Yep… it’s finally here. I’m sick.. right after Chinese New Year too. Whenever I get sick I look back at the things I did in the past few weeks and almost all the time I can find the reason why I got sick. Either because I’ve been really stressed, working really hard, sleeping not enough, eating unhealthy or not exercising.

This time though I looked back and I saw what I did all Chinese New Year.

When I first got back to Penang for Chinese New Year I thought it was going to be a very quiet 1 week for me. Not doing much, just hanging around the house spending time with family. I was wrong though. I met up with some old friends when I was in Penang. And from those old friends I met up with more and more old friends and before I knew it I spent almost every night partying. I realized then how much there was to do in Penang these days.

Like this other day I went to this new club in Penang Times Square called Soju. The whole time I was in Penang, lots of people were telling me how I had to go there because they had this really good Live Band there called Crush.
The band consisted of people from all over. There were a couple of Thais, a Filipino, a Canadian and I think one or two from The States. They were great! Really got the party going! Heck I went on a Tuesday night and even then it was pretty full of people! I ended that night, just like many others with a lot of drinking … and of course sleeping late. No doubt that contributed to the state I was at today.

What else contributed… well let me tell you what. Meet “chee gu”.

This potato chip-looking snack is evil I tell you.

Once you start eating it, it takes a very very strong conscious effort to STOP eating it. It’s almost impossible I tell you. Impossible!

This Chinese New Year I won’t be surprised if I ate an entire KG of this stuff.

It doesn’t help that every Open House I go to they have it right on the table there with the host egging you on to have some.

Saturday night I attended Nicholas’s Open House. Look at the amount of food they prepared for us there.

Here’s a picture I took of some of the Nuffies there that night.

I saw how they made a waste bag holder out of this plastic stool and I was really impressed.

I went “Wow! What a smart idea!” only to have everyone look at me strangely saying “Haven’t you seen this before?”.

After Nicholas’s Open House, I rushed over to the Global Battle of the Bands to watch Nic Davis perform. His band, Rosevelt was competing that night. I’ve always failed to make it to all of his performances in the past but I knew this one was important so I made sure to go.

I was already falling sick then and the thick smoke in the club didn’t help my sore throat. It was worth it though, Nic was great and Rosevelt came in 3rd. I went to bed that night feeling really tired and when I woke up this morning…. I felt sick already.

But I couldn’t stay home. I had to go for a family lunch and then later on in the afternoon go visit Shorty’s parents. Shorty pointed out that I haven’t yet visited her parents for CNY since I’ve been away in Penang all along. So okay… then after that visit, we had another dinner and now…

I need to go to bed.

Sooo tired…

Not going to work tomorrow is not an option… it’s going to be a really busy week ahead. So good night everyone.

Yesterday was Shorty’s Birthday. The first few birthdays Shorty I put together a really nice surprise for her. You can read about one of the first ones here if you’ve missed it before.

As we moved on in our relationship though we grew simpler in a lot of ways and that includes birthdays. For birthdays now we just have a really nice dinner together and cake.

So this year that’s what we decided to do. As far as Shorty knew, we were just going for dinner date together at Fukuya or something we called “Shorty & Fatty’s Night Out”. I decided though to have a small get together with some of her close friends. I booked a room at Fukuya and according to them the room could only fit 10 people so I could only call a few friends.

Shorty always tells me every other day that she doesn’t have anymore friends in KL. That all her friends have left for overseas but when I’m limited to 10 invites, I realized that she actually has a lot of friends. So I had a tough time deciding who to call but decided to make sure the people I called were sort of in the same group of her friends so she could just kickback and relax the whole night rather than having to go around making sure that everyone’s comfortable and not left out.

Plus my sister Fayth’s birthday happens to be a week after Shorty’s and I won’t be around to celebrate it with her so I decided to make it a joint celebration between Fayth and Shorty. Fayth on the other hand is a very private person. When asked on which friends she would like to invite she only wanted to invite one.

Here are some pictures we took of the 10 of us there that night.

And here’s Fayth and Shorty both cutting their birthday cake.

Birthday cakes are a tricky one for Shorty. Remember in the first birthday party I did for her I got her a custom made Hello Kitty birthday cake?

Well she didn’t eat a bite of it because one thing you should know about Shorty. She doesn’t like cake.

So this time I made sure the cake was an ice-cream cake, something she wouldn’t have an excuse not to eat. Fayth and Shorty, 2 of the 3 most important women in my life (My mother would be the other one in the Top 3).

And a group photo of all of us together.

Happy Birthday Shorty and Fayth!

Don’t ask Shorty how old she is this year…. don’t… I made that mistake once.

I went house visiting quite a bit this Chinese New Year. In one of the houses I visited, I bumped into a visiting uncle who hails from Canada. After some small talk over pineapple tarts and chee gu, I learned something that would be the talk of the next few hours. He used to work in an airline. Air Canada specifically.

I love talking to people who had at one point work in airlines because I always have a lot of questions. Don’t you? I mean when we fly we’re asked to follow rules that we sometimes don’t even know why they’re there but just do it anyway. So I’ve always wanted to learn why these rules were there…. like why do you need to open all the windows when we’re landing and taking off? Etc etc.

This uncle is not the first though. I have a few friends who’re now air stewardesses with Malaysian Airlines, Air Asia or even Singapore Airlines and whenever I see them the conversation always goes the same way. So here are some things I’ve learned about flying. Please note however that whatever I’m sharing here is in its rawest form. I didn’t cross check any of these facts online to see if they’re 100% true. They’re just based on what my friends who work in airlines tell me.

1) Why do we need to open all the windows during takeoff and landing?

I’ve heard a lot of reasons for this in the past. Some people say it’s so that if the plane crashes *touch wood*, the emergency crew on the outside will be able to look in and see what’s going on inside. What I learned though is that it works both ways. Having the window open allows a passenger to see what’s going on outside in a split second and it’s not only because the window is opened. Say imagine if the plane crashes and the windows then just automatically open on its own leading way to a ray of bright sunlight coming into the passenger cabin. For a few seconds, all the passengers inside won’t be able to see anything outside until their eyes adjust to the bright sunlight outside. That few seconds in the case of an emergency is crucial.

2) Why do we have to dim the cabin lights every time we do night landings?

The reason for this is exactly the same as the first reason. During night landings the outside of the aircraft is dark. So they want to make the inside dark too so that it doesn’t take any time for your eyes to adjust when you’re looking outside.

3) Why do we have to turn off mobile phones and all electronic devices during a flight?

This is a funny one which I’m not sure how true it is. Well basically everyone I talk to tells me that this is bullshit. There is no real evidence that your mobile phone or your iPod interferes with the aircraft systems. In fact a pilot friend mentioned that the pilots always have their mobile phones turned on in the cockpit throughout the flight anyway.

Then why is this rule there? Well because the only electronic devices that can really interfere with the airplane systems are like satellite phones or long range walkie-talkies or something. They don’t want to be able to specify each of these equipment every time the plane takes off and land so they just do a blanket “Turn off all electronic devices”.

Of course there are probably some other reasons. Like if an emergency happens during take-off or landing, they want you to be able to listen to any instructions the cabin crew have to give rather than having it blocked out by your iPod.

4) Smoking on the airplane

A lot of smokers I know always have this way of smoking on the airplane. Many claim that they were taught this method from the cabin crew themselves. What they do is they go into the airplane toilet and take one of those small paper cups and use it to cover the smoke detector in the toilet. Then smoke and blow the smoke into the sink because there is a suction there.

What I’ve learned is that in most airplanes, they don’t have smoke detectors in the toilet. They’re heat detectors instead because smoke detectors can be too sensitive and cause some false alarms here and there. The real deterrent though isn’t setting off any detectors. It’s because it’s DANGEROUS to all the other passengers on the plane. Also it’s illegal and if you do get caught you can get in big trouble. So don’t smoke on the plane!

5) Do airplanes run out of food?

Yes. Some airlines intentionally stock food for less passengers that its carrying to reduce weight of the aircraft and in turn save costs. This is especially so in night flights. So say there are 300 people on a night flight to London, the airlines take a bet that maybe… 10% of the passengers will choose not to have a meal and instead sleep through.

So the aircraft only carries food enough for 270 people instead of 300. If however everyone chooses to eat on one particular flight then they have to go find biscuits or all sorts of different things.

6) Do people shag on flights?

YES…. and you know how I know? All my friends who are cabin crew tell me so. So when you’re thinking of joining the mile-high club by shagging on flights, know that all the cabin crew will know haha. One of my friends told me that she even saw a girl going down on her boyfriend at their seat while trying to hide underneath a blanket. It was the talk of the entire cabin crew the whole flight.

There’s so much more that I’ve learned but I think putting it all in here would make this post much more lengthy than it already is so I’ll stop here. Just happy to share whatever I’ve learned. If there’s anything you guys know that I don’t, please feel free to share in the comments 🙂

My brother showed this to me over CNY. Thought it was really cool.

Now everyone can have a platinum album!!!

I don’t have many pictures for Chinese New Year period because my family always made me promise not to put any pictures of them on my blog. They’re all very shy. Here’s how my Chinese New Year has been going though.

1) My two cousins are the latest Tiahs to be addicted to Starcraft 2.

Meet Stephanie Tiah

And Rachelle Tiah

Both of them saw me playing Starcraft 2 with my brothers over the course of the week. One day when we left our computers unattended they decided to start up Starcraft 2 and try the game themselves. Before we knew it they were addicted to it. Much more addicted to it than I am. Ahh if only my gf “accidentally” started playing Starcraft 2 on her own and got addicted to it too. Then we would have so much quality time together heh.

2) Wedding Pressure

Speaking of my gf. This CNY I got my first official pressure to get married from my mother. We were just talking about marriage and relationships and it came to this:

Mum: Aiyahh still so young la you don’t need to think about marriage yet. How old are you again ?

Me: Ummm this year I’ll turn 27.

Mum: What?! I thought you’re 25 only! Eh son if you are sure already then what are you waiting for? Faster get married. Old already.

That’s not the only pressure I’m getting though. My relatives apparently have an ongoing bet that I will get married either this year or next. Apparently they say 30% chance I’ll get married this year and 70% next year. In other words they’re saying there is NO chance that I will get married if I don’t get married by next year. I told both my Mum and my relatives the same thing. I’m not ready for marriage yet and neither is Shorty.

3) Rude Shorty

Speaking of Shorty. She was over at my place yesterday and was so sticky from all the CNY heat (and for playing indoor football with my cousins) that she took a shower and wore some of my clothes. One of my t-shirts she put on was my “Mr Rude” t-shirt. When I pointed out that she was wearing a Mr Rude, she went into one of her usual laughing fits.

Only to stop for 2 seconds only to do something rude (to live up to her t-shirt), like flip me the finger or something.

Funny Shorty.

I will end with this picture of Shorty wearing my Mr Rude t-shirt and giving the ugliest rudest face possible.

Hehe my cute shorty. How she can mess up her hair, dress up like that, give that kind of face and end up looking like that from this little angel here.

Heh.

Just had the Chinese New Year Eve Steamboat dinner that I have with my family every year. One of my favourite meals ever is the steamboat that we do at home.

See that thing on top of the pot? That’s Fu Chuk… or deep fried bean curd… LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!

All of you guys must be having your CNY Reunion dinners now.

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m back in Penang now for Chinese New Year. Spending some time with family and catching up with some old friends. During the day I have been running errands for my mum getting stuff ready for the Chinese New Year dinners. Like we’re preparing the steamboat dinner so I went to this Burma Road Wan Tan Mee store to buy raw Wan Tan from the owner.

Then for the beef balls I went to the Bomba beef ball noodle place and bought like 80 over beef balls from her.

Couldn’t resist having lunch there too. That is in my opinion the best beef ball noodle in Penang and it’s done by this pretty girl. Everyone refers to her as “leng lui”. If you’re wondering where it is, it’s right opposite the Fire Station at the end of Beach Street.

I also managed to find some time to pay a visit to my old baby sitter Aunty Nancy who took care of me when I was young.

At night though I’ve been going out quite a bit. My favourite hangout place this trip has been G-Spot at G Hotel because of their Live Music. Been there two nights in a row already.

Last night I was there to watch Dasha Logan.

She turns out to be the sister of one of my old secondary school mates. She’s really really good… I heard she performs in KL too so I’m going to make it a point to bring Shorty to see her one of these days.

Speaking of Shorty…. let me tell you some conversations I’ve been having with her.

It was 11.30AM or so on a Saturday morning. I BBMed her to wish her good morning and we chatted for a short while. Then after the 3rd reply I stopped getting any replies from her. I waited patiently and went to do my things.

Some 1 hour later she finally replied me
“I fell asleep again.”

This happens quite a lot. Shorty is a little narcoleptic.

———–

Later that day we were BBMing again. I was telling her how Penang had really cool weather this Chinese New Year… unlike the usual CNYs that are really hot.

She said “2012 iz coming”.

My Shorty says the funniest things.

So it’s like that. Wednesday morning I woke up all ready to go to work. I was trying to decide what to wear. I normally wear long sleeve shirts with jeans and sneakers but that morning I felt like wearing a t-shirt. So I reached into my closet and picked up this Google t-shirt I bought from the Google HQ in Mountain View.

For some reason the t-shirt felt a little tight. But it couldn’t be! I just wore it last week and it felt perfectly fine. So I tweeted.

I was running through all the scenarios in my head. I considered everything. Maybe it shrunk in the washing machine, maybe I just didn’t remember that it fit like this or maybe… just maybe…. I had grown fat! ARGHH!!!

I brushed it off though and I went to work. Then when I reached work and opened my e-mails I noticed an e-mail from Facebook. It was telling me that someone had commented on my status update so I went to look at the comment.

My friend Jia Jer said “Maybe you wore the wrong shirt – your gfs shirt lol”.

I laughed at it for like 2 seconds, shrugged and went back to work. Just as I was looking at my other e-mails it dawned on me that what Jia Jer said could be true (even though he meant it as a joke). I could be wearing my girlfriend’s t-shirt because I bought two of these same unisex t-shirts. One of them S (for my gf) and one M for me. I could be wearing the S.

A quick check at the size and I realized that I was indeed wearing Shorty’s t-shirt. I don’t know what got into me but another stupid thing I did next was to say it out loud in my quiet office “OH SHIT.. I’M WEARING MY GF’S SHIRT”.

Everyone turned around and laughed. I went for lunch that day with some of the Nuffies and the girls kept looking at my t-shirt saying that they could see my nipples through it. Feeling violated, I covered my breasts with my hands… suddenly feeling like a girl being checked out by shameless men who kept staring.

I now know how it feels like when we guys stare at girls.

One of the topics that has often been in the news in the past few years is our “brain drain”. We’ve had lots of smart and talented Malaysians who graduate with good degrees and great results but choose instead to work and settle down overseas as opposed to come home. It’s a little bit of a surprise to me that only in the recent years did this really become a topic we focused. I’ve seen it happen since I first started university in the UK back at 2003. We were just at the beginning of our 3 year degree and yet almost all the Malaysians I met there had a clear mission in mind. They were all going to study hard, get their First Class Honours and find a job in the UK. If they fail to get a job in the UK, they would then try the USA, Hong Kong or even Singapore. Anything but going back to Malaysia.

3 years later in 2006 we all graduated.

True enough at least 50% of all the Malaysians I knew in London had chosen to stay in London. Of the 50%, some of them had jobs but some didn’t. Those who didn’t get a job vowed to stay there until they did. I was in the remaining 50% of Malaysians who wanted to come home. I love London and all that but home is home. It wasn’t just among students in the UK though. It’s friends everywhere else. I have friends who studied in Australia but failed to get a job there after graduation. They didn’t want to come home so they stayed there for years living off part-time jobs, being waiters at cafes, promoters and jobs like that. Mind you that some of these people I knew were top scorers in their school days but yet would rather be waitering tables in Melbourne than come home and work in a bank in Malaysia.

Sure I know why some people don’t want to come home. I’m well familiar with that. It’s something a lot of my Malaysian friends at university always educated me on. They asked me day in and day out “Why do you want to go home? It’s better here.. equal rights and you get paid more too”.

I always replied... “You said it yourself. It’s home”. Today I still believe the same thing. I’ve been lucky to travel all around the world for work and I’ve seen the life of different cities. I still believe though that Malaysia is a great place to live and a place with lots of opportunity. I can go for a jog in the park and just make friends with any of the strangers I see there regardless of whatever race they were. They’re all just Malaysian to me.

The good news is that in recent years more I’ve seen more and more of my friends moving back to Malaysia from overseas and they have done good things. I’ll talk about two of them here as an example. One of them is Shaun and one of them is Wilson. They were both straight-A students.

Shaun here graduated from the London School of Economics and worked at Ernst & Young in London for a few years.
Wilson here on the other hand studied in Warwick University and worked at an investment bank in London called Dresdner Kleinwort.

After a few years in London they both decided to come back to Malaysia. Together they started a beverage distributor that’s now doing really well. Plus just recently they hopped on to the group-buying craze and started Milkadeal.com. It’s a site where we can get really good deals out of anything, like 50-90% discount just by getting our friends to buy together and take advantage of volume discounts. You can check it out here.

So if you’re Malaysian and overseas. Come back. Malaysia as a developing country still has challenges… but it is still home and I truly believe it’s getting better.

For years, I along with a lot of other Malaysians suffered from the never-improving broadband connection called Streamyx. I mean when Streamyx first came out it was really good. But then years went by and while other countries moved on to 10-20 or even 100mps lines now, Streamyx still stayed at 1mbps. It also didn’t help that most of the time we never even hit that 1mbps.

I get a hint though of the kind of internet that the outside world experiences. When I was in Japan, the lines there were so fast you had YouTube videos loading instantly and downloading any software patches of any sort took minutes instead of hours.

When watching YouTube videos, most Malaysians are used to doing one thing. They would click play on the video, then click pause and wait for the red progress bar to load till the end before they actually start watching the video. Not to mention sometimes the video loads halfway and then it stops so you’ll have to refresh the whole page again.

So when I first heard about Unifi I was excited for it, but at the same time a little cautious. Sure it was going to be fibre optic and had better infrastructure but I was just pessimistic about our providers being able to achieve high-speed broadband in Malaysia. When it first launched it wasn’t available in my area yet. So I kept checking every month and finally it was. I was the first person in my area to get Unifi-ed.

Now the reason why I’m writing this entry is because…. when bad things happen we’re often generous in the flaming we give TM. So I believe that when TM does things right, we should be generous in giving them credit.

Let me tell you about Unifi.

The Speed

The speed is amazing. I went for a 20mbps line which is the best they got but only because I’m sharing the line with a lot of other very heavy internet users in my household. I just did a speedtest and this was the download and upload speeds I was getting.

Everything is totally different with Unifi. Sure surfing is a breeze but there’s more to that:

I don’t lag in any online gaming I do. It used to be in Starcraft 2 that it would take a long time for every menu page to load because the net was so slow. I don’t get that anymore.

YouTube is a whole new experience. You can click and instantly watch any video on the spot. In fact I don’t even watch standard YouTube videos anymore. I often now go for the full screen HD videos.

Unifi is as fast as any other fast connection that I’ve experienced overseas in Japan, USA or even Singapore. Perhaps they have even faster lines there but I’m not sure how much more faster than 20mbps we need. Unifi is basically how internet should have always been for us in Malaysia… and I’m glad it’s finally here.

The Service

Installation

Now the speed of it or the product itself is just one thing. It’s the people and my experience with their service that spurred me to write this entry. On the day of the installation, the TM staff (some people say the installers are 3rd party contractors but lets just refer to them as TM staff here) were an hour late to my place but that’s because they got lost finding it. They were very apologetic though. So I forgave them. They came at 4PM and started working on installing my Unifi. They did some of the work outside my house before they came in and then came in just to set up the equipment.

They got the internet connection working in no time but they faced some problems with installing the IPTV. Every time they turned it on it failed to connect to the server or something. So they tried all sorts of troubleshooting and made lots of calls to different TM numbers to find out what’s going on. More than an hour passed and since it was pass 5.30PM I wondered if they were just going to leave the job unfinished and come back another day. They didn’t.

They stayed all the way on till 9PM to try to fix the problem. I felt so bad and I told them that they could just come back another day if they wanted but they said that as long as I’m ok with them staying long at their place, they’ll be happy to stay until they fix it. Dinner-time came and went so I served them milo and cookies which they gobbled up in no time. They were appreciative. After 9PM they decided that there was nothing more they could do but they would get someone else on the equipment side to come fix it another day. I had gotten my internet up working anyway so I thanked them and they left.

A week later or so someone else from TM came and got my IPTV working.

Problems

Then just last week I had problems.  My internet connection just died. So I called up the Unifi hotline. Their customer service officer was really helpful and she lodged a report for me and told me they were trying to fix the problem remotely. The next morning I followed up with them and they said they were going to send someone over to my place in the afternoon to check it out. This time they were on time… and they fixed it in no time. In less than 24 hours since I had called their hotline, they had sent a team over to fix my problem. Now if that’s not great customer service what isn’t?

So I’m inspired by Unifi… by the people behind it at every level. I’m glad that TM as a Malaysian company has managed to pull itself together and gradually change the perception people had of it before.

To be fair, the IPTV isn’t great. When it comes to TV, Astro is still far superior to Unifi so don’t think of replacing your Astro with Unifi. But if you’re looking for a faster internet connection. Unifi is a good bet 🙂