I woke up this morning looking for some news to read online.

I went to the usual mainstream sites and then to Digg where I sometimes find some interesting stuff there. This morning I saw one of the Top 10 entries had the title “The Top 10 Worst Places To Get Caught Having Sex”.
Naturally the curious me clicked on it to take a look and they started listing the places, in a courtroom, on top of a police car etc etc, if you’re curious click on the link and go read it.

Anyway I quickly scrolled down to see what the number 1 worst place to have sex was and funny enough it was… on a set of train tracks.Now the impulse thought that crosses your mind when you see something like that is
“WHO THE HELL WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!”

But well the article came with a true story. Apparently in South Africa, a couple was getting it on on the train tracks when a train started coming their way.

The train conductor happened to see them on the tracks a distance away and knowing that the train won’t be able to stop in time, he shouted at them to get out of the way.

And what did the couple do in hearing the conductor shout at them and the train roaring towards them?Naturally if it were you… you would get the fuck out of there right. You won’t even bother getting dressed… leave your mobile phone and underwear behind for all you care!

Well this couple decided to finish up with their shagging instead and probably hump faster or something. They ended up being run over by the train.

Now so that there’s no confusion if anyone ever thinks of shagging on our local KTM tracks, if the train comes and you hear a conductor shouting at you… you don’t finish up.. YOU GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE!!!!!

But for the fun of it, lets do a poll. Answer the poll on my sidebar to see first if you would do it on a train track and if you would get the puck out of there or try to finish up if you saw a train coming in. Then compare your results with everyone else who reads this blog.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Sometimes I can’t help but ponder about my future.

I ponder about the struggles I am going to face and the joys that I will have.

I ponder about where my career will take me. How much farther Nuffnang will grow and where it will be in 5 years.
I ponder about the money I will make and the money I will lose.

I ponder how the ups and downs of business will be for me, and how experiencing success or failure will change me.

I ponder about which friends of mine will leave during the hard times, and which will stay.

I ponder how my parents will age and how much time I have left with them.

I ponder how I will take care of them and love them as they grow old.

I ponder how my brothers and sister will grow up and who they will end up marrying.

I ponder who will be walking down the aisle to me one day and what her smile will be like.

I ponder how much I will love her and how much she will love me too.

I ponder how beautiful it would be to wake up next to her every day for the rest of my life.

I ponder how sad I will be when I see her cry, and how happy I would be when I see her laugh.

I ponder about the many places in the world that I would love to take her to.I ponder about being with her “For Richer or Poorer” and “In Sickness and In Health”

I ponder about what I would do if I ever lost her.

I ponder about the family we would have together and how our kids will be.

I ponder if I will be able to provide my family with the best of everything but yet something tells me that at the end of the day, all they will ask from me is my love.

I ponder if my children will love me as much as I will love them.

I ponder about the places that I will travel to for work and the time I will spend away from home.
I ponder if I will ever make a mark in my life.

I ponder if I will make a positive impact on another person’s life.

I ponder about the regrets that I will have in my life and the mistakes I will make.

I ponder about the lessons I will learn.

I ponder about how I will miss the memories I had gained in the past…

But I look forward to the ones I will make in the future.

I can’t wait to live life!

I was at Sunway Pyramid yesterday for a hair cut. Gosh it was the longest time I had ever spent in a hair saloon in the 24 years of my life. Total time spent: just over 2 hours.

I went there just with the intention to get a hair cut and have my hair dyed. But as the hair stylist took a look at my hair, she noticed that I could use some various hair treatments for my sensitive scalp. Treatment that would solve some problems I was having.So while I was reading my book she kept recommending this and that and eventually before I knew it, at the end of the 2 hours I had spent a bomb on my hair.

I jumped when I saw the bill but then I thought to myself that after all the 20 odd years of my life that I have had hair, I never spent much on it. Most of my life had me spend max RM5-RM10 on a hair cut so I thought.. okay fine why not. Besides whatever problems I had with my scalp was miraculously cured right after the treatment.

Now let me say this… there is something I absolutely love about cutting your hair in a hair saloon. I LOVE the part when they wash your hair. GOSH… all the scrubbing and head massaging always makes me feel like I’m floating away to a far far away dream land.

At the end of my 2 hour treatment, wash and hair cut… this is how I ended up looking like.

Do I look even more like a little teenage boy?

While I was getting my hair cut, the stylist just had to ask me
“So are you still studying or working already?”

I told her that I’ve been working for about 2 years now though on second thoughts, maybe I should’ve told her I was still a student. Maybe she would’ve given me a student discount.

Hah!

Have a Happy Sunday ahead everyone!

A few days ago I was at this office building for a meeting. I parked my car in the basement carpark and the machine gave me a ticket that looked something like this one from KLCC.

So fine… I went for my meeting and about two hours later I was ready to leave. I first headed to the Auto-pay machine to pay for parking. I put in the card and the machine said I needed to pay about RM4.00.

Fair enough, I put in a RM5.00 note and soon after the change came out. I took the change out of the machine and went down the elevator into the basement where my car was parked.

Then as I was walking towards my car… I noticed something. What did I miss out?

Can you guys guess?

I TOOK MY CHANGE BUT I LEFT MY PARKING TICKET IN THE MACHINE!!!

I rushed back up to get it praying that it would be there but by the time I got back, it was missing. Someone had already taken it. Why would someone wanna take my parking ticket? To save his RM4.00 on parking?

So I went back down and had to pay the penalty for losing my ticket. The penalty… RM50.00 for just 2 hours parking.

Aihh.. I guess they call this tuition fees.

First things first, lately I noticed quite a number of bloggers are coming up with their own businesses. Latest one I’ve seen is from Nicole herself who just started what she calls Nicolekiss Boutique. Check it out.

Last Saturday Nuffnang Malaysia worked with Nokia to hold our own Halloween party we called the Nuffnang Nokia Silent Halloween.
Most of our Nuffnang events in the past had very crowd-centered kind of games but we had a slightly different format this time round. On top of the games with some great phones to give away, we had the Nokia IAC bands perform live.

and we had our very own silent-rave where everyone listened to the same song on their ear phones and danced to the music so to the outsider it looked as if a crowd of people were just dancing on their own without music. I wanted to go as Stewie from Family Guy but since there was a music theme going on there I decided to go as Kurt Cobain. The guys at Absolut Pitch were nice enough to dress me up for it (if you ever need a costume for anything call Gabriel at 014-6433401) .

So this is how I looked like. Apparently this is exactly how Kurt Cobain dresses like (although I’m sure his hair wasn’t as blond).
And you know what. To make things worse, Klubbkidd Joe came as Kurt Cobain too.. and his outfit looked so much more intense than mine.

Check out some of the other costumes.

We had an Ayumi Hamasaki, a Joker-Style Barbie and Bjork!
and even what I think is Dark Angel.

A pirate!

A Marilyn Monroe and uhmm… a butterfly.

A joker nurse and someone even came as a milk carton LOL

Our emcee Liang came as Elvis

The three ladies who were in the running then to win the best dressed female.

Two of whom were lucky to win some of these Nokia phones along with the best dressed males for the night.

We also had a Hitler

And even a Dr. Evil

And this is one of the cutest outfits that night in my opinion.

Goldfinger went as Scary Spice and Mehlin went as … PINK.. (well okay red…)

The best part about the party was that along with the many agencies we worked with to put this party together (MediaCom, JWT and Text 100) a group of the Nuffnang team who could make it for the party led by Robb were in charge of putting the party together.

Everything from putting up the props to handling registration and the thing that impressed me most was how all the Nuffies worked so well as a team to put this together.

There were no egos or politics when it came to working together, and nobody complained about anyone doing more or less work, everyone just helped out and we had so much fun and laughter doing it.

One of the greatest asset of Nuffnang.. is truly its people.

To the rest of the team who didn’t get to make it that night… no worries.. there will be another time!

Hope all the Nuffnangers there that night enjoyed themselves.

I know I did.

If you want to see more pictures. Click here.

With the world economy in bad shape, everybody is wondering when the many of us here in Malaysia will start to feel the heat. Some people say it won’t hit us, some people say that it’s already beginning to hit us and some people say that the bad times will come only in the first half of 2009.

When bad times come, everyone is affected. Companies who find themselves in trouble will cut their costs from their marketing budgets to staff count. At Nuffnang though, eventhough I’m personally expecting some sort of slowdown in the first half of next year, we still find ourselves hiring in order to keep up with our current growth.

Everyone is so overworked here.

Allow me to illustrate.

This is how Nicholas looked like not too long ago.

This is how he looks like now (well some sort).

This is how Pinky looked like when she first joined.

This is how she looks like now.

So as a result of that we still find ourselves needing to hire a few more Nuffies all around our offices though the process has been a little slow since we find it a little harder than expected to find people who can blend in well with our team.

Last week I actually interviewed a potential Nuffie for our KL office who was then working at a multinational and after some time making sure she not only had the skills but was able to work well in our team, I offered her a job.

I e-mailed her to tell her of the job offer to see whether she would take it. Her reply:

Hi Timothy

Sorry, I can’t accept your job offer. Reason being is that I don’t think it’s the right time to change jobs now with our current economic crisis right.

By the way, thanks for the offer, I do appreciate it. And glad to meet your Nuffnang team. 😉

I understood the merits of her decision. I mean there she was working in a big multinational that has been around for decades through thick and thin recessions. And in this kind of economic climate, if you were looking at stability, would you pick the big multinational that has been around even before you were born or a fresh new young company called Nuffnang.

Just two days later though she sent me another e-mail

Hi Timothy,

Is the position still available? My current company is cutting people and I guess I’m one of the unlucky ones. If the position is no longer available it’s ok…

I guess the bad times are starting to kick in.

Hold on to your piggy banks guys.

Last week I found myself at the launching of Heineken’s “Be Prepared” game at TTDI Plaza. It’s an online game that they just put up on their website (www.greattogether.heineken.com.my) but one with a little bit of a twist.
Instead of one of those flash games you play on your own, this one required that you get together with another 2 of your friends to work together and play the game. A game like that requires the full attention of an actual launch event though we all know it’s mainly just an excuse for people like me to go drinking.These are the kind of events where just about everybody who’s anybody turns up in. Most of them there that I took pictures with made me vow not to post their pictures on my blog so the only one that was nice enough to agree to it was this very capable man named Adrian who started KLue magazine years ago.

Please ignore how red I was. I wasn’t … uhmm… high on booze or anything. I was just… blushing.

Soon enough a mini-competition there got started among teams of 3 put together from the people there. Everyone there got together to form a team.

The crew behind some of the magazines there like KLue, Catcha and Newman got together to play
Some of our Nuffnangers were there too.

Tock, Joshua and Andrew formed a team they called “Nang United”.

KY, Suanie and another friend of KY’s formed another team that eventually won the free trip to Krabi they were giving away that night.

I came back home a little excited that night but managed to play down my excitement and go to bed first.

The next day at work I paid a visit to the Heineken site to check out the game they had going.

Now I gotta give Heineken some credit, their site is pretty cool. When you first get there a dockpanel video starts playing right away holding your attention for a bit. How they manage to stream it so well with my struggling broadband speed is beyond my understanding.

Without being too distracted from the reason I was on the site in the first place, I clicked on the “Be Prepared Game”. The introduction for the game is pretty cute and it looked like it was some kind of game meant to get people together to do stuff.

I mean games and all are fine as long as they’re fun to play and of course it helps if there is some sort of incentive. That’s why we all play games right?

Why do so many people play WoW? Sure it’s fun and all but after a while I’m sure it gets pretty routine and the only reason why you continue to play is so that you can tell your friends that you have whatever magical item they come up with or that you have 20 Level 60 characters on WoW.

In the case of “Be Prepared”, the incentive was 3 tickets to watch the Heineken Star Final, an exclusive UEFA Champions League Final viewing experience.So fine… that’s enough to incentivize me. The game objective?

Well turns out that I basically have get a lost beer delivery truck to the supermarket and then once I finish my part I have to get a friend of mine to continue from there.No problem since I have many friends.

I played the game anyway.

Turns out to be quite cute and easy to play. Just drive my truck around on the map but I kept getting lost or making the wrong turns so I didn’t get what I thought was a good time (at least not good enough to win). So I uhmm.. “cheated” and tried the game a few more times until I made perfect turns and at the end of my final try… I did it all in 56 seconds!
So then okay I was supposed to pass it on to a friend to finish the game. I took a quick look on my MSN list and decided to ask some of the people there.

My first pick… Nicholas Chay.
After a few more conversations like this I have decided to give up on my friends who can’t even play a game with me!

So now I’m going to open it up to you guys.

Please help Boss Stewie play this game. I’ll have to play it over again but I memorized the map already so I should be able to do it in that time or better. If you wanna join me, just leave your e-mail address in my comments or e-mail me at lengmoublogs@yahoo.com and I’ll send you the invite.

And… I just have to say this… PLAY PROPERLY AH!!!! DUN MAKE ME LOSE!

Today is a very special day, a day that I will start by telling you about my relationship with my father.

I was never the model son growing up, far from that actually. I refused to study and I was so rebellious you’d wonder if I was dropped on my head while I was a baby. I even recall times where I would actually pretend to be sick just to get away from tuition classes so it was no surprise that out of 12 subjects or so in school I would fail half of them all the way up to Form 1.

My parents tried very hard to motivate me to study using both carrot and stick approaches. They tried to tell me that they would reward me if I got good results, but it didn’t work. Then they tried to tell me that they would spank me and ban me from watching TV and playing computer games but again it didn’t work. I would just sneak to play computer games when they’re not around.

Then just right after Form 1 my parents decided that they have had enough of putting me in a co-ed school. They thought that maybe I was getting distracted with all the girls there especially with all the overflowing hormones at that point in time. I was sent to a boy school in Penang called St. Xavier’s where they streamed classes. That means they put you in class based on how good your results before were.

Out of 8 classes, 1 being the best and 8 being the worst, I expected to be put in 1 but to my surprise I was put in 5. That was the day I realized that I was quite a moron after all! So for the first time in my life I started studying and my grades slowly improved. From being ranked 168 out of 280 in the form I went to 120, 96 , 66, 4 and eventually 1 (before quickly falling back to 4 and 5 again).

My father was proud to see my grades improve but he wasn’t the kind to show it.

He told me “Son, don’t think you’re so smart, there are a lot of people out there smarter than you and you’ll know it sooner or later”.

And he was right. I went to college to do my A-Levels and realized that there were a lot of people there smarter than me. Then I went to do my Economics degree at UCL in London and heck compared to the brilliant minds there, I was a total idiot.

Then came to the next part of my life… what I was going to do once I graduated. I always thought that I was going to end up in an investment bank simply because it was a job that paid really well. So much that I made it a point to do internships at a couple of foreign investment banks during my summer holidays.

All that changed however one summer during my internship with Deutsche Bank. I got together with some friends and worked on a little fun non-profit project to help students find tuition teachers. I came across the realization that I enjoyed the adrenaline of running a web startup and around the same time I started blogging too leading to a growing sense of passion for the blogging community.

Just before I graduated I told my father that I didn’t want to work at a bank. Instead I wanted to start an internet business and expecting him to ask me to work first to gain some experience, he instead said “Okay son, lets talk about this when you get back from London”.

I got back to Malaysia on the summer of June 06 and along with Ming I started working on a business plan for a web startup that was to be called Nuffnang. After I presented the business plan and financial models of Nuffnang to my dad, he made me make a decision
“Okay I was going to give you this sum of money to do your Masters but you decide what you want to do. If you want to take it to start a business instead then go ahead. Either ways I think you will learn something and become a better person”.

We got to working and for someone who was new to running businesses, I made a lot of mistakes and struggled to learn. Then when Nuffnang officially launched in February 2007, the real stress started.

There was pressure to bring in sales because a company without sales is a ticking time bomb and it didn’t help that both Ming and I didn’t know anyone in the advertising industry neither did any of our family members so we resorted to cold calling and begging for meetings.

But we got really lucky and as people (both clients and bloggers) put their faith in us, Nuffnang grew. But a growing company comes with its own fair share of stress and days went by where I never got much sleep.My father though was always there for me being supportive all the way. Always guiding me teaching me how to deal with the stress and how to solve problems I faced. I know there were even times when my own problems troubled my father as much as it troubled me.

At the same time, my father always tried to manage my expectations. Always afraid that I might get disappointed, he constantly reminded me

“Son… this is your first business and it may not work out. Most people don’t get it right the first time round so if you don’t, then don’t be disheartened okay?”

It really took us both by surprise how Nuffnang grew to where it is today and how it is still growing so rapidly. One day not too long ago, my father for the first time in my life said to me
“Son… I am very proud of you”.

To a son who has had a rocky start in life and who was a little devil to raise…. those were the best few words I could ever long to hear in my life. Little does my father know that whatever I am today though is whatever my father shaped me to be. My father taught me so many things that I now carry with me today.

He taught me to be humble for no matter how successful I may ever be in life, there will always be others who are more successful.

He taught me to be nice to everyone you see on your way up in life, because you will see those same people again on your way down.

He taught me to be determined that the ones who persevere are the ones who eventually make it.

Sometimes I wonder what good I must’ve done in my previous life to deserve such a good father.

I love you Dad… Happy Birthday!

Hey remember the radio interview I had a few weeks back at BFM?

You can listen to it here.

Don’t laugh at me! Even I can’t hear myself talk.

So it was a usual grumpy Monday morning for me. Parked my car, took the crowded elevator up and then opened the door into our office. The minute I opened the door, I got a big shock.

Staring at me from the front door was this.
I let out a
“AAAAAARRGGGHHHH!!! WHAT THE FUCK?!?!”

And I heard all the Nuffies laughing. Even our latest Nuffie Chee Ching.

The office was decorated with Halloween props everywhere, something Robb had put together when he secretly came to the office yesterday to put everything up.

Then this morning he waited to watch everyone’s reaction when they walked in.

We had all sorts of different reactions but unfortunately most involved some form of cursing. People curse when they are shocked.

Yee Hou for example walked in and shouted
“WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?”

Pinky who is the nicest girl you would ever meet walked in and screamed
“FUCKING SHIT!!!!”And shortly after I walked in, we heard the door beep again, indicating that someone else was coming in.

It was Nicholas, and when he walked in and saw the prop he went
“WOAHH!!! What the hell?!” … the most polite response we’ve had all day.

Our office is so Halloween-ny now.

Robb thought it would be fun, to put the office in the mood for our upcoming Nuffnang Nokia Silent Halloween party and I guess he’s right.We have everything from these little guys hanging around from our closets,

to heads hanging from the ceiling.

Sometimes I really wonder how we get any work done around here.