I know I know. No update for quite a while but I’ve been sooo busy. Promise an update soon. In the mean time… read this article.

Hhaha…. now nobody can say Starcraft is a waste of time. I never knew Starcraft 2 in the Silicon Valley was akin to chess. I should play more now.

Okay so let me tell you guys about my Krabi trip in pictures.

1) The resort I was staying in was called Centara Grand Beach Resort. What’s cool about it was that eventhough it’s part of the mainland, it was surrounded by mountains like this.

So the only way to get to the resort was by boat.

Or for the more adventurous there was a trail you could hike through the jungle called “Monkey Trail”.

2) The hotel’s visitor information card had warnings all over it about the “Monkey Trail”. It said how because of environmental laws they weren’t allowed to improve on the trail so it was dangerous and not to be used as an alternative route to Au Nang, the small town right next door on the mainland.

On the second day though I managed to convince Shorty to go with me on the Monkey Trail. Halfway on the trail, she wasn’t happy.

It started with a lot of steep steps to get on to the mountain. Then a long trail through the jungle like that with wooden planks. The trail was so run down that some of the wooden planks were missing so you really had to watch where you were stepping. I let Shorty walk in front so I could catch her in case she fell back or something.

She was walking so slow up the ramp at one point she was holding back a couple of Australians that were hiking right behind us. So I struck a conversation with them. Shorty wasn’t very talkative though. She said her legs were so tired they were shaking. Exercise and Shorty is like water and oil. They never go together.

So to make up for it I bought her a coconut during lunch.

Shorty loves coconuts.

3) After lunch we were just walking around the shops in Au Nang. We passed this luggage bag shop and Shorty saw a bag that she just had to have. So 10 minutes later we were out walking on the street with this bag.

She called it the cow and all the way we were making sound effects for her cow bag. Moo…

4) Even brought it on a TukTuk ride with us. Look how excited he was. Moo…

5) The TukTuk brought us back to the pier to get a boat back to our resort. Shorty put her hat on me and took this picture.

I was looking very touristy. I actually never ever wear socks and sneakers like that unless I’m playing tourist.

On the boat back, this is Shorty awkwardly creeping up next to the driver and pretending to drive the boat.

6) At the resort beach with Shorty later that evening.

7) We were just standing on the beach letting the waves engulf our feet.

I left my flip flops behind somewhere so they won’t get washed away. While I was standing there in the waves though I suddenly heard Shorty scream “AHH AHH AHH!!!”. She was jumping up and down and pointing at the water in front of her.

I looked only to see one of my flip flops floating away in the sea. I ran after it and managed to get it back.

Otherwise I would have only one flip flop left the whole day.

8) Meet Roberto.

Roberto is a pianist from Philippines that we met on the resort. We met him on our first night. Shorty and I were having dinner at a restaurant in the resort when we heard some beautiful music coming from a piano. At first we thought it was from the stereo up above because we couldn’t find the piano but when we looked hard enough we found Roberto in a piano hidden at a corner.

This picture was taken with him the next morning.

9) Went for my birthday eve dinner with Shorty at a Japanese restaurant in our resort.

We were walking back to the room after dinner when I noticed the Concierge desk was empty. So I quickly asked Shorty to sit there and pretend to be the hotel concierge for a photo.

10) The next day we went to the shooting range.

Shorty shot a 9mm and I got myself an M4A1 Carbine.

This was the result I got.

Not great but I guess it wasn’t completely out of the park.

The rest of the day we went for a foot massage, head massage and a spa. Man I love Thai massage, they’re like the best!

My favourite part of a massage is at the end when they massage your hand and head. Feels sooo sooo good.

11) After a day out at town again we went back to the hotel. We headed for the beach again.

Shorty took a place at a hammock by the beach while I just sat in the waves and played around in the water.

After some time at the beach I went for a swim in the hotel pool.

Shorty gave me her waterproof Sony Cybershot camera to play around with so I was taking lots of pictures underwater.

This is Shorty’s feet.

And this is me. Only after taking this picture did I realize what an idiot I was.

Pay attention to the words on my goggles. Notice it says “Please remove protective film”. I had just bought this pair of goggles that afternoon and totally didn’t realize that I had to remove a layer of film on it.

Sort of like buying a new shirt and forgetting the remove the price tag. Something I have done before too.

12) I was swimming in the pool was Shorty was reading her kindle on one of the deck chairs nearby. Then I realized we were missing something. So I asked Shorty to go order some fries and a drink each so that we can have a drink while chilling at the pool.

Aww man that completed the experience.

That was our last evening in Krabi. And one that completed it all.

After just 3 nights in Krabi I felt all ready to go back to work.

We met this Australian couple there who was on holiday on all the islands around the area for some 4 weeks. I don’t know how they do that. Maybe I’m too much of a city boy but I can only do a few nights in a nice beach resort. After that I start getting eager to go back home or go do something. I can spend much longer in cities though. Like a week in New York or London is no problem to me.

Anyway guys that was my Krabi trip in pictures.

Thank you Shorty for the wonderful surprise trip.

The whole journey took me 2 car rides, 1 plane ride and 1 boat ride before I caught a glimpse of our resort.

At first I thought that this was a secluded island on its own but I just realized today that it’s actually part of Au Nang, except that it’s separated from the town by a big mountain. So in order to get there you have to trek through some run down jungle trail or go by boat. The resort we’re staying in takes pride in being able to be there in that protected part of the island. So apart from our resort, there really is nothing else there.

There are no cars, no bikes, no nothing. No jet ski or anything motorized either. The closest thing we have to a car there is one of those electrical buggies that help us carry our bags to our rooms. At first I couldn’t believe it. How could it really be that there’s nothing around us? So I pulled out my iPhone and did a GPS location find. This is where it found me.

Notice how there is NOTHING around us. I’m sure there are some even more secluded resorts but this has got to be the most quiet resort I had ever been to. Actually this is the first kind of holiday of its kind that I’ve really been to. I mean sure I’ve been to Phuket and all but Phuket isn’t exactly a very quiet ulu kind of place. There’s so much to do there (if anyone even suggests that Penang is Ulu imma go find you and throw a plate of Char Koay Teow at you).

On this trip, there wasn’t anything to do. Sure there are some stuff like rock climbing or visiting caves or diving but Shorty and I don’t do any of that stuff. So I came to this island expecting to do nothing but just relax. That was Shorty’s intention really. I guess she thinks I work hard sometimes and it’s good for me to get away from things.

So let me show you some pictures of the resort. This is the long stairs up to everyone’s rooms. Everyone’s rooms are put in little villas on a hill. So in its effort of being green and all there are no elevators or anything. You wanna go to your room you climb a hill.

On the stairs there are these little statues.

Shorty thought that this one of a crab looked cute so she got me to take a picture.

This is the swimming pool of the resort.

I think there are actually two pools in the resort. This is one of them. I wanted to go swim in there today but it started raining. I think it’s the world telling me that it doesn’t want me to exercise and that I should just be fat.

This is me outside some of the villas.

Now let me show you our room. There are different levels of rooms at the resort. Everything from our room up to even having your own 3-bedroom villa. Of course because we’re not billionaires or anything we went for the average room there and it was already really nice.

When you walked into your room there’s a little patio area where you can sit and have breakfast or something.

And an outdoor balcony where you can sit and admire the view.

Inside the room the first thing you see is the bed.

It actually overlooks a big window that looks out to the sea view or more specifically… this view.

Then there’s this big walk-in closet.

The bathroom is huge too with a really nice bath tub.

And a shower area with enough space to shower a small dinosaur.

So there you have it everyone. Now the sun is setting and it’s time for me to run off for dinner now.

I have one more day in this quiet spot in the world.

Enjoy your week ahead everyone!

Hey Guys,

Just a quick one before I go. Shorty’s taking me on a surprise trip. Well a surprise trip that ceased being a surprise because David from Nuffnang China MSN’ed me last night and said “Hey heard you’re going to Krabi, have a good trip”. I went “I’M GOING TO KRABI!?!?”.

Then I tweeted about it and in 2 minutes Shorty messaged me and I quote “WHO TOLD YOU!”. She then went on to make death threats on the person who told David. David felt so bad in the end he said “Please just send a bomb to me in Beijing now” so that he could blow himself up. Heh. He was joking of course.

Okay I gotta run off to the airport now. Beach holiday here I come!

Whew… this week has been one helluva week. It’s been a lot of fun though. One of the things new with me this week is I finally managed to get my hands on some of our ChurpChurp premiums. Like this.

Can anyone guess what this is?

Some people who see it think it’s a keychain, some an eraser, but it’s actually a USB Drive. You can open up the ChurpChurp bird and up comes a socket. We made it overseas and had them ship it over to all the countries in which ChurpChurp is in. Because they’re pretty expensive to make we don’t have that many to give out but if you want one, you can join this little fun contest we’re having on the ChurpChurp Facebook Fan Page.

It’s just meant to get our Churpers to post up pictures of themselves if they think they’re cute and we’ll let everyone vote to see who they think is the cutest.

The winners get a USB Pen drive and this ChurpChurp plush toy.

Here are some of the pictures they posted up.

Not surprisingly the steep competition is from the girls 🙂

Check out this guy! So confident of his body.

Unlike me who dare not show another shirtless picture of myself online ever.

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I’m going away this weekend. Shorty is taking me away on a surprise holiday. I have no idea where I’m going except that it’s a beach resort. I don’t even know if I should be bringing my passport or not.

So this weekend it’ll just be Fatty and Shorty.

PS: If you want to join the ChurpChurp Cutest Thing Contest or just check out the photos people are uploading, click here.

I’ve been flying all over the place lately. It’s crazy! I counted that day… every month I spend at least 10 days out of 30 overseas on business trips. Traveling is fun and all but sometimes it kinda makes you miss your routines. Miss your friends too.. that whenever they wanna ask you out you’re never around. So much that sometimes they even assume you’re not around and don’t bother asking you out whenever they’re planning something.

So when you travel around a lot like me it takes an extra effort to keep in touch with friends.

I’ve been away so much lately for conferences and also for setting up new offices in other countries. In 2008, we expanded Nuffnang from just having a presence in Malaysia and Singapore to Australia and Philippines. It was a big gamble for Ming and I at the time. We took whatever little money we had earned from Malaysia and Singapore and plowed everything we had there into Philippines and Australia. Then we spent the last two years growing those markets and making sure both Nuffnang Philippines and Australia stand on their own feet. Today both Nuffnang Australia and Nuffnang Philippines are profitable and are on their own feet.

So we’ve decided to spread our wings again… and last year we started setting up an office in Beijing for Nuffnang China.

China is a huge market so before we went in guns blazing we spent many months doing research, finding out how we can create a community of bloggers there and how we can add value to the bloggers there. That’s why before we’ve even started selling ads or anything there we’ve been holding blogger gatherings to talk to bloggers there and find out more.

After a lot of preparation and talking to many bloggers we’re finally comfortable enough to launch. So last week we did a soft-launch of Nuffnang China. The response has been great so far. Within the first week we signed up over 1,000 bloggers and more and more are joining us each day. It’s still a drop in the ocean for the huge number of bloggers China has but it’s an encouraging start.

Lots of people have told us about China. How very few companies in our industry have actually gone to China and succeeded but Ming and I decided that if there was any time we were going to try, it has to be now. Leading the team for Nuffnang China though is the very capable David Wong that we sent from our Malaysian office.

Exciting times ahead for us. Good luck Mr Wong!

Check out the Nuffnang China website here. It’s like the rest of our Nuffnang sites but in Chinese 🙂

So it’s like that. We have been hiring a lot lately and one of our new Nuffies requested a MacBook Pro. We decided to grant that Nuffie that wish. I remembered though that I have a MacBook Pro that I just bought a few months ago and to be honest it doesn’t quite suit me. Why?

1) It’s way too powerful for what I use a laptop for. I don’t play games on it (not like it’s any good for playing games), I don’t do any graphic design or photoshop work. All I do is just check e-mails, surf the net and other work related stuff.

2) The MacBook Pro weighs a TON. A TON! It’s really really heavy. It’s okay if you’re carrying it from home to office and back. But when you travel a lot and lug it with you from airport to airport it gets really tiring on the back.

So what I decided to do in the end was to give my MacBook Pro to this new Nuffie and buy myself a MacBook Air which is cheaper than buying a new MacBook Pro.

Tadaaa!!!

The MacBook Air is a lot smaller and it has a much smaller drive. It’s big draw though is that it’s really really thin and light.

What I do like about it though is its flash storage hard drive. You know normal laptops that have normal hard drives, if you’re doing something on it but you jerk the laptop a bit too hard it sometimes causes your hard disk to crash. Happened to me once with my previous MacBook Pro. Flash drives though are the kind of things your USB drives are made of. This kind of thing doesn’t happen so you can jerk it or even drop it and your hard disk should be fine.

The drawback though is that the hard disk space is a lot smaller. So you can either have only 128GB or 256GB of memory.

So from now on I just end up having to cut down on the stuff I have on my laptop. Less music, photos and movies on it. That’s totally fine with me.

I’ve been a Mac user for 4 years and I gotta say one thing though. If you’re not a Mac user now, you don’t exactly really have to switch to a Mac. 4 years ago when Windows XP or Windows Vista was around, the Mac’s OS was far superior to Windows. Now with Windows 7 though, PCs have a pretty good OS so you don’t really need to switch. Switching to Mac also means paying a lot more for hardware because Mac is typically a lot more expensive for whatever specs you get.

Anyway… I’m loving my new MacBook Air. I can carry it around with me a lot easier now.

While I was in Bangkok I managed to catch up with a couple of friends for Steamboat. Over this steamboat lunch I learned of two stories of two entrepreneurs. Let me share it with you here.

Now I love this huge steamboat chain in Bangkok called MK. If you go to Bangkok you can’t miss it. It’s everywhere!

The story behind it is that it was started by a lady who used to work in a steamboat restaurant. After some time the owner of that steamboat restaurant didn’t want to do the business anymore and shut it down. So seeing that it was one thing she knew how to do, she decided to start her own steamboat restaurant. Today is has grown to have … something like a 100 branches in Bangkok… and from what I understand it’s not a franchise. All of them are owned by her and run now by her son.

Amazing huh…. shows that sometimes in life it doesn’t matter where you start or what industry you’re in. There will always be opportunity. Some people say that if you end up working in a bank, you will always be working in a bank and you don’t know what business you can eventually start. Well I know people who worked in investment banks and eventually started their own investment funds that now do very well. I guess the moral of the story is that, there is opportunity in every industry! It need not just be the internet.

Anyway I was having lunch with two of my Thai friends: Ji and Pruet.

Ji is the pretty girl on the left. Her name is of course a lot longer than just two letters but seeing I had trouble pronouncing the Thai name she just asked me to call her Ji. So Ji it became! Her Dad has a really interesting success story. She told me that her Dad in the past many many years ago had tried a number of other businesses but they didn’t work out. Then one day he went to Japan and he happened to see a kind of candy machine that could make heart-shaped candy. He decided to bring it back and sell heart shaped candy in Thailand.

He called it Hartbeat Candy.

What made it big though wasn’t just the fact that it was candy shaped like a heart. He had one novel idea. He thought of putting “love advice” inside each of the candy wrappers just like a Fortune Cookie. Each candy wrapper will have different advice.

So one might say “Don’t wait anymore to make the move for the one you love” whereas another might say “Don’t betray your friend for the one you love”.

After that the candy just took off! For more than a decade it became legendary in Thailand. Everybody knew what it was. Some sort like how everybody in Malaysia knew what Mamee Monster was because we grew up eating it. Now the company does lots of other stuff apart from Hartbeat candy though Hartbeat still sells pretty well. They now export it to India too and it’s apparently the number 1 candy in India.

I loved the story so right after lunch I went to pick up a packet of the candy.

I took out the first candy I saw in the packet, opened it and popped the heart-shaped candy in my mouth. Then I asked Ji to help me read what my “love advice” was since it was in Thai.

It said “Love is delicate. Don’t rush it”.

Such a simple idea made something so simple sell so well. Sometimes I guess it’s really in the little details of things.

I’m in Bangkok right now to catch up with some friends. I was having coffee with a friend yesterday at a Starbucks here when I saw the longest queue I had ever seen in a Starbucks anywhere. I had to queue some 20 minutes for my coffee but right after me the queue piled up. It went like a snake all the way out of the outlet and on to the road. It’s like everyone needed Starbucks coffee to wake up. The whole hour or so I was at the outlet the queue never got much shorter. People were constantly adding to the queue. Must be great to own the franchise there.

I was seated by a window having a coffee and a cinnamon roll with my Thai friend. I was explaining something to him when suddenly I got distracted by something outside the window. Outside I saw this little boy sitting innocently with a paper cup in his hand begging for money.

When he got up I saw his face. He had the look of innocence in his eyes and he could pass for any cute little boy we know today. The only difference between the cute little boys we know and this little boy is…. this one wasn’t in school when he should be. He was out on the streets begging for money.

I immediately wanted to get up and go give him some money when my friend stopped me. He said his mother was somewhere around watching him and giving him money would just encourage her to keep forcing her son to do this. So I held myself back. True enough some 20 minutes or so later I saw his mother come by. She collected whatever money he had and sat with him for a while then left. My friend estimated that they made RM100 -RM200 a day or RM3,000-RM6,000 a month from this.

Throughout the whole time I sat at that Starbucks window I kept getting distracted. I kept asking myself all these questions… why is that boy not in school? why is his mother doing this? why can’t she find a job and support his son?

I knew whatever the answers were, I would never be able to understand them.

Then suddenly I saw an act of kindness. A kindness different from the kindness he had been getting from the other strangers dropping coins or small notes into his cup. A man dressed like he was on his way to work, came by and gave him a plastic bag and left. Inside the plastic bag was a small bottle of chocolate milk.

The boy took out the bottle of chocolate milk in a hurry, pierced the straw through the top and immediately started gulping down the chocolate milk.

It then dawned on me that the whole time he didn’t even have anything to drink.

I told myself that if I can’t give him money, I would do the same. After I was done with Starbucks I would go to the nearest supermarket and buy him a drink and some cookies. By the time I left Starbucks though he was gone and nowhere to be found.

Still this made me reflect on my life again. On how lucky so many of us are. If you’re reading this blog, if you have a Facebook account, if you care about politics, if your main stress is whether you will do well in exams or your job… you know you’re a lot more fortunate than this little boy here and his mother. Their only thoughts are probably on where there next meal will come from. Or when he will get to drink his next bottle of chocolate milk.

I’ve been so busy the past week I don’t even know where to find the time. Apart from all the work that I have to do, last week I attended the New Media Asia conference and gave a keynote speech there. Some of the Hong Kong Nuffies were down last week for some training too so I spent some time taking them around.

I brought them to all the good Malaysian food I could think of. They loved Nasi Lemak, Nasi Bojari and all this kind of stuff. They found the idea of curry chee cheong fan a bit weird but they were quite adventurous on everything else. One day I even decided to take them for Pudu Siu Yoke. At first their reaction was… “SIU YOKE?” and they gave me a look that said “Please larr… siu yoke Hong Kong wan sure 1000 times better”.

I made a deal with them. I said after they tried this siu yoke, if there really is one as good in Hong Kong… they must bring me when I go next time. They tried it… and they loved it.

They even had trouble thinking of a place in Hong Kong that had better siu yoke than this.

I had a bit of time to take them for some sight-seeing on some nights. The favourite of all the tourists that seem to come from overseas is the Petronas Twin Towers. It’s like a must-see. So some of the Nuffies and I brought them there one night after work.

Just like all the other friends from out-of-town we brought there, they went WOW. Well all of them except Masato who instead said “SUGEHHH!!” which actually means “Wow” or “Great” in Japanese.

On Friday night we all went to Velvet. I didn’t manage to take any pictures that night because we all got so high so quick. Totally forgot about blogging about that night. I made sure not to make the same mistake the next night though. Saturday night the Nuffies planned a little house party.

The theme was “Bombshells & Aviators” so a lot of the Nuffies came like this.

I’m not sure what that theme meant for guys but Nick D told me that the guys can just come up like a vest or suspenders. Kinda like the Godfather dressing of those days. So I did… at first I wore a full blown vest with slacks and all.

Then I realized that I was going to be really uncomfortable the whole night with those slacks so I changed my slacks to jeans.

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Shorty though went with the whole aviator theme. This is how some other Nuffies dressed.

Notice that red bra and red granny panties they’re holding? Well that’s for people who didn’t come dressed up following the theme. So if you wanted to get into the party and didn’t dress up, you had to wear that and let everyone take a picture of it. One guy who got it bad was one of the Nuffies from our Tech Team who came dressed like that.

When Pinky saw him she said

“Oi! Think you’re going Murni ar?”

And they got him to wear the unflattering giant red panties and bra. We all took pictures but I think I’ll save him the embarrassment and not share it here 🙂

At first the night started off with everyone being proper and all. Then when the booze kicked in… everyone was in the dance room dancing.

So many people got drunk that night. I didn’t though. Decided to control my drinking. I think my liver has had enough punishment in the past few weeks. One thing I noticed about this party was that… all the Nuffie girls were gathering around taking group pictures like this.

Where the hell are all the guys then? Well they were the ones taking the pictures.

Tomorrow I’ll be traveling again for work. Gonna be spending a lot of time on airplanes again in the next few weeks.