I’ve been in Hong Kong for the past couple of days. I didn’t really do much eventhough it was Halloween weekend. During the day I’m attending meetings that I flew in to Hong Kong for.

Then when those are done, I would spend the rest of my free time in the hotel. I did however get to have dinner with the Nuffies from our Hong Kong office.

And I also got to meet up with Arnold who gave me another one of his beautiful Aranez Kangaroo Leather iPhone cases.

For the rest of my trip though I just spent it in my hotel room. You know you’re tired of traveling when you don’t bother going out when you visit another country. I was really homesick too… and this is considering that my trip was only for 3 days and 2 nights. I know traveling sounds fun and it was at first but there can be too much of a good thing too. I spend a lot of time alone waiting in airports for my flights, or in taxis on the way to the airports and things like that.

How I entertain myself though is by watching movies. This trip I watched one of my favourite movies of all time. Now that’s a question a lot of people have asked me before… “What’s your favourite movie of all time?”. Heck it was one of those conventional questions that people would have answers to on their Friendster profile in those days. I always found it to be one of the hardest questions to answer though. It is right? Because there are just so many good movies out there.

This trip though, after enough thinking and after some 27 years of my life…. I think I have finally found my favourite movie of all time. It’s called Forest Gump.

Forest Gump is a movie that came out in 1994 (I was 10 years old then) and was a huge hit. I love everything about the movie… from the soundtrack to Tom Hanks acting in it but the thing I love the most… is the story.

It’s about a man who was born a little mentally challenged still manage to go on about life doing amazing things like winning the Medal of Honour, starting a successful company etc etc.  He did all that, still viewing the world in its most innocent form ever.

If you haven’t watched Forest Gump… I highly encourage it! It’s my favourite movie of all time! 

What’s yours?

A few days ago we announced the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2011. Do you guys remember the previous blog awards?

Let me show you some pictures while I tell you about it.

The previous and the first Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards was held in Singapore back in 2009.

Historically, Blog Awards can be relatively easy to do. Nuffnang wasn’t anywhere among the first to start its own blog awards. Many websites on the internet already do their own blog awards and have small events to give the awards away. Sometimes there isn’t a physical trophy for the award but just bragging rights to bloggers that they have won an award.

We wanted the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards to be different though. We wanted it to be more than a web award but an Oscars for bloggers. An event where we would all honour the Best of Blogs not just in Malaysia but all over Asia-Pacific.

That’s why the nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards or NAPBAS is and still remains the Most Expensive Nuffnang event we’ve ever held in our history. So much that even with big sponsors, Nuffnang as a company has to invest more money to cover the costs. Fortunately though it’s something we decided to do not every year but once every two years.

 

How it works is that once every two years, each country in which Nuffnang is in will bid for the opportunity to host the Blog Awards? In 2009, Singapore won the bid and this year, Malaysia did.

So this year’s NAPBAS will be held in KL on the 16th of December at the Marriott, Putrajaya. We’re working with partners like Volkswagen, Olympus and even Tiger as a Drinks Partner. 

If you’re a blogger and if there’s any one Nuffnang event you should go for… you should try to make it this one. Invites though are often very limited… why? Because there are over 1,000,000 Nuffnang Bloggers all around the region and only 500 seats!

So apply to get an invite through the contest soon. Invites aren’t transferable and we don’t sell them. 

So if you’d like to nominate a blog for a NAPBAS award or to try get an invite, check out the official site here.

I heard that just in the first 24 hours in which we announced it… there were already 2,000 over individual blogs that were nominated for an award. So good luck guys… and see you at the awards!

If you’d like to check out more pictures from the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2009 to get an idea of how the Awards Night is like… click here. There are LOTS of photos there.

 

Today was Gene, Jon and Quah’s joint birthday celebration. They held it in Kampachi so we all had a limitless amount of awesome Japanese food to celebrate it.

I got the chance there to catch up with a lot of old uni friends that I haven’t seen for a while. Some of them are lawyers, some accountants and some entrepreneurs too.

One cool thing about the party though was… the cakes!!!

Because there were 2 Birthday Boys and 1 Birthday Girls, we had 3 cakes.
They were all sourced by Jon’s resourceful girlfriend and I loved that each had some meaning to it. Gene’s cake was a girly cake.

Jon’s one is of gold bars and money because he now works in a pawn shop (his family business).

Quah on the other hand had this for a cake….

Why milk? Well.. because he’s one of the two guys that started Milkadeal.com early this year.

 

Really cool cakes eh!

On a last note, Prudential has been running this really cool campaign themed “R U Ready?”. It runs along the lines of equipping young people of today to the things they want to achieve in life. I wrote an article that you will find on their FB page that’s titled “R U Ready To Start Your Own Business”. It covers 5 important things that I’ve learned from business.

You can read it here.

 

Just finished watching this match. The second match I’ve watched since I became a Manchester United fan after going to Old Trafford and meeting the players in September. It was a painful experience… so painful… but Manchester City was just the better team then.

No matter… there will be another day!

I was in Jakarta not long ago for some work. It was my first time in Indonesia really. I’ve never even been to Bali. It was a really short trip though and I was so busy that only when I got back did I realize that I didn’t even take a picture of the city!

Anyway my first impression of Jakarta is great! I actually quite like it there. The city is massive but it feels to me a bit like KL maybe because you can get around fine just by speaking Bahasa Malaysia. I also find the people there really friendly!

One thing about Jakarta though was that I hardly saw an iPhone there. Quite the opposite of Singapore where everyone there has an iPhone… in Jakarta, EVERYBODY uses Blackberry. Why? Just because of BBM (Blackberry Messenger).

My friends there tell me that people don’t even ask for phone numbers anymore. Their main mode of communication is BBM. One friend told me that he talks to some of his friends regularly on BBM and doesn’t even have their phone numbers. So a BBM is a must… you can have your second phone as an iPhone or Android… but nobody does without a Blackberry there in Indonesia.

As for me, I just bought myself one of these. Partly because I couldn’t stand the problems my Torch was giving me anymore.

The Blackberry 9900 however… is the best Blackberry ever made! It’s fast, doesn’t lag or hang and it’s a joy to use. The other Blackberries I had were kinda like phones that I needed for work… but this one is one that I LOVE!

If you’re a Blackberry user, this phone is enough to keep you on BB and not switch to Android or iPhone. However, if you’re an iPhone and Android user now I’m not sure if this is good enough to make you switch back to Blackberry. Overall though I love my new Blackberry 9900. If RIM had come up with the 9900 last year instead of this year, lots of people who switched would probably still be using Blackberries 🙂

Ok so here’s the story. For the longest time I was looking for a small bag to carry my laptop or my tablet in wherever I go. After looking around for some time I eventually found one that I liked from Crumpler.

It was simple, small and light…. all for just above RM100.

Of course I know I don’t exactly have the best fashion sense in the world so I did what a lot of guys did. I brought Mimi along with me to help me choose the bag… since Shorty was busy. And Mimi agreed that it was a nice bag.

That was the last time I ever heard anyone say it was a nice bag. Ever since then, everyone I meet tells me that it’s a horrible cheap looking bag. Shorty at one point even thought that it was one of those “free gift” bags that I got for buying whiskey or milk powder or something.

In fact my friends hated my bag so much that Ming ended up buying me a new bag. The new bag is a lot more heavier and bigger and it looks like this.

This one… Shorty approves.

So I don’t know…. are my friends right?

Among these two bags… which do you think is nicer?

The first or the second?

iOS5 came out at 1AM last night so the first thing I did this morning was to upgrade my OS. The whole process took a lot longer than I thought it would and caused a few problems at first but after all that was over with… taadaaa I had the new OS. If you want to learn more about what it does, watch this video.

Now Apple says there are 200 new features with the new iOS 5. Well technically that’s true but there are only some new 5-7 features or so that I think will make a real difference. One of them is that whenever you get an SMS or a WhatsAPP message or anything, the annoying pop-up that interrupts whatever you’re doing is taken away. Instead it’s just put in a notifications tab just like how the Android or Blackberry does it. If you have a BB just like me too, you probably wouldn’t feel the huge difference there because you’ve been having a notifications tab on the BB for years now. But if you’re a pure iPhone user then yes… it’s a huugeee difference.

Many of the features that the iOS5 is something that the Android and/or Blackberry already has had for a while but it’s still great to finally have them on the iPhone. There are some other stuff the Android has that I wish the new iOS has like having the Twitter/Facebook feed on the home page or dashboard but I guess some people like the iPhone interface the way it is.

Go plug in your iPhone 3Gs/4 to iTunes today to update it. It’s a definitely an improvement you wanna have!

When I was in Bangkok some months back, some of my Thai friends brought me clubbing. One of the places we checked out was a popular club there called Funky Villa. The club’s really different from the Zouks and MOSs that I’m used to. Instead of playing dance music all night long, they had a live ban that would play for an hour at a time. After a live performance is done they would take a break and then dance music would come on.

At first I found it odd… but after a while it grew on me. It’s like if you’re ever feeling bored of the dance music, a great performance comes on stage and everyone jumps to the music by the band. I always wondered why we never had a concept like that in KL…. until now that is.

My friend Vuitton recently got together with some partners to start a club in KL just like that. It’s called Neverland and last night I went there with some of the Nuffies.

It was their official opening and the club was supported by Carlsberg, Pepsi, Martell and Chivas: All the liquids you need to get you in the dancing mood.

They got some top bloggers to go and even Hannah Tan showed up to host.

Here’s a picture I took of one of the performances.

Friggin cool right??!

The best part about it is that it wasn’t just one single band. A few bands took turns to sing really different kind of songs.

At one point, one of the bands even sang Beyond’s Hai Guo which drove me nuts. I ended up singing along at the front of the stage, though admittedly by then I was already high.

My friends got me to drink and I made a mistake I constantly seem to make over and over again. I mixed my drinks. I started with vodka, then to whiskey, beer and even champagne towards the end. By the middle of the night I had a cocktail of a variety of booze in my blood and was high. Fortunately I’m the happy kind of high.

I’ve seen all sorts of “high’s”. Some people are “happy highs” like me, some “crying highs” and some even “angry highs”. That’s right, some of my friends will cry when they’re high and tell me how much they miss their boyfriends and others would get angry and start cursing at me and picking a fight with a random stranger.

High as I was, I still managed to get some pictures though. Here’s Ringo, Chuckei and “high” me.

Me with some of the Nuffies. Luke, Firdy and Min!

Here’s me with Mimi, Karen and Raessa.

And me with even more Nuffies.

Some of us… higher than others of course.

Neverland is my new favourite club in KL! It’s refreshing to finally have something new in our clubbing scene.

I’ll be going there more often now. Anyone going this weekend?

PS: If you’re wondering where it is… click here.

Today on the 10th of October 2011, Shorty and I celebrate our 3rd year of being together. Well ok to be honest, the both of us couldn’t tell when it was that we officially became a couple. Because the way our relationship started wasn’t with a “Would you be my girlfriend?” question. We never asked any questions or officiated anything. We just silently knew we were a couple and started to act like one. So there isn’t like a specific date.

We knew however that the date was somewhere around the 10th of October but weren’t 100% sure… so well we decided to just call 10th of October our anniversary date. Since it’s a nice number…. yes… very Asian of us. But actually it’s not because of the number but because we found the date 10/10 to be really funny. You guys know the “ten ten ten” joke right?

So anyway, we’ve been together for 3 years now. This is a new milestone for me… because I’ve never had a relationship that ever crossed the 2 year mark. I know… I’m not proud of that.

Apparently it’s a milestone for Shorty too. Both of us suffer from a short attention span when it comes to relationships and never lasted in a long relationship… until now.

So to celebrate our longest relationship evahhh…  Shorty and I went to Garibaldi for dinner.

It’s been 3 years… but it still feels like we’ve been together only for 3 months.

Happy Anniversary Shorty!

I was out for lunch at a mall with the Singapore Nuffies last year in Singapore. Right after lunch a group of them insisted to go buy Pearl Milk Tea. It wasn’t just something they felt like doing all of a sudden but it was apparently a regular thing for them… have lunch, then have a pearl milk tea. I couldn’t figure out this sudden craze for pearl milk tea. I mean it’s been around for more than 10 years as far as I remember and why the sudden craze now?

Well this year, that craze hit Malaysia. It started with Chatime. The story goes that this guy’s father asked him what he wanted to do. So he said “Give me a million bucks and I’ll grow it for you”.

The father did… and so he went for a holiday in Taiwan and visited this franchise exhibition. That was the first time he heard about Cha Time and he decided to bring the franchise to Malaysia. He came back and started 2 shops and within a month the franchise in Malaysia has grown to over 25 shops. Some of the shops are owned by him and some, by other franchisees.

My friend Richie is one of the other franchisees that just started his first store in Publika Solaris. So I decided to pay a visit to his store yesterday.

I had trouble finding Publika at first.. heck I had no idea what it was but when I finally got there I was shocked. Publika is this huge and really nice mall that exists 5 mins away from Solaris Mont Kiara.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of it, it’s probably because eventhough it started a year ago, it hasn’t really picked up yet until recently.

So to support my dear friend Richie I decided to buy 33 cups of Cha Time Pearl Milk Tea for the Nuffies. It took them some 20 minutes or so to make that many cups.

And when I finally brought it back to the office. Madness ensued!

It’s like I was bringing food aid to a poverty-stricken country. All the Nuffies went crazy and rushed around to get themselves a cup.

That’s the kind of effect Cha Time still has on people. So if you’re a Chatime addict… go support Richie at his store in Publika ok? It’s worth visiting the mall too. Not all the shops have opened yet but in due time I’m sure it’ll be an awesome mall!