In the past week I watched two movies. Both which I would highly recommend.

The first movie is one of those movies that I think gets a lot less attention than it truly deserves. It’s called Devil’s Double.

It’s about Uday Hussein. Saddam Hussein’s eldest and notoriously cruel son. Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia that describes the kind of things Uday used to do.

• As head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, Uday oversaw the imprisonment and torture of Iraqi athletes who were deemed not to have performed to expectations. According to widespread reports, torturers beat and caned the soles of the football players’ feet—inflicting intense pain without leaving visible marks on the rest of their bodies. Uday reportedly kept scorecards with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten after a poor showing. He would insult athletes who performed below his expectations by calling them dogs and monkeys—considered insults in the Arab world—to their faces.[8] One defector reported that jailed football players were forced to kick a concrete ball after failing to reach the 1994 FIFA World Cup finals.[9] The Iraqi national football team were seen with their heads shaved after failing to achieve a good result in a tournament in the 1980s.
• Allegedly kidnapping young Iraqi women from the streets in order to rape them.[2] Uday was known to intrude on parties and otherwise “discover” women whom he would later rape. Time published an article in 2003 detailing his sexual brutality.[2][11]
• Usage of an iron maiden on persons running foul of him.[12]
• Allegedly Uday beat an army officer unconscious when the man refused to allow Uday to dance with his wife; the man later died of his injuries. Uday also shot and killed an army officer who did not salute him.[10]

I know I know!

Haven’t been blogging but I can explain…. I’ve been sick for the past few days. So if I were to blog, most of my entries will be of how much I slept in bed.

I got bored of sleeping at home today though. So I went to the office to work for a couple of hours. It was an extremely productive couple of hours and I felt all alive again! Somehow I come from the school of thought where I believe if you’re sick, you don’t wanna be doing sick people kind of things like staying in bed or eating porridge. I like to eat GOOD food when I’m sick.. even if the doctor tells me I should avoid it.

At the end of my 2 hours in the office my body punished my defiance with a fever so I went back home to sleep. Only to pick Shorty up for dinner at Publika. After that… here I am. Playing Battlefield 3 before I go to bed. Somehow playing games when I’m sick make me feel better too. I remember when I had my knee injury in secondary school and couldn’t walk. Playing Counter-strike made me feel like I was walking all fine again!

So now it’s time for me to head to bed now. Good night guys!

FOOoooHH!! Haven’t updated my blog in 5 days. That’s gotta be a new record!

I’m sorry guys. Let me explain. Haha truth is I don’t really know what to update in the past few days. I’ve been back in Penang for CNY but my parents have made me promise not to put any picture of them on my blog. So the only CNY picture I can actually put up here is of this.

The one thing I get very addicted to every CNY.

We had a game going on among my cousins to see who could eat just 3 pieces of this and nothing more… while watching everyone else munch away. Nobody won this challenge. It was wayy too addictive.

One thing I noticed this CNY is how all my little cousins have the best of phones now. I remember when I was 13 years old, we had our little Nokias and all. Kids today don’t have Nokias. They have iPhones and along with their iPhones they have cute iPhone covers just like this.

I was supposed to go for an old school reunion dinner tonight but I can’t make it because I’ve finally fallen sick today and spent most of the day today in bed. I met up with some old school friends last night and they were telling me how I should go. How I would be “amazed” to hear what some of my old school mates do for a living now.

Sure many are engineers, accountants etc etc but one of them for example is a pimp. That’s right… a PIMP. He supposedly makes the most money out of everyone else too haha.

I don’t know what to tell my old school friends when I do see them one day either. If I did see them this year I would tell them the biggest change of my life this year would be getting married. Just a week before I followed Shorty to go try on some wedding dresses that she liked.

Only to realize later that the groom isn’t supposed to follow the bride wedding dress shopping. So I shall make it a point not to go anymore. Heh.

Ok I’m not feeling well now so I shall go lie down for a bit. I actually feel like having frozen yoghurt all of a sudden but I’m not sure if that’s the best thing for my cough right now.

In any case, Gong Xi Fa Cai everybody! May the year of the Dragon be a wonderful one for us all!

I gotta admit, when I first watched Tangled and saw the scene with all the “floating lanterns”, I didn’t believe that there really was such a thing in real life.

I thought it was just a Disney fantasy. Then one day I heard from my colleagues in the Philippines that Nuffnang Philippines did a blogger gathering some time last year where they got bloggers to release floating lanterns up into the sky together. When I knew there was such a thing… I knew I had to do it.. at least once in my life.
I just never knew I would get to do it so soon.

That “soon” for me was just recently on our company trip in Chiang Mai.

We had this nice company dinner on our last night at Chiang Mai. Right after the dinner everyone gathered around and the resort staff had a little surprise for us. They were going to let us release floating lanterns like this.

Everyone got excited and started letting go of them. When one of them floated into the air it was beautiful, when a few more followed it was a sight you would never forget. We didn’t have as many as the movie Tangled. But we had loads.

The Singapore team even released one together.

The one I released though had a little wish written on it. Got a video of it here.

Hope that wish comes true.

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

——-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on a bamboo raft ride down the river.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the Blue Man Group.

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

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

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

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

I saw this video posted on ChurpChurp SG here.

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

A window washer that is richer than us all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost made cooking seem soo easy.

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

G’night!

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

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

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

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

2) TV Drinking Games

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

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

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

You can read more about it here.

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

i) Every time there is a corner kick.

ii) Every time there is a free kick

iii) Every time there is a header

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

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

vi) Every time there is a foul.

vii) Every time the referee blows his whistle.

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

So what other drinking games do you guys normally play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donated some money, spent some time feeding the homeless

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

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