So it’s like that. We have been hiring a lot lately and one of our new Nuffies requested a MacBook Pro. We decided to grant that Nuffie that wish. I remembered though that I have a MacBook Pro that I just bought a few months ago and to be honest it doesn’t quite suit me. Why?

1) It’s way too powerful for what I use a laptop for. I don’t play games on it (not like it’s any good for playing games), I don’t do any graphic design or photoshop work. All I do is just check e-mails, surf the net and other work related stuff.

2) The MacBook Pro weighs a TON. A TON! It’s really really heavy. It’s okay if you’re carrying it from home to office and back. But when you travel a lot and lug it with you from airport to airport it gets really tiring on the back.

So what I decided to do in the end was to give my MacBook Pro to this new Nuffie and buy myself a MacBook Air which is cheaper than buying a new MacBook Pro.

Tadaaa!!!

The MacBook Air is a lot smaller and it has a much smaller drive. It’s big draw though is that it’s really really thin and light.

What I do like about it though is its flash storage hard drive. You know normal laptops that have normal hard drives, if you’re doing something on it but you jerk the laptop a bit too hard it sometimes causes your hard disk to crash. Happened to me once with my previous MacBook Pro. Flash drives though are the kind of things your USB drives are made of. This kind of thing doesn’t happen so you can jerk it or even drop it and your hard disk should be fine.

The drawback though is that the hard disk space is a lot smaller. So you can either have only 128GB or 256GB of memory.

So from now on I just end up having to cut down on the stuff I have on my laptop. Less music, photos and movies on it. That’s totally fine with me.

I’ve been a Mac user for 4 years and I gotta say one thing though. If you’re not a Mac user now, you don’t exactly really have to switch to a Mac. 4 years ago when Windows XP or Windows Vista was around, the Mac’s OS was far superior to Windows. Now with Windows 7 though, PCs have a pretty good OS so you don’t really need to switch. Switching to Mac also means paying a lot more for hardware because Mac is typically a lot more expensive for whatever specs you get.

Anyway… I’m loving my new MacBook Air. I can carry it around with me a lot easier now.

While I was in Bangkok I managed to catch up with a couple of friends for Steamboat. Over this steamboat lunch I learned of two stories of two entrepreneurs. Let me share it with you here.

Now I love this huge steamboat chain in Bangkok called MK. If you go to Bangkok you can’t miss it. It’s everywhere!

The story behind it is that it was started by a lady who used to work in a steamboat restaurant. After some time the owner of that steamboat restaurant didn’t want to do the business anymore and shut it down. So seeing that it was one thing she knew how to do, she decided to start her own steamboat restaurant. Today is has grown to have … something like a 100 branches in Bangkok… and from what I understand it’s not a franchise. All of them are owned by her and run now by her son.

Amazing huh…. shows that sometimes in life it doesn’t matter where you start or what industry you’re in. There will always be opportunity. Some people say that if you end up working in a bank, you will always be working in a bank and you don’t know what business you can eventually start. Well I know people who worked in investment banks and eventually started their own investment funds that now do very well. I guess the moral of the story is that, there is opportunity in every industry! It need not just be the internet.

Anyway I was having lunch with two of my Thai friends: Ji and Pruet.

Ji is the pretty girl on the left. Her name is of course a lot longer than just two letters but seeing I had trouble pronouncing the Thai name she just asked me to call her Ji. So Ji it became! Her Dad has a really interesting success story. She told me that her Dad in the past many many years ago had tried a number of other businesses but they didn’t work out. Then one day he went to Japan and he happened to see a kind of candy machine that could make heart-shaped candy. He decided to bring it back and sell heart shaped candy in Thailand.

He called it Hartbeat Candy.

What made it big though wasn’t just the fact that it was candy shaped like a heart. He had one novel idea. He thought of putting “love advice” inside each of the candy wrappers just like a Fortune Cookie. Each candy wrapper will have different advice.

So one might say “Don’t wait anymore to make the move for the one you love” whereas another might say “Don’t betray your friend for the one you love”.

After that the candy just took off! For more than a decade it became legendary in Thailand. Everybody knew what it was. Some sort like how everybody in Malaysia knew what Mamee Monster was because we grew up eating it. Now the company does lots of other stuff apart from Hartbeat candy though Hartbeat still sells pretty well. They now export it to India too and it’s apparently the number 1 candy in India.

I loved the story so right after lunch I went to pick up a packet of the candy.

I took out the first candy I saw in the packet, opened it and popped the heart-shaped candy in my mouth. Then I asked Ji to help me read what my “love advice” was since it was in Thai.

It said “Love is delicate. Don’t rush it”.

Such a simple idea made something so simple sell so well. Sometimes I guess it’s really in the little details of things.

I’m in Bangkok right now to catch up with some friends. I was having coffee with a friend yesterday at a Starbucks here when I saw the longest queue I had ever seen in a Starbucks anywhere. I had to queue some 20 minutes for my coffee but right after me the queue piled up. It went like a snake all the way out of the outlet and on to the road. It’s like everyone needed Starbucks coffee to wake up. The whole hour or so I was at the outlet the queue never got much shorter. People were constantly adding to the queue. Must be great to own the franchise there.

I was seated by a window having a coffee and a cinnamon roll with my Thai friend. I was explaining something to him when suddenly I got distracted by something outside the window. Outside I saw this little boy sitting innocently with a paper cup in his hand begging for money.

When he got up I saw his face. He had the look of innocence in his eyes and he could pass for any cute little boy we know today. The only difference between the cute little boys we know and this little boy is…. this one wasn’t in school when he should be. He was out on the streets begging for money.

I immediately wanted to get up and go give him some money when my friend stopped me. He said his mother was somewhere around watching him and giving him money would just encourage her to keep forcing her son to do this. So I held myself back. True enough some 20 minutes or so later I saw his mother come by. She collected whatever money he had and sat with him for a while then left. My friend estimated that they made RM100 -RM200 a day or RM3,000-RM6,000 a month from this.

Throughout the whole time I sat at that Starbucks window I kept getting distracted. I kept asking myself all these questions… why is that boy not in school? why is his mother doing this? why can’t she find a job and support his son?

I knew whatever the answers were, I would never be able to understand them.

Then suddenly I saw an act of kindness. A kindness different from the kindness he had been getting from the other strangers dropping coins or small notes into his cup. A man dressed like he was on his way to work, came by and gave him a plastic bag and left. Inside the plastic bag was a small bottle of chocolate milk.

The boy took out the bottle of chocolate milk in a hurry, pierced the straw through the top and immediately started gulping down the chocolate milk.

It then dawned on me that the whole time he didn’t even have anything to drink.

I told myself that if I can’t give him money, I would do the same. After I was done with Starbucks I would go to the nearest supermarket and buy him a drink and some cookies. By the time I left Starbucks though he was gone and nowhere to be found.

Still this made me reflect on my life again. On how lucky so many of us are. If you’re reading this blog, if you have a Facebook account, if you care about politics, if your main stress is whether you will do well in exams or your job… you know you’re a lot more fortunate than this little boy here and his mother. Their only thoughts are probably on where there next meal will come from. Or when he will get to drink his next bottle of chocolate milk.

I’ve been so busy the past week I don’t even know where to find the time. Apart from all the work that I have to do, last week I attended the New Media Asia conference and gave a keynote speech there. Some of the Hong Kong Nuffies were down last week for some training too so I spent some time taking them around.

I brought them to all the good Malaysian food I could think of. They loved Nasi Lemak, Nasi Bojari and all this kind of stuff. They found the idea of curry chee cheong fan a bit weird but they were quite adventurous on everything else. One day I even decided to take them for Pudu Siu Yoke. At first their reaction was… “SIU YOKE?” and they gave me a look that said “Please larr… siu yoke Hong Kong wan sure 1000 times better”.

I made a deal with them. I said after they tried this siu yoke, if there really is one as good in Hong Kong… they must bring me when I go next time. They tried it… and they loved it.

They even had trouble thinking of a place in Hong Kong that had better siu yoke than this.

I had a bit of time to take them for some sight-seeing on some nights. The favourite of all the tourists that seem to come from overseas is the Petronas Twin Towers. It’s like a must-see. So some of the Nuffies and I brought them there one night after work.

Just like all the other friends from out-of-town we brought there, they went WOW. Well all of them except Masato who instead said “SUGEHHH!!” which actually means “Wow” or “Great” in Japanese.

On Friday night we all went to Velvet. I didn’t manage to take any pictures that night because we all got so high so quick. Totally forgot about blogging about that night. I made sure not to make the same mistake the next night though. Saturday night the Nuffies planned a little house party.

The theme was “Bombshells & Aviators” so a lot of the Nuffies came like this.

I’m not sure what that theme meant for guys but Nick D told me that the guys can just come up like a vest or suspenders. Kinda like the Godfather dressing of those days. So I did… at first I wore a full blown vest with slacks and all.

Then I realized that I was going to be really uncomfortable the whole night with those slacks so I changed my slacks to jeans.

d

Shorty though went with the whole aviator theme. This is how some other Nuffies dressed.

Notice that red bra and red granny panties they’re holding? Well that’s for people who didn’t come dressed up following the theme. So if you wanted to get into the party and didn’t dress up, you had to wear that and let everyone take a picture of it. One guy who got it bad was one of the Nuffies from our Tech Team who came dressed like that.

When Pinky saw him she said

“Oi! Think you’re going Murni ar?”

And they got him to wear the unflattering giant red panties and bra. We all took pictures but I think I’ll save him the embarrassment and not share it here 🙂

At first the night started off with everyone being proper and all. Then when the booze kicked in… everyone was in the dance room dancing.

So many people got drunk that night. I didn’t though. Decided to control my drinking. I think my liver has had enough punishment in the past few weeks. One thing I noticed about this party was that… all the Nuffie girls were gathering around taking group pictures like this.

Where the hell are all the guys then? Well they were the ones taking the pictures.

Tomorrow I’ll be traveling again for work. Gonna be spending a lot of time on airplanes again in the next few weeks.

Inspired by Jolene

——————-

Dear 16 Year Old Me,

I know how you’re feeling right now. Ann had just broken up with you for someone else and you’re swearing off all girls until at least after SPM. The truth is you learn two things in the near future. The first is that Ann tries to come back to you but you don’t take her back. And the second is that you DON’T keep your promise to swear off girls until after SPM.

That’s because at the end of this school year, you will go with Rayvin and Roy to Bukit Jambul Complex. There you will spend the day with these 3 other girls and one of them, you will fall in love with. Her name is Melissa. She will eventually be your girlfriend and give you two good years of her life. After that you will make a mistake that you will pay for. You’ll break up with her only to try to go back to her a few months later but she won’t take you back. Just like how you wouldn’t take Ann back (Funny how history repeats itself huh). You will be heartbroken and you won’t fully get over it for at least a couple of years.

So no you won’t end up with Melissa. Today both Melissa and Ann are happily married and it’s not to you.

In the next few years though you’ll be lucky enough to have a few more great girlfriends but you won’t end up with them either. I know what you’re looking for in a girl. You want a girl who is tall, sexy, classy, has a great ass and big boobs. Believe me when I say what you look for in a girl changes dramatically in the next 10 years of your life. In fact the girl you’ll be with 10 years later doesn’t look anything like what you imagine her to be now. She doesn’t have a big ass or abnormally big boobs, she is cute, quirky and she is one of the tiniest people you’ve ever met but I can guarantee you that she will make you laugh every day of your life and you will love her more than any of your other girlfriends.

I’ll tell you one more thing about her. She’s not from Penang. She’s from KL or more specifically Subang. I know at this point you have little knowledge of what Subang is. All you know is that Sunway Lagoon is there but I guarantee you this girl will spend many many days in the next 10 years telling you how big and great Subang is.

I know you’re stressed out with exams and all. I know you want to prove yourself to Dad. Well don’t be. You won’t do as well as you expected in SPM but you will make up for it in A-Levels and still go into a good university. I know you still don’t know what you want to grow up to be. Yes yes I know… when you were 6 years old you told Mum that you wanted to be a postman but now that you’re old enough to ride your own motorbike the appeal of riding around delivering mail doesn’t shine anymore right?

You really won’t know what you want to be until you hit university. Then you will think you want to be an investment banker but that’s only because everyone else around you there aspired to be one.

And also because they earned a lot of money! But when that happens to you, believe me when I say that’s not what you will end up doing.

I know this will be hard to believe but right after graduation you actually start an internet company. That internet company grows beyond your expectations and today hires over 90 employees not just in Malaysia but around Asia. You’ll also somehow end up being on the newspapers, magazines, radio and TV sometimes. You will travel a lot for work and everything else your fortune teller tells you will come true. It won’t be all fun and games though. You will get a lot of stress and go through difficult times. The weight of 90 of your colleagues depending on you for a job gets heavier each day.

People will tell you all sorts of things growing up. They will tell you that you will wish you were back in school again when you finally faced working life. That turns out to be not true. You don’t ever miss school or college life and ever want to go back to it. Not that it’s bad… but you just enjoy living a grown-up life more.

People also tell you that you have to be a millionaire by age 28 or you will never be successful. That also turns out to be not true. I’m turning 27 next month and I realize that success isn’t measured by money. It’s measured by happiness. You will learn that money satisfies… but it doesn’t make you happy. What makes you truly happy is doing what you love doing and having good people around you.

That being said, people in your time do predict some things that eventually do come true. They predict that everyone will eventually be able to video call one another. That turned out to be true. Mobile phones change significantly in the next 10 years. Take another good look at your Siemens that you’re using right now.

Well 10 years from now nobody will be using Siemens phones anymore.

The more popular phones won’t even have buttons on them and yet they’ll be able to do much more than even your computer can do today.

Technology grows more advance in the next 10 years but don’t worry. Many things remain the same. We still drive cars to get from one place to another. Our cars don’t fly. We still sleep on beds, we still watch TV (much less because there are other things to do but we still do), we still go to the cinemas to watch movies and we still go to shopping malls to window shop.

We still play computer games. I know you spend a lot of time playing Counter-strike and Starcraft now. I’ve got good and bad news for you.

The good news is that in my future we’re already playing Starcraft 2. It’s a lot cooler than the first installment.

The bad news is… It will only come another 10 years from now. So in the mean time hang tight and find other games to waste your time on.

You’d think that by the time you’re age 26  you’d stop playing games right? After all you hardly see a 27 year old at a cybercafe. Well in the future, the 16 year olds who were playing computer games grow older and they still keep playing. So do all your friends.

Your best friends change though. You don’t really hang out with the people from school anymore. Maybe it’s because you move away from Penang…. oh yeah forgot to tell you that. 10 years from now you don’t live in Penang anymore. You live in KL.

So anyway your best friends 10 years from now will be people you meet in university or in the outside working world. You don’t hang out too much with your secondary school friends anymore but you still make it a point to see Rayvin or Matt every now and then. The childhood friends that you keep in touch with a lot today though are your primary school friends from Sri Inai. You still see Eng Gin and Melvin quite a bit. Eng Gin is single but Melvin’s getting married this year.

The friends you haven’t met but should look out for will come in the next 5-10 years.

At college you will meet a bunch of good friends. Wilson, Andrew, Sin Thean and some others.

At University you will meet Hasan from Bahrain. You will also meet Ming who will eventually be your business partner.

And out in the working world you will meet some other friends… like Pierre, Joanne, Desmond and Kau Sern.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you from all this is that… there’s a lot to look forward to in the next 10 years of your life. I can’t give you any advice on what you should or shouldn’t do because you just have to go through life the way it’s meant to be. I’ve already spoiled it quite a bit for you by telling you what expect. I’ll make up for it with this little tip. Please tell Dad to buy shares in Google and Apple. They’ll be worth a lot more in 2011 than in 2001. In 2004 ask him to find this guy named Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard and invest in a site he’s starting called Facebook.

In any case, you will enjoy the next 10 years of your life. Much more than your past 10 years. So live well 16 year old me.

Don’t forget to slow down and smell the roses sometime. That’s what that Subang girl will tell you some 7 years from now.

——————

PS: Ok wait wait I just thought of something you shouldn’t do. 10 years from now you will sprain your ankle playing this thing called XBOX Kinect. Mum will tell you to go see a Chinese doctor. When that happens… DO NOT FUKING GO!!!

Sincerely,

26 Year Old You

Remember how we all took some time off at our Nuffie Company Trip last year to brainstorm for new ideas and stuff.

Well we came up with loads of ideas. One of the ideas was this:

In the past 4 years of Nuffnang, we’ve allowed bloggers to earn money from their influence. Things have changed in the past 4 years though. With Malaysia having one of the largest Facebook population in the world and a fast growing Twitter user base, everyone including blog readers themselves have influence!

So we thought… wouldn’t it be a really cool idea if we allowed blog readers the same opportunity as bloggers to earn from their social networks. That maybe… blog readers can earn

We worked on it for many months. We tried looking for any example of this that has been used overseas before but we couldn’t find anything to really learn from. We’ve seen banner ads that allowed users to share it with their friends but nothing that rewards people for doing it.

So we had to start building this model from scratch. So we started drawing it out on a white board. Then on to putting it into slides and then trying to see if it was technically possible and the lots of complications it would give us. Eventually we managed to get a prototype working and we started doing more work to make it simpler, simpler and EVEN SIMPLER.

We brainstormed for names and we decided to call it Grapevine.

Today we’re finally launching a Beta Version of Grapevine. The first campaign on board is this DiGi iPhone campaign and if you look to the top of my sidebar you might see something that looks like this.

This is just a picture of it so don’t try to interact with this. The running LIVE version is on my sidebar.

If you don’t see it then refresh it because it’s on rotate.

So next time whenever you see a Nuffnang Grapevine ad that you think might interest your friends, share it on your Facebook or Twitter. Both you and the blogger you’re reading will get rewarded for every unique click 🙂

What do you guys think?

Since this is just a Beta version. Anything we can do to make it better?

PS: To learn more about Grapevine, click here.

On one of the days when we were at Gold Coast, we went to Sea World.

It’s this big place where they kept lots of animals that come from the land and sea. Everything from seals to pelicans… and they even managed to squeeze a pirate ship in.

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My favourite two animals though are the penguins.

(I seriously can’t stop looking at these penguins and think that they’re just going to break out into dance any time)

and the dolphin.

They’re so friendly. When you stand at the side of the lake they come up to you as close to you as they can as if they want you to pat them. And they seem genuine too. I mean if a shark or a crocodile came up to you and pretended to be friendly, you can be pretty sure they’re friendly up till the point you get into the water with them. After that they’ll be adding ketchup on to you and tying a napkin around their necks.

Dolphins on the other hand just seem to want to play with you.

I promised Shorty that if I’m a billionaire one day and have this huge house, we can have some pet dolphins.

Now I expected Sea World to be all about animals and sea creatures but it wasn’t that way at all. It had quite a bit of a theme park too. I went on a few rides. On one of these drop rides that I tried to get Shorty to go on but she refused. So to make it up to me she stood by the side and snapped a picture of me when I was coming down the ramp. See the guy seated behind with the green t-shirt?

That’s me during my moment of regret thinking “WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS AGAIN?!”.

This particular slide wasn’t too bad though. So after that ride I mustered up the courage to go for this roller coaster.

Aww man this roller coaster scared me not because of the drops or the loops or anything like that but because it was so high up and the foundation looked like lego. Plus when you got to the top and it turned around just before they dropped you, I kept feeling as if I was going to fall off the roller coaster and die.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. The first time I went, Shorty refused to go. Some ten minutes later I returned from the ride telling her that it really wasn’t that bad compared to some other rides we’ve been on so she decided to try it out. I ended up going for the ride a second time. I love sitting roller coasters with Shorty. She has the cutest scream.

What I fancy less though are sitting on kiddie rides with Shorty. She saw this little kiddie ride that only had parents and kids and she insisted we get on to it.

At first when the ride attendants saw us, they weren’t sure if they were supposed to let two adults ride it. Since you know, it’s meant for kids. Eventually they let us on though and it was the most boring ride I’ve been on the entire trip.

Sea World was our 3rd theme park. By the end of it I think we had enough of rides and roller coasters. So the next day we went to the beach.

The beach in Gold Coast is really different from every other beach I’ve been on. Maybe it’s because the weather and the sea water was really cold but… the waves there were a lot stronger than the waves you would get in say.. Phuket.

We didn’t last long on the beach though. Because as you can tell from the last picture… IT STARTED RAINING!

Still.. was great while it lasted!

So that’s the end of my Gold Coast entries. Maybe it’s just me though but while Gold Coast is nice, I find cities in Asia a bit more exciting. KL, Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo…. all with the hustle and bustle that I love.

But if you want to go somewhere nice to relax without having to travel too far. Gold Coast is great. Plus I hear the flights are much cheaper now with Air Asia. So go have fun guys!

Hey Guys,

I’m back from Gold Coast and I’m friggin tired. All because I took a night flight back and I was seated on the 2nd most front row on Economy class. You know what that means right?

Well the first row of economy class is where all the parents with infants sit. Because it’s where they have the little bassinet for their babies. Naturally …. throughout the flight I had babies crying all over so I hardly got any sleep. It was early Saturday morning by the time I arrived KL. I went back and wanted to sleep immediately but found myself really awake after the shower. So I didn’t really get to sleep much all day and now I’m reaaally tired.

So this entry will be fairly short. It’s going to be about the apartment my family and I stayed in at Gold Coast. You see when you travel in a big family it gets really expensive to stay in hotels. So what we often do is we go around looking for apartments to rent for a short-term. And that’s what we did at Gold Coast.

We managed to find this really nice 3 bedroom apartment we could all squeeze in. It came with two living rooms with TVs in each of them.

This is the nicer looking one… which my mum happened to comment that the sofa doesn’t match the living room.

And this other simpler one.

I didn’t manage to take a picture of the other rooms but there were basically 3 bedrooms, all with balconies, a laundry room and quite a few toilets.

It also had a really nice open-kitchen kind of area.

This is where we would sit around and have breakfast every morning. This is a picture of my sister and Shorty making breakfast one morning.

The best part about that kitchen though is that it has a balcony right opposite it.

And outside that balcony is this beautiful view.

Imagine waking up to that every morning. You could look down and see people walking on the beach and hear the waves. One night though we were sitting out in the balcony having some drinks and we noticed a search helicopter going out to see looking for some people who might have been lost at sea.

A really scary thought because at night when you look out to see, all you see it darkness. That kind of thing scares me sometimes and I get extremely paranoid when I’m on cruise ships. You know, the feeling that if you fall off a railing on a cruise ship and you’ll be lost in the darkness. Nobody will be able to spot you or pick you up. I once asked the staff of the cruise ship I was on last year if anything like that has happened and he said yes. Bad news was that they never found the passenger that fell off because it was too dark. Plus by the time the ship was able to stop it would be like… far far away from the spot where that person fell.

So anyway, I think I will just admire the sea as it is like this.

Ahh I kinda miss that view already but whatever it is… it really feels good to be home. Going to get my sleep now guys! Good night!

So I’ve been in Gold Coast for a few days now. What have I been doing?

Well according to the tourist guides there’s shopping, surfing, extreme sports stuff and theme parks. Lots and lots of theme parks. So for the past few days I’ve been waking up to this beautiful view.

Having a nice home-cooked breakfast. Sandwiches and ham mostly. And then my afternoons are spent in theme parks. I have sat on quite a lot of rollercoasters the past few days. I think I must’ve counted 7. Now here’s the deal with me and thrill rides. I used to be extremely chicken-shit when it comes to roller coasters. Wouldn’t go on any of them. Until one day somebody told me all I had to do to have fun on a roller coaster is shout as loud as I can. So I did it and now I enjoy it. While I love roller coasters, in my books there are…. roller coasters… which are fun.

And there are … what I call “sick sick rides”.. which many other people probably find fun but not me.

Let me tell you how.

Roller coasters are like this one that I just went for today at Seaworld.

And a really good one would be the Lethal Weapon one I blogged about in my previous entry. You know…. some loops, corkscrews, drops and a lot of speed. That’s lots of fun!

In my definition… sick sick rides are like … this one that I saw in Dreamworld.

See that tall tower. That tower must’ve been some… I don’t know… 12 storeys tall or something. One of the rides there is called The Big Drop. It’s something like the Solero Shot in Genting where they take you up all the way to the top and drop you. Unlike Solero Shot though, I think it’s a LOT friggin higher… and it drops all the way down. It doesn’t even stop. The worst part about this ride what I call the “Point of Regret“. You know when you’re sitting up there with your friends and looking down realizing that’s where you’re going in a few seconds. Then you ask yourself “WTF AM I DOING HERE?!?!?!”. Then before you can curse your friend for talking you into it… they drop you.

Now when I go on roller coasters, I hate the drops but I love the loops, the corkscrews and everything else. So as a package I love it. These kind of rides though take away everything else and just focus on what some say is the best part… the DROP. That’s too much for me so I avoid them.

Another sick ride is this one… suggested by thetaggingmonster. On the same tower is this ride called the Tower of Terror 2. What happens is that you sit on a roller coaster that catapults you backwards through a tunnel and all the way up this tower. Then you vertically fall down.

Now I was seriously considering that ride though. I mean the drop doesn’t seem so bad but I thought twice about it because of the catapult. You see there are two types of roller coasters. One that pull you up a track and then let gravity slide the roller coaster through the track. And another one… that uses a catapult to shoot you so that you pick up speed really fast really quick.

I’ve been on two rides in my life with the catapult. Both in Europe and I don’t like the way it made me feel. Being shot from a catapult makes your stomach feel like you’re being dropped… only worse. So I guess I can never been an Air Force pilot 🙁

Here’s another sick ride. This one was the first one I have ever seen of its kind.

You basically sit on this long bench with others and this robotic arms turn you around upside down, left right whatever. Its only purpose seems to make you dizzy!

The most sick ride that I saw this trip though was one they called The Claw.

You guys seen this kind of ride before right? Where it swings you up and down like a pendulum. The point of regret for that is the minute you sense that the dropping back and forth is making you sick in the stomach. Only that.. unlike other drop rides, this ride gets much much worse after the point of regret.

Now whats worse about The Claw is that… it not only swings you but it turns you around while you’re swinging. So sometimes you’re falling sideways and sometimes you’re falling backwards.

Now let me tell you what in my opinion is the MOTHER OF ALL SICK RIDES. Watch this video and you will understand why.

As much as I love roller coasters… I WILL NEVER DO THIS RIDE!

I’m on the first holiday I’ve had in a year. The last time I actually managed to find some time for a holiday was in May last year when I went to New York with Shorty. Ever since that trip, I’ve still been traveling a lot but always for work. This time though I found myself in Gold Coast for a family trip.

It’s my first time to Gold Coast. I’ve heard loads about Gold Coast (probably a lot from the Air Asia ads I always see promoting it every now and then) but never been. My impression of it is …. lots of surfer dudes, nice beaches, loaaads of theme parks and great weather. So far that has more or less how it turned out to be. Shorty calls it an “Older and quiet version of Miami”. I have never been to Miami so I can’t tell you if that’s true or not.

Today we went to Warner Bros Movie World. It’s sort of like a smaller version of Universal Studios. The first thing I saw when I got there was this huge rollercoaster called The Superman Escape. You can see the track in the background.

Pay attention to the roller-coaster track. Notice how it goes up like a horse shoe and then dives down again? My sister totally wanted to go for it when she saw it at first but I chickened out. My sister on the other hand is this dare devil that would go sky diving if she could. So every ride to her is like… nothing.

Still, I hadn’t been on a roller-coaster for a while and hopping on to that one was too big a commitment too quick. So Shorty and I settled for taking a picture in front of the roller-coaster. She made her Y U NO GUY face so I think she meant to say “FATTY… Y U NO BRAVE LIKE SUPERMAN”.

Now I love roller-coasters but that one had such a strong vertical dive that even watching other people go on it destroyed whatever courage I had. So I spent the day going for some of the other rides and a smaller roller-coaster called The Scooby Doo. We even sat on this other small roller-coaster meant for kids where Shorty barely made the height restriction.

Based on her height, in order to get on that kiddie roller-coaster she had to be accompanied by an adult. Fortunately I was there to be the “adult”.

Now the other rides were all fun and all but I still thought that it wasn’t enough. So at the end of the day I decided to go for the other extreme roller-coaster in the park. It was called The Lethal Weapon. Let me describe Lethal Weapon to you.

This is how the track more or less looks like.

This picture was taken in an observation in the middle of the tracks (so to the left of the photo is a whole lot more track that we can’t see) where it was protected with a net, in case anything dropped out of the pockets of the people on the ride. The ride started with a drop, and then a couple of loops, then more drops and then a corkscrew and I think a few more drops. The only real twist for this one compared to the other roller-coasters I’ve been on before is that…it’s the type that leaves your legs hanging in the air. So you’re not really in a carriage but kinda just…. hanging from the tracks.

Still that’s something I figured I could handle since… well.. the only thing I’m really afraid of are the drops. You hardly feel the loops and the corkscrews.

I was a little wrong though. For some reason I totally felt the corkscrews in this roller-coaster. The whole ride was dropping, looping and corkscrewing all at one go it doesn’t give you much of a chance to recover. So I was shouting the entire ride until some 75% of the ride was done. By then I had run out of breath to scream or shout. But it was damn fun!

Shorty didn’t go for the ride because she said those days are behind her. So she was in the observation area watching me the whole time and took pictures of me while I was on the ride. So I think if you look closely at the previous pictures you might see me shouting away in fear for my life. My brother apparently took a video of me on the ride and said I was shouting the loudest (If I manage to get that video from him maybe I’ll post it up here ).

That’s what I learned about roller-coasters though. I used to hate them… and was too afraid to sit on many of the more extreme ones. Then one day instead of keeping it all in I decided to shout in fear and I found the ride a lot enjoyable then. So if you’re afraid of roller-coasters… try shouting or screaming… I think it’ll help you get over it a lot better.

Still.. this time I was shouting very very loud. So loud that while walking out of the ride in the end, the two Australian teenagers sitting in front of me said
“You shout really loud!!!”

After sitting on Lethal Weapon I was all pumped up to go for the Superman ride. In comparison it seemed a lot less stressful except for the big drop… but my parents wanted to go home by then. So we decided to call it a day.

Will be visiting a few more theme parks here in Gold Coast in the next few days. Will see which ones I can get on. I got back to our hotel just in time to see the sunset on the Gold Coast.

It was beautiful.

Being here in the Gold Coast feels like you’re far away from everything familiar to you in the world. Suddenly all my stress and problems seem to so far away. I think it’s good break that both Shorty and I needed for a long time.