Hi Guys,

I recently did an interview with an awesome program on Astro Awani called Entrepreneur. For this program they go around interviewing entrepreneurs in Malaysia about their business and tips for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The host is Ben Ibrahim who’s this really cool guy that made me so comfortable I didn’t feel I needed to see the questions before the interview. So the answers I gave on the program weren’t rehearsed or anything which was why I guess I could’ve answered some questions a little better.

In any case it’s an awesome program and I think it’s the only one that regularly focuses on interviewing Malaysian entrepreneurs from all sorts of industries. Catch it on Astro Awani if you can 🙂

Last Saturday night, instead of going to the movies or to Zouk, Shorty and I decided to do something different. We went to the Kechara Soup Kitchen in Imbi to help out. Kechara is this huge buddhist organization that does lots and lots of different things and one of it is the Kechara Soup Kitchen. While it was started by Kechara, the Kechara Soup Kitchen or KSK is not for exclusively meant for buddhists or any particular religion. The whole idea of KSK is to feed the hungry regardless of race or religion and the volunteers you find there are of all races and religion. I for one am Christian… but I found myself very much at home there because it’s main focus was not to spread buddhism or anything like that but just to feed the homeless.

The night started off with all of us meeting at the Kechara Soup Kitchen in Imbi for a safety briefing. We were all told the things we should and shouldn’t do while going out on the streets to give food to the homeless. Things like how to approach the homeless safely. Most of the homeless were ok but some who might be mentally unstable had to be handled with care.

After we were all confident that we knew enough not to get ourselves in any trouble while on our trips, we were all introduced to our team leaders and fellow team mates that would go out on 10 different routes around KL that night to feed the homeless. It was amazing. The target every weekend is for volunteers like us to go out and feed 650-700 homeless people ranging from Petaling Street

to Bangkok Bank and more.

Shorty, Huai Bin, David and I were put into a team that was in charge of Chow Kit and a place they called “Honda”.

All of the food that we gave out came from sponsors. Everyone from Giant, High 5, Tupperware, Pensonic, Khind to even hotels like Le Meridien who would take turns to cook food to donate. Even many restaurants around KL like the Boathouse in TTDI would donate food to be distributed.

The logistics was quite something. First volunteers had to pick up the food from all the sponsors. Then people had to pack it or distribute it among the 10 different teams that will go out.

And finally we would all load it up in our vans or cars like this.

Carrying all that food and loading it up into our van made me feel like an aid worker for the UN. Each food pack we gave out had

– A meal pack consisting of either rice with something or pasta.

– A mineral water bottle

– A loaf of High-5 bread (that was high in demand among the homeless so it ran out really quickly).

– Bread rolls from High-5 (which was also high in demand but fortunately we had plenty of that).

We also brought along some other stuff like some clothes in case we found any of the homeless needed any.

Shorty and I had reached KSK about 8PM but it was only about 11PM that we were ready to leave. Why so late? Well the truth is… there are lots of homeless people in KL but we don’t see them during the day. Why? Because they too have a sense of dignity and want to blend in with society. So when the sun is up and everyone is busying around with their days, they’re hiding in the back alleys where we never look. When night comes and the shops close at 10PM, they start coming out and laying their mats right in front of all the store fronts to spend their nights there. It is only at around 11PM when you see lots of them sleeping on bus stops or in front of store fronts in all these areas like Chow Kit.

Our first stop was “Honda” which turned out to be the Honda showroom I always drove past whenever I went for Super Kitchen/Kin Kin Chilli Pan Mee.

There were already about 40 homeless people already waiting there for us by the time we got there. I was told that every Saturday night, a crowd of homeless people would gather there to wait for us to give them the food and water they needed.

We stopped our van right next to the showroom and we all went to work to unload the van.

 

We then formed a line of volunteers where we would each give them one specific item. I was in charge of giving everyone bottles of water while Shorty and Huai Bin were in charge of giving them bread and a pack of pasta. We learned that a lot of them didn’t like pasta. Unfortunately for us our team didn’t have the rice packs so for those who didn’t want the pasta we could only make up for it by giving them more bread.

Most of the homeless were very happy to see us. They would smile and thank us in all their respective languages whenever we gave them anything. Those smiles alone made the entire night worth it for us. For the rest of the homeless, they were less smiley. Not because they felt it was like their right or anything… but because you could see in their eyes they were ashamed to even take this from us, but they had to… to continue living.

After we were done distributing the food, some of them would stay back to talk to us. KSK’s view of feeding the homeless was that while it starts with addressing their primary physiological need, it doesn’t end there. KSK spends much of their time starting conversations with the homeless and helping find them jobs and a way out of poverty.  Then again some of you might ask, how did they get into being homeless people in the first place?

Contrary to the belief some might have, the homeless people of today aren’t all homeless because they’re lazy or refuse to find a job. They come from all races and religion. A good number of them are educated and speak fluent English! I even met an Indian homeless guy that spoke fluent Tamil, English and Hokkien. All of them probably had lives like you and I at one point years ago. What they did have that we didn’t though… was very very bad luck.

Let me illustrate this from two real life stories of two homeless people.

1) On one of our stops, I met a 50 year old man that we all called Mr Chee. Mr Chee used to be a very skilled elevator technician. He knew everything about elevators and had a pretty good job, even spent some years of his working in Singapore. One day he got into a fight with someone which resulted in him being hit really hard on the head. He took off his cap to show us his injury. I had never seen anything like that before in my life. The right side of his skull had collapsed so instead of a typical roundish looking head, the right side of his skull was flat downwards like a cottage roof.

I never knew somebody with that kind of injury could still live! But there he was, almost a miracle! That injury though ended up costing his entire life. Because of it, he would get very very bad headaches during the day. So bad that he couldn’t continue working. Then as it got worse, he found relief in taking drugs and eventually began an addict. Eventually he lost his job, his home and whatever family and friends he had… and now he was out on the street with a few of other homeless people who have become his friends. Mr Chee had a life… a home.. a job. But this is how he’s likely to live the rest of his life. Sleeping on a opened up cardboard box by the street.

2) The other story I’m going to tell you was told to me by my team leader whom I will refer to here as KW. KW was distributing food near an LRT station one night and saw this homeless Indian man. He asked the Indian man in Malay if he wanted food only to have the Indian man reply in fluent English and with a British accent. KW was shocked. He later learned of this Indian man’s story.

Many decades ago that old homeless Indian man was working with JKR. He was a civil servant working under the British back in those days and subsequently for our very own Malaysian government. He had family: Two daughters that he sent to the University of Sheffield in the UK to study law. One of them married a Brit and never came back. The other came back and became a lawyer in Malaysia.

He finally retired at the age of 65. Having nothing to do he picked up drinking at home. Every day he would kick up his feed in his living room sofa and have a couple of beers. His wife though didn’t like that at all. Eventually the wife kicked him out of the house and there was nothing he could do about it since the house was under her name. The remaining daughter in Malaysia took the mother’s side and so he left home… all alone. After spending his entire lifetime working to raise his children and giving them a good education… this man was all alone on the streets, without a home and not knowing where his next meal will come from.

So as you can see from both these stories, many of these homeless had lives like you and I at one point. There were many other stories. From senior citizens who worked all their lives only to have their pension cheated out of by some con man, or grandfathers or grandmothers who have been abandoned.

Our second stop of the night was in another area of Chow Kit where another long queue of 30 or so homeless people were waiting for us.

My team leader said that these first two groups we’re visiting have already been trained from our previous team. They knew how to line up and let the ladies go first. After we were done with this second group was when the “hunting” started. We drove all around Chow Kit looking for homeless people to give the rest of our food to. Our team leader knew of these little pockets. We would go to those pockets, see someone we think needs food and drop off some food and water.

When you look at some of these people, the harsh reality of living on the streets is obvious on them. Some are dressed ok but most are dressed with really old clothes and smell like they haven’t showered in a while. They have black feet and some of them have had injuries. You can also tell whether they’re newly homeless or have been homeless for a long time.

We saw this homeless person sleeping on the bus stop and from the way he hugged his bag to his chest while he slept indicated that he was just newly on the streets. According to our team leader, the ones who have been on the streets for the longest time don’t care. They sleep like a starfish on the streets if they had to because they know they have nothing to lose.

We didn’t want to wake him so we put some food next to him. He will wake up to some pasta, some bread and a fresh bottle of clean drinking water.

Another place where our team leader knew some homeless people stayed at was at the top of this pedestrian bridge.

You probably drive past many many bridges like this at night not knowing that some homeless people actually live on top of these bridges. We sent a few of us down to look for them and found them hiding in a corner of it, all dug in ready to sleep.

We made many more stops that night, in places that I never thought would have homeless people inhabit.

By the time we were done it was 2AM. We had drove around for 3 hours on a Saturday night, looking for homeless people to give food to. At the end of it, Huai Bin joked it was not too late to go to Zouk… but we all knew we were too tired. We just wanted to go home and sleep.

That night, before I went to bed I asked Shorty
“Aren’t we so lucky that we get to sleep on our nice beds in a safe air-conditioned room?”

She replied
“You know what scares me? At one point of their lives…. they probably had this luxury too”.

———-
If you’d like to volunteer at KSK. There are many many many things you can do. Helping distribute food to the homeless is just one of them. They feed the homeless not just on weekends but every day. So if you’d like to volunteer, call Kwok Wai at +603 2141 6046.

The Nuffies all over are the wackiest bunch I know. Every now and then they would do something that would prove that point.

For example, this is what the Nuffies in the Singapore office do in their free time.

I was out with a client last night and she was talking to me about blogging. Asking me how I found the time to update a blog for so many years. The truth is, I found it so much easier when I was a student… you know in the Leng Mou days. Now when I’m out working it’s just so hard. After a long day at work, I get home and I sometimes sit in front of a blank screen waiting for inspiration for my next blog entry. But it doesn’t come… because my mind is so mentally exhausted and just want to do anything but write.

I guess to some extent you can see it in the quality of my blog entries lately. Shorty recently said to me that my blog sucked! And I guess it does. I don’t know why you guys keep coming back to read it but whatever the reason is… thank you for being so tolerant!

At the end of the day I think about all the eventful stuff I’ve done and the truth is… not that much. I mean a lot of it is work and computer games in my free time and there’s nothing really interesting to blog about them both. Then again I spend some 5-10 minutes a day reading funny stuff online and watching funny videos so I’m thinking maybe I’ll share some of that up here. So here’s one that I really like.

I watched this video over and over and over again with Shorty. Haha damn adorable!

I love how the older kid is so matured and the little boy is soo… hahaa cute!

I spent my afternoon today at Chatime Publika. To support my friend Richie there and because I know lots of our Nuffnangers/Churpers love Chatime, we decided to have a small gathering there. Was loads of fun! Thought the Nuffies did a great job putting the little gathering together which in line with Chatime tradition, started with a queue.

Richie also took a picture of some of us and put us up on the “Wall of Fame” in the stall. So if you go there for your Chatime anytime soon, check out the wall 🙂

My following pictures are going to be of something that I don’t think many of you would know what it is. In fact if you do, you’re probably as geek as I am 🙂

Ok so Ming bought me this and got Jamie to bring it down for me all the way from Singapore.

It’s called the Gears of War 3 “Epic Edition”.

For the non-geeks, Gears of War is one of my favourite XBOX games. In fact it’s the game that finally influenced me to buy an XBOX in the first place.

The cool thing about the Epic Edition is that the game doesn’t just come in a typical XBOX games case. It comes in THIS.

And the whole set comes with this handmade piece of the Marcus Fenix. The main character of the game.

Pretty cool if you’re a geek to me.. but I know I know.. if you aren’t … then all you’re thinking is… “so it’s a model of a very muscular man eh?”.\

Hey Guys,

I have a confession. My social life these few days is pretty much gone thanks to a new game called Battlefield 3. If you’re into first-person shooter games… you gotta try it out. Don’t take my word for it though, watch this trailer.

Computer graphics these days have gotten so good it’s insane! I felt like I was in a real battlefield and it reaffirmed my belief that I probably wouldn’t last more than 30 seconds on a real battlefield. Probably get shot before then. Still it let me live the life of a US marine for a while… heh… did you know when I was a little boy I once told my mum that I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up?

Speaking of great computer graphics, I watched Tin Tin last night too and the graphics is beautiful! Definitely worth a watch especially if you’re a TinTin fan.

A quick update on the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards happening in KL this year. Due to many requests we’ve decided to bring back a couple of new categories: Region’s Best Blog and Most Influential Blogger.

Also, the ChurpChurp team decided to sponsor a new category there called “Best Micro Blog”. Nomination ends on the 7th of November which leaves us with just a few days left. So if you haven’t nominated someone you think is worthy of the award, click here.

I’ve been in Hong Kong for the past couple of days. I didn’t really do much eventhough it was Halloween weekend. During the day I’m attending meetings that I flew in to Hong Kong for.

Then when those are done, I would spend the rest of my free time in the hotel. I did however get to have dinner with the Nuffies from our Hong Kong office.

And I also got to meet up with Arnold who gave me another one of his beautiful Aranez Kangaroo Leather iPhone cases.

For the rest of my trip though I just spent it in my hotel room. You know you’re tired of traveling when you don’t bother going out when you visit another country. I was really homesick too… and this is considering that my trip was only for 3 days and 2 nights. I know traveling sounds fun and it was at first but there can be too much of a good thing too. I spend a lot of time alone waiting in airports for my flights, or in taxis on the way to the airports and things like that.

How I entertain myself though is by watching movies. This trip I watched one of my favourite movies of all time. Now that’s a question a lot of people have asked me before… “What’s your favourite movie of all time?”. Heck it was one of those conventional questions that people would have answers to on their Friendster profile in those days. I always found it to be one of the hardest questions to answer though. It is right? Because there are just so many good movies out there.

This trip though, after enough thinking and after some 27 years of my life…. I think I have finally found my favourite movie of all time. It’s called Forest Gump.

Forest Gump is a movie that came out in 1994 (I was 10 years old then) and was a huge hit. I love everything about the movie… from the soundtrack to Tom Hanks acting in it but the thing I love the most… is the story.

It’s about a man who was born a little mentally challenged still manage to go on about life doing amazing things like winning the Medal of Honour, starting a successful company etc etc.  He did all that, still viewing the world in its most innocent form ever.

If you haven’t watched Forest Gump… I highly encourage it! It’s my favourite movie of all time! 

What’s yours?

A few days ago we announced the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2011. Do you guys remember the previous blog awards?

Let me show you some pictures while I tell you about it.

The previous and the first Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards was held in Singapore back in 2009.

Historically, Blog Awards can be relatively easy to do. Nuffnang wasn’t anywhere among the first to start its own blog awards. Many websites on the internet already do their own blog awards and have small events to give the awards away. Sometimes there isn’t a physical trophy for the award but just bragging rights to bloggers that they have won an award.

We wanted the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards to be different though. We wanted it to be more than a web award but an Oscars for bloggers. An event where we would all honour the Best of Blogs not just in Malaysia but all over Asia-Pacific.

That’s why the nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards or NAPBAS is and still remains the Most Expensive Nuffnang event we’ve ever held in our history. So much that even with big sponsors, Nuffnang as a company has to invest more money to cover the costs. Fortunately though it’s something we decided to do not every year but once every two years.

 

How it works is that once every two years, each country in which Nuffnang is in will bid for the opportunity to host the Blog Awards? In 2009, Singapore won the bid and this year, Malaysia did.

So this year’s NAPBAS will be held in KL on the 16th of December at the Marriott, Putrajaya. We’re working with partners like Volkswagen, Olympus and even Tiger as a Drinks Partner. 

If you’re a blogger and if there’s any one Nuffnang event you should go for… you should try to make it this one. Invites though are often very limited… why? Because there are over 1,000,000 Nuffnang Bloggers all around the region and only 500 seats!

So apply to get an invite through the contest soon. Invites aren’t transferable and we don’t sell them. 

So if you’d like to nominate a blog for a NAPBAS award or to try get an invite, check out the official site here.

I heard that just in the first 24 hours in which we announced it… there were already 2,000 over individual blogs that were nominated for an award. So good luck guys… and see you at the awards!

If you’d like to check out more pictures from the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2009 to get an idea of how the Awards Night is like… click here. There are LOTS of photos there.

 

Today was Gene, Jon and Quah’s joint birthday celebration. They held it in Kampachi so we all had a limitless amount of awesome Japanese food to celebrate it.

I got the chance there to catch up with a lot of old uni friends that I haven’t seen for a while. Some of them are lawyers, some accountants and some entrepreneurs too.

One cool thing about the party though was… the cakes!!!

Because there were 2 Birthday Boys and 1 Birthday Girls, we had 3 cakes.
They were all sourced by Jon’s resourceful girlfriend and I loved that each had some meaning to it. Gene’s cake was a girly cake.

Jon’s one is of gold bars and money because he now works in a pawn shop (his family business).

Quah on the other hand had this for a cake….

Why milk? Well.. because he’s one of the two guys that started Milkadeal.com early this year.

 

Really cool cakes eh!

On a last note, Prudential has been running this really cool campaign themed “R U Ready?”. It runs along the lines of equipping young people of today to the things they want to achieve in life. I wrote an article that you will find on their FB page that’s titled “R U Ready To Start Your Own Business”. It covers 5 important things that I’ve learned from business.

You can read it here.

 

Just finished watching this match. The second match I’ve watched since I became a Manchester United fan after going to Old Trafford and meeting the players in September. It was a painful experience… so painful… but Manchester City was just the better team then.

No matter… there will be another day!