I was surfing around YouTube and found this recording of a prank call gone wrong.

Listen to it.

If there is any lesson to be taken away from this prank call, it would have to be: Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman’s Wrath!

The biggest Manchester United fan I have ever met and known has got to be the other Co-Founder of Nuffnang, Ming.

Seriously.

Let me tell you 3 true stories to show you why.

Story 1: Watching the Champion’s League Semi-Finals

While Manchester United was playing the semi-finals of the Champion’s League Ming was down in KL for work and he was staying at my place.

The match was something like 3.00AM and in spite of having an early morning meeting the next day, he made sure he was up at 3.00AM to watch the match in my living room.

The night was a very very quiet lonely night and I was sleeping nicely through it when I was suddenly jolted out of bed by a yell from my living room.
“YES!!!!!!”

I remembered that Ming was in my living room watching the match so I assumed Man Utd must’ve scored a goal or something so I went back to sleep.

The next morning I saw Ming and he was bright awake. I asked him how was his sleep and his reply
“Dammit … I was so happy last night after the match.. I couldn’t sleep!!! I actually CRIED when they won the match!!! “

I just nodded when he went on to say
“Eh I think I’m going to Moscow to watch the finals”.He eventually went and lucky for him, Man Utd won the finals.

Story 2: Conference Call

We were having a regional conference call with some potential business partners when suddenly the topic of football came up between Ming and a guy that I’m going to refer to here as John.

The conversation went like this.

Ming: OH I didn’t know you’re a football fan too!!!

John: Yeah man! I am.. HUGE FAN!

Ming: Who do you support?

John: I support the Gunners. Arsenal.

Ming: WHAT?!?! YOU JUST WENT DOWN ONE BROWNIE POINT ON MY LIST MY FRIEND!!!
Story 3: LIVERPOOL VAN

This just happened last week.

I was down in Singapore and had just had dinner with Ming and some of our friends. We just got out of an elevator to go into the carpark when suddenly he saw a HUGE RED VAN.

On the red van was a HUGE Liverpool Football Club video with the line “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

The van looked like it was plastered with this all over.
The minute Ming saw that he started cursing away
“LOOK AT THIS COCKSTER!!! COME PARK RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF ME ALSO… C*BAI NABEH!!! MOTHERF*CKING LOSER!!! NO WONDER HE’S DRIVING A VAN!!!”

To Goldfinger and RockingDandy: It’s ok. I’ll smack Ming for you both!!!

Visiting the Taylor’s Sri Hartamas Campus
“I made 120 decisions today… all of them are wrong”

I was sitting in a talk last Sunday and looking at that line and I couldn’t help wonder where my life had taken me since I left high school.

Let me refresh my memory.

The first thing I was thinking about right after I walked out of my last SPM paper was how I was going to spend my next few months dating my girlfriend at the time.I was thinking of all the movies we would watch, all the walks on the beaches we would take and all the other… uhmm.. innocent fun we were going to have. Those few months flew by so quickly and by the time I realized it, it was time for me to think of where to go after school, what I was going to study and where I was going to end up.

I had no clue what to do to be honest. I didn’t…
It’s true… when I was young I wanted to be all sorts of things. I wanted to be a soldier once… then a pilot another time… and at one point I even wanted to be a postman.

I told my mum that I thought it was so much fun riding around everywhere in a motorbike. My mum panicked a little bit.. you know typical traditional Chinese family. If your child doesn’t grow up wanting to be a doctor/accountant/lawyer then your son needs help.

So there I was back in present time sitting at this lecture hall listening to this talk about careers.

I was at Taylor’s Sri Hartamas Campus.

that just newly opened and I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon there since they were all so nice to invite me to go pay a visit.In the audience were starry-eyed students fresh out of SPM and concerned parents trying to figure out what future would be best for their children.

I sat there alone unaccompanied by anyone with jeans and sports shoes so much that I looked like I had just finished my SPM myself… though I actually wish I had really sat through one of these talks right after I left school.

At least I might have known what I should do with my life.
After the talk ended, the nice people that man the new campus decided to take me a tour of the campus. It was quite an environment.

Allow me to illustrate.

They had nice hangout places for students to just sit and chill.Can you believe that? They actually had special spots just for you to CHILL!!!

That’s it!!!

During my days as a student (which wasn’t too long ago), we all sat on the staircases to chill which was fun for a while until your butt becomes so flat you could place a cup of coffee on it.

Not to mention, occassionally a passing lecturer would say
“OI!… So free can just lepak here ah?”

At this college now at least the students could say
“No Sir… I am just making use of college facilities Sir.”

Then there was the library.
I’m used to seeing library with old wooden chairs and wooden tables. Heck memories from my old university days but this library actually had something more than just the really cute “Alphabet” stools on the tables there.

Seriously, just a private thought to myself right… it’s not going to take long before the students start arranging the chairs to spell

“F…U….”

“N”….. AH HAH !!!

I was going to say “FUN”.. what were you all thinking! Notty notty!

Now apart from the cute alphabet chairs, what really grinded my gears was… that they had their own “Nuffie Corner” there.

And one that was SOOO MUCH bigger than the one we have at the Nuffnang office in KL.

And check out these really really cute ‘chair’ like bean bags they had.

Dammit if I were a student there.. that’s where I would be all my student life. Sitting on that chair.

I’ll be there so often they’ll call that place “TIMMY CORNER”.

See? Don’t I just fit in there?

That’s the thing I love about bean bags. They don’t judge you if you’re fat like me. No… not like other chairs where you might be too big to sit on. Bean bags, they fit around your butt no matter how you sit on them.

Ahhh…

Anyway, seeing how nice the library was I insisted they showed me how the classrooms looked like. And this is how they looked like (without the hot chicks sitting on them chairs).The classrooms were pretty Hi-Tech and it wasn’t only because of how each classroom had a fixed projector of its own …

But they had these things called “Dynamic Notes” where at the end of each class, you could Bluetooth to your mobile phone a recording of the entire session and take it home with you.

How stressful is that? I mean imagine if you were passing notes in class and your teacher catches you and gives you a public caning in front of everyone in the class.

Before, your shame would only be limited to the few people in the class who were there to witness it but now anyone there could take the recording to any of the computer labs they have thereand upload it on to the internet with titles like

“Timmy Tiah Gets Spanked During Biology”

After the classroom tour I had a “BEHIND THE SCENES TOUR” of the teachers’ lounge.

CHECK THIS OUTHeck … I can see why more and more people are becoming lecturers these days. I can even imagine myself there… you know… “Mr. Tiah”.

Sitting down sipping my morning coffee and reading a newspaper.

I would be one of those ‘cool’ lecturers that jokes and dances in class.

Okay soon my tour of the campus came to an end and I’m going to show you my favourite part of the campus.

While we were walking around I spotted this glass room with chairs and table in it and I asked “What is this?”
The room was apparently called… the “BRAINSTORM” room.

How cool is that!?

You actually have a glass room for you to do nothing but brainstorm in it.

Now I’ve seen this in a few corporations… really really hip ones but this is the first time I’ve seen it in a college!!!
I love these rooms.

And not too far away from these rooms.. A VENDING MACHINE!!!
For us to binge!!!

The total sum of money it took to put together a college like that with all the glass rooms, projectors, classrooms, chairs, tables and BEAN BAGS… came up to… RM6,000,000.

Ah how Taylor’s has come so far from its early days at Pantai Bahru (Yes… believe it or not Taylor’s College started there in 1969… not at Subang).The Taylor’s new Hartamas Campus is still pretty new so go check it out if you guys have the time but if you’re going to go into college soon… my advice… figure out what you wanna do first… you know go for a talk or talk to some people.

I ended up doing Economics at university because I didn’t know what else to do and ended up not liking the very very mathematical subject but I had to force myself to finish the course I started. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

I’m really excited today because today is the day we’re officially launching Nuffnang Philippines Inc.

We’ve been working on this for many months now to be honest and I’ve actually been flying to Manila to help set up Nuffnang Philippines with our local JV partner there Outcomm Inc.

Outcomm is one of the largest outdoor advertising firm in the Philippines and our partnership all started with a call to our office, leading to an overseas conference call and finally a meeting in Singapore before I eventually flew over to Manila to get some work done.

Gosh you have no idea for how long I wanted to blog about my trip to Manila especially about meeting one of the most popular bloggers in Asia… BryanBoy who is now part of Nuffnang too.

Look how star-struck I was. Giggling away like a little boy.

But alas, I had to keep it all secret because we didn’t want people to know that we were going into the Philippines yet.. although word started to leak out rather quickly.

A local blogger there happened to see one of our job ads to hire Nuffies for our new team in Manila office and word leaked out. Speaking of the Nuffnang office in Manila, it’s sooo wonderful!

It’s at this place called Bonifacio High Street where you have a beautiful garden with office units throughout the side.During the evenings you can actually see people walking their dogs around the area. It’s like a half office half shopping high street kind of area. Really nice!

Imagine looking out your office window and seeing a view like that with a fountain in the middle.
Manila was just really really quite nice. I mean what is there to NOT like. The people are all English speaking and they are extremely polite, humble and friendly.

Heck you guys should meet our local partners there.

Meet Eric and Jay, the founders and owners of Outcomm Inc.Both extremely successful entrepreneurs who graduated from Top US Colleges (Eric went to Stanford and Jay went to UPenn Wharton) and both extremely humble people.

Then there is Geraldine on the right of the photo below who is one of the key people responsible for setting up Nuffnang PH operations.

This photo was taken in our Nuffnang office in Manila a few months back when I was up in the Philippines helping set up the operations there.

I am so excited!

Will post up more pictures of all the rest of the Nuffies in our Manila office when I go there again ok?

1 and a half years after Nuffnang first started, we are now in 3 countries with offices in all of them.

Ahh exciting and challenging times ahead!

Ok I am really really extremely busy right now but I’m going to write a really really quick entry about a dinner we had with some Nuffnangers yesterday.

Well here goes.

Nuffnang has become increasingly famous for having huge fun themed parties among hundreds of bloggers to get the community together. The problem with these parties though is because of their size, they tend to take a lot of time and money to plan so we limit them to at most once every 3 months.

Yet as a Community we’ve always wanted to have something consistent, something where we could get together with Nuffnangers regularly in the most casual manner.. just to hang out, have dinner and get to know each other better.

Then one day we all had an idea. Why don’t we have just small dinners of say 25 Nuffnangers just to meet up and chat. The downside was that we wouldn’t be able to host as many Nuffnangers so we might have to rotate… but the upside… was the opportunity to get to know these few of them a lot better.

Last weekend we had our first of such dinners at Italiannies in 1-Utama at what we call a Nuffnang Sharing Session where we would all have dinner together and then get one or two bloggers to share their experiences in blogging or anything else.
The two bloggers we had that night were Cindy and Ringo, 2 of our Malaysian Dreamgirl contestants who were there to share their experiences being in a reality TV show.

The night turned out to be a lot of fun. Good food and great company.

I personally got to know a lot of Nuffnangers a lot better, many of which I met before in some of our earliest parties but couldn’t remember.

Here are some pictures I managed to take on the night… before I spoilt my camera which is now sent for a 3 week warranty. *sigh* That’s a whole other story.

Sorry guys in my rush to get this entry out… I didn’t have the time to link up everyone that I managed to take pictures with.

It was great meeting you guys! I actually had so much fun.

If you didn’t manage to get one of the limited seats for this session, we’ll be having another one next month ok?

See you guys then.

Alright I’m off!!!

A friend of mine just pointed out that my blog doesn’t have an “About Me” page like most other blogs do.

So I’m going to do an “About Me” entry now so anyone new to my blog could learn a bit more about me.

Okay so here goes.

My name is Timothy Tiah and I am 24 this year (2008).Although I now spend most of my time in KL, I grew up in Penang getting my secondary school education in a boy school there called St. Xavier’s Institution. I lived a very typical student life back then, spending most of my free time in cybercafes playing games like Half-Life, Counter-strike and Starcraft.

Whatever time I had left was spent playing table tennis, a sport that I used to be really good in representing my school, and eventually even representing my university when I studied in London.I used to be pretty fit…

but now I am fat.

I’m not sure why but it must’ve been all the excessive ice-cream.
After I finished college, I pursued a BSc in Economics at University College London, apparently the 25th Top University in the World according to a NewsWeek survey. Up till today I still wonder why they accepted me as a student.

The plan was that I was going to be an investment banker after I graduated with an Economics degree. Why? No reason in particular… I just didn’t have a better idea and everyone tells me that investment bankers make a lot of money.

So during my summer holidays I did internships at both JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, hoping that I would learn a thing or two about investment banking there.

In my final year of university however, I started a joke blog with a friend of mine which marked the beginning of my blogging career.

I got to know a lot of bloggers and began to feel a sense of passion for the blogging community.

It was then where I saw an opportunity for bloggers to get together in one big network and collectively sell their ad space to advertisers and so right after I graduated from university in June 2006, I turned down a job offer from an investment bank and took the biggest gamble of my life.

With with my partner Ming, we started Nuffnang.After spending months preparing the business plan, doing feasibility studies and building the website, Nuffnang officially launched on 27th of February 2007.About one and a half years later, the small team we had grew from a small office in Penang to having offices now in Penang, KL and Singapore. Our Community has also grown and as of August 2008, the Nuffnang Community had over 50,000 bloggers from Malaysia and Singapore alone.Our clients have also grown from the smaller companies that supported us when we were small today to big multinational brands like Nike, Nokia, MAS, HUGO and the likes.

Nuffnang today is pretty well-known as one of the fastest growing dotcoms in the region and we’ve had the fortunate blessings of being in an out of the media quite a bit. We’ve been covered in most major newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore, been on National TV 3 times and in 2007 both Ming and I were nominated by BusinessWeek Magazine as one of the Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs in Asia.

Young is what Nuffnang is… not just by the number of years we have been around but even by the age of the team at Nuffnang and I take pride that such young people are doing such remarkable things.

Of all of us at Nuffnang today, the oldest is 32 years of age and the average age is 24.

Today I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world and it’s not only because I love what I do and the poeple I work with.

It’s because I’ve had the good fortune of meeting the right people that believed in Nuffnang from day one who brought us to where we are today, be it the bloggers that always supported us to the clients that taught us all about the advertising industry and all we needed to know about how to run a company.

Where Nuffnang is today is something that I can’t and won’t take for granted.

I have learned that for any entrepreneur, life is full of its ups and downs even for some of the most successful billionaires in the world that I have read about like Richard Branson or Steve Jobs.

This blog will document my very own ups and downs.

Share with me my joys when I am up… and my tears when I am down.

Thank you for being with me on this journey.

I just got an e-mail from a fellow Nuffie sent to everyone at Nuffnang in all our offices.

The e-mail was sent by Nicholas and had one photo he candidly took of Yee Hou with his camera phone.

The title of the e-mail was
“How to Increase Productivity”.

Sometimes the funniest things happen at the Nuffnang office.

Happy Friday everyone!

One of my friends just sent me a mail to tell me that a friend’s daughter is missing.

Her name is How Li Min and she’s 29 years old.

She was wearing a pink T-shirt & pink long skirt (with some small flower chocolate dots) & blue long sleeve sweater outside. She went missing since 19.8.08 at approximately 5.00PM near TAAT House Jalan Tun A Razak (Johor Bahru).If anyone sees her, please contact Mr K S How at 016 777 5911.

Thanks guys. I hope she’s safe.

Update: Ok looks like they found her unharmed now.. Thanks anyway everyone

Monday mornings are sometimes the most dull and stressful for some people.

But not for me…. heck I love my weekdays… I love the work I do and I love the people I work with so I actually look forward to weekdays. This Monday however I started off on a slightly different foot.

See, Sunday night I realized that there was a small leak underneath the sink of one of my apartment’s toilets. I didn’t think much of it… I thought “Ok.. call the plumber tomorrow”.

Monday morning I woke up and you know what I saw…. that leak had turned into a bloody MONSOON!!!

Water was POURING out from the bottom of the sink and flooding the toilet so fast it had begun to leak into the bedroom and before I knew it… I woke up and the room was A SWAMP!!!

Has any of you ever heard of the term… “SPEED MOPPING”?

Well… allow me to introduce to you that new term.

Speed Mopping is when you grab a mop… and MOP THE HELL AWAY FOR FEAR THAT THE WATER WILL SPOIL YOUR WOODEN FLOOR!!!

While in the chaos I managed to grab my cordless phone and called the plumber.

The conversation basically went like this
“HEEEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!”

Then after a while of SPEED MOPPING… I realized that it hadn’t helped much and I had one of those light bulb moments where a light bulb lights up in my head.
Why don’t I just turn off the water mains where the water meter is. I jumped out of my apartment and straight to the water meter and I couldn’t remember which was my apartment and which was my neighbour’s water supply but I didn’t give a flying f*ck at the point in time…. I turned BOTH OFF!!!

I had a small image in my head of my neighbour in the shower covered in soap and suddenly had the water turned off before he could wash the soap off but I thought about it for a while and then just decided
“NAH!!!… What are the odds?”

After that I ran back to speed mopping with a bit more success this time and in a few hours time, the plumber arrived!

All he did was to replace a small little pipe underneath my sink and it cost me RM150.
I wanted to haggle with him… but I was too tired from all the speed mopping I gave him the money and laid down on my bed for a while before I headed to the office.

So there you have it everyone.. my unconventional Monday morning!!!

Don’t you just wish your life had so much drama!

I spent almost the whole day of Saturday at MidValley Exhibition Center for the Samsung WCG 2008.

Man what a day it was.

Okay let me tell you about my day.

I woke up early in the morning to drag myself to the Samsung WCG 2008 happening at MidValley Exhibition Center for our special mini-CS competition happening at the Samsung booth there.
There were going to be 8 Nuffnanger teams (each with a requirement of at least ONE female player) and the Nuffnang team was going to be one of them competing in the competition.

4 of us Nuffies from the Nuffnang KL Office were taking part and we got Jolene to be our female player.

Not too long after I arrived, we played our first game and the Nuffie team won.

The Nuffnangers were playing our small competition here at the Samsung booth

While the big boys of the real WCG played in these computers here.
Heck the big boys are the big boys.

You know they take gaming so seriously when they insist on bringing their own mouse and keyboard to play at the competition.
Heck soon they’ll insist on bringing their own computer.

At one point of the WCG, they started broadcasting one of the games that the big boys were playing on two big screens.

Both of the teams were really good but one was better than the other and the better team was kicking the ass of the other team.
Gosh so embarrassing, imagine having everyone at the WCG watching you getting thrashed. Fortunately I gave up trying to be a professional gamer long time ago.

Speaking of which… for many many years I have always heard so much about the Samsung WCG that happens each year. I mean what’s there not to love for a gamer, it’s like the Olympics for computer games but I never went.Why? Because I thought it was literally just a computer game competition so if I weren’t playing and my friends weren’t playing then why go right?

But going there yesterday, the truth was that there were just so many things going on for the public all day long.

Some of us KL Nuffies were there to play around with all that.
All sorts of games, and all sorts of prizes to win. And when I say prizes I don’t mean like a WCG T-Shirt… I mean Samsung MP3 players, mobile phones, Intel-powered desktops and stuff like that.

The other notion I had about the WCG was that it was an event full of guys because computer games are mostly a guy thing. Well that turned out to be not true either… I saw soo many girls there… heck even Cynthia and Debbie came to support us!

The Nuffie team played up till the finals but right before the finals we decided to have lunch.

Over lunch we knew that we were going to lose anyway. The team who was up against us in the finals was just far better than us… it’s like they studied Counter-strike in school or something.

We took some photos at lunch.

I have no idea how I managed to take this shot of Jolene with a flower exactly covering her face.

Sorry Jolene. Didn’t mean for it like that haha.

And here’s Pinky who went that to cheer us on that day too.

Anyway after lunch we got our asses whooped by the other team in the finals and when everything was over, everyone was just waiting for one thing… the prize-giving ceremony for the best blog entries of “My Favourite Computer Game of All-Time”, a contest that Samsung held on the Nuffnang Community a few weeks ago.

At stake were mainly 3 prizes. A Samsung Digital Camera for the Most Creative Entry, an MP3 player for the Samsung favourite and the grand prize… a 32″ LCD TV for the Funniest Entry!

Mr Gin won the MP3 player for the Samsung favourite and this guy won the most creative bringing home the digital camera.
Then it came to the time to announce the Nuffnanger who was going to walk home with the 32″ LCD TV that everyone was waiting for.

Just a few minutes before the winner was announced though, Robb came up to me and whispered into my ear
“Tim… I tell you a secret that you’re not supposed to know yet ok?”

I looked at him and said
“What what? I love secrets.. tell me!!!”

Then he went on to say
“The Samsung client said that they think your entry was the funniest entry and the entire team there agrees so they want you to win the 32″ LCD TV”.

A little taken aback I said
“No lah dude…. I don’t think we should do that”.

But Robb was already ahead of me.
“I know Tim, I told them that but they all insist that you win it, they thought your entry was the funniest, even if it was just done for fun”.

I didn’t think my entry was the funniest but well this put me in a really difficult position. I mean how would it look if I won a contest even as a blogger that was organized by Samsung on the Nuffnang Community.

In the few minutes I had before the prize was announced I quickly called up a very close friend to ask for him for advice.
His answer was simple…
“Look! The client picks the winners… not you or anyone in Nuffnang so if they insist your entry was the best and if you want to take it then what’s wrong? Besides some people are going to say what they’re going to say anyway… in the past even when you had done nothing wrong they would make up stories to try to put you down so why should this even stop you?”

I put down the phone and a few minutes later the winner for the 32″ LCD TV was announced. I heard the emcee shout the name “Timothy Tiah” and everyone started clapping.

As I went on to the stage, my mind suddenly had the answer. I couldn’t do it.

Up there I told the client and the emcee that I couldn’t take the prize. It’s not because of what people might think but what I would think of myself if I led that happen.

The Samsung people (Lynne, Sue and Annabelle), being as nice as they always are… insisted that I take the prize.
and the emcee went on to make a quick joke
“WAH!! 32″ LCD TV YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE AH!! WHY TOO SMALL FOR YOU AHH??”

Even the two Samsung blue-haired girls were surprised

Then when they were certain I didn’t want to take the prize they asked me what I was going to do with it and I didn’t have an answer yet.

So we just went on with the prize giving ceremony while I told the Nuffnangers there that I would find another way to give out this 32″ LCD TV.

We had tea after the event and we decided that we would give the 32″ LCD TV to the Nuffnanger that wrote the best entry about the WCG event and well everyone was happy.

I spoke to many people that day and I had mixed opinions.

Some thought that I had done the right thing, but others thought that I had made a mistake.

To put it in the words of another Nuffnanger
“You can’t always be so nice.. you’re going to get stepped all over one day”.

Well, I slept well last night so I think at least my heart thinks I did the right thing.

What do you guys think? Do my poll on my sidebar.

If you’re one of the Nuffnangers who were at the WCG, click here to see how you can win the 32″ LCD TV.

So everyone, that’s the day I gave up an 32″ LCD TV that I would’ve been really nice to have.