation of the story. There is also, many and many awesome manga that’s not published here, that leaves me with only scanlation manga to read them.

So why did the scanlation sites is taken down? The reason is, recently, US and Japanese publisher are forming a coalition to fight scanlation sites. You can read more on this news on ANN, U.S., Japanese Publishers Unite Against Manga Scan Sites.

Now that it come to this, there should be a solution, for both sides. I know that scanlation is illegal due to copyright issue, but there is a lot of manga that is not available everywhere and not as update as in Japan. I won’t mind if I have to pay to get a licensed manga to read online, so I hope there is still a way, that we can still read manga online, no matter if it is paid or not.

At least, to the extent we can see now, there is two solution. First is the upcoming Open Manga. The second? Obviously, underground… IRC or P2P to get the latest scanlation… lol

Hope everything will be well, but, farewell One Manga. It’s a good year I had with you. I still won’t said farewell to Manga Toshokan, as I will still open them regularly to check for updated manhwa and manhua.

Update: One Manga has taken down all of their manga, farewell One Manga! Now let’s see how’s other sites going.

The address is in www.keaglez.com.

I’ll put my profile and portfolio in this website soon. The design and website is still in development.

Mean while, I put a fancy coming soon animation. Supported browser are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. Firefox is a little lagged at first. All version of Internet Explorer is not supported, though it still looking good enough.

However, by some reason, for this past few years, things are not doing very well when I’m close to this day. Wonder why… lol But, it is always the best day I have every year. I hope, today is also a good day to me.

Turned to 19, that means, I have lived for:

19 years or
228 months or
6940 days or
166560 hours or
9993600 minutes or
599616000 seconds

That also means I’m one step further to my dream and bear more responsibility as time flows. Well, I’ll promise to myself that I will really do better from now on.

Thanks everyone.

Update:
I can’t believe this either, but thanks to idiotnesia to remember my birthday and made a thread about this in Kaskus. Thanks for all WWW Kaskuser.
I also get plenty of greetings on Facebook. Thanks friend.

Well, this is a little unusual. I got two times of Google sorry today, while I actually never got one before. This happened when I’m trying to search a query in Chrome address field. Weird… It might be my network though.

And of course, I don’t have any bot program to run search repeatly. And I also didn’t do any ping to their server. Is that means Google have increased their security for overuse of their search engine? Well, whatever. I just hope that it won’t happen again.

Last month, I bought a notebook by credit, a MSI GX633. This notebook is made for gamer, so should work fine for designing job and of course, for drawing and even better for programming. My old Pentium 4 PC is so slow when it comes to run an IDE, such as Aptana and Netbeans, and even worse when I’m drawing, and it lags a lot when I run many browsers (usually 3 version of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) together, IDE and a graphic software. LOL. To make up with it, I used Linux, so at least, I got a better performance than I was on Windows XP. Now, I can run Windows 7 pretty well, have a lot of windows opened together, and still work fine without lag.

Well, this is the first time I experienced Windows 7 anyway. I skipped Vista since I heard a lot of complain about it, and I heard a lot of compliment for 7. XP is a very good OS, and works well with everything, while in 7, I need to care about compatibility. But at least, I have almost every software I need worked just fine. The thing I hate for XP is the windows management. It especially worse when we have a lot of windows opened together, when working, I got more than 10 (sometime can be 20 and even more) windows opened together. In 7, it works a little better, though it is only grouping the same software together (which is available in XP as well), but a lot more eye candy. Eye candy is good when we tired on working in a long time… LOL . But well, I still missed workspaces feature in Linux.

The things I don’t like about this notebook is the keyboard, I loved the numeric pad there, but just, the space is too small for all this button together. Also, touch pad is placed in bad position that made it easy to be touched while writing. But thankfully, we have a function key to disable touch pad. So I usually disable it when I use my Wacom tablet.

About the tablet, 7 didn’t work well with my Wacom Bamboo tablet. The tablet suddenly stopped working after sometime, and there is a performance issue too. I searched and read a lot about it on the net. I hope I got it fixed. The solution I found is from this post and this post. Also, for the performance issue, it is related to the Tablet PC service from 7 (and Vista as well). See this thread. Now it worked a lot better.

Okay, that’s it for the notebook and tablet.

It has been more than one year since I started working as freelancer. Thanks God that I performed better lately. I want to share my first year experience as freelancer, but I’ll write about it later, in another post.

And finally, this is the only art I draw this past two months.

For comment and full size, please go to my deviant art.

Tthat’s it for now. Thanks for reading.