I love it when I discover funny videos on YouTube and this is one of them. Haha!

It’s actually filmed in Taiwan where they were launching the new Sony Ericsson Android phone. They got this guy in an Android suit to dance around and BOY DID HE DO A GOOD JOB!

I mean CHECK out the way he was moving! At no point did he look like he was tired… except for the part where he lay down on the stage for a while. YouTube as always have the best comments sometimes.

Whatever they’re paying this guy… it’s not enough! HAHA!

So today some of the Nuffies and I decided to head to Lot 10’s food court for lunch. I was feeling a little “heaty” so I decided to have porridge. Halfway through my porridge, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around to see Kenny Sia.

I haven’t seen Kenny in a long long time. He was down in KL only for a night and he just so happened to be in Lot 10 right there and then. He didn’t yet have any dinner plans so I asked him to join Shorty and another friend tonight. I brought him to what is my favourite restaurant in KL: Nerotecca.

I love it because… well I have a thing for very small and quaint restaurants. You know, the kind of places you find in places like London, New York or even Melbourne. Small, old and quaint little restaurants that you know have been around for a long time and yet only have a few tables.

Nerotecca is one such restaurant (though it doesn’t look old or anything) and the food is amazing. I love the cold cuts.

And they have what is in my opinion, the best pasta in all of Klang Valley.

What I also really like about Nerotecca is the ambience. Just the kind of place you can go and relax with friends.

Service is great and the best part is that it’s really affordable. One bowl of pasta is like … RM28 or something. And you can tell them to customize your own pasta for you. Shorty and I love going there and we normally order stuff that aren’t on the menu.

The other thing that’s new with me lately is that I finally got myself a tablet. That’s right! I totally missed the tablet phase. While everyone was having their iPads and all… I didn’t have anything but my Kindle. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what I would use the tablet for.

Then I read more and more about how tablets are changing the world and I finally decided that since I’m in the digital industry, I gotta keep up with times. At one point I really wanted to get the Motorola Xoom and other alternative tablets like the Blackberry Playbook but got tired of waiting for them to come out in spite of all the hype they were creating.

So I recently got an iPad 2. I googled around and got it from one of those suppliers who bought it from an Apple store overseas and brought it back to sell in Malaysia for a bit of a premium.

I know it’s coming out in Singapore this month but if memory served me right last year, it was pretty much sold out everywhere for the first few months. So I thought okay, pay a little extra but just get it. I paid RM2,500 for a 32GB Wi-Fi which is pretty much the most I could ever get myself to pay for a tablet. It was the same price I paid for the first iPad I bought my mum a year ago (before it hit Malaysian shores).

The iPad 2 is supposed to be faster, has a front camera and is supposedly 33% thinner than the first iPad. Everything else though is pretty much the same to be honest. So if you have the first generation iPad, I don’t think the change in technology for the iPad 2 is a big enough leap for you to change it. It’s supposedly lighter but it’s still too heavy to hold it up and read like you do the Kindle.

What I use my iPad for so far is really reading lots of news online.

Plus I now carry it around with me instead of my laptop which makes me feel better. For the past year I’ve always gotten paranoid about carrying my laptop around or keeping it in the car trunk for fear of people breaking it open and stealing it. On the iPad though I can just carry it around like a file.

With the iPad though I think in future I might just change from my iPhone to an Android phone in future. I also do have a Blackberry for work. Got a Torch recently when my Bold 2 died. It gave me a bit of problems at first but now that I’ve fixed them, I love it!

Hope I end up loving my iPad too.

You guys should check this out. While we all know about the vast and rapid development of China, here are some parts of that development that we don’t really hear about.

They’ve built cities for millions of people but they’re empty just like ghost cities.

Remember when I blogged about Astro B.yond some time back?

Well recently, Astro decided to let me try it out for myself. So they helped me get it installed in my place just a few weeks ago. Getting it installed was a bit of an adventure.

You see I stay by myself in one side of the apartment and my brother and sister stay on another side. The Astro is actually on my brother’s and sister’s side of the apartment hooked up to an old box TV we have.
I have a HD LCD TV on my side but it’s not plugged into anything except for my DVD Player and XBOX. So when I was going to get Astro B.yond installed on my side of the apartment I met with some protests. My brother and sister wanted to have it on their side instead so in the end because it was 2vs1 I let it happen. So that means I won’t be able to watch programs on HD but I guess I can live with that.

So since I’ve been away for a week I just finally got down to using it today. I played around with all the features. I noticed that my maid who watches the Astro in my apartment far more than the rest of us has already figured out to record a program and recorded one of hers.

Some Bollywood dancing program.

The core feature and the most user-friendly feature of Astro B.yond is the ability to record any programs you want and watch it any time you want. To me it was really cool but always felt like a “nice to have” rather than a “must have”. Just like iPad.

That’s when I was wrong.

Sure movies and all you can just buy DVDs or well go for the less legal option of downloading them. But there’s so much on TV that’s worth watching but I miss just because of the timing. Like I scrolled through HBO, Star Movies and Cinemax only to choose to record “The Postman”.

Then I browsed through Discovery Channel and Discovery Science and I came across all the programs that I’d definitely watch and wouldn’t easily be able to find. I ended up filling up my recording queue very quickly. Extreme Machines, Modern Marvels, Mega Machines… all the kind of stuff that I’d always watch when I catch it on Discovery (upon writing this Shorty just called me a geek for liking these shows).

Then there were a lot of other stuff. Like I’m really into Modern History especially about World War 2, so I scrolled through the History Channel and looked for programs I would watch. If that wasn’t enough I went to CNBC then because on weekends they have features where they interview billionaires or give you a look in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Then I thought of the other stuff I loved watching… like E!’s True Hollywood Stories.. and it went on and on!

I went crazy! ALL THE TV I ALWAYS WANTED TO WATCH BUT NEVER FOUND THE TIME TO WATCH…. JUST LAID ITSELF BEFORE MY EYES! ALL… accessible from this one controller.

So I went to the Astro website and started looking at what programs they have coming up on the channels and what I’d like to watch. It suddenly became addictive!

Now I can’t wait for the night to end so I can watch all these recorded programs this weekend. Oh man.. I never thought that Astro B.yond would be so cool! I’ll blog again after a few weeks of using it to see if I still love it!

I never forget that it’s April Fool’s Day! Never! Because I’ve been trained to remember it. Growing up, on every April Fool’s Day my babysitter would prank me. I would wake up early in the morning for school, put on my school uniform then go down for breakfast. When she sees me she would say “Hey Tiam your fly is down”. I would look down and she would say “April FOOL!”.
So over the years I constantly forced myself to remember it. Until the years I got into secondary school I started Fooling her back too. So this year’s April Fool was no different. I knew it was coming but every year more and more people seem to want to fool me and they get smarter and smarter.

This morning I woke up, checked my e-mails as usual and I saw this e-mail from David Lee, a director of Nuffnang Australia.

I was shocked! You guys remember David Krupp right? David Krupp (or we refer to him as Kruppy) has been with Nuffnang Australia almost ever since we started off. Before Nuffnang Australia he was at MySpace so we were lucky to have him.

I knew he had always been a ladies’ man. Very charming and all so I wouldn’t put it behind him to get involved with someone in the office. The truth is that while our “official stance” is to frown upon inter-office relationships, in Nuffnang and ChurpChurp.. where everyone is young and hang out a lot so much it happens. So Ming finally decided that fine.. if it happens it happens because every Nuffie has the right to pursuit his own happiness. Just don’t let it affect your work or your colleagues around you.

In this case, David Lee was saying that it was causing problems in the office so okay. The next e-mail I saw was from Ming.

So I guess… ok Ming knew.

Then the next e-mail we got was from Kruppy himself.

And that’s when I went “FUUUUCCKK!!!”. So there you have it Kruppy, now you know how much we all love you.

I never forget that it’s April Fool’s Day! Never! Because I’ve been trained to remember it. Growing up, on every April Fool’s Day my babysitter would prank me. I would wake up early in the morning for school, put on my school uniform then go down for breakfast. When she sees me she would say “Hey Tiam your fly is down”. I would look down and she would say “April FOOL!”.
So over the years I constantly forced myself to remember it. Until the years I got into secondary school I started Fooling her back too. So this year’s April Fool was no different. I knew it was coming but every year more and more people seem to want to fool me and they get smarter and smarter.

This morning I woke up, checked my e-mails as usual and I saw this e-mail from David Lee, a director of Nuffnang Australia.

I was shocked! You guys remember David Krupp right? David Krupp (or we refer to him as Kruppy) has been with Nuffnang Australia almost ever since we started off. Before Nuffnang Australia he was at MySpace so we were lucky to have him.

I knew he had always been a ladies’ man. Very charming and all so I wouldn’t put it behind him to get involved with someone in the office. The truth is that while our “official stance” is to frown upon inter-office relationships, in Nuffnang and ChurpChurp.. where everyone is young and hang out a lot so much it happens. So Ming finally decided that fine.. if it happens it happens because every Nuffie has the right to pursuit his own happiness. Just don’t let it affect your work or your colleagues around you.

In this case, David Lee was saying that it was causing problems in the office so okay. The next e-mail I saw was from Ming.

So I guess… ok Ming knew.

Then the next e-mail we got was from Kruppy himself.

And that’s when I went “FUUUUCCKK!!!”. So there you have it Kruppy, now you know how much we all love you.

Update: Sorry just realized that I accidentally had my comments for this post turned off all this while. It’s back on now!

Updated again: I realized again that this entry was broken because of some WP problem I had. I published it with a line from number (4) missing. Sorry have added it back in.

Lets play a little game! Hehehe.. Simple game called 9 Truths 1 Lie. I’m going to tell you 10 Facts about myself but one of them is a lie. I’m going to elaborate each”fact” in detail and tell you a story as if each of them were true. See if you can spot the “lie” ok? Cool lets go!

1) I had my first girlfriend when I was 13.

We were an official boyfriend/girlfriend. Went around school hugging, holding hands, kissing… doing all sorts of stuff. Eventually it got the attention of the headmaster who then called us up to his office. Along with us went one of my other best friends in my class and his girlfriend. Up in the headmaster’s office, the school counsellor joined us and they both educated us about sex. I can’t remember what exactly they talked about but I remember being happy that I was missing class for that.

My parents eventually got tired of me causing so much trouble with the girls in the coed school that they threw me into a St Xaviers. A boy school! Believe it or not, my grades started to improve then.

2) I was a rebellious child growing up

While most kids growing up were rebellious in their teens, I was rebellious from age 9-12. I would argue with my parents and get into so much trouble in school that my mum was often called to school. I was the leader of this “school gang” which was a very very mild gang because it’s the gang of a small private school. We didn’t do half the shit the government gangster school boys did. We didn’t intimidate anyone. All we did was irritate girls and teachers.

We had a name for our gang. We called it G.R.O.S.S. (inspired by Calvin & Hobbes’ Get Rid of Slimey girlS). There were 5 of us official members. Today I’m still very close friends with 2 of them.

3) I have a Fu Chuk Obsession

For those who don’t know, Fu Chuk is this dried bean curd skin. I can eat. You can sometimes eat it when its put together with fishball.

Or sometimes eat it on its own in a steamboat pot.

This is my favourite!

This past weekend I think I had a big overdose of it. And I think that’s why I’ve now fallen sick.

4) I’ve only had 6 girlfriends my whole life.

Shorty is the shortest of them all but the only one I could really see myself living my life with.

5) I Spent A Good Portion of My Life Playing Counter-Strike

I spent a lot of time of my teenage years on Counter-Strike. I played so much that I eventually got bored of it but I kept playing those hours so I could get better at it. Why? Because me and my school friends at the time were in a team (back then we called it a Clan) we called ANTZ. We would then go play lots of Counter-Strike competitions. We hardly won first place but most of the time we always made it to the Top 4.

My girlfriend at the time got fed up watching me play Counter-Strike she once gave me an ultimatum. Either I choose her or Counter-Strike. I chose Counter-Strike. The good news was that she didn’t leave me for that. We broke up a year later for some other reasons. Still… I will always remember how I chose a computer game over a girlfriend. Would certainly never do that now.

6) I’ve Never Had Sex

I was very active in church starting from when I was say 14 years old. When I say active I mean like Wednesday I would go for prayer meetings, Friday for cell group, Saturday for youth group, Sunday bible class and all. Would even go caroling. So one thing that was drilled into me back then was that sex is a gift that should only be experienced by a married couple.

So with all my girlfriends, we’ve done some other stuff but never sex. I’m waiting for the right one to come along before I do.

7) I Once Got Kicked Out Of a Club

When I was studying in London, I would go with my uni friends a lot to this asian club there called Thai Square. It had good music and it was cheap so… great place for students to hang out.

One night we went there the music was really bad though. They were playing some canto-trance stuff or something like that. So not feeling the music, my friends and I just decided to spend our night drinking all sorts of different stuff. Later in the night, the music got better so some of us decided to head to the dance floor. I was already feeling really high so instead I fell asleep on a couch near the dance floor for like 10 minutes! In spite of all the noise and action happening around me.

By the time I woke up I felt like puking. So I pushed through the crowd in my rush to the toilet. I didn’t make it in time. I threw up right outside the Gents and Ladies with everyone looking at me. Then I went into the Gents, locked myself in the cubicle and puked the remainder there. Shortly after that I heard a loud bang on my cubical door. The person on the other side of the door shouted “Get out!”. I opened the door only to see this big black guy in a big trenchcoat waiting for me (exactly like the kind of bouncers you see in the movies). He waited for me to wash up then grabbed me by the shoulder and escorted me out.

After that some of my friends came out and we went to Chinatown for supper. Was feeling much better after puking.

8) I’m best in Table Tennis but my Favourite Sport is Badminton

Table Tennis to me is once of those family sports. My whole family from my father to my grandfather to my great great grandfather and everyone in between plays table tennis. So much that when I was 9 years old, my Dad hired a coach to train me and my brothers and sister in table tennis.

The result of that is that I became pretty good. Won some little trophies in the school years.

Then went on to university and college and played there too.

Once when I was back for my uni summer break, my Dad got the Malaysia Number 1 player to come train me for a month.

In spite of all that though, the sport I play the most is actually badminton. I kinda enjoy playing badminton a lot more than I do table tennis eventhough I’m not very good in badminton. Feels a lot more simpler to me. Table Tennis is just stressful sometimes. Having to estimate the spin of every ball that comes your way.

9) I Go Clubbing for the Dancing

When you ask a guy about why he goes clubbing, it’s often down to 3 reasons. To drink, to pick up girls or to dance. Most guys go for the first two but I’m one of the few that go for the third. I’m not one of those guys who can go to a club, book a table and then just sit down and drink there all night. If you want to drink and talk with your friends then go to a club.

And sure it’s fun going clubbing and meeting girls every now and then but what really motivates me is dancing. If I’m ever in a club, you’ll see me most on the dance floor. Just like badminton, I’m a pretty terrible dancer but I love dancing on the dance floor. It’s like… you set your troubles completely free at that instant and nothing in the world exists except you, the music and the dance floor!

10) My Favourite Gadget

I love gadgets! I have an iPhone, Blackberry, PS3, XBOX, Wii, Kinect, Kindle and all sorts of other things. I don’t have an iPad though. Just never knew what I was going to use it for if I ever had one. That being said I think I’ll get one when the iPad 2 comes out… just to keep up with times.

Of all my gadgets though, the one that I really can’t live without is my Blackberry. Nothing makes you feel more connected that the Blackberry does. I mean the iPhone is great in many ways and in some ways its far superior to the Blackberry but it just doesn’t make me feel as connected as the BB does.

When I go overseas though, the Blackberry is the only phone where I turn my data roaming on. I find that in my experience, if I just keep the data usage to just e-mails and BBM, my roaming charges come up to only RM25-RM30 a day or so. That’s pretty decent considering the wi-fi in hotels cost much more than that sometimes.

——

So there you have it everyone? Which is the lie?

I came back to Penang yesterday. Going to be here for a few days before I fly off again for work. I’m back in Penang for two things mainly.

1) To celebrate my mum’s 61st birthday – Yes my mum is 61. When my little niece heard how old my mum was she went “SIXTY-ONE?!??!”

2) The second thing I’m back here for is to handle some work stuff back in Penang. A part of the finance for the Netccentric Group is actually handled out of Penang. So every now and then I have to come back and clear up some stuff.

Today though I had lunch at my Aunty’s beautiful apartment in Penang. Check out the view from her balcony

Having spent most of my time in KL these days, I sometimes forget how it’s like to be able to see the sea every day. Sitting in my Aunty’s living room with the balcony door open I could hear the sound of the waves hit the beach below. It was really peaceful. Sure not everyone in Penang lives next to the sea. I certainly don’t myself and it’s probably pretty expensive too but it’s definitely far cheaper than an apartment like that in Singapore.

I have no idea how much my Aunty’s apartment costs but I would imagine if you’d like a place like that in Singapore, it would probably cost you almost RM10,000,000. A week or so ago a friend of mine from Singapore came down. He’s been looking to buy an apartment in Singapore and was telling me how expensive it was. The cheapest apartment you can find there would cost you at least some RM2,000,000. I decided to give him a bit of a tour of what that kind of money could buy you in KL.

I drove him around some nice gated-community areas. Where you had beautiful houses with gardens and no fences. There are a lot of places like that in KL. Smaller ones like the Idaman Damansara near Tropicana or bigger ones like Desa Park City. Well in Penang, you can get a nice apartment, by the beach like this. With the beach view on one side.

Down below, the swimming pool of the apartment.

And on another side, a small view of Penang town.

I didn’t grow up in any of these beautiful houses though. Believe it or not, I actually grew up in a small housing area. On one side of the housing area was a Kampung and on the other side a cemetery.

I still enjoyed my old neighbourhood though. I remember the evenings I would spend cycling around with my neighbours and walking to badminton classes. I guess we can’t forget that what makes a home really isn’t how expensive or beautiful it is. It’s the family that’s in it.

Still I was thinking that it would be nice to have an apartment like that one day with this to look at every morning.

If we all work hard and pray… perhaps we’ll all get there some day. And if you become super-rich you can always buy an apartment like that IN Singapore and have the best of both worlds.

On Wednesday this week I went to watch Lat Kampung Boy, a Musical about the life of Lat. It was quite a rush for us. Right after work I had to pick Shorty up and rushed back home to change. We decided that since I did the world shame by wearing t-shirt and shorts to the Michael Buble concert the week before, I will go home and wear a suit to Lat. I’m glad I did though because everyone was dressed up really formal that night.

Jenhan was nice enough to get Shorty and I tickets… really good seats too.

Our PM Najib Razak happened to be watching the musical that night too and our seats were some 3-4 rows in front of them. I was so annoying, I was trying to get a picture of PM and Rosmah so I was waving my camera in front of them trying to take a picture of them while they both sat facing forward.

I was afraid they would get fed up and suddenly have their bodyguards throw me out… but fortunately that didn’t happen. Probably used to people taking pictures of them.

So anyway back to Lat. I didn’t have very high expectations of Lat to be honest. I mean it was a local musical and while I’ve seen decently produced local musicals and they were mostly just okay. I was pleasantly surprised though.

Lat turned out to be one of the best musicals I have ever seen in my life! Better than Phantom, Avenue Q, Les Miserables, Fame and all the other musicals I’ve seen. It comes only second to Wicked… but I really think it came really close to Wicked though. It was so good. The cast was brilliant, the music was beautiful, the songs were nice, the script was good and the set was world class! About 80% or so of the musical was in Malay language and 20% of it was in English but if you don’t understand Malay its ok because there’s a screen on top of the stage that displays subtitles.

I am so extremely proud that we Malaysians manage to produce such a high quality musical. I only wish it was a performance they kept running for years so that I could bring my overseas friends who visit to watch it. It had a really 1Malaysia feel to it too. I hope they sell the soundtrack for Lat. I would totally buy it!

Lat runs only until the 4th of April so if you haven’t seen it yet I strongly recommend you go watch it. IT IS THAT GOOD! I am a fan and this is my unbiased opinion! I mean I’m not paid or anything to write this. You can get tickets here.

So catch it soon 🙂

To the people who made Lat… well done! So proud of you guys!

Every now and then whenever we have the chance to, the Nuffies organize a little gathering they call the “Nuffnang Sharing Session”. Nuffnang as a company doesn’t make any money from these things. We do it just to get some bloggers together because we know how the community love to meet each other. We just go up to a restaurant and ask if they could sponsor food for some 20-30 Nuffnangers for us all to get together. What we also do is invite a couple of top bloggers to interact with other Nuffnangers and share any experiences they might have had as a blogger.

Last week we had a Nuffnang Sharing Session at Frames in Sunway Pyramid. Frames is this new place that has been around for less than a year. The whole theme was they had pictures they got from real people they knew and then put them all up in frames around the outlet. If you took a really good picture, even you could contribute to it.

We put an announcement of this gathering out and some 200 over Nuffnangers applied to come for it but unfortunately we only had place for 20. So if you asked for an invite but didn’t get it, don’t worry there will be a next time.

In terms of guests, this time we got Shorty, Cindy and Cheesie to come by and mingle with the other Nuffnangers. But there was a little surprise. On that weekend, Xiaxue and Mike happened to be down in KL and bunking with me and Shorty. So since we were going for this dinner with the Nuffnangers we decided to invite her along. At first she was shy about it… saying she didn’t want to intrude but she came along anyway.

Part of the reason why she was shy to come also was because she wasn’t exactly prepared for it. You know if you’re a blogger and you go for a gathering with a lot of other bloggers there you would make sure you dress up because you know a lot of pictures are going to go up on everyone’s blogs. Xiaxue wasn’t prepared.  But she was sporting about it! So let me first say that Xiaxue on a normal day (when she is not up at 6am and tired from shopping all day) is fucking chio ok?

Great.. now moving on 🙂

I didn’t really take many pictures there that night but here are the few that I took. This is Nuffies Michelle and Xinxian from our Blogger Relations side giving a welcome message.

The night started off with a little icebreaker. Where Xinxian passed around this “magic wand” and everyone who held it had to introduce themselves and say what they would do if they want a magic wand.

Here’s a picture of Rachel and Ming.

The owners of Frames happened to be old college classmates of both Rachel and Ming.

Shorty and me with Ming, Hui Wen, Rachel and Cindy.

Cindy doing her camwhoring.

Copykate, Sherry and Melissa

Cheesie, Xiaxue and Shorty.

Xiaxue intentionally closed her left eye when taking this picture because her contact fell out of place.

Here’s Thara… sharing something with the Nuffnangers there that day.

Thara is the only married Nuffie in the KL office. That’s right.. the only one!

Had a lot of fun getting to know more Nuffnangers that night. Thanks to Frames for sponsoring the venue and thanks to the Nuffies Thara, Rachel, Michelle and Xinxian for putting it all together.