Sorry just realized previous entry was cut off. Stupid wordpress. Here is the full version.

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On the second day of our company trip, we were all up early. Oh yeah let me show you some promised pictures of our room at the resort. This is the room that Ming and I shared.

The room was so nice it really looked like it was made for couples to shag on their honeymoon trips. Why? Because in the bathroom was this huge Jacuzzi meant for two.

The room and the Jacuzzi however, were wasted on Ming and I. We were really cautious about letting the room get to us. We made sure no bromance kind of shit happened right there.

So anyway on the second day,I got out of my room by 7AM. It was bright out though so I took a picture of a part of our resort which had this tower thing. That’s the entrance to the lobby of the resort.

We all had breakfast and we then headed to the elephant farm where we caught an early show of trained elephants doing all sorts of tricks.

We even saw elephants draw pictures of themselves or pictures of scenery with paint and water colour. It was amazing. I saw this one painting later drawn by an elephant which featured an elephant humping another elephant. Yes… I supposed elephants have porn too.

Throughout the show I could feel Clara’s excitement from right next to me.

We also went for an elephant ride. There were 50 of us Nuffies there so it took 25 elephants to bring us from one end of the farm to another.

Riding on elephants is loads of fun. I can’t explain why… maybe it’s because you’re sitting really high up and really because when the elephant walks from side to side you shake a lot and think you’re going to fall off.

It was real cute seeing Yuen Yee and Wenny ride the elephants. They’re both terrified of heights and riding on that elephant was hell to them and you could see it in their facial expressions. By the end of the ride though they both admitted they had loads of fun.

So when the elephant ride was done, we all went…

on a bamboo raft ride down the river.

They gave me a chance to control the raft from the front at one point. But I was so bad at it my raft went sideways and nearly went off the river.

So most of the time we just sat there and took pictures. Here’s what with me and Raessa.

The bamboo raft ride was the last activity on the elephant farm. After that the tour brought us to this umbrella factory where we could buy all the touristy kind of stuff (and the tour guides could earn a commission or something).

Unfortunately most of us didn’t buy anything apart from an aunty that had this small ice-cream stall. All of us went in there and cleared out her fridge for the day.

The one person that DID do lots of shopping though was Wenny.

Wenny is the oldest Nuffie in our company. She’s married with two kids and she helps manage our finances. So she’s like an aunty figure in our company that tells us what we can afford and what we can’t afford. She was our first full-time accountant that joined us in the early days of Nuffnang and was there all the way to see Nuffnang/ChurpChurp grow. Throughout the whole trip she did loads of shopping for her family and her kids. Including loads of baby clothes.

Unlike the rest of us that mainly just went around buying ice-cream or coconuts.

After the umbrella factory, we all went back to the resort and everyone went their own ways. Some went shopping, some went for massages. Firdy, Min and I though decided to check out the clubs in Chiang Mai. So we went to this club there called Warm-Up. I love Thai clubs. Their format is really like Neverland in KL. You have live performances and when the live performances take a break, good RNB or dance music comes on. So we went to check it out… and also to check out what a lot of my Thai friends in Bangkok have been telling me about Chiang Mai.

When I told my Thai friends I was going to Chiang Mai for a company trip they all said “Chiang Mai girls are VERY PRETTY”. So ok! We were determined to put that to the test. After that night I can say… YES everyone. It is true. Chiang Mai girls are the prettiest girls in Thailand. Then again, when I got back I told Shorty that and she didn’t believe me. She always doubts my taste in women.

The atmosphere in Thai clubs though is amazing. You know how in KL or Singapore when you go clubbing, most people are quite stand around their tables and are quite conscious about how they look like to other people in the club. In Thailand, everybody doesn’t seem to care about how they look. They just go there, jump around and want to have fun.

Anyway one highlight for me that night was when we were trying to figure out how to go to the club. We called some taxis but they all weren’t free to take us so we resorted in booking a tuk tuk. Our tuk tuk though wasn’t just ANY tuk tuk. It was this one.

Glowing with neon lights and all YO! All setting the mood for clubbing. We took a picture on board the tuk tuk and this is how we looked.

Like the Blue Man Group.

The joke was we were talking among ourselves on the way to the club in the neon-lit tuk tuk. I said
“I hope the tuk tuk doesn’t drop us right in front of the club. Otherwise we would all arrive damn unglam la”.

Some 15 minutes later… here was the scene at the entrance of the club when we finally got there.

Nice cars were in a queue taking turns to drop beautiful people off for a club night out. Then after one car, one little tuk tuk covered in blue neon-lights appeared and stopped right in front of the club with everyone looking. Three grown men squashed in the back alight and walk as cool as possible to the club.

Yes… everyone was looking. I’m not sure if they were looking at the fact that we came in a tuk tuk or because our tuk tuk looked like a UFO from the 60s.

I saw this video posted on ChurpChurp SG here.

Check this out. It’s about the lifestyle of a window washer.

A window washer that is richer than us all.

This actually reminds me of another real life story. When I was studying in London my friend and I always noticed this “homeless” lady sitting outside Harrods in Knightsbridge begging for money. One day though, my friend happened to notice that when she finished work she walked further ahead down the street and she got picked up in a chauffeur-driven car. He was like WTF?!?

So I guess begging for money is like all other professions. If you’re good at it, you’ll make loads of money.

Today I flew into Chiang Mai to meet some of the Nuffies here that flew in a few hours before me. We’re in Chiang Mai this week for our long overdue company trip.

Our company trip is a combined company trip of the Nuffnang & ChurpChurp teams in both Malaysia and Singapore. We’re staying in this really nice resort here that I kinda neglected to take pictures of today because I was in a rush. I shall take many pictures of our rooms and resort tomorrow.

What I did take lots of pictures of though was our little group activity we did earlier today. A few hours after landing in Chiang Mai airport I found myself in a paddy field dressed like a farmer.

The activity that the organizers of the trip had planned… was planting paddy.

We were all broken up into teams and had a competition going to see who could plant the most paddy quickest and who could do it in the most organized “straight-line” way. You’ll be surprised, planting paddy in a straight line is harder than it looks.

At first I was hesitant to get into the paddy field because it was all muddy and all. When I did I could feel my foot squish the mud below it and it gave me a really gross sensation on my feet. I did eventually get used to it though and planting paddy became fun. It was extra fun given all the taunting and trash talking we were giving each other in the spirit of competition.

Today I learned that planting paddy isn’t easy especially considering how most paddy fields have a huge land mass. Even planting on that small patch we had in the hot sun was a challenge for us already. I now think rice is sold for too cheap… for the effort that goes into planting or growing it.

During lunch that day when I looked at the rice on my plate, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it took to plant the rice on my plate.

After our planting paddy activity we then had a cooking competition.

We were all taught to cook some Thai dishes and had to cook it to see who had the better dish. We made papaya salad, pattai and this really coconut milk based dessert with chestnuts.

Almost made cooking seem soo easy.

Alright I have to go to bed now. Have an early start tomorrow. We’re going to be riding elephants and going on some bamboo raft. So gotta get all the rest we need.

G’night!

So I was talking to a friend last night about the drinking games he plays. It’s funny how most games center around having a dice or cards but the absence of such items don’t seem to stop people from playing games to get each other drunk. Here are the 2 of many that I like:

1) “A shot for every time you touch your phone”.

Somebody told me that he had read this online at first but it’s an extremely simple game. Everyone sits around the table and has casual drinks. But every time somebody takes out his phone to check his messages or Twitter or anything, that person takes a shot.

I love the idea of this because it turns the most “anti-social” habit that we all do, into a very social one. You be anti-social, but you make everyone else laugh about it.

2) TV Drinking Games

A well-known game some years ago was the “24 drinking game”.

See if you watch 24, you’d notice that Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) would go through the most intense action scenes and at all times he’s not allowed to curse the F word or anything around those lines. So he ends up saying the word “Dammit” a lot.

So college students back then started a drinking game where they would watch 24 and every time Jack Bauer said “Dammit”, everyone would have to drink a shot. Kiefer Sutherland eventually found out about the game so he started playing with his fans, saying “Damn it” as many as 14 times in one episode. Or saying 3 dammits in a row like “DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT!”. I remember seeing that.

You can read more about it here.

This concept of a drinking game carries on today to all sorts of different TV shows and even to football matches. This friend of mine was telling me how they would all gather around with shots to watch a football match. Then they would all list down a list of “approved triggers” in which every time one of those things happen in a match, the person who is assigned it has to take a shot. Examples are like:

i) Every time there is a corner kick.

ii) Every time there is a free kick

iii) Every time there is a header

iv) Every time one team loses possession of the ball to the other team.

v) Every time the other team loses possession of the ball to the team you’re taking.

vi) Every time there is a foul.

vii) Every time the referee blows his whistle.

I say “approved triggers” because whatever action you suggest you want to take has to be something everyone approves of. For example, nobody is going to approve of you taking a shot only when a goal is scored because that happens too infrequently compared to the rest. My friend told me that of all the drinking games he’s played, that… was the most fun.

So what other drinking games do you guys normally play?

Shorty is away this week. Right after New Year she left me for Japan for a girls trip she had planned since a few months back. She said if I came I along for the trip I would be bored from them doing all the girly stuff. I’m normally the one that leaves Shorty when I go for my business trips so this is a first for me… and boy did I feel bored and a slight tinge of loneliness without that Shorty orbiting me on normal days.

She told me last night though that just after two days away she’s feeling “homesick” and “fatty sick”. That’s a first. Normally Shorty’s really really happy in Japan!

Heh as for me. After I spent the first few days in KL kickstarting the new year with my team, I flew today to Bangkok for some meetings. I’m now writing this post while in the Nuffnang Thailand office.

Right after Bangkok I’ll be flying straight to Chiangmai with the rest of the Nuffies from Malaysia and SIngapore who will be going there for our company trip. We normally have our company trip in December but we’ve been so held up with the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards in December that we had to move it to January.

Anyway I’m excited about 2012. Hope it’ll be a great year for all of us!

On another note, I saw this on FB the other day and shared it on ChurpChurp.

HAHAHA Whoever thought about this.. is a genius! Charge you more for that extra limau? How much more can they possibly charge you for an extra limau.

I mean what’s the mamak waiter going to do?

I spent New Year’s Eve this year with my family. You know it’s funny. In my younger years, New Year’s Eve meant following my parents for some of their own functions filled with their friends. I would be bored there, along with all the other kids of my parents’ friends who were forced to go there too. I would think about all the parties I could have been having and how I was missing out.

Well the past few years, I indulged in all that. On one year I had a house party with my friends, another year we went to Cangkat Bukit Bintang and there were other years of parties. This year though I found myself wanting to go back to spend it with my parents… in one of those dinners that I used to dread going to.

I don’t know why… maybe it’s because I know my parents are getting older and I won’t have too many New Year’s left to celebrate with them. Or maybe… at age 27, I’m already feeling the age.

It was a New Year’s Eve party at Penang Swimming Club.

Most of the people there were my parents’ age and man did they know how to party. When the 60s-70s music came on, they all rushed to the dance floor to dance. There was something different about the way they danced. When our generation danced in clubs, a part of us was conscious to make sure… that we looked at least a little cool or stylish. When the uncles and aunties hit the dance floor to do the Twist, none of them appeared to care about looking cool at all. They all just seemed like they wanted to have a good time.

That New Year’s Eve party was the first time in that year that I began to reflect on what I did in 2011. At first when I though about the business side of things, I was disappointed. I felt that Netccentric hadn’t achieved as much as I think it could have achieved. So I made a resolution to do more in 2012. After I was done beating myself up I began to see the lighter side of things. The company has grown. The whole Netccentric group has grown to have 130-140 full-time staff in the region (with Nuffnang on its own having close to 100 staff). Nuffnang expanded to yet another country: Thailand.

And the company overall has grown in every other metric we could look at. We made mistakes this year too. Mistakes that cost us but we learned from them and we put more structure into the company so we could better cope with the growth.

As always one of the things I am very thankful for in 2011 is the wonderful team of Nuffies I work with on Nuffnang & ChurpChurp. To me, they are the best and I wouldn’t trade them for anyone else.

I am overall pessimistic about 2012 though. Since half a year ago I’ve been telling the Nuffies in our townhall sessions that 2012 will be a difficult year. It will be the year of slow economic growth or a recession. So on our side we have being doing all we can to prepar for it, trying to keep our costs low. E.g. we were supposed to move out to a new office in KL this year to fit our big team but with the recommendations of the Nuffies we instead changed the layout in our current office so we can fit more.

On a personal level, 2011 was a good year for me. It was when my relationship with Shorty matured.

Before I had a fear of getting married and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to take the next step. Somehow something happened in 2011 that changed that. I still don’t know what exactly happened but I just know my heart began to feel ready.

I had fewer friends in 2011 than I did in the previous years. A part of it is because I spent much of 2011 traveling for work so I haven’t had the time to meet up with a lot of my old friends. Whatever time I have left in KL is spent with my family, Shorty and maybe a few other friends.

2011 was a good year for me. Looking back I have a lot to be thankful for. 2012 will be a difficult year, but all we can all do is make the best of it.

My main New Year resolution this year? To do more to help the needy.

I feel that I’ve been given a lot in life to be thankful for but I haven’t done enough in return to help the needy. Sure on a company level Nuffnang and ChurpChurp was involved in many company initiatives for charity and social work in 2011. On a personal level though I haven’t done enough. Yes I did visit some orphanages,

donated some money, spent some time feeding the homeless

but I think giving is the kind of thing when you don’t know when you’re doing enough, but you definitely know when you’re not. I know so far that I’m not.

Happy New Year everyone! May 2012 be a wonderful year for us…. (and may the world not end in 2012)…

 

Hi Everyone,

Here’s a pretty late Merry Christmas! I know I should’ve updated my blog sooner but I have an excuse… well sort-of. Well Shorty and I have been really busy. When in KL we were busy tidying up whatever left we had to do in KL before we made a trip back to Penang. And now that we’re back in Penang, we’ve been busy looking around at venues for our wedding next year. No we don’t have the dates for that yet. Mum is still trying to find an “auspicious” date for that which is great… because if we weren’t guided by mum, we would’ve just probably opened a calendar and picked a random date by means of eenie meenie minie mou.

Of course being back in Penang means you find time to eat some good hawker food. So I ate my favourite Hot Bowl curry mee in Abu Siti Lane for lunch today. This my friends… is in my opinion… the best curry mee in ALL OF MALAYSIA.

 

If you go, be sure to order the steamed chicken.

Anyway this is a quick update to share with you guys what I bought Shorty for Christmas. In all honesty, Shorty and I don’t really have the habit of buying each other Christmas gifts. We never do. In fact we never even buy each other Anniversary gifts. Birthdays are the only occassions in which we do. The reason for it? Well I guess the standing tacit agreement between Shorty and I has always been that we don’t have to wait for an occassion to buy each other a gift. So if at any point I see something that she likes or she sees something that I like, we’ll just buy it for each other. Regardless if there’s an occassion or not. Once in a while we buy expensive gifts for each other like designer purses or bags or phones but we’re always quick to remind each other that our gifts to each other don’t always have to be about the dollar value to it. Most important is the thought. So if I bought her a Miu Miu purse for her birthday, I won’t have to worry about buying her something MORE expensive on her next birthday or Christmas and the same goes for her to me. It doesn’t work that way for us.

When I gave her this present on Christmas morning she first went
“What is this? What is this? Huh?” in a very worried tone.

And when she realized it was my Christmas present to her she went “FATTY!! I thought you said we don’t buy each other Christmas presents??”.

Well yeah that’s true but this time I felt like buying her a small gift. I noticed that whenever we travel she would sleep very uncomfortably with her neck swinging from side to side. When I got myself a neck pillow she loved it but she never got herself one because she was waiting till she found a cute pink Hello Kitty one.

So this Christmas, I managed to find her one. And taadaaa.. Here it is.

All in time for her trip to Japan next week. She loved it so much she couldn’t wait to use it so she brought it along for our road trip to Penang.

Ok I gotta go have a nice family dinner with Shorty now. So here’s a late Merry Christmas from the both of us!

Have a wonderful New Year’s Eve guys!

A couple of weeks before I proposed to Shorty on the 30th of November, I decided that I wanted to have a video made of the moment that I ask her to marry me. I wanted to have it as a memory that we would keep forever and maybe something we can show our kids in future. I was away on business a lot so I didn’t really have a chance to look around so I asked one of my colleagues, Mimi to help me out.

At first I thought of getting a friend of mine Nigel Sia to do it. But I heard that he was already booked out with many other jobs plus it was last minute. So Mimi then managed to find this production crew called Crazy Monkey Studios. They agreed to do the job and we met at Nerotecca itself a day before the proposal date to plan where the cameras were going to be. They didn’t know I was going to show any memes. All I told them was that I would be showing some signs through the glass door and that’s it.

Then on the day itself we did the proposal and the video was made. About a couple of weeks later, Shorty and I had just blogged about our meme proposal. It went on 9GAG and we saw it go around the internet a bit. That scared us a little. Why? Because after years of blogging we’ve learned that if you put yourself out there, you will some people saying nice things about you, and you will get some people saying bad things about you.

We’re used to taking the bad with the good but when it came to our proposal, we just wanted to remember it for the good and not the bad. So after the pictures from our blog entries went on 9GAG, we almost decided not to post the video up at all. We were pleasantly surprised though that there were lots of good comments on 9GAG about our meme proposal… much more than the bad. So that alleviated our fears a bit. But we still weren’t sure if we wanted to put the video up.

Crazy Monkey Studios though kept persuading us. They said it was an awesome video and if anything it was just to share it with a few of our friends and our blog readers. So on Tuesday night they told me that they were going to make the video public. I said okay but neither Shorty or I blogged or tweeted about it. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I saw tweets from people having already seen the video. It was even posted on ChurpChurp by one of my other colleagues Tim2.

So by noon I decided to blog about it and then tweet about it. From then it exploded. We went to bed on Wednesday night with 60K views on the Vimeo video. When we woke up Thursday morning it had passed 100K and someone had put a copy of it on YouTube. It ended up on 9GAG for the second time.

I was a bit afraid then that it might annoy 9GAGers because from what I understand, 9GAGers don’t like reposts.

When we searched “meme proposal” on Twitter, there were new tweets every minute and the touching thing was how they were all about how they loved the video. “Meme proposal” even trended on Twitter Philippines.

The blogs and news sites all around the world caught up with it. It was on Gizmodo.

On Mashable.

On TheNextWeb.

And many other news sites. Some celebrities started sharing it too. Like Guy Kawasaki.

Or Chris Brogan

Then people started tweeting me, saying that the official music video of the song used in the video “A Thousand Years”, had loads of comments from people saying they were brought there by the meme proposal which I thought was really cool.

 

Then before we knew it, we saw Ryan Seacrest share it on his Facebook,

Twitter and Blog.

That’s when we were like…. OMG OMG OMG!!!

I was at my grandmother’s house on Thursday noon when I learned Christina Perri herself had tweeted about the video.

When Shorty and I both tweeted her back to thank her for the wonderful song she replied.

 

That was a totally surreal moment for us. Never have we ever been tweeted by a famous artist/actor/celebrity whatever.

Before we could calm down our excitement, we found out that our “meme proposal” video was one of the Most Viewed and Top Favorited videos of the day.

 

There were loads of comments on the video and we were afraid to read them at first. We did eventually muster the courage to read them and were touched to see that so many of them were all good comments. Every now and then you’d see a bad comment but then other YouTubers would stand up for us.

We were so moved at how everyone loved our video.

We loved how people from all over the world watched it and loved it.

And we especially loved how our fellow Malaysians were so proud that the “meme proposal” is… and will always be… MALAYSIAN (FUCK YEAH!!!)

We had the best responses. Even some 9GAGers creating little memes for us too.

The honest truth is that we never expected the video to go viral the way it did. We always thought it was just a really simple proposal. It wasn’t lavish or big or anything. It was just me proposing to Shorty at a restaurant with some meme signs… and with some of our best friends.

The proposal gave us some media attention too. Radio stations and newspapers called us up for interviews.

But all that ‘fame’ never mattered to Shorty and I. Because we always knew that it will go away as fast as it came. What mattered to us the most was that for a few days in December 2011, people from all over the world shared the joy of our wonderful moment. Thank you everyone.

We love you all!

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PS: Yes everyone. If you look closely at the video you’ll get a glimpse of this card in the stack. In case Shorty said no.

The truth is that I was pretty sure she’d say yes since we’ve been going out for 3 years (or she wouldn’t have wasted so much time on me haha)… but it was just there as a joke.

Fortunately she said YES though. So everyone will just remember this one.

If you haven’t already watched the video, here it is.

As of today (5 days since video went public), our YouTube video has had close to 1.5 million views and our Vimeo 1.3 million. There’ve been many other reposts of our video on YouTube, even one video with Portugese subtitles. Haha! Cool huh!

This post was sponsored by a Korean car brand that looks good 

Ten years ago, the only Asian cars apart from Protons that I saw on the street were Japanese cars. You’d have your Hondas, your Toyotas and your Mitsubishis. Then again everything Japanese was cool ten years ago. Japanese music, anime, Japanese seaweed and Japanese food. Remember the number of Sushi Kings we had in KL ten years ago?

Loads right? Well now we have Sushi Zanmai, Ichiban Boshis and a whole lot more than the Sushi Kings we had ten years ago.

Of course today we still love our sushi but we’re beginning to see a bit of a shift. Malaysians aren’t as big into Japanese stuff as they are into Korean things. We love our Korean TV dramas, Korean food, Korean beer and for the first time you’re seeing as many Korean cars on the  street as you are seeing Japanese cars.

Why? What changed about Korean cars?

Here’s what I found out while doing some research.

Back in 2004, Kia models looked like this.

Yes Korean cars slowly built a reputation of of being reliable and well-built but design wise it left much to be desired.

Then in 2006 Kia hired Peter Schreyer who’s an automobile designer who used to work in VW and Audi before that. He was the guy who designed the famous Audi TT design that was so cutting edge that it still looks good today.

He also designed the VW Beetle, also another design that still doesn’t grow old today.

When Peter Schreyer joined Kia 5 years ago, it was big news for the entire Asian Automobile industry. Everyone waited to see if Kia would come out with cars that looked good and here’s what they ended up looking like.

This is the Kia Forte, a car we’re all familiar with.

A car Shorty test-drove some months back when she was thinking about buying a car. Of all the cars she test-drove, this was one of my favourites. It looked good and it had this little camera on the rear-view mirror that I thought was some Star Trek kinda stuff going on in there. I’m a sucker for gadgets.

The 2-door version looked even better.

 The latest Kia to hit the road this December though is the Kia Optima K5. This is how that same model used to look like 7 years ago.

And this is how it looks like now.

MEGA HUGE difference!

How I came across this car? This is how.

Now I think it’s a nice car… just not… in that colour.

What colour would yours be?

Hi Guys,

Shorty and I thought about this for a long time about whether to share this video or keep this to ourselves.

But the crew at Crazy Monkey Studios that helped us put this video together really wanted us to share it so here it is. This is how our meme proposal really happened. Let me manage your expectations a bit ok? Don’t expect reality TV show kind of quality. All this was taken in one take and was what really happened.

At the end of the night one of the crew members asked me if I would like to film the entrance again to make it a little more dramatic but I declined. I said “This video is for me and Aud. We just want to remember everything as it was”.

So here it goes.

PS: Thanks to Crazy Monkey Studio who did a good job filming this memory for us. Follow them on Twitter at @crazymonkeycms

You can follow me and Aud on Twitter @timothytiah and @fourfeetnineaud