This morning I woke up and saw Neil Patrick Harris posted a picture of him chilling at the poolside of his Vegas hotel. Kinda made me miss Vegas and our US trip. That thought then moved on to me missing… the Cheesecake Factory. This chain in the US with the best cheesecakes. Like this one.

My Cheesecake factory binge is the reason why Shorty decided to ban me from eating any desserts or sugar drinks for the next month after we came back from the US. Man it was so hard and I only managed to do it for 10 days. That 10 days though was quite a challenge but believe it or not in those 10 days, I actually lost a few KG (coupled with my daily jogging routine).

Still I gave up eventually when I was waiting waiting in KLIA for my plane to Manila. I have this airline card that lets me get into the airport lounge for free even if I’m flying economy class. When I was in there I noticed… free flow Haagen Dazs ice-cream. The fat person who wants to be skinny.. in me said.. NOOooo… but the Malaysian in me said “Anything free just take”.

Eventually the Malaysian won. I guess I’m more Malaysian than I am fatty and that was when my 10 day streak of no dessert or sugar drinks ended.

So I was browsing my pictures at one of the Cheesecake factories we went to in the Bay Area and I managed to find one of my favourite pictures of Shorty. When we first got into the Cheesecake Factory I was busy taking pictures and I asked Shorty to go get us a table.

I saw her move on to the girl behind the counter and ask for a table. I noticed that the girl behind the counter had to tip toe a little bit when she talked to Shorty. I thought it was damn cute. Even more cute was this picture I took of her while she was waiting for a table and standing next to a divider. A divider that was actually as tall as she was (I remember the counter to be almost as high as the divider too… just a little lower).

So I put my phone camera on top of the flat surface of the divider and took a picture of Shorty. This is what my phone camera caught.

Yes ladies & gentlemen, this is how my Shorty looks like from divider-level. I think it’s cute.

Before I start on this blog post, I have something to show you guys.

NICE OR NOT MY T-SHIRT?!?

Haha I saw it when I was in Japan town in San Francisco and immediately picked it up. I have this little infatuation for Domokun. If you ever come by our office you’ll see me walking around in these slippers.

Shorty bought it for me two years ago coincidentally at Japan Town in San Francisco as well and I’ve been wearing it since. Not only is it awesome-looking but it keeps my feet really really warm too.

Anyway ok on to the main part of my post. I was just checking my Formspring today… something I haven’t had the time to check at all in months. Yes I’m sorry… I’ve been left many questions that went unanswered and I can’t seem to get down to actually answering them all and I’m sorry for that.

So I logged in today and I saw this question.

I was going about to respond to it when I decided that maybe I should just do a blog post about it. Yes it is the age-old question and society’s expectation… that when a man brings a woman out he should pay for everything. Or he ain’t no man right?

Well I kinda have a really different thought to that.

See to me, a relationship is a pretty strong word. How do you know that you’re in a relationship? What do you physically do or …. what is the thing a man and a woman could do that says the most about their relationship together. No it’s not hugging, it’s not kissing and it’s not even sex. To me… it’s holding hands. You can go to Zouk on a Saturday night and see a couple who just met kissing, hugging and doing all of the above after that. But you will never see a couple who just met… walk and hold hands in public.

So to me when a couple walks and holds hands in public… you know that SHIT JUST GOT SERIOUS.

What is a relationship then? It’s past courtship. A relationship is the conscious decision that a guy and a girl make to commit to spend time together… whether physically or over the phone. It’s almost a promise that for as long as this relationship lasts, each will be there for the other. And as long as the relationship lasts… both will go through the continuous struggles of putting aside differences.

So a relationship is two-way (or at least I think that couples in two-way relationships are happiest).

Now I bring us back to the initial question. Should a guy pay for everything in a relationship?

My answer to that is… it depends. It depends on the dynamics of the relationship and it depends on the economic circumstances of either side. If the guy is earning more, then by all means let the guy pay. If the girl is earning more… then yes let the girl pay. After all why does it matter? What’s important is that nobody takes anyone for granted and everyone is happy! If we spend too much time as a couple bickering over who should pay for what…. we end up forgetting to enjoy the journey of the relationship. That… is a bigger waste than the cost of a dinner or 10 dinners.

Do I pay for Shorty? Yes most of the time I do because so far I earn more from her. We always joked though that if she does Foruchizu and makes much more money than me then she will be the one paying for me.

Still Shorty likes to pay every now and then and it doesn’t matter the amount. It’s only the thought that matters. When we go for a steak dinner, I’ll pay. But when we go eat my favourite pork noodle in Imbi, she pays. Whatever it is… we’re both happy.

So put all expectations aside and just enjoy the relationship. Because would you rather have an abundance of happiness in your life? Or an abundance of money? I would pick an abundance of happiness any day.

After two weeks of traveling to different parts of the region for the small exclusive blogger previews we put together in 4 countries….Today is the launch of NuffnangX.

Before I go on to tell you what it really is about for the first time, let me tell you how this idea came about. Since 2-3 years ago Ming has always said that we need to one way or another find a business that is targeted at the mobile phone. The mobile phone was huge and it was about to get bigger and even today the outlook looks the same. Mobile phones are a bigger deal than they ever were and they’re still set to look even bigger. So Netccentric went on to explore various different internet businesses but we eventually came back to our roots of blogging. Netccentric’s first company after all (Nuffnang) is a company about blogs.

Now here’s the thing about blogs. In today’s world, some 50% of Twitter’s 175 million users and 54% of Facebook’s 900 million users are mobile users. We pulled stats from figures of the 1,000,000 blogs Nuffnang has in Asia and we found that only 1% of blog readers read their blog on their mobile phone. Because of that, the influence of bloggers are being held back. So when I was at Nuffnang Blogopolis in July, someone asked me “What challenges lie ahead for the blogosphere?”. My answer to it… was technology. In the past 10 years so much has changed when it came to social media. Friendster, MySpace and Bebe came and went, then came Facebook, Twitter and today we have Instagram and Twitter. On the blog front, the only thing that has come out of Silicon Valley are platforms like Tumblr and Posterous but when it comes to long-form blogging, all we have is still WordPress and Blogger. After 10 years.

We waited for Silicon Valley to come up with some new mobile innovations for the blogging community but after a few years of waiting nothing happened. So one day Ming and I decided that we had to do it. So Ming and I took out money from our own pockets and created a new company called NuffnangX that will develop a mobile app for reading blogs. Credit to Ming… the app was his idea and I thought was one of the best ideas ever.

As much as felt passionate about the idea and the app it’s a risky investment though. NuffnangX has no revenue model, no ads no nothing for now and will likely not have one at least for the short – medium term. In this period we’re all focused on only one thing… to build a product that users love.

So what does NuffnangX do?

1) Follow Blogs You Love

You can follow blogs that you love just like you follow people on Twitter or Instagram. You can also comment on them, heart them, or share them but that’s not it.

This is where it differs from a traditional reader. Now traditional readers normally pull the title of a blog and then its first paragraph. We felt though that one paragraph is still too long for people to decide whether they want to read a blog or not on a mobile phone. So we developed an algorithm that will crawl through an entire blog and pick the one most interesting line of the blog entry to display on the app.

We call this line the “elevator pitch”.

So for example, when I read Xiaxue’s blog on my reader this is the line it pulls.

The “elevator pitch” may or may not be the first line of the blog entry. In Xiaxue’s case if you compare it with the full blog entry, the line is somewhere in the middle and it’s good enough to tell you what “Quirky Kwerkee” is about and interest you to click it.

Cool huh? It’s currently about 70-80% accurate but will get more accurate in time. How the algorithm does it is still a secret but we’ve filed for a patent for it.

2) NuffnangX Conversations

The other cool feature about NuffnangX that probably hasn’t been properly discovered by a lot of users yet is NuffnangX Conversations. This feature we hope will change the way people leave comments on blogs and respond to them. Traditionally if you want to leave a comment on a blog, you fill up a form and then you leave a comment there. When a blogger wants to respond to it, he/she leaves a another comment herself like this.

That is one of the most frustrating things about making comments or responding to comments.

What NuffnangX conversations does is that it lumps comments into conversation threads.

And because everything is on mobile, when you leaves a comment on my blog via the NuffnangX Conversations plugin below OR via the NuffnangX app, I will get a notification on my phone. When I get that, I can reply your comment from my mobile phone and you will then get a notification on your phone (if you used your NuffnangX account to comment). Commenting on blogs then become a very direct conversation with bloggers and bloggers can reply comments now when they’re on a bus or waiting for an elevator.

You can try it when you see the NuffnangX Conversations plugin at the bottom of my blog.

3) Discovery

There are millions of great blogs out there all over the world. Many blogs that you would be interested to read but you just don’t know how to find them. Up till today there still isn’t a really easy way to find good fashion blogs or tech blogs or even sports blogs. We hope to change that in NuffnangX. To make it easy for people to find new blogs in categories they’re interested in. I for example am really interested in technology, gadgets and celebrity news so NuffnangX has helped me find and follow blogs I wish I knew existed before.

All in all, NuffnangX’s launch today marks the end of some 9 months of preparation work. It is however only the beginning of what we plan to do with the app. After ironing little bugs we have in our initial launch we have so many more ideas on things we can do with NuffnangX. Ideas that we’re holding back for now because we want to make the app as simple as possible to understand. It’s a long road ahead for Ming and I… but a really exciting one.

So download NuffnangX on the Apple App Store for iPhone or Google Play for Android and try it out. I’d love to hear what you think.

Back to work now for me! I have a conference call with the US NuffnangX team in 90 minutes. Good night everyone!

————-

UPDATE: OMG 9 HOURS AFTER LAUNCH AND WE’VE MADE IT TO THE 5TH MOST DOWNLOADED APP ON APPLE’S APP STORE IN SINGAPORE AND 11TH IN MALAYSIA!!!

Today I learned that my blog is one of the few blogs my dear friend Eric Soong reads. So say HELLO ERIC SOONG!

—————–

Hello!

Somewhere in the middle of this week I found myself in the air again!

Lilian,  my new assistant and I took a flight to Manila for the NuffnangX preview event there to twenty of the top bloggers in the Philippines. Of course…. since we were going there we took the chance to do some work with Nuffnang Philippines too and to have lunch with the team.

The team in Nuffnang Philippines now is 16 Nuffies strong. I still remember when we first invested into the Philippines back in 2008. Ming and I had taken whatever money we had earned and then put it all into the Philippines. The digital market in the Philippines at the time was small but we believed in it and we were blessed with finding good partners there. 4 years later it’s paying off. Nuffnang Philippines is one of the fastest growing companies in our group and that investment we made in 2008 paid itself back and more. Not just in monetary terms but in the friendships we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned.

Of all the Nuffies we have everywhere, I think in no other country do the Nuffies love to drink as much as the Nuffies in Nuffnang Philippines do. Every time I go there my liver gets punished a little. When I was at the Nuffnang Philippines office this time round though, I spotted this on one of the Nuffies’ chairs.

They actually made their own custom made Nuffnang letter jacket. Kinda reminds me of McKinley High in Glee. Heh now I feel like making one for the rest of the Nuffies too. The NuffnangX Blogger Preview there was really fun. Maybe it’s because I saw some familiar faces.. like Jane here who I met some few years ago.

The event was held at this cafe called the Big Bad Wolf. The Big Bad Wolf ladies & gentlemen is where I then had the best potato skins I’ve ever had in my life. Now I’ve been to loads of different places with different styles of potato skins but this one… was the best.

It was a little bit crispy but not too crispy… and a little salty. So yummy.

Almost as yummy as the steak I had the night before. Our partner Eric brought us out. Every time I go to the Philippines our partners there bring us out for awesome food.

The Nuffies on the other hand bring me out for drinks and to try weird food. The last time they tricked me into eating ox brain. Remember that?

Still the Philippines was loads of fun. For next year’s Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards we’re deciding whether to hold it in the Philippines or in Australia. The team in the Philippines is a bit worried about the daunting task if they were to host it next year. They want it to be hosted in Melbourne… but hey I told them… after all.. “It’s more fun in the Philippiness”.

While I was in the US I spent a lot of time thinking about our company culture. Sure Nuffnang’s culture is something to be proud of. The Nuffies as we know it are a really fun bunch and it’s really fun to work at Nuffnang. Or so I hear.

But as in all things we do, there’s always the possibility of doing better. So I spent a lot of time in the US thinking, reading and even visiting Zappos there to figure out what their culture is like and how we can take ours to the next level. I came back energized… with loads of ideas ready for implementation. I recruited some Nuffies to help implement some of these ideas and the first one was implemented just last week.

It’s called the Nuffie Hero’s Wall.

When I was in the US, Shorty gave me an article to read about how people get motivated at work. One of those things apart from money and all is recognition and show of gratitude for a good job done. In many Asian companies though, the culture is very much stick more than carrot. So if you do a bad job you almost always get scolding but if you do a good job you may not get recognized or praised for it right?

I realize that happens in our company too and I’ve been guilty of that myself. So I came up with the idea of this Nuffie Heroes Wall. Where Nuffies can leave “thank you” notes for any0ne in the company that they think has helped them or made a difference for them be it at work or even personally. It could be “thank you for staying up late last night and helping me with this project” or “thank you for helping me get through my break-up”.

This will be put up for everyone to see and every two months we clear the board to make space for new notes and the old notes get passed on to the relevant Nuffie for that person to keep. When we put this idea together we weren’t sure how many people in the company would actually use it but wow the response was great. So much that we had to make more space for each month on the board.

There are many other initiatives we have planned but that will come in the following months. So as to not introduce too many things too quickly for the 160 Nuffies in our organization.

On another note Red Bull was really nice to give us a fridge that will be stocked up periodically with Red Bull. They dropped us a mail one day and said they identified the Nuffies as “key opinion leaders” so they all gave us one. Thank you RED BULL!

And finally last week our whole company took a Thursday afternoon off and we went Disco Skating.

I had not skated in 10 years or so but man was that fun to pick up again.

Some of us like Nic Chay here had never skated before so he struggled a bit.

But for most of the time we had Nuffies who knew how to skate coach and help the Nuffies that didn’t. It was good fun.Ok gotta go now guys. Catching a plane to Philippines now for the NuffnangX preview there. See you guys soon.

So let me tell you all about my weekend. This weekend is different from all my other weekends? You know why?

Because it’s one of those weekends when I’m all alone… in this case because Shorty is in Japan for work. Before she left though, she added something in my car. Something I only discovered the next morning after she was gone. So I hopped into my car happily that following morning and I saw THIS on my dashboard… staring at me.

I took a picture of it and posted it up on my Instagram (in case you’re not already following me, you can do so at @timothytiah).

And these were the responses I got.

Clearly a number of people have seen our wedding video where I promised to be only “moderately angry” when she put a Hello Kitty sticker on my car.

This however wasn’t a Hello Kitty sticker. It was some air freshener that stood on my dashboard. Now anyone who looks at my car is going to think that it’s driven either by a girl or a very girly man. In any case I left it there and all weekend I have been struggling to make my peace with it. I still haven’t though. When I was stuck in the jam yesterday I could see it staring at me there with that big act cute smile. It took a lot to hold myself back from whacking it off my dashboard with one swing of my arm.

On another note, I picked up a copy of Malaysian Tatler over the weekend because I found out that a short mention of me was in it.

My friends think I look pretty good in that picture but believe me when I say it’s not because I look good in real life. The photographer had to take some 1,000 pictures of me before he could finally found one where I don’t look either fat, stupid or geeky. Plus on top of that they probably had to airbrush my pimples away too. Credit to them.. they did a great job 🙂

I must say… being the first time Shorty has left me for the weekend, I under-performed when it came to making the most of my “freedom”. On Friday night I went with some Nuffies to meet up with some bloggers at an Asahi drinking session. Where we ordered some 65 glasses of Asahi.

We had it at this bar on KLCC Tower 3. Can’t remember what it’s called but it had this beautiful view of the twin towers.

I don’t know many places where you get to have drinks right next to the tallest twin towers in the world. Here’s me with Povy and Jamie in one of the few pictures I managed to take that night.

I came totally under-dressed too. Everyone there was dressed up in shirts and all but I ended up going in a t-shirt that said “Osaka” on it. Totally unintentional because well.. when I went to work that day choosing to wear that t-shirt I didn’t think I would be going out for drinks at a nice bar after. In fact I didn’t even know that was happening… but some of the Nuffies dragged me along.

So Friday night was off to a good start right you’d think? Right after the NuffnangX preview I was at a bar on top of KL City having drinks with some cool and good looking, well-dressed people. Well… not really. I was the first to leave that night. Went home by 10PM to sleep. My friend Wilson who owns Milkadeal.com then messaged me and asked me to go Butter Factory … apparently some new club but I said nahh wanna go sleep. Just before I slept another friend messaged me and asked me to go clubbing too but again nahh… I tucked myself into bed and was asleep by 11PM or so that night.

Saturday night was even less eventful. I had dinner with my family here and then right after I went back, played some Battlefield 3…. and then was in bed by 11PM. Part of it was because I’ve been keeping myself intentionally jetlagged by a few hours so I could wake up early and go to the gym before I go to work or something but still… how did I just waste Friday and Saturday night sleeping away when all my friends were partying?

Seriously… what has become of me? Is this normal for all married people that… well you just get boring or lazy to go out after a while? Or is this just happening to me.

Oh well we’ll see anyway. Now I gotta go for Sunday dinner with my family then come home to sleep… probably before 11PM again. Ish.

It’s just a few weeks now before our launch of our Silicon Valley startup based in this building in Sunnyvale, California.

This building is a huge center where loads of other Silicon Valley startups are based. Paypal was supposed to have started off here when they were first founded too.

The startup Ming and I are doing in Silicon Valley is called NuffnangX.

Even though it borrows on the name of Nuffnang that we came up with some 5 years ago, NuffnangX is a completely separate unrelated company from Nuffnang. Unlike Nuffnang which is a mid-sized company with a strong management team that practically runs the company now, NuffnangX is a startup with few staff and limited resources that will need loads of personal attention. So Ming and I have invested lots of our personal money and time into it because we believe in it.

But still we know that it’s one of those things that will either be really big some years from now… or completely fail. There is no middle ground because there is no revenue model yet and for it to really make money in future it needs scale. Lots of scale. So much scale that we know even if we’re successful in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia or any of our other Asian countries we’re in… it wouldn’t be big enough to survive. So that’s why we decided to invest in setting up offices in Silicon Valley and in London, to try to cater to our US and UK users.

My colleagues in our US office here Ezen and Gabriel along with some others will be helping us with that.

NuffnangX isn’t meant to be a company or a product targeted just to the Malaysian or Singaporean market. It’s meant to be for the world and our dream is to change the blogosphere of the world.

So far the excitement and the experiences we’ve been having doing this new Silicon Valley startup has been really rewarding. The stress is tough… but still it brings me back to our exciting startup days from before. If we fail, I know at this point that we’ll have no regrets. Ming and I would have lost a lot of time and money… but we would have made in experiences and lessons.

If we succeed though, I hope we would be the first Asian company to be able to break into Silicon Valley.

Wish me luck guys.

If you want to be kept up to date with NuffnangX’s developments, you can go to www.nuffnangx.com.

Or follow NuffnangX on Twitter @NuffnangX.

So here’s the deal. I’ve always wanted new experiences… and one of the things on my bucket list is to go sky diving. I’ve always wanted to do that but was held back by the thought of the feeling of the ‘drop’. Like I love rollercoasters but the one thing I can’t stand to bear is when you feel like you’ve left your stomach behind (still because I love the thrill I end up doing all sorts of roller coasters). Recently though I happened to find out that sky diving doesn’t have that drop feeling at all.

It basically just feels like floating all the way down from the air.

That removed my last and actually only fear of sky diving and I was all up for going. So in Vegas last week I had researched a place to dive and decided to go. The day before I planned to go I was talking to Shorty about it and she wasn’t excited about the idea. She said “NO NO NO… What if you die?”. Then I asked her if she’s putting her foot down and she said “Yes”, followed by a stamping of her right foot on the ground.

I didn’t give up though. I kept bugging her about it all the way till the night before and she finally said
“Okay! Google skydiving accident stats and let me see them”.

So I googled it hoping to find something encouraging. That you know… it’s really safe now with technology. The stats I pulled showed that in 2012 alone, about one reported person a month has died from Skydiving. If that didn’t scare Shorty enough, it went on to describe how the accidents happen. In one case both parachutes didn’t open on the way down and the instructor and student that was strapped to him just went splat on the ground. The student died on the spot but the instructor lived. Though he was critically injured.

In the end I yielded. So I started looking for another experience to do in Vegas and I found one where you can drive supercars on a race track.

I signed up for it immediately and the next morning we found ourselves on the way to a race track.

When we first got there, they got us to go for a briefing on some basics of driving on a track. Then they brought us in a car around the track so we got familiar with it and then they got us all to put helmets on.

Shorty said the helmet made everyone wearing it look silly. Never bugged me though heh. After suiting up, we picked whatever cars we wanted from the whole selection of Ferraris, Lambos, SLS, R8s, Astons and the likes. Then we sat in the car with an instructor who then taught us how to drive. He taught me how to take turns quickly… you know… slow down before a turn, drop a gear and then release a gear just while you’re making the turn.

I ended up trying out two cars. The first one was a Ferrari 458 Italia which apparently costs upwards of RM2 million in Malaysia. This is the instructor briefing me before I got on to the track.

The 458 is the latest Ferrari and I must say it was amazing to drive. I thought it was the most forgiving car to drive. I could take sharp turns too quickly and no matter how I punished the car or yanked the steering wheel, the car would stick to the ground.

I got a video done of me driving the car with the instructor. You can watch it here.

After the Ferrari F458 Italia I tried the Lamborghini Gallardo.

Unlike the Ferrari 458, the Gallardo is the lower end of a super car (unlike some of the other Lambos). So it didn’t handle as well as the Ferrari but somehow I loved it. I loved how it”s smaller and more compact looking… and looks really sharp. I thought I’ve always wanted a Ferrari before… but now I think my dream car is a Lamborghini Gallardo.

Because it didn’t handle as well as the Ferrari (and because I’m not a good race track driver) I ended up taking turns too quickly and had my car skid. Was still loads of fun though.

At the end of the experience we had one last option (notice how they only allow you to go for this next option only at the END). We could go on a “ride along” on a Corvette. The driver was a professional race car driver that would drift the whole track. I asked my instructor if I should go for it and he said “Well do you like rollercoasters?”
I said “YES!” and he replied “Then go for it!“. So I did.

This is a video of what happened next.

I had two new experiences that I had never had before that day. One… to drive super cars on a race track.

And another… to ride with a professional driver as he drifted through the track. Both were equally awesome.

Hi Everyone!

It’s our last night here in the USA. We’re back in Silicon Valley now so tomorrow I go to work at our new office here and at night we’re taking a flight back to Malaysia. It’s hard to believe we’ve been away for 3 weeks. This is the longest I have ever been away from home (apart from my 3 years studying in London).

So since I’m not going to be able to blog much in the next few days, Shorty and I decided that we’re going to leave you with our long overdue blog post of our wedding dinner. Lots of the pictures here are courtesy of our photographer Wayne, my cousin Michelle who is ALSO a talented photographer and Carol. So rather than go through a whole long story of the night, let me show you picture by picture. This is how our photo corner looked like.

I remember the first time we went to our wedding planner, Audrey Chow from Focal Concepts. She asked us “So what theme do you have in mind?”. We immediately said “UP!”. At first it drew some blank stares but when we explained that it was supposed to be the Disney Pixar cartoon UP,  she immediately got it. She was excited about doing it because it wasn’t like the usual wedding she had done before. Most weddings she has done have colour themes or flower themes but this was the first … well.. odd one.. she had.

Audrey (as in Audrey Chow, not to be mistaken with Shorty) and Shorty worked together and came up with some of the best ideas. That photo corner was one of Audrey’s ideas I think and it was meant to be the “Living room” of the UP House. She even sourced for furniture that looked as close as possible to that and added in some personal touches in it. For example, look at the backdrop of it.. notice the little blue ChurpChurp bird? Shorty and Audrey filled the photo frames of the photo corner with pictures of Shorty and I either from our photoshoot or our childhood pictures.

Then comes the decor of the registration table.

We had more pictures of us.

And we had a mailbox with our handprint on it… just like in UP.

Then this I think is another of Audrey’s ideas where she took this picture of us and got all the guests to leave coloured thumb prints on them so they all end up looking like balloons.

Our guest book, was the exact same Adventure Book that Mr Fredrickson had in UP. Then of course we had loads of signs that led guests to thewedding party.

Now we knew UP themed meant we had to have a lot of balloons right. The problem was that… if you had a lot of balloons tied around chairs all over the ballroom you’d end up with a wedding that looked more like a birthday party than a wedding. So Audrey suggested that instead of balloons, we use lanterns… and this is how beautiful it looked by the time it was all set up (but just before the guests arrived).

This is the walkway from the door all the way to the stage.

Shorty picked the door gifts and ended up with these little jars of honey. I don’t really know why to be honest and I’m yet to ask her but it looked cute so okaaay.

On the stage came our backdrop. The theme or the objective of the wedding wasn’t to make it look grand. We’ve been to lots of grand weddings before and wow are they hard to beat. So Shorty and I just wanted a fun wedding. Our backdrop on the stage ended up like this.

Notice the “duct tape” on the side of it holding the map down. It’s kinda how the world map in the adventure book looked like in UP. And if you look closely at the map you’ll see markings on the places that Shorty and I have been together. Or places that she has been without me. And yes my favourite part of the backdrop was how they used real balloons to hold “US” up 🙂 Oh Oh and I nearly forgot to mention. WE HAD AN ACTUAL FLOATING HOUSE !!!

While Shorty and I were hiding in the bridal suite getting ready. Our guests were gathering at the cocktail area already. Some of my friends came from all over. Here’s Hasan from Bahrain talking to Eddie and Adrian from Hong Kong.

I met all three of them while studying at University College London. I used to hang out with them every day! I came down before Shorty to mingle with the guests. Here’s me with Sara and Linda.

And here’s Rina and Wendy taking a picture with Angeline in the background looking really fierce (but hot ok.. hot .. ).

You know the best part about a wedding is that it’s the one time in your life where all the friends you made throughout life will come together in one place.

I had friends from school in Penang, my college friends in KL, my London friends and now my current friends.

They were all together in this one place. Some of them knew each other, some of them didn’t but all of them were happy. And this will probably almost never happen again.

So after all our guests went into the ballroom, it was time for our entrance. First went the bridesmaids with the groomsmen.

And then came Shorty and me.

Words cannot describe the feeling of doing the first walk-in. You walk hand in hand with the woman you love, down a red carpet with all your best friends and fathers friends on the side standing and clapping with smiles on their faces. If there was one moment in my life I could save and revisit over and over again… it would be this.

I gotta say AGAIN that I LOVE Shorty’s dress. It is the most beautiful wedding dress I had ever seen in my life. Thank you again for designing it Gilbert.

Now traditionally once the bride and groom walk into the room, they take their seats at the main table and then everyone else sits down. My mum though wanted something different. She said forget tradition. She said that it was only polite for me to go up on stage first and thank all our guests for coming tonight. So because mummy knows best… I went on stage, still holding my Shorty’s hand and thanked our guests who had come from all over the world for that one night.

Then we went back to sit down on the main table.

The rest of the night went by really quickly.  I remember being disappointed with the first few servings of my food. We had gone for a food tasting before and it was really good but that night I didn’t really enjoy my food. I guess it’s one thing to make food for one table… and another thing to make food for seventy. What I did enjoy though was the company of all my other friends there.

After we all sat down my father gave a speech. I can’t include a picture of that yet because my Dad is blog-shy.   And then after some food and some performances Angela went up to give her speech as maid of honor.

Then Shorty went away to make her change.

While she was putting on her second change, I was….

Well going around and drinking with my Dad’s friends. And then came my turn to go up and give my speech.

I already posted the content of my speech before but if you want to read it again, here it is. Here’s Shorty talking to her bridesmaids.

And then came Ming’s turn to give his speech as my best man.

After Ming’s speech, the Nuffies had a little surprise for me. They all went up on stage and they all department by department said some words or poems. It was a nice little surprise… enough to get me up clapping by the end of it.

We ended with a group picture.

This is a picture of me talking to my grandmother.

I can’t remember what about but possibly something about great grandchildren…

The night flew by much quicker than I expected it to be. Before I knew it I was at the exit saying goodbye to all the guests that came. I had never in my hands shaken the hands of 700 people before. It was tiring. Took us quite a while… so much that by the end of it even Shorty decided to do without her high heels. People had to bend down to hug her. Hehe.

We were supposed to go for an after party after that but Shorty said she was too tired to. I don’t blame her. It was a long and tiring day… but it was an awesome wedding.

An awesome wedding… of a Fatty and a Shorty.

Read Shorty’s version here.

————-

PS:

One of the reasons why Shorty and I loved our wedding so much is because it came out not just like how we envisioned it to be… but even better. We couldn’t have done it if we didn’t have the right people working with us for all these things and I think we were blessed to have the right planner, photographer etc etc.

So I want to share our contacts with you. If you’re a bride to be… let me see if I can help you out in making your wedding awesome.

Here are some resources if you’re looking to plan a wedding of yours soon. I’ll list our wedding planner, photographer and wedding dress designer.

Wedding Planner – Focal Concept. They’re a Penang company. Who we worked with though was a lady named Audrey Chow. She’s awesome. Her email is dreychow@gmail.com. It’s so important to have a wedding planner who not only understands how important your wedding is to you but totally understands what you want and know how to build on to it. Audrey was one such planner.

Wedding Dress Designer – Shorty’s wedding dress which I think is the most beautiful of all is done by Gilbert. You can check out his site here.

Wedding Photographer  – Wayne from Mocco.my. Wayne and his crew were awesome and I think he managed to capture the emotions of our wedding so well. There are so many other pictures but I can’t post them all. He’s great.

Videographer – And of course, our video grapher was Crazy Monkey Studios. Ask for SK. They did the meme proposal video and the meme proposal sequel. They also did the video for our wedding dinner but they’re still working on that so it’s not out yet. You can also reach them on Facebook here.

Hair Stylist and Make-Up – Shorty seems to think that I look good that night only because Hicky from 76Style did a great job in styling my hair. Hicky was awesome, she was with us all weekend and took good care of Audrey’s make-up throughout. She wasn’t just like a stylist… but like a friend. She helped Shorty with everything she needed. You can check out 76 Style here.

Pre-Wedding Photo Shoot – One Way Ticket was the company we used. They’re new and I heard we’re one of the first couples they did. We didn’t want to go for the tried and true and famous photographers. We wanted to go for the rebels… the new kid on the block that would be passionate about doing a quirky shoot. And do a great quirky shoot they did. You can reach them here.

So I was at a stand-up comedy gig last night and the comedian said

“Vegas is the only place in the world where once you land you’ll call one of your friends and say ‘I’M IN VEGAS BABY!!!’. It really is… you don’t hear anyone landing in Ohio and calling his friend and saying ‘I’M IN CLEVELAND BABY!'”.

And yes ladies & gentlemen. That’s where I am!

I’m going to be here for a week. Actually it was supposed to be for a few days to kill time before I have to get back to San Francisco on the 31st August to orientate our new team just before I head home to KL. Then yesterday as I was looking at the hotel rates for San Francisco I was like wtf? The hotels in Vegas are like 60% cheaper than the hotels in SF. So I decided to spend more time in Vegas killing time and only head back to SF when I really have to.

It’s been fun though. Let me run through with you what we did from the pictures we took in the past few days.

Shorty and I went to watch The Beatles Love Cirque Du Soleil. It’s basically like a circus with all sorts of stunts and dancing to the Beatles old songs.

Shorty first heard about this when she saw an ad about it on TV in San Francisco and she immediately decided she had to go. So we got the tickets and went. She loved it but I didn’t know many of the songs they played so I didn’t really enjoy it. Now don’t get me wrong… I love the Beatles too but maybe I don’t know ALL the songs… and the other songs they chose to play… well I didn’t quite like them. So I thought it was just really bad song selection.

We walked down the Strip many times in the past few days. Another thing that same comedian I was referring to in the beginning of this entry talked about during his gig was “depth perception”. He said “Just because you can see the Stratosphere… it don’t mean its a block away”.

And that’s so true of us. Somehow everything in Vegas looks close but when you actually start walking it’s pretty friggin far eventhough you can see it right in front of you. It’s easy to underestimate how big each hotel is and how long it takes to walk past each one.

This is one of the nicest hotels on the Strip. The Bellagio.

Famous for its beautiful fountain show that they have every 30 minutes or so.

You can watch a video that I found of it on YouTube here.

I remember reading about it in a book about Vegas once. It was actually built by Steve Wynn for $1.6 billion plus another $400 million he spent just on art to decorate the place. The whole theme of the hotel was that it was supposed to be a really luxurious place… and well he spared no expense even in the expensive art he got for the place. That was what got him personally interested in art.

Eventually though because he was spending so much money building the Bellagio the share price of his company then came down so much that a competitor of his bought it over and now owns the Bellagio. Kinda sucks right.

So what he did later on was to build an even more luxurious hotel called the Wynn… and the Encore.

And yes…. that thing in the bottom left of the picture here… is my finger.

The hotels here on the Las Vegas Strip are huge. Each of them have thousands of rooms each and they have very different themes. There’s a hotel called New York New York.

And a hotel called Paris with an Eiffel Tower of its own.

Or even this huge complex called City Center.

There are just so many things to do in Vegas. Sure there are the hangover Strip Club kind of things but apart from that and the gambling there are tons of shows to watch.

Shorty and I have been watching a new show almost every day until well.. we’re kinda running out of money so today we’re not going to do that today.
Part of the fun part of Vegas was meeting one of Shorty’s readers: Rachel and her boyfriend Anthony.

This is them making some personalized M&Ms at this machine.

And this is me with Anthony.

With my eyes closed for whatever reason.

One of the first places we had a meal together was at this Diner kind of place. I ordered some corn beef with bread but it looked huge on the menu so I decided to order like a half portion. And this is how it looked like.

Seriously. There is so much meat it’s almost like they just killed a cow and slapped two slices of bread around it.

We had a fun few days hanging out with Anthony and Rachel but unfortunately they had to go back today. So let me end this entry with the last dinner we had together at Wolfgang Puck last night.

Ok guys… time to go sight-seeing. More updates in the next few days!