I woke up this morning and realized that my Shorty jumped me and published our wedding photos on her blog first. So to make it fair to my own readers, here are some of the best pictures I picked.

Our wedding shoot took a whole day. After the shoot though I realized that I will never be able to live the life of a model. I find taking photos such a painful thing to do and I think the photographer found me really stiff and hard to work with. Credit to them for managing to make the best of my unphotogenic self.

So here are the pictures.

Because we’re having an UP Themed wedding, we got a little Grape Soda badge too.

And we had an Up-Themed shoot in the afternoon.

And our last and final shoot took place at night in Petaling Street.

I gotta thank One Way Ticket for the great job they did with the photos. For more of our wedding photos you can check out Shorty’s blog.

On another note, today I arranged for JJ & Ean from Hitz.fm to do a Gotcha call on Audrey. Haha listen out for it in the next few days.

Hello everyone!

I just got back from Beijing.

It was a really short business trip that I had to make just two weeks before the wedding. This time though I managed to drag Shorty along for a quick break.

We flew on Sunday night and arrived Beijing on Monday morning at 6am. Right after that I went straight to work. As for Shorty, she took a short nap in the hotel then went on with an itinerary I had planned out for her. For the two days that I was there for work I arranged for a tour guide to take Shorty around Beijing to see all the historical sites or do whatever she wanted to do. I spent my entire day time in the office in meetings with the Nuffies there

but Shorty on the other hand managed to go visit the Forbidden City, The Summer Palace and even time to do her nails. For that side of the story you can probably read that on her blog when she updates it next.

On my end though the only time I managed to go out and enjoy Beijing was during lunch or dinner or at night after work. We did a few things then.

David introduced me to a fellow Malaysian who was working in the advertising industry there in Bejing. Her name is Nicole. She’s smart, witty and really funny. She brought us to loads of good food and on the first night brought us for a short walk around a shopping area there.

I can’t remember what it’s called but there’s a huge shopping district of designer brands in Beijing that often look empty. The reason isn’t because the Chinese don’t like their designer goods. Quite the opposite actually.. they love branded stuff… but in China all designer goods cost some 30% or so more because of the import tax.

According to Nicole though, some local Chinese still go to those stores sometimes and buy stuff just to be seen.

We’ve had some funny meals when we were there too. For lunch on one of those days, the team brought us to a restaurant that actually serves insects.

I totally opted out of it. Can’t bear the thought of eating maggots or worms or stuff like that.

One of the highlights for me this trip though was the last night. We had finished all our work so we decided to go celebrate and for that we went for ice-cream.

At one of the largest Haagen Dazs I have ever seen. It was like a whole building.
Here’s Ming, me, Shorty, Nicole, David and Aveline.

And here’s Aveline and Rebecca, visiting from our Singapore office.

It was an extremely tiring trip for me. Fly in, do work and fly out. It was though a very very productive trip and eventhough I spent so little time exploring Beijing this time round, I kinda grew to like it a little more this trip.

My reward for the tough trip is this.

Yes…  I love ice-cream!

So in the past couple of weeks we’ve outgrown our old office and took over another unit which now acts as our new office. There are now 50 Nuffies in the KL office so we thought that it was about time some of us actually moved out for our own space. We still have the old orange office… but it’s now more like a back office to us.

For the first time ever… we now have our own little lobby with our logos on it to greet guests.

Now when we first took over this new office unit, everything about it was really corporate. It was nice.. but just corporate. We knew it wouldn’t do. We also knew that our Nuffies were a talented bunch. So instead of getting an interior decorator to do it, we set aside some budgets and we trusted the Nuffies who would be using the new office a free hand in decorating their own offices. Or as we call it… to “Nuffie-fy” our new office.

This is the result.

Welcome to the Blogger Relations Department in Nuffnang Malaysia.

This is where the team that manages our 300,000 bloggers in Malaysia sit every day and help Nuffnang bloggers with whatever they need.

They thought that since we’re all crazy about blogging and social media in general, they would decorate their walls with this.

And they would have little photo frames all over with a little notice board for them to put up post-it notes for each other.

And of course there’s a notice board for them to put up stuff they got to keep from past Nuffnang events.

Whether it’s just a ticket stub or a flyer or even a cap from the event.

Next to the Blogger Relations department is a more formal meeting room where we have some of our bigger meetings.

It comes full equipped with a wine cooler, fridge, microwave etc etc for the people having a meeting to snack. We’re also thinking of adding a foosball table in the room for Nuffies to chill out when the room is not being used for serious stuff.

On the whole other side of the office sits the ChurpChurp team. They keep their door closed all the time so nobody really knows what the girls are doing. They call their HQ, the Birdie’s Nest.

Right outside their room though you’ll see their shoe racks with all their shoes in them.

Welcome to the ChurpChurp office.

They opted for a bright yellow wall and little decos that are of birds… since well… ChurpChurp’s mascot is a bird.

The entire ChurpChurp team operates very independently from Nuffnang and even from me. I don’t really get involved with their team at all. I just put a bunch of really talented people together and they do their own hiring and run their own operations. One thing about them though.. is that for some reason… all the staff at ChurpChurp are girls.

Which kinda explains why @Churp2 is so feminine.

I asked them why is it they don’t have any guys in their team and they played this song which they say is their theme song.

So okay… fine fine. I moved on but told them it’s about time they hired some guys. Perhaps they foresee themselves hiring some guys already because for some reason they have a football in there.

The rest of their office is pretty cool

I really like how they turned boring old cupboards to really nice ones like this.

Or boring plain walls with little stickers of birds like this.

And of course they too have their own notice board where they can post memorabilia from their previous events.

My favourite part of their office though was their insta-wall. Where they printed up and put up pictures that all of them had collected about Nuffnang or ChurpChurp from Instagram.

I spent some 10 minutes there looking at one by one of the photos. I love how they’re really creative in the stuff they put up and the best part was that they’re not even done. When I went over they were still putting stuff together for their new office.

I think the Nuffies at both Nuffnang & ChurpChurp did an awesome job with their new office. I always think though that it’s not just about how the office looks that makes a company fun. It’s the culture and the people and for that I’m thankful that I’m working with the most wonderful team evah!

I go to work every day looking forward to see all of them.

But I realized that the pictures I took for it was all blurry!

Well so let me give you a bit of a spoiler. The new entry is about our new Nuffnang & ChurpChurp office in KL. It’s really really cool so to give justice to what the Nuffies there did to the office I’m going to go back to the office tomorrow and retake some of those pictures. Then I’ll update this blog again ok. Until then… see ya everyone.

I got a surprise wedding present sent to my office today. The sender was anonymous but looking at the return address, it looks like it came from a company called Determined Chicken. They sent us a t-shirt of Derp and Derpina. If you read 9GAG often enough then you’ll know who they are 🙂

And some meme badges too… I guess because of our meme proposal.

I googled them and found their site that sold lots of meme related merchandise. So if you’re into memes… you can get them here.

Thank you for the nice gift Determined Chicken!

On another note… our wedding is in two weeks so Shorty and I have been doing what all to-be-wed couples do at some time before their wedding. Rummage through all their childhood pictures for their wedding video. My mum sent some of mine up from Penang so let me show you how I look like.

This…. is how I look like today.

Except thinner. Camera added 10 pounds here *denial

And this… is how I looked like as a little boy.

It was my birthday party and my mum got me a cake that looked like a cottage. The baby on my left with very little hair… is actually my little sister. She was damn cute (and still is cute to me actually)!

So does the kid look like me? I know what you’re thinking… “But… where is the mole?”.

I think I only grew my mole in my later years.

My mum was talking to me and Audrey about wedding stuff last weekend. I gotta admit that I’m not very involved in the wedding preparations. Shorty has got it all covered on that end. So far no bridezilla moment from her yet… well then again she did kinda have one last week but the next day she regained her morale and was just like this.

So one thing I learned is that apparently one of our wedding band members play the trumpet. My mum asked me to think about what kind of songs we want the wedding band to play that involved the trumpet.

Well… when it comes to music I’m really ignorant. So when I thought about what our trumpet could play, I thought about this.

Well this is not really a trumpet. More like a bugle but for some reason every time I think of a trumpet I think of this tune. I get flashbacks from all the cartoons I watched growing up… you know when one cartoon wants to wake up another cartoon, he pulls out this bugle and starts blowing away the most annoying tune ever.

I decided to explore how annoying this tune would be as a wake up call. So I downloaded it to my phone and made it not just my alarm clock sound but also my ring tone. It has two kinds of effect on you… but the effect it has depends on what state of mind you are.

1) When my phone rings around people who are wide awake, they tend to laugh at my silly ringtone.

2) When you’re sleeping though there is a different effect. I tested it on trying to wake up Shorty one day. Some background on the case, Shorty is extremely hard to wake up in the mornings. A volcano can explode 500 metres away and if we don’t turn to ash instantly, Shorty would still be asleep. So I played this tune to wake her up one morning. The first 10 seconds of it passed and Shorty didn’t move an inch. Then as the tune dragged on relentlessly for the next 20 seconds she finally woke up… looking annoyed and looking like she just got out of the wrong side of bed and is going to make me pay for it.

So guys… what do you think of my new ringtone? Hehehe

When I told the Nuffies I had a new ringtone they were guessing “Is it call me maybe?”. Ah come on… this is much better.

 

So today I started toying around with Siri a little bit. My friends and I were just talking about the new Samsung Galaxy S3 yesterday and how good it was, since Pierre and Ming just got one each. Then I told them how I regret going for the iPhone 4S just because of Siri. I remember when the iPhone 4S first came out. Everyone was talking about Siri and how good it was and etc etc etc.

Fast forward to now, I don’t hear anyone talking about Siri anymore…. because it just doesn’t work well enough. I seldom use Siri now too. Well I still try but most of the time it doesn’t get me.

Today I tried to ask it to remind me to take my parking card back at 7 o clock. This is what Siri understood from me.

 

 

Yep… Siri still doesn’t get me.

 

So Shorty and I have been talking a lot of people about where to go for our Honeymoon. Most people supported the idea of a Europe trip but I’m not sure if that’s my kind of thing. While I was studying in London I did manage to explore Europe a little bit and I can’t say that it’s a part of the world that I enjoy. Plus my parents now are cautious about letting me go to Greece or Spain or places like that because their economies are not doing well. They have high unemployment and well potentially high crime. Then again if we look at the amount of crime that we have in KL right now… can it be much worse?

I don’t know if it’s just me but I’ve always had this one place that I’ve always wanted to go since I was a little boy. That place is Disneyworld, Florida. As a kid, I remember reading about it in some big encyclopedia-like book that talked about how it was the biggest amusement park in the world. Over the years, I hear that it has gotten only bigger. I’ve always wanted to go there. Go spend a week or two there in the happiest place on Earth where there is so much to see you can immerse yourself in Disney for a week and not feel bored.

So that’s where Shorty and I decided to go for our Honeymoon this year. Not Europe or anything like that… but Disneyworld, Florida. I kinda wish I could go as soon as next month but we decided that we’re going to wait till its cooler… some time in October or November before we go.

Shorty and I haven’t had a holiday in a while. This time last year we had just finished our beach holiday in Krabi and it was just a couple of months away from our London trip. So this year’s gap between this and a holiday seems like a whole long time.  Plus I’m having an extremely busy year and I have so much to do before our Disneyworld honeymoon. I guess that’s why my blogging frequency has suffered a little. I’ve just had so much to do these days that I can hardly find the time to blog.

Back to the main point, has anyone been to Disneyworld Florida? How is it?

Been another really busy week for me this week. So busy that it just flew by.

Here’s what I’ve been up to recently.

1) Went for the Astro On The Go party with Nuffnang & ChurpChurp.

Loads of Nuffnangers and Churpers there at this joint party that was hosted by Adam C.

The dress code was to wear your favourite football jersey. Shorty wore my Man Utd jersey and matched it with a shoe I had never ever seen before in my life.

According to her, it’s supposed to be a Hello Kitty shoe.

Only managed to take a few pictures that night. Here’s one with Shorty and I with Jesrina and partner.

And one with Sofia from ChurpChurp. Sofia has been working with ChurpChurp for close to a year now. She just came up to me at the event and said “Tim! I’ve just realized we’ve never taken a picture together”.

2) Mashable Hangout!

This is the coolest thing I’ve done in the past week. Mashable dropped me a mail the week before and asked if I’d like to be part of a Google Hangout that discusses the state of social media in Asia.

If you’d like to watch what happened at the Hangout you can read about it here on Mashable.

3) Bought my own Japanese tea cup!

Haha I know this is a really small thing but it’s one of those things that need not cost a lot of money but still made me happy. I followed Shorty to Daiso this week to look at some stuff. You guys know Daiso right? The Japanese store where everything is RM5.

So I saw a shelf with Japanese tea cups and I decided to pick a couple of these up because I drink green tea every day and I normally do it from some random cup. I decided it was time to drink from a proper Japanese tea cup!

I bought two for RM10. One for my office and one for my home.

When I brought it back to my office, Angeline the accountant looked at me and questioned me where I got it from. She thought that I had stolen it from some Japanese restaurant over lunch. Ye of little faith!

4) Siri

Finally, in other news… Siri is still not working for me.

I gotta say that I feel like I was suckered into buying the iPhone 4S because I saw the ads on how cool Siri was. If I had known that it wouldn’t really understand me as well as I thought it would… I wouldn’t have bought it. Then I probably would’ve gotten an Samsung Galaxy S3 by now or something. Oh well….

This past year I’ve had the chance to meet and develop friendships with some really cool people. One of them is Sam.

Some time last year, Pierre introduced me to a guy who wanted to know more about social media. When I eventually met up with Sam, it turned out that we had actually met once before. His Dad and my uncle are friends and we once bumped into each other at a restaurant.

Sam’s family owns a property developer called Ken Holdings that Sam helps to run. He’s smart, humble and a really easy guy to get along with, so we somehow clicked and before I knew it I was hanging out with Sam’s group of friends who surprise surprise… turned out to be all property developers too. I was the odd one out… the only non-property developer of the group. Through this new group of friends I learned a lot about the property industry in Malaysia. I never used to understand what the difference was and how property developers sought to differentiate themselves, but over time I did.

Sam’s family company Ken Holdings for example differentiates itself in building “green” buildings. Buildings that are not just beautiful but energy efficient. When he first told me about it, I thought having a “green building” just meant having big windows so you can let the light in and having solar panels on the roof or something. Over a Bak Kut Teh lunch he took the time to elaborate. He told me how lots of little details mattered… like even which direction a house faces (against the sun). An ideal house doesn’t have to bear the full brunt of the heat from the sun but still enjoys the light that the sun brings into the house (so you don’t have to turn on lights during the day).

Some few weeks ago, Sam asked me along to visit one of his favourite developments though. It’s called Ken Bangsar.

He brought us up to the penthouse there which he says is the highest residential unit in the entire Klang Valley. The view there was gorgeous. I wish I had a picture of the view but I was so captivated and distracted by the beautiful view and the apartment that it didn’t even occur to me to take any pictures.

I did manage to get a couple of pictures of the penthouse I visited though. This ladies and gentlemen, is what the living room of a penthouse I can’t afford looks like.

Notice the huge windows. It’s so bright in the apartment during the day that you hardly have to turn on any lights.

The penthouse had 3 floors, each with really really high ceilings. It had beautifully furnished rooms and a private pool

The way the building was designed made the corridors really windy too so the elevator lobby didn’t have to be air-conditioned or anything. It still felt really cool up there. Sam is really into green stuff like that when they build any of their buildings. The pleasure of meeting all sorts of people from different industries is that you get to learn a bit more about different businesses. That I realize is something I enjoy: Learning how other companies work. In this past year, I’ve met people who’re property developers, plantation owners… even specialized cleaning companies or owners of businesses that made loads of money but you never imagined existed. The sad thing is that few of them are on Twitter, blogs or even Facebook. So I don’t get to follow them as much. So whenever I meet them I try to get them to at least start Tweeting.

I convinced Sam to tweet and now he tweets at @SamCS10. So if you’d like to see what a property developer’s life is like… you can follow him here. Hint: They play a lot of golf.