Hi Everyone,

Here’s a pretty late Merry Christmas! I know I should’ve updated my blog sooner but I have an excuse… well sort-of. Well Shorty and I have been really busy. When in KL we were busy tidying up whatever left we had to do in KL before we made a trip back to Penang. And now that we’re back in Penang, we’ve been busy looking around at venues for our wedding next year. No we don’t have the dates for that yet. Mum is still trying to find an “auspicious” date for that which is great… because if we weren’t guided by mum, we would’ve just probably opened a calendar and picked a random date by means of eenie meenie minie mou.

Of course being back in Penang means you find time to eat some good hawker food. So I ate my favourite Hot Bowl curry mee in Abu Siti Lane for lunch today. This my friends… is in my opinion… the best curry mee in ALL OF MALAYSIA.

 

If you go, be sure to order the steamed chicken.

Anyway this is a quick update to share with you guys what I bought Shorty for Christmas. In all honesty, Shorty and I don’t really have the habit of buying each other Christmas gifts. We never do. In fact we never even buy each other Anniversary gifts. Birthdays are the only occassions in which we do. The reason for it? Well I guess the standing tacit agreement between Shorty and I has always been that we don’t have to wait for an occassion to buy each other a gift. So if at any point I see something that she likes or she sees something that I like, we’ll just buy it for each other. Regardless if there’s an occassion or not. Once in a while we buy expensive gifts for each other like designer purses or bags or phones but we’re always quick to remind each other that our gifts to each other don’t always have to be about the dollar value to it. Most important is the thought. So if I bought her a Miu Miu purse for her birthday, I won’t have to worry about buying her something MORE expensive on her next birthday or Christmas and the same goes for her to me. It doesn’t work that way for us.

When I gave her this present on Christmas morning she first went
“What is this? What is this? Huh?” in a very worried tone.

And when she realized it was my Christmas present to her she went “FATTY!! I thought you said we don’t buy each other Christmas presents??”.

Well yeah that’s true but this time I felt like buying her a small gift. I noticed that whenever we travel she would sleep very uncomfortably with her neck swinging from side to side. When I got myself a neck pillow she loved it but she never got herself one because she was waiting till she found a cute pink Hello Kitty one.

So this Christmas, I managed to find her one. And taadaaa.. Here it is.

All in time for her trip to Japan next week. She loved it so much she couldn’t wait to use it so she brought it along for our road trip to Penang.

Ok I gotta go have a nice family dinner with Shorty now. So here’s a late Merry Christmas from the both of us!

Have a wonderful New Year’s Eve guys!

A couple of weeks before I proposed to Shorty on the 30th of November, I decided that I wanted to have a video made of the moment that I ask her to marry me. I wanted to have it as a memory that we would keep forever and maybe something we can show our kids in future. I was away on business a lot so I didn’t really have a chance to look around so I asked one of my colleagues, Mimi to help me out.

At first I thought of getting a friend of mine Nigel Sia to do it. But I heard that he was already booked out with many other jobs plus it was last minute. So Mimi then managed to find this production crew called Crazy Monkey Studios. They agreed to do the job and we met at Nerotecca itself a day before the proposal date to plan where the cameras were going to be. They didn’t know I was going to show any memes. All I told them was that I would be showing some signs through the glass door and that’s it.

Then on the day itself we did the proposal and the video was made. About a couple of weeks later, Shorty and I had just blogged about our meme proposal. It went on 9GAG and we saw it go around the internet a bit. That scared us a little. Why? Because after years of blogging we’ve learned that if you put yourself out there, you will some people saying nice things about you, and you will get some people saying bad things about you.

We’re used to taking the bad with the good but when it came to our proposal, we just wanted to remember it for the good and not the bad. So after the pictures from our blog entries went on 9GAG, we almost decided not to post the video up at all. We were pleasantly surprised though that there were lots of good comments on 9GAG about our meme proposal… much more than the bad. So that alleviated our fears a bit. But we still weren’t sure if we wanted to put the video up.

Crazy Monkey Studios though kept persuading us. They said it was an awesome video and if anything it was just to share it with a few of our friends and our blog readers. So on Tuesday night they told me that they were going to make the video public. I said okay but neither Shorty or I blogged or tweeted about it. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I saw tweets from people having already seen the video. It was even posted on ChurpChurp by one of my other colleagues Tim2.

So by noon I decided to blog about it and then tweet about it. From then it exploded. We went to bed on Wednesday night with 60K views on the Vimeo video. When we woke up Thursday morning it had passed 100K and someone had put a copy of it on YouTube. It ended up on 9GAG for the second time.

I was a bit afraid then that it might annoy 9GAGers because from what I understand, 9GAGers don’t like reposts.

When we searched “meme proposal” on Twitter, there were new tweets every minute and the touching thing was how they were all about how they loved the video. “Meme proposal” even trended on Twitter Philippines.

The blogs and news sites all around the world caught up with it. It was on Gizmodo.

On Mashable.

On TheNextWeb.

And many other news sites. Some celebrities started sharing it too. Like Guy Kawasaki.

Or Chris Brogan

Then people started tweeting me, saying that the official music video of the song used in the video “A Thousand Years”, had loads of comments from people saying they were brought there by the meme proposal which I thought was really cool.

 

Then before we knew it, we saw Ryan Seacrest share it on his Facebook,

Twitter and Blog.

That’s when we were like…. OMG OMG OMG!!!

I was at my grandmother’s house on Thursday noon when I learned Christina Perri herself had tweeted about the video.

When Shorty and I both tweeted her back to thank her for the wonderful song she replied.

 

That was a totally surreal moment for us. Never have we ever been tweeted by a famous artist/actor/celebrity whatever.

Before we could calm down our excitement, we found out that our “meme proposal” video was one of the Most Viewed and Top Favorited videos of the day.

 

There were loads of comments on the video and we were afraid to read them at first. We did eventually muster the courage to read them and were touched to see that so many of them were all good comments. Every now and then you’d see a bad comment but then other YouTubers would stand up for us.

We were so moved at how everyone loved our video.

We loved how people from all over the world watched it and loved it.

And we especially loved how our fellow Malaysians were so proud that the “meme proposal” is… and will always be… MALAYSIAN (FUCK YEAH!!!)

We had the best responses. Even some 9GAGers creating little memes for us too.

The honest truth is that we never expected the video to go viral the way it did. We always thought it was just a really simple proposal. It wasn’t lavish or big or anything. It was just me proposing to Shorty at a restaurant with some meme signs… and with some of our best friends.

The proposal gave us some media attention too. Radio stations and newspapers called us up for interviews.

But all that ‘fame’ never mattered to Shorty and I. Because we always knew that it will go away as fast as it came. What mattered to us the most was that for a few days in December 2011, people from all over the world shared the joy of our wonderful moment. Thank you everyone.

We love you all!

—————–

 

PS: Yes everyone. If you look closely at the video you’ll get a glimpse of this card in the stack. In case Shorty said no.

The truth is that I was pretty sure she’d say yes since we’ve been going out for 3 years (or she wouldn’t have wasted so much time on me haha)… but it was just there as a joke.

Fortunately she said YES though. So everyone will just remember this one.

If you haven’t already watched the video, here it is.

As of today (5 days since video went public), our YouTube video has had close to 1.5 million views and our Vimeo 1.3 million. There’ve been many other reposts of our video on YouTube, even one video with Portugese subtitles. Haha! Cool huh!

This post was sponsored by a Korean car brand that looks good 

Ten years ago, the only Asian cars apart from Protons that I saw on the street were Japanese cars. You’d have your Hondas, your Toyotas and your Mitsubishis. Then again everything Japanese was cool ten years ago. Japanese music, anime, Japanese seaweed and Japanese food. Remember the number of Sushi Kings we had in KL ten years ago?

Loads right? Well now we have Sushi Zanmai, Ichiban Boshis and a whole lot more than the Sushi Kings we had ten years ago.

Of course today we still love our sushi but we’re beginning to see a bit of a shift. Malaysians aren’t as big into Japanese stuff as they are into Korean things. We love our Korean TV dramas, Korean food, Korean beer and for the first time you’re seeing as many Korean cars on the  street as you are seeing Japanese cars.

Why? What changed about Korean cars?

Here’s what I found out while doing some research.

Back in 2004, Kia models looked like this.

Yes Korean cars slowly built a reputation of of being reliable and well-built but design wise it left much to be desired.

Then in 2006 Kia hired Peter Schreyer who’s an automobile designer who used to work in VW and Audi before that. He was the guy who designed the famous Audi TT design that was so cutting edge that it still looks good today.

He also designed the VW Beetle, also another design that still doesn’t grow old today.

When Peter Schreyer joined Kia 5 years ago, it was big news for the entire Asian Automobile industry. Everyone waited to see if Kia would come out with cars that looked good and here’s what they ended up looking like.

This is the Kia Forte, a car we’re all familiar with.

A car Shorty test-drove some months back when she was thinking about buying a car. Of all the cars she test-drove, this was one of my favourites. It looked good and it had this little camera on the rear-view mirror that I thought was some Star Trek kinda stuff going on in there. I’m a sucker for gadgets.

The 2-door version looked even better.

 The latest Kia to hit the road this December though is the Kia Optima K5. This is how that same model used to look like 7 years ago.

And this is how it looks like now.

MEGA HUGE difference!

How I came across this car? This is how.

Now I think it’s a nice car… just not… in that colour.

What colour would yours be?

Hi Guys,

Shorty and I thought about this for a long time about whether to share this video or keep this to ourselves.

But the crew at Crazy Monkey Studios that helped us put this video together really wanted us to share it so here it is. This is how our meme proposal really happened. Let me manage your expectations a bit ok? Don’t expect reality TV show kind of quality. All this was taken in one take and was what really happened.

At the end of the night one of the crew members asked me if I would like to film the entrance again to make it a little more dramatic but I declined. I said “This video is for me and Aud. We just want to remember everything as it was”.

So here it goes.

PS: Thanks to Crazy Monkey Studio who did a good job filming this memory for us. Follow them on Twitter at @crazymonkeycms

You can follow me and Aud on Twitter @timothytiah and @fourfeetnineaud

Last Friday we had one of the biggest Nuffnang events ever. The kind of event that we have only once every 2 years. It was the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2011. The Awards is meant to be the Oscars for Bloggers in Asia-Pacific, to honour the best of the blogosphere. We had 550 bloggers from 10 countries flying in to attend it: Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Brunei and even as far as Japan.

 

This is the hall before all the bloggers arrived. All prepared.

To tell the story about Napbas, let me share with you a snippet from the booklet we gave out that night. A message from Ming and Me to all the bloggers there.

Months before Nuffnang started back in 2007, we attended one of the early blogger gatherings in KL. Some 50 or so bloggers met up at a restaurant called Wizard World, a huge number in those early days of the blogosphere. The organizers were two passionate bloggers: Jolene and Yee Hou.

The event was a huge success but at the end of it, some bloggers had mistakenly left without paying for their own food. Jolene and Yee Hou who put in the effort to organize the gathering now found themselves a huge bill to settle. We offered to help cover the cost but they refused and managed to settle it on their own.

That incident changed the course of Nuffnang altogether. Initially planned to be just a Blog Advertising Network, we decided that we wanted Nuffnang to do more than just help bloggers earn from their blogs. Following that, Nuffnang started down the path of establishing a community instead. Our mission was to build and support the ecosystem in which the blogosphere exists in through various initiatives. In helping bloggers meet other bloggers, in finding talented bloggers and promoting them to the world and in creating opportunities for bloggers that never before existed.
Four years on, Nuffnang has changed the blogosphere in a way that surprises even us even today. No longer are brands and advertisers doubtful of the power of bloggers. They now embrace it. Almost every consumer brand out there today now has blogger engagement as part of its media or PR plan. Credibility of bloggers has also grown. Bloggers today are seen as independent journalists and are regularly invited whenever companies today launch a new product or initiative.

Top bloggers who used to earn a little bit of pocket money in the pre-Nuffnang days now earn enough to make blogging their full-time jobs. Some even going as far as to start new companies to house all their blogging income.

Then there is the social part of the blogosphere. Nuffnang has brought bloggers together not just locally but internationally. It all started with the Nuffnang-Chipster Pajama Party back in 2007 – Our first cross-border event that brought Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers together. Since then Nuffnang has expanded its wings to many other countries in Asia-Pacific. As Nuffnang’s reach grew geographically, so did opportunities for Singaporean Nuffnangers to meet Filipino Nuffnangers or Malaysian Nuffnangers to meet their Australian counterparts.

Today Nuffnang is home to over 1,000,000 bloggers throughout Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong and China. Each of these countries have a local Nuffnang team that actively seeks to support the local blogosphere. From providing advertising income to bringing bloggers new experiences through sponsored trips or even to allow bloggers to meet other bloggers.

The size and power of the Nuffnang community in Asia-Pacific today gives us one important asset: A blogging community of powerful content creators who actively create thousands of new articles that are read by millions each day.

The Nuffnang-Asia Pacific Blog Awards was created two years ago to honour the Best of Asia-Pacific’s bloggers. The inaugural event was held in Singapore and involved 400 bloggers from four countries: Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia.

This year’s Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards though is a far larger event. Look around the room and you will see 550 bloggers not just from Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia but also bloggers who have flown in from Thailand, Hong Kong, China and Indonesia. Tonight… great bloggers will be recognized, new cross-border friendships will be made but most importantly, we will all celebrate the phenomenon of blogging.

Let me bring you through the rest of the night in pictures.

The VW cars that were parked outside after bringing in a group of Malaysian bloggers in for the Awards.

Me with Jinn from Hitz.fm. His blog was a finalist in the category of the “Best Entertainment Blog”.

He just started blogging not too long ago so he didn’t expect to even make it to the finals but check out his blog and you’ll know why he got in. It’s amazing!

Me with Hui Wen, Ginny , Vivien Sam.

 

Me, Shorty and Fayth at the event.

Me, Shorty and Hanis who was a finalist in the “Most Influential Blog” category. She is one of the Top 10 people searched by Google in Malaysia for 2010 and 2011 so it’s no surprise she’s in there.

Bobo and me.

 

Harith Iskandar who gave a show that night. He was HILARIOUS!

Shorty and I are huge fans of our local stand-up comedy scene but up till that day we’ve never had chance to meet Harith. So when we saw him that night, we rushed for an opportunity to get a picture with him.

 

Me with Pang Kirari who is one of the top female bloggers in Thailand.

 

Me with the finalists from the Philippines.  The Philippines contingent took home 4 of the 14 awards that night. Huge!

 

Philippines is tied with Malaysia for the most number of awards won that night. Both countries won 4 each.

Eric, our partner in Nuffnang Philippines with me and fellow Nuffie Tim2.

Our partners for Hong Kong and Australia. Kingston and David Lee.

 

Picture with the Nuffie girls before they started work that night. They looked gorgeous!

Rina and Anne who were really busy the whole weekend too.

And here’s Angeline and Rina. I sit next to the both of them in the office.

Our Nuffies manning the registration table. Registration was separated by the countries the bloggers came from.

Outside the ballroom in the cocktail area where bloggers gathered before the dinner, we had a gallery of all the finalists that night.

We had two bloggers from Indonesia too. They came not knowing anyone but by the end of the weekend they were like best friends with some of the bloggers there from Singapore and Japan.

 

Ming and I started with a speech that night on Nuffnang and how far we’ve come.

Me presenting the Award for the Region’s Best Blog to Xiaxue.

She cried. She didn’t win Best Lifestyle Blog earlier in the night and she thought she wasn’t going to win anything. She ended up winning two awards that night. Region’s Best Blog and The Most Influential Blog.

David Lee after presenting the award for the Best Geek Blog to Geekout from the Philippines.

One of the finalists from Australia that night came with this cute outfit with a dinosaur like tail. She got a lot of attention!

Me with Joyce and Linora from Red.FM.

A picture of all of us and the finalists that night.

Ringo and Kenny. Ringo won Best Fashion Blog and Kenny won Best Micro Blog.

Kingston and Jenni Epperson who won the Best Lifestyle Blog.

Reshmonu performed that night on stage too.

The Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards booklet that we gave out that night.

Hui Wen and Bobo just walking into the hall.

It was a totally awesome night and I have to thank the sponsors who made it possible. VW, XPAX, Olympus, Air Asia and Putrajaya Marriott who made it all possible. And 76style for the hair 🙂

If you’d like to see more pictures of the awards click here.

If you’d like to see who won what click here.

And here’s a picture of Shorty and I at the Awards.

It was a wonderful night. Stressful at first with some glitches along the way but overall we enjoyed the night. We hoped you did too 🙂

When Shorty and I first decided to blog about our little proposal, we knew we were going fairly public about it. We didn’t expect what happened next.

One night we realized that somebody had posted it on 9GAG and it was trending. The next morning, it made it to the front page of 9GAG where all the “HOT” posts are.

 

The title: “Meme usage in Malaysia“. There was no mention of my name but Shorty’s name in the signs wasn’t properly blurred out. So the whole world saw it.

After that we saw these pictures posted on Facebook walls or Twitter streams all over the world from as far as Russia. The honest truth was that our very first feeling… was a bit of fear. Being bloggers for years we’ve come to terms with something… that if you’re going to post something online, you’re going to get good comments and you’re going to get bad ones from trolls. So we didn’t dare to read any of the comments on the 9GAG post. Later on in the day though I decided to just do it. So I went through all the comments on our entry and I was surprised. Sure there were bad ones… but the good ones overwhelmed the bad ones. So I told Shorty that it was safe to go have a read and she had a good time reading it all.

Today the post on 9GAG has been tweeted 354 times, Facebook Shared 2,982 times and Liked 1,000 times.

It has 586 comments on it.

There were some mean ones like these.

And quite a number of comments saying commenting on my “lady hands” holding the sign up… HAHA

And there were also comments about how I had used some of the memes wrongly.

That it should’ve been “FLY, YOU FOOLS” not “RUN, YOU FOOLS”.

But among that were also some really wonderful comments. And here they are.

So thank you for all the nice comments everyone. They lit up my day.

 

On the 30th of November I asked Shorty to marry me. It was a surprise I had been planning for months. A surprise that only a couple of her close friends knew about: Angela and Ringo. And the only reason why I had to let them in on the secret was so that they could help me secretly find out Shorty’s ring size. Leading up to the actual proposal I was thinking really hard for ideas. My Dad never understood it though. He always thought proposals should be simple… just ask a question over dinner or something and that’s enough. When I told him how I wanted to do a surprise and do something a little special, he shook his head and said “Young people these days…”.

I thought really hard about how to propose. Even watched like a hundred YouTube videos to see how other people did it. There were the really simple ones like this… (that ended up failing).

And really elaborate ones like this.

First I had to think of a place. Some of my friends did it while on holiday, at a beach resort or even at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But I decided against it. I thought that since Shorty and I met in KL and have spent most of our relationship in KL…. I should propose to her in KL. Plus I think we’re simple. We’re not very romantic to each other and we both like simple things. One thing we both love doing though… is making each other laugh. So whatever proposal I did had to at least try… to make her laugh.

One day I was discussing proposal ideas with Angela and she gave me an idea. She said since Audrey loves all these meme or 9Gag/Reddit kind of stuff, maybe I should give her a picture of the Y U NO GUY that said something like this.

That gave me an idea. It’s true. Shorty and I both love all these memes. So I thought that instead of just having one picture, maybe I’ll tell a story with her favourite memes. I quickly put a plan together for the 30th of November.

The Day Came

On the 30th of November I got Tze, Jam and Ringo to ask Shorty out for dinner at Neroteca; a restaurant we frequent a lot. I wasn’t supposed to go for the dinner. I told her that I had plans with my other friends, Thean and Wilson. So while she was on the way to the restaurant, I was waiting at home with my friends.

I had never been so nervous before. I had done all sorts of things. I’ve given speeches to hundreds of people and been on many TV interviews and all those things never got me nervous anymore. The thought of proposing to Shorty though… made my heart beat so fast I thought it was going to burst out of my chest. It wasn’t because I was afraid she would say “NO”. I mean I was fairly confident she would say “YES”. But perhaps I knew this was something I was only going to be able to do once in my life… so I had to do it well.

Once Shorty sat down at the restaurant table, Ringo WhatsApped me to tell me that she was there. My friends and I left for the restaurant quickly. When we got there, the camera crew I had engaged to record this memory was waiting for me. They told me that they already had some of their crew hidden among the patrons in the restaurant filming what was about to happen (The video is still being edited today. It was actually just meant to be kept by Shorty and I for memory’s sake so I’m not sure yet if we’ll post it online when it’s done but will check with my fiancee :)).

The crew set me up with a mic and along with Thean and Wilson, I walked towards the restaurant. I reached the glass door of the restaurant and waited there till she noticed me through the glass. When she did, she first gave me a surprised look (because she thought I was out with my friends), followed by a big smile and a wave. I took a deep breath and then took out some signs I had made the week before.

Neither Shorty or I or her friends had actual photos of me showing the signs because we were all too caught up with the whole thing so the best I can do is show you what those signs looked like.

The following were the exact order of the signs I showed her that day (it’s a bit geeky and you may not understand some of the slides unless you’re really into internet memes but if you want to know more of the meaning of each one… check out knowyourmeme.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After this sign I waited for Shorty to nod (or shake her head for that matter). Fortunately, she nodded and with a sigh or relief I then showed her this sign.

What she didn’t know then was that being a boy scout before and living by the  motto of “Always Be Prepared”, I had printed another sign just in case she said NO. It was the “forever alone” face.

Anyway after I showed her the successkid.jpg sign (the one where she said YES), I opened the glass door and walked into the restaurant. She stood up from her table then and in tears she asked me “Are you serious? Real wan or not? Real wan or not?”.

I gave her the bouquet of flowers I had bought just a few hours ago then I got down on my knee.Then I presented the ring to her. I was so nervous my hand was shaking.

I had prepared a speech in my mind on what to say to her when I was down on my knee but I failed to execute it. I was so nervous I ended up mumbling something which I can’t remember what exactly till today… except that it ended with a “I love you and I want to take care of you for the rest of my life”. Or something like that.

I then took the ring and put it on her ring finger… only to realize that the size both Ringo and Angela gave me was wrong. It was too big for her. So she wore it on her middle finger instead which fit better.

We kissed and hugged. When we were done we looked around us and all her friends were in tears. I looked at my friends too and they too looked like they wanted to cry but they forced themselves to cry MACHO tears. We stood there with everyone staring at us for a while then we said “Ok… what happens now?” and everyone laughed.

The answer to my question was… we all then sat down for dinner together with my close friends and hers.

Till that moment, both of us hadn’t tweeted a single word about our proposal yet but our friends did. So our phones were beeping with people on Twitter asking us if it was really true. We spent the next few minutes reading the tweets and finally tweeted to confirm… that yes… I asked Shorty to marry me (and she said yes).

So that everyone was how I asked Audrey to marry me.

It was one of the happiest moments of my life…. and it was the beginning of the life of a Fatty and a Shorty.

Two very imperfect people… who’re perfect for each other.

You can read Shorty’s version here. Our versions differ a bit in sequence of events because we remember some things differently. 🙂

PS: Thanks to Mimi, Thean, Angie, Rina, Wilson, Angela, Ringo, Jam and Tze for helping me put this together.

About a couple of months ago I was sitting down and thinking about one of the companies we have under Netccentric: ChurpChurp.

ChurpChurp’s a sister company of Nuffnang and has been around for the past 2 years. Just like what Nuffnang does for bloggers, ChurpChurp allows any social media user to share brand messages with their friends on Twitter and Facebook and get paid for it.

It’s run by a group of my colleagues who call themselves Churpies.

Which ironically is exactly what the ChurpChurp stuffed toy is called too.

ChurpChurp as a company on its own has been a commercial success. Something always bugged me about it though That maybe it does what its meant to do (help Facebookers and Twitterers earn money) well… and that’s just it.  Nuffnang for example always focused on doing much more than just helping bloggers earn money from their blogs. We helped bring bloggers together through our events, we gave bloggers opportunities to review products, go on trips and collectively we helped promote the ecosystem of blogging.

Sure ChurpChurp has a vibrant community of users that always come out whenever we have an event.

But what else can we do?

I didn’t have the answer. Until the 5th of October 2011 came. That was the day Steve Jobs passed away. I spent the morning reading tributes to Steve Jobs, watching his interviews and reading about his life. I read about him creating the iPod and how Microsoft tried to compete with the iPod with the Zune. I can’t remember his exact quote but it was something along the lines of “Microsoft failed to come up with a product as good as the iPod because at Apple, we all really love music. We’re not building it for the sake of making money… but because we’re building a product we love”.

That’s when it hit me. That we need to make ChurpChurp a product that we all loved. So I sat in our brainstorm meeting room with the Churpies that day and asked them what they like. The objective was not to build a product that will sell a lot of advertising. No. The objective… was to build a product that we would all LOVE to use every day.

Finally we came up with this idea of discovery. The first wave of the internet was helping people find what they wanted to find on the internet. That’s how search became so powerful. Then came social networking which helped people stay in touch with each other. The third wave though, will be about discovery. Sites that help us find things we don’t know that we’re interested in but we don’t know we’re interested in it yet. There are sites like that out there like Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg and the list goes on.

So we decided to make ChurpChurp a site not just for earning cash but for discovery. If you want to go see a funny viral video or a cute picture that other Malaysians are looking at, you go to ChurpChurp. You can then share that with your friends or even share something of your own there if you find it interesting.

We also made it such that you can follow what your friends on ChurpChurp are reading or watching online too. Like I would be interested to know what Shorty and Ming reads. So we started work on the new ChurpChurp and because it was inspired on the day Steve Jobs passed away, internally we called the project… Steve.

A couple of days ago we launched the new ChurpChurp (or Steve). This is the result.

Our dream is to create a site that you can visit every time you want to read something interesting or even something that would make you laugh or cry. The Churpies even came up with an idea to encourage people to share the good stuff they see online. They’re giving away NINE Christmas presents to 9 lucky Churpers who share really good stuff on ChurpChurp. One of them by the way… is an iPhone 4S.

So check out the new ChurpChurp, take the tour… and read the cool stuff the Churpers are sharing there online now.

In the mean time, I know many of you are waiting for me to blog about my proposal to Shorty. Give us time to put everything together ok? Heh still waiting for some pictures from others.

While waiting for more pictures to come in from our proposal and before blogging about it we decided to blog about how we got together in our own respective point of views. This entry covers some really personal things about me and Shorty. We always made it a point not to put everything out online because we wanted to keep some of our relationship for ourselves… but this is a rare entry that I will share more. 

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I first met Shorty back in 2008. Su Ann, Kenny and Wen-Qi wanted to bring me out for a small birthday tea time think at The Banquet in Bangsar Village so I went along.

Over there we bumped into Shorty having tea with a couple of her friends. My first thought when I first saw Shorty
“That’s gotta be a new record of short-ness in a dress”.

She was wearing this yellow dress that was so short it barely covered anything. I later learned that the dress wasn’t really a dress but more like a top that Shorty was wearing as a dress…. and she had really short shorts under it.

Shorty and I didn’t know each other then… but we knew OF each other. She knew that I had started a small internet company called Nuffnang and I knew that she was a pretty well known blogger who used her height as her blog URL. We talked a little and I learned that just being freshly back from the US, she was looking for a job in the advertising industry. So I promised to help and we exchanged e-mail and MSN contact. We didn’t even exchange phone numbers.

After that first time we met, we never saw each other again for a while though we did keep in touch over MSN.  Shorty had a boyfriend at that time and I was with a wonderful girl then named Wen-Qi. In the next few months though our relationships ended. Shorty broke up with her boyfriend and Wen-Qi and I broke up when she left for Singapore to study music.

As time passed, our MSN conversations turned out to be quite something. Shorty and I would make each other laugh over MSN every day. She was really smart, witty and had this confidence about her that she wasn’t afraid to make fun of herself whether it’s her height or her absent-mindedness. Eventually we got together one day. It wasn’t like a “Will you be my girlfriend?” or anything like that. It was somehow like a mutual understanding that we were both together. I was 24 and she was 23 though, so we weren’t looking for anything really serious (definitely not marriage)… just having a little bit of fun from our companionship.

3 years later we find ourselves still together which is an achievement for us both because I tend to have a relatively short attention-span when it comes to relationships and Shorty says she always gets dumped. We were lucky. I think for us, our honeymoon period lasted for a year (eventhough it didn’t feel like it). It was only after a year had passed that we knew we were going into the ‘comfort-zone’ of a relationship phase but somehow….. we still made each other really happy. We would still make each other laugh every day… and on days where either one of us had problems, we would sit down together to talk about it. Talking to her about my problems always made me feel better.

As attached to we are to each other, ironically we’re also quite independent. Whenever I go home to Penang for a few days or go overseas for a business trip we don’t always find the need to call each other before we sleep. Once in a while we would make a call to each other but when I do come home we would sit down and do nothing but talk about what happened in those past few days.

It’s not like we never had problems though. We had many… and many of them were common problems other relationships had. Like we would argue because I would feel I do a lot for her but she didn’t do enough back for me. Over time though we naturally learned to bridge these differences. I would learn to bring down my expectations and she would learn to try to do more. Today, we still have some of these problems but we have somehow learned to accept them.

Shorty and I had a kind of relationship that I had never experienced before. We somehow really understood each other.

Marriage on the other hand was something I had always been terrified of. My married friends always told me to stay away from marriage and enjoy single-hood.
They told me two things:

1) As a guy, the older you get… the more options you have.

2) Marriage is tough.

I found the first point a little true. In university, I wasn’t very popular among the ladies. But as I grew older and somehow a little more matured (eventhough there’s still a little boy in me), things got easier. Girls who were my age were all looking to find “the one” and get married so they would make a little more effort to get to know a guy… and then of course you have girls a few years your junior who were always looking for someone a little bit older.

For the second point though I realized I could never know what to expect. I’ve seen a number of my friends already end in divorce and those we weren’t in divorce yet were complaining about their wives/marriages etc etc. I knew I should get married sooner or later though… I just didn’t want to yet.

One day I realized something. A fortune teller once told me that I would always have to take care of my wife. I’m not sure what that really meant but it apparently could be interpreted as that my wife would always fall sick and all that. I thought about it and yes I can imagine it. Shorty’s the kind who’s really weak and always falls sick. When I thought about her being sick I realized that if she were one day sick, I would want to be the one to take care of her.

Not have anyone else but me.  That’s when I knew…. she was the one.

So last week on the 30th of November… I proposed.

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PS: Here’s something I just learned last night. While Audrey grew up in Subang and I grew up in Penang, we were both actually born in the same hospital in Penang and delivered by the very same doctor.

I will save the proposal for the next entry 🙂

You can read Shorty’s point of view here.

Hi Everyone,

A quick announcement. Tonight I asked Shorty to marry me. It’s been a long day trying to put everything together so I’m going to take a rest now. Will blog about it when I get the pictures and find the time ok?

Some little facts about tonight

– It happened in a restaurant that we all frequent a lot: Nero Tecca

–  Her close friends and my close friends were there to witness it

– Yes I did get down on one knee in front of everyone in the restaurant.

– It was a surprise so she didn’t know anything about it.

– It happened around 8.30PM

– The way I proposed was something that was very… US.

and finally… she said “Yes”.

Good night everyone!