Wen-Qi was overwhelmed by the response we got from you guys, with so many people wishing her well.

For that I must say thank you.

Wen-Qi has since been discharged from Pantai Hospital and is resting at home with a bandage on her forehead (occasionally making microwave popcorn to kill time).Only thing about her now is that her movements are all very very slow and it hurts whenever she has to laugh.

Please note however that if you were to ever meet Wen-Qi, please DO NOT say
“Hey I heard you banged a wall”.

What you SHOULD say is
“Hey I heard a wall banged you”.

So please get that right, she did not bang a wall, a wall banged her.

Just yesterday Wen-Qi said to me
“You lied to me in the car! You said it wasn’t a serious cut! How could you?”

I guess what I should have said was
“HOLY SHIT THAT IS A SERIOUS WOUND!!! MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH GOD WEN-QI, YOU’RE NOT GONNA MAKE IT!!!”.

Saturday 31st March 2007.

I woke up at 6am in the morning to drive back from KL to Penang.

I was rushing back to make it for an afternoon meeting with the CEO of a listed company who happens to be in Penang.

In spite of being able to get his phone number through a contact, it took me three weeks of following up to finally get a meeting with this very busy man, so when he offered me an opportunity to meet him on a Saturday, I grabbed it.

I had my chance and I wasn’t about to blow it.

By the time the hot afternoon sun hit Penang, I was already at home in the comforts of my room rehearsing whatever I had to say to the CEO.

Wen-Qi even came all over to my place that afternoon to give me some support before my meeting.

Before I knew it, evening came and it was time for me to leave home for the meeting.

Wen-Qi who came in her own car was the first to drive out in her Kelisa, followed by my father who also happened to be going out at the time.

I got into my car as I saw my father’s car disappear in the distance and left home.

Just a little down the road from my place, I suddenly saw my father’s car stopped by the side of the road.

As I whizzed by not suspecting anything, I caught my father jumping out of his car in a hurry and rushing to the opposite direction.

Wondering what was going on, I looked in my rear view mirror only to see Wen-Qi’s Kelisa crashed into a retaining wall; a sight that I had completely missed as I drove past the first time.Pic: The actual wall that Wen-Qi ran into after they cleared the wreckage.

I screeched my car to a stop and rushed out towards the crashed Kelisa.

As the car drew nearer I found myself getting increasingly anxious.

The wreckage was much worse than it looked in the distance.

I reached the driver’s door and looked in.

The door was smashed in just like the front of the car and there was shattered glass everywhere.

Wen-Qi was there sitting in the driver’s seat dazed and covered with blood.

My heart dropped at the horrifying sight.

She was in pain with her bloody hands covering her eyes crying
“My head… it hurts… it hurts!!!”

I stood shocked for a few seconds, not knowing what to do but I came back to earth when I heard my father shout “GET HER OUT OF THE CAR!!!”.

I unlocked the driver’s door from the outside and tried to yank it open but the door wouldn’t budge.

As I tugged on the driver’s door, Wen-Qi was moaning in pain so I tried to comfort her.

“Don’t worry don’t worry… we’re going to get you out of here”.

Failing miserably to open the driver’s door, I ran over to the front passenger’s door and threw it open.

My dad crouched in, released her safety belt that had a layer of blood over it and pulled her out of the wreckage.

I carried Wen-Qi to my car and put her in the back seat wiping the blood off her with as much tissue as I could find in my car.

She had cuts and bruises all over her body but most of the blood was coming from a big cut in her forehead.

My dad gave her a huge stack of tissues and said “PUT PRESSURE ON YOUR WOUND!!!“.

I jumped into the driver’s seat and drove her off to the nearest hospital (which wasn’t exactly a stone’s throw away).

My dad led the way in his own car.

I was driving fast praying that there would be no traffic but I was too hopeful.

Traffic was heavy.
Every few seconds, my eyes darted back at Wen-Qi who was in my back seat to see how she was doing.

She was still dazed and kept saying
“What happened? Am I dreaming?… my head hurts so bad… I wanna wake up!!! Please wake me up”.

She was bleeding everywhere, her top and skirt were soaked in blood.

It didn’t help when she looked at the stack of tissues that she had earlier been using to cover the gash on her forehead.

It too was soaked in blood and the sight of it was a good enough reason for panic.

She cried
“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD…. I’M BLEEDING SO MUCH.. OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!!!”.

I looked back and shouted
“DON’T WORRY!!! IT’S JUST A SMALL CUT… DON’T WORRY… YOU’RE FINE!!!”.

I felt the guilt right after those words left my mouth.

I didn’t know if it was a small cut or not, and it probably wasn’t considering the amount of blood there was, but I knew that I had to calm her down though I doubt saying that helped much.

Her thoughts suddenly swinged a full 360 degrees and she said
“OMG!!! Your MEETING… you’re going to be late for your meeting!!!”.

I replied hastily
“That is the LAST THING I’m worried about right now… I HAVE to get you to a hospital first”.

She managed to thank me somewhere in the midst of her pain, only to tell me a few minutes later
“I think I need to puke”.

I looked back at her and saw the dreadful expression on her face as she tried to keep herself from puking.

I shouted yet again.
“LOOK… if you have to puke then PUKE here in the car!!! I am NOT stopping till we get to a hospital!”.

Puke in the car she did.

She skillfully decorated my car with puke but it wasn’t the typical puke you would see from a drunk man.

She was vomiting blood.

That was enough motivation for me.

I stepped on the gas and starting aggressively honking the slow cars ahead of me.

Finally we got to Gleneagles Hospital in Penang but our sense of relief was short-lived.

We got stuck at the entrance.

At Gleneagles whenever a car wants to get into the hospital grounds, it has to first take a parking ticket.

So as any pessimist would guess, when shit happens… it happens not just once or twice at a time, but all in one go.

The ticket machine wasn’t working and the barrier wouldn’t go up so both the cars my dad and I were driving were stuck outside the hospital.

We decided to leave our cars by the side of the road as my dad carried Wen-Qi into the emergency room.

I followed to help only to hear my dad say
“Go for your meeting!!!”

I resisted and replied
“How can I go when she’s like this?”

But my dad was adamant
“What are you going to do? You’ve already taken her to the hospital, she’s going into the Emergency Room, all you’re going to do is WAIT… so JUST GO… I’m taking care of her… and call her parents!”.

I stood there for a few seconds thinking about what my father said and decided to listen to him.

So I got into the car and rushed to the meeting place.

When I got there, I first rushed to the restroom to wash up.

The white shirt I was wearing was spattered with blood and as I rinsed my hands in the sink, the water turned red with Wen-Qi’s blood.

I washed it all off and tried to calm myself down.

Then I walked confidently into the lounge where I was supposed to meet the CEO and waited.

He came not long after and we talked for more than an hour about Nuffnang (of course with me initially explaining the blood all over me and ensuring him that I didn’t just kill someone who didn’t like idea of Nuffnang blogs).

My mind was racing back and forth.

On one hand I was wondering what the hell I was doing here at the meeting when I should be with a friend who needs me now more than anything else.

But my Father’s words came back to my head and I focused on the meeting.

Right after the meeting ended I rushed into the car and called my father to get an update on the situation.

They had moved from Gleneagles to Loh Guan Lye Hospital because Gleneagles didn’t have a brain surgeon present at the time.

But alas some good news.

Wen-Qi had a scan at Loh Guan Lye and they didn’t find any damage to the brain, just a hairline crack.

But the cut was very deep, so deep that you could even see her skull. The neurosurgeon at Loh Guan Lye advised us that since the patient is a 19-year old girl, we should instead take her to a plastic surgeon to stitch up her wound. At least the stitches might look better.

We found a plastic surgeon at Pantai Hospital all the way on the other side of the island and we made our way there.
This time with Wen-Qi’s father driving the car and I sitting in the back seat with Wen-Qi, trying to make her smile in this difficult time. I succeeded in most instances.

When we reached Pantai Hospital, there were already people waiting to get Wen-Qi on to a wheelchair to wheel her straight into the Emergency Room.

I followed her in.

She was still suffering in pain, at one point even saying that her head was hurting so much she felt like ripping it off.

I took it as a joke.. but I wasn’t so sure if she was really joking.

She went into surgery at 9.30PM and her parents told me to go home, saying that she probably wouldn’t be awake until the next morning.

I went to see her the morning after. She was lying in bed with a huge bandage on her head.

She gave me a cheeky smile as I walked into her ward which indicated that she was feeling better.

Her pain had subsided and she was feeling a lot better, remembering a bit more of what really happened.

I took of a picture of her in bed and asked
“Your Dad last night asked me if I’m gonna blog about this. Should I?”

She said
“Okayy… but I look so awful nowww”…

I pictured how she looked yesterday right after the accident.

Then I said
“You’ve never looked better”.

It wasn’t a lie.

PS: All the pictures in this blog entry (except the first pic) was taken after the incident. I obviously didn’t quite have the peace of mind to stop and take a picture during the crisis.

What kind of bastard would I be if I did that?

Ming and I are in KL doing our marketing rounds to tons and tons of advertisers and just yesterday we got a little lucky.

We managed to secure a meeting with the CEO and Founder of a very large multinational company which commands a brand that every Malaysian has heard of.

That afternoon, we walked straight into the grand office with a secretary smiling at us and asking
“May I help you?”

Right that instant a well-dressed older man walked out of a room and straight past the secretary’s table.
He saw Ming and I standing there with our briefcases and asked “What are you both doing here?“

I calmly replied
“We are looking for PPP (Not his real name obviously 😛). We have an appointment with him for right now”.
He let out a short laugh and said
“I am PPP.”

I mentally gave myself a pat in the back for looking like an idiot but before I could say anything else, he said
“Come come into my office”.

We walked into his posh office, it was beautiful.

Not extravagantly huge but beautifully furnished with expensive furniture.

We all took our seats on the soft sofa couches around a striking wooden coffee table.

He sat down comfortably on his end of the sofa and said
“Okay… now tell me, how can we do business together?”

Ming and I started first by introducing ourselves and how we came about to start Nuffnang.

Then we went on to describe Nuffnang and the ins and outs of how we work and then bring the story round to whether his huge company would be willing to take a small percentage of his advertising budget to advertise with us.

That small percentage would already be HUGE for us.
At the end of our introduction, PPP said
“Your kind of internet business has very low barriers to entry. You have to be careful. You will experience fierce competition, and in my experience, competition can turn nasty.”

He paused for a while then asked
“How much money did you put in this business?”

I gave him the 6 digit figure and was quick to tell him that both my partner and I are lucky to have little financial constraint on this end.

He then asked
“Do you need another investor?”, smiling at the both of us as the words left his lips.

Thoughts ran through my mind in that split second.

On one hand, there we were in the office of this tycoon hoping to convince him to advertise on Nuffnang blogs but instead we were now having him ask us if we would like him to invest in Nuffnang.

I looked at PPP and realised that rather than trying to pitch to him, I should instead be pitching to his Marketing Department.

I shouldn’t be using this meeting to pitch, I should be using this meeting to learn from PPP.

Ming and I are both young and we have a lot to learn but we learn fast. If there is any chance to ever get business advice that money can’t ever buy, it was now.

So I asked him for more advice, trying to draw from his business experience and that’s how we spent the rest of our meeting.

Before we knew it, 15 minutes was up and the Tycoon had to be some place else.

He showed Ming and I out of the office and said
“If there is any way that you can think of that I could help, please let me know. You have my contact details on the card. Let me know when you’re free to meet again and we can talk more”.

I thanked him graciously and walked away from his private office.

As Ming and I were walking away I said
“Do you know that we just had a meeting with one of the Richest Men in Malaysia?”

In one of my previous blog entries, one of my readers (Suicidal), asked me how much would be my price before I do a belly dance for everyone to see.

I said RM5,000.
And just recently, another reader (William) recently made an entry on his blog to start a fund collecting RM5,000 from everyone to see if they could get me to Belly Dance.

The bastardo William even photoshopped a preview of how the dance might look like if I were to really go through with it.

Now this is how I look like in person (Just taken yesterday. Not my best picture, I know)
And this is what William photoshopped me to look like if I were to really do a belly dance.

(Notice my mole was too small in the picture he took so the bastardo photoshopped a bigger one for me… aww how sweet)

Will someone please go over to William’s blog and tell him what a SILLY SILLY idea this is and how NOBODY is going to pay money to see Boss Stewie Belly Dance with his BIG TUMMY.

PS: But okay, in the miracle that William really manages to gather the RM5,000. I will keep to my word and do the belly dance. But I won’t keep the money. I can’t bear spending such HARD EARNED money on myself. I’ll give it all to charity :p

Last Saturday night, 11.58PM.

While most people were either sleeping or out partying, all of us at Nuffnang were behind our computers waiting for the first ads to launch.

Call me a pessimist, but I always believe that something will always goes wrong. So to make sure we were prepared for it, I got everyone at Nuffnang to stay up and sit in front of our computers, waiting to pounce at the problem when it surfaced.

The clock hit 12AM and our servers starting serving out the first paid ads.

Everything ran smoothly at first but we noticed a small bug that affected a small number of blogs.

All of us got to work immediately and before long, we had ironed out all the problems.

There was nothing left to do but sleep.

I stared at my computer screen for a while admiring our first paid ads.

As I sat there, I thought about the challenging week I had ahead of me, meeting advertisers every day, big to small and all from various industries.

Then I thought about what a very big advertiser I was dealing with asked me just last week,
“Timothy, how in the world did you guys get so many blogs to sign up with you in just these few weeks?”.

I paused for a while, wiped the sweat off my forehead and said
“It wasn’t because of anything we did… it was what the bloggers that supported us did. They are the only reason why we are where we are today.”

When I meet this week’s batch of advertisers, my answer to that question will be no different.

One of my friends yesterday just said to me
“Eh!!! You’re coming up with all these one line posts nowadays ar! Getting lazy to blog ar?”

Ahhh my dear readers.

The truth is that it’s not that I’m getting lazy to blog, or that I’m neglecting you guys, but Nuffnang has been keeping me very very busy this week, especially since our first paid ads are rolling out tomorrow.

Yes we’re a relatively quiet bunch at Nuffnang. We don’t talk too much about what we’re “planning” to do and end up not delivering in the end.

We’d rather spend all that time focusing on getting the job done.

So it doesn’t mean that we’re not doing anything at Nuffnang if we’re not announcing to the world about what we’re doing.

Anyway on another note, I was having dinner with some friends yesterday and one of them asked me.
“Eh… if Google came over today and offered you USD 1 million for Nuffnang, would you sell?”

I said
“Probably not at this early stage… but everybody has a price right?”

That was the theme of the night…

EVERYONE HAS HIS PRICE in anything!

My brother and I were watching Fear Factor the other day only to see a healthy American woman drink down some drink with fungus and maggots in it for $5,000. It was disgusting.

I asked my brother if he would do it for RM10,000 and he said “NO”.
“How about RM100,000?”

And he thought for a while and said “Yeah okay… I’ll probably do it for RM100,000”.

Back at the dinner table last night, I asked one of my girl friends there.

“So if a married but wealthy man in his 50s who goes around in a Rolls Royce offered you RM100,000 would you sleep with him?”
She shut her ears and said
“NO NO NO NO NO!!! I WON’T DO IT NO NO NO!!!!!”

Then I raised it “How about RM500,000?”

And she went on
“NO NO NO NO!!!! I WON’T NO!! EWWW!!!!!”

Then I said
“How about RM2 million?!?”

She suddenly paused for a few minutes only to say later
“Okay for RM2 million I’ll think about it.”.

I like playing this game.

GUESS WHO?!

And no that’s NOT Marilyn Manson.

Earl Ku from Kukujiao.com is missing.

If you see this person please contact his sister Kim at 016-6902359.

A police report has already been lodged.

UPDATE: It turns out that Earl is safe and actually in Johor. So no worries…

I happened to meet another reader just last weekend.

You guys remember Mae right?

Mae’s the girl who found her boyfriend through this blog.


I asked her what she thought about me before and after meeting me and this is what she said.

• I don’t think you’re a pervert anymore!! (Just kidding, I know all guys have wandering thoughts.. ALL THE TIME.)
• You’re smaller than I imagined you to be.
• You’re not as fat as you have exaggerated.
• Your mole is smaller than I imagined to be too.
• You’re really nice!!! More so than I anticipated you to be!
• A lil’ more serious than I imagined. But who can be funny all the time right?

DID YOU GUYS HEAR THAT?

SHE SAID THAT “all guys have wandering thoughts… ALL THE TIME”.

What’s that supposed to mean?

That’s not true right? Right?

All we guys think about is how to treat our women with respect, dignity and LOVE!!!

Check out Mae’s full blog entry here.

At Nuffnang, we all have this little board called the “Google Wannabe Board“.

This was inspired by an issue of Fortune (or Forbes) that both Ming and I read which told the story of how life at Google’s HQ in Mountain View was like.

The employees there had free car washes, free meals, free massages, swimming pools and everything else you could ask for.

Ming and I always wanted our leetle dotcom to be like that and Ming insisted that we didn’t need to have money to incorporate a culture like that. We could start it now in our small ways.

So what we agreed on was to have this little board that stated something new we would do for our team mates every couple of months.
It started in January and February with medical benefits for our colleagues (something that burns through the pocket of a tiny dotcom but we felt it would be worth it anyway).

And for March and April, we decided to stock up our pantry with so much junk food it would make our office look like a slumber party.

For that… Ming and I went to Tescos!

Just like all other Tescos, the one in Penang was HUGE!!!

There was everything on sale!!! EVERYTHING…. you could probably even buy a spaceship if you wanted to.
But we were only interested in one thing….

THE JUNK FOOD SECTION

So Ming and I got a trolley and dumped as much junk food as we could in it.
The trolley started off pretty empty at first.

But we were quick to fill it up with everything from Double Decker, to Mamee, to Jelly, to Sweets, to biscuits and most importantly… CHEEZELS!!!

But as I was rolling our trolley around, something caught my attention.

BEER!!!

Now I thought about it… that a beer-filled office would be a happy office. You know, people who laughed about everything or people who talk loud enough to sound extremely motivated about anything… even work.

So I stood there for a second and pondered…

And I pondered….

Imagine someone calling up our office:

“Hello Nuffnang Sdn Bhd? Could you please put me to the Sales Department?”

And a very drunk person on the other end saying

“AHAHAHAHAHA HELLO NOOFNANG HERE…. DID YOU SAY SALES DEPARTMENT??? HAHAHAHA YOU MEAN… YOU MEAN A DEPARTMENT THAT SELLS?!?!? AHAHAHAHAAAHAH Wait wait…. what do we sell again?”

Not exactly the best example to show to a potential client.

So I reluctantly said goodbye to the crates of beer.

And went off to pay the bill!

Yes… the bill.. it was long….Soo soooo longgg…

Anyone wanna suggest a new perk we can add on the board for May/June?

Please… something we can afford… don’t say “Company trip to Space” or “Beyonce Concert”…