I’m back in Penang now for Chinese New Year. Spending some time with family and catching up with some old friends. During the day I have been running errands for my mum getting stuff ready for the Chinese New Year dinners. Like we’re preparing the steamboat dinner so I went to this Burma Road Wan Tan Mee store to buy raw Wan Tan from the owner.

Then for the beef balls I went to the Bomba beef ball noodle place and bought like 80 over beef balls from her.

Couldn’t resist having lunch there too. That is in my opinion the best beef ball noodle in Penang and it’s done by this pretty girl. Everyone refers to her as “leng lui”. If you’re wondering where it is, it’s right opposite the Fire Station at the end of Beach Street.

I also managed to find some time to pay a visit to my old baby sitter Aunty Nancy who took care of me when I was young.

At night though I’ve been going out quite a bit. My favourite hangout place this trip has been G-Spot at G Hotel because of their Live Music. Been there two nights in a row already.

Last night I was there to watch Dasha Logan.

She turns out to be the sister of one of my old secondary school mates. She’s really really good… I heard she performs in KL too so I’m going to make it a point to bring Shorty to see her one of these days.

Speaking of Shorty…. let me tell you some conversations I’ve been having with her.

It was 11.30AM or so on a Saturday morning. I BBMed her to wish her good morning and we chatted for a short while. Then after the 3rd reply I stopped getting any replies from her. I waited patiently and went to do my things.

Some 1 hour later she finally replied me
“I fell asleep again.”

This happens quite a lot. Shorty is a little narcoleptic.

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Later that day we were BBMing again. I was telling her how Penang had really cool weather this Chinese New Year… unlike the usual CNYs that are really hot.

She said “2012 iz coming”.

My Shorty says the funniest things.

So it’s like that. Wednesday morning I woke up all ready to go to work. I was trying to decide what to wear. I normally wear long sleeve shirts with jeans and sneakers but that morning I felt like wearing a t-shirt. So I reached into my closet and picked up this Google t-shirt I bought from the Google HQ in Mountain View.

For some reason the t-shirt felt a little tight. But it couldn’t be! I just wore it last week and it felt perfectly fine. So I tweeted.

I was running through all the scenarios in my head. I considered everything. Maybe it shrunk in the washing machine, maybe I just didn’t remember that it fit like this or maybe… just maybe…. I had grown fat! ARGHH!!!

I brushed it off though and I went to work. Then when I reached work and opened my e-mails I noticed an e-mail from Facebook. It was telling me that someone had commented on my status update so I went to look at the comment.

My friend Jia Jer said “Maybe you wore the wrong shirt – your gfs shirt lol”.

I laughed at it for like 2 seconds, shrugged and went back to work. Just as I was looking at my other e-mails it dawned on me that what Jia Jer said could be true (even though he meant it as a joke). I could be wearing my girlfriend’s t-shirt because I bought two of these same unisex t-shirts. One of them S (for my gf) and one M for me. I could be wearing the S.

A quick check at the size and I realized that I was indeed wearing Shorty’s t-shirt. I don’t know what got into me but another stupid thing I did next was to say it out loud in my quiet office “OH SHIT.. I’M WEARING MY GF’S SHIRT”.

Everyone turned around and laughed. I went for lunch that day with some of the Nuffies and the girls kept looking at my t-shirt saying that they could see my nipples through it. Feeling violated, I covered my breasts with my hands… suddenly feeling like a girl being checked out by shameless men who kept staring.

I now know how it feels like when we guys stare at girls.

One of the topics that has often been in the news in the past few years is our “brain drain”. We’ve had lots of smart and talented Malaysians who graduate with good degrees and great results but choose instead to work and settle down overseas as opposed to come home. It’s a little bit of a surprise to me that only in the recent years did this really become a topic we focused. I’ve seen it happen since I first started university in the UK back at 2003. We were just at the beginning of our 3 year degree and yet almost all the Malaysians I met there had a clear mission in mind. They were all going to study hard, get their First Class Honours and find a job in the UK. If they fail to get a job in the UK, they would then try the USA, Hong Kong or even Singapore. Anything but going back to Malaysia.

3 years later in 2006 we all graduated.

True enough at least 50% of all the Malaysians I knew in London had chosen to stay in London. Of the 50%, some of them had jobs but some didn’t. Those who didn’t get a job vowed to stay there until they did. I was in the remaining 50% of Malaysians who wanted to come home. I love London and all that but home is home. It wasn’t just among students in the UK though. It’s friends everywhere else. I have friends who studied in Australia but failed to get a job there after graduation. They didn’t want to come home so they stayed there for years living off part-time jobs, being waiters at cafes, promoters and jobs like that. Mind you that some of these people I knew were top scorers in their school days but yet would rather be waitering tables in Melbourne than come home and work in a bank in Malaysia.

Sure I know why some people don’t want to come home. I’m well familiar with that. It’s something a lot of my Malaysian friends at university always educated me on. They asked me day in and day out “Why do you want to go home? It’s better here.. equal rights and you get paid more too”.

I always replied... “You said it yourself. It’s home”. Today I still believe the same thing. I’ve been lucky to travel all around the world for work and I’ve seen the life of different cities. I still believe though that Malaysia is a great place to live and a place with lots of opportunity. I can go for a jog in the park and just make friends with any of the strangers I see there regardless of whatever race they were. They’re all just Malaysian to me.

The good news is that in recent years more I’ve seen more and more of my friends moving back to Malaysia from overseas and they have done good things. I’ll talk about two of them here as an example. One of them is Shaun and one of them is Wilson. They were both straight-A students.

Shaun here graduated from the London School of Economics and worked at Ernst & Young in London for a few years.
Wilson here on the other hand studied in Warwick University and worked at an investment bank in London called Dresdner Kleinwort.

After a few years in London they both decided to come back to Malaysia. Together they started a beverage distributor that’s now doing really well. Plus just recently they hopped on to the group-buying craze and started Milkadeal.com. It’s a site where we can get really good deals out of anything, like 50-90% discount just by getting our friends to buy together and take advantage of volume discounts. You can check it out here.

So if you’re Malaysian and overseas. Come back. Malaysia as a developing country still has challenges… but it is still home and I truly believe it’s getting better.

For years, I along with a lot of other Malaysians suffered from the never-improving broadband connection called Streamyx. I mean when Streamyx first came out it was really good. But then years went by and while other countries moved on to 10-20 or even 100mps lines now, Streamyx still stayed at 1mbps. It also didn’t help that most of the time we never even hit that 1mbps.

I get a hint though of the kind of internet that the outside world experiences. When I was in Japan, the lines there were so fast you had YouTube videos loading instantly and downloading any software patches of any sort took minutes instead of hours.

When watching YouTube videos, most Malaysians are used to doing one thing. They would click play on the video, then click pause and wait for the red progress bar to load till the end before they actually start watching the video. Not to mention sometimes the video loads halfway and then it stops so you’ll have to refresh the whole page again.

So when I first heard about Unifi I was excited for it, but at the same time a little cautious. Sure it was going to be fibre optic and had better infrastructure but I was just pessimistic about our providers being able to achieve high-speed broadband in Malaysia. When it first launched it wasn’t available in my area yet. So I kept checking every month and finally it was. I was the first person in my area to get Unifi-ed.

Now the reason why I’m writing this entry is because…. when bad things happen we’re often generous in the flaming we give TM. So I believe that when TM does things right, we should be generous in giving them credit.

Let me tell you about Unifi.

The Speed

The speed is amazing. I went for a 20mbps line which is the best they got but only because I’m sharing the line with a lot of other very heavy internet users in my household. I just did a speedtest and this was the download and upload speeds I was getting.

Everything is totally different with Unifi. Sure surfing is a breeze but there’s more to that:

I don’t lag in any online gaming I do. It used to be in Starcraft 2 that it would take a long time for every menu page to load because the net was so slow. I don’t get that anymore.

YouTube is a whole new experience. You can click and instantly watch any video on the spot. In fact I don’t even watch standard YouTube videos anymore. I often now go for the full screen HD videos.

Unifi is as fast as any other fast connection that I’ve experienced overseas in Japan, USA or even Singapore. Perhaps they have even faster lines there but I’m not sure how much more faster than 20mbps we need. Unifi is basically how internet should have always been for us in Malaysia… and I’m glad it’s finally here.

The Service

Installation

Now the speed of it or the product itself is just one thing. It’s the people and my experience with their service that spurred me to write this entry. On the day of the installation, the TM staff (some people say the installers are 3rd party contractors but lets just refer to them as TM staff here) were an hour late to my place but that’s because they got lost finding it. They were very apologetic though. So I forgave them. They came at 4PM and started working on installing my Unifi. They did some of the work outside my house before they came in and then came in just to set up the equipment.

They got the internet connection working in no time but they faced some problems with installing the IPTV. Every time they turned it on it failed to connect to the server or something. So they tried all sorts of troubleshooting and made lots of calls to different TM numbers to find out what’s going on. More than an hour passed and since it was pass 5.30PM I wondered if they were just going to leave the job unfinished and come back another day. They didn’t.

They stayed all the way on till 9PM to try to fix the problem. I felt so bad and I told them that they could just come back another day if they wanted but they said that as long as I’m ok with them staying long at their place, they’ll be happy to stay until they fix it. Dinner-time came and went so I served them milo and cookies which they gobbled up in no time. They were appreciative. After 9PM they decided that there was nothing more they could do but they would get someone else on the equipment side to come fix it another day. I had gotten my internet up working anyway so I thanked them and they left.

A week later or so someone else from TM came and got my IPTV working.

Problems

Then just last week I had problems.  My internet connection just died. So I called up the Unifi hotline. Their customer service officer was really helpful and she lodged a report for me and told me they were trying to fix the problem remotely. The next morning I followed up with them and they said they were going to send someone over to my place in the afternoon to check it out. This time they were on time… and they fixed it in no time. In less than 24 hours since I had called their hotline, they had sent a team over to fix my problem. Now if that’s not great customer service what isn’t?

So I’m inspired by Unifi… by the people behind it at every level. I’m glad that TM as a Malaysian company has managed to pull itself together and gradually change the perception people had of it before.

To be fair, the IPTV isn’t great. When it comes to TV, Astro is still far superior to Unifi so don’t think of replacing your Astro with Unifi. But if you’re looking for a faster internet connection. Unifi is a good bet 🙂

Shorty and I one night just decided to go on YouTube to listen to the theme music of all our favourite cartoons growing up. Just listening to them tunes brought back lots and lots of memories. I thought it might make a cool blog post so here are my Top 10 favourite.

10) Cow & Chicken

Mama had a Chicken… Mama had a Cow… Dad was proud he didn’t care how.

Can’t say I absolutely loved this particular cartoon. I did watch it here and there but I found some parts where they played too much on Cow’s nipples to be a little disgusting. Still the theme song for its intro is one that you’ll remember forever.

They always seemed to play Cow & Chicken about the same time they played “Courage the Cowardly Dog” though. I liked Courage a lot more. When you look at him you just can’t help but feel he’s thinking “FML” all the time.

9) Powerpuff Girls

I guess by the time Powerpuff Girls came out I was young enough to still enjoy cartoons but old enough to not worry about publicly liking Powerpuff Girls. You know how boys are last time, you can’t like anything girly.

Powerpuff girls though was cool. My favourite character was Bubbles.

Always wanted to have a gf like her one day. Then again… current GF ain’t too far away from that….

Tiny… check

Big Eyes… check

8 ) Captain Planet

I watched this a lot growing up. Thought all their superpowers were really cool except for the one Ma-Ti had. I mean the others could cause earthquakes, tidal waves, fireballs or hurricanes but what can the native Indian Ma-Ti do?
He has this super power called “Heart”. When he does that… well nothing really happens. Ok not exactly NOTHING. According to Wikipedia this is what he can do

“Ma-Ti uses the power of heart to instill caring, passion, and sympathy into the people of the world to care for the planet. He can also use this power to communicate with animals telepathically”

So he can instill care, passion and sympathy except on those bad guys they always fight in the series… oh and he can talk to squirrels.

7) Johnny Bravo

All I can say is… WHAT AN EPIC IDEA FOR A CARTOON!

GOTTA LOVE JOHNNY BRAVO… WHO DOESN’T! A guy who takes good care of his hair, always wears sunglasses and calls himself “Pretty”.

6) Chip N Dale

Chip N Dale was this cartoon about this team of characters that went around.. well.. foiling the plans of bad guys to take over the world or do evil stuff and all that. I remember liking it a lot because you have two types of characters. Chip was the smart one and Dale was the … well stupid one who also happened to be my favourite one.

I don’t remember why I liked Dale so much. Maybe because I always thought he was funny or that he was always good with the ladies. The theme song for Chip N Dale is one of my favourites though.

5) Transformers

Back when I was a kid watching Transformers, I never imagined they would actually make a movie of it many many years later. And a really good movie at that too! For some reason as a kid I liked Bumble Bee eventhough he was really like Ma-Ti in Captain Planet… useless.

The Bumblebee in the Transformer movies though could do some decent fighting on his own. Back in the cartoon he was just… well.. like I said… a Ma-Ti.

4) Smurfs

Just listening to the opening music gives me happiness. Ahhh I remember the mushroom houses they used to stay in, the little bad man who always tried to catch them and of course… Smurfette.

Smurfette was hot man… in those kid years.. everyone had a crush on Smurfette. Eventhough she was this blue little cartoon character.

The good news is that they’re coming up with a Smurfs movie this year I think. I’ve also heard a lot about Smurfs lately from the hype of the game Smurf’s Village that has been going all around. The game’s so popular now that there are even sites like this that sell “Smurf Village Secrets”.

3) Dexter’s Lab

Dexter’s Lab to me back then was kinda like a little Stewie from Family Guy. Except that of course Stewie didn’t have a little annoying sister that pressed buttons that weren’t meant to be pressed.

That’s one thing I always noticed about Dexter’s Lab. HE ALWAYS HAD SOME BUTTON FOR DEE DEE TO PRESS.

2) Duck Tales

I LOVE DUCK TALES. I love everything about it. Every episode was more or less the same. The Beagle boys was always trying to steal money out of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. That’s right… he has this big safe full of gold coins that he calls a money bin. And what does he do in the money bin whenever he’s not out earning even more money? He swims in it. Literally.

Love the theme song too.

1) Robotech

This is hands down, my favourite cartoon of all time. It’s actually my very first taste of anime.

The whole showthough really wasn’t just like any other cartoon. It had a deep plot and a really cool storyline set in the future. War, love, friendship… all those themes were covered in Robotech. It was also the first cartoon I ever saw that actually had people in it “Die”. That was always a strange thought to me. I mean back then… cartoons in my mind didn’t die. Look at how much Jerry manage to beat the shit out of Tom in Tom & Jerry. No matter what happens to Tom, he still lives.

In Robotech though, they build up characters throughout the show and one by one of them they die. I think it even made me cry once. The show was long though. It had 3 whole seasons to it. They referred to each Season as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Generations. The 1st Generation featured the first set of humans. The 2nd featured the children of the 1st Generation (once they grew older) and the 3rd generation featured children of the 2nd Generation.

Cool huh?

This is one of my favourite scenes from Robotech.

I love Robotech. I wish there was a way I could find all the episodes again just to keep. I hear that Tobey Maguire is a fan of Robotech and is going to be making a movie of it too. I really hope he does. It would be a dream come true.

So there you have it everyone. My Top 10 Cartoons growing up.

When I look at the cartoons I grew up watching and compare it with the ones the kids of today grow up watching I can’t help but feel that the cartoons of today really aren’t very good. I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve grown out of cartoons to appreciate what kids watch these days but even popular cartoons like Ben 10 and Spongebob Squarepants really make me wonder why they’re even popular in the first place. Sure their animation is a lot better than before but I always felt that the cartoons of today were really “hollow” if that makes any sense.

Anyway what are some of your other favourite cartoons of your time?

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Right after posting this entry I realized that I missed one very very important cartoon.

GARFIELD AND FRIENDS

One of our Nuffies Tim2 just moved into a new place some months ago. So last Friday he decided to do a house warming for all us Nuffies. All of us went over at work. Yuen Yee, Robb and Shun Yau were a bit late though because they got stuck in the office late for some meetings. So while waiting for them to come, the Nuffies were watching YouTube videos on Tim2’s big TV in his living room.

One of the videos they thought that would be fun to watch was this particular video.

Spoiler: Watch it only if you’re not easily scared. It’s one of those “shock videos” that scare you when you least expect it though it starts looking like a “strip tease”.

So the Nuffies thought scaring themselves was a funny thing. What they thought was even funnier though was scaring Yuen Yee. So when she finally reached Tim2’s place, they all got her seated in the living room and played the video. I decided to take a recording of her reaction and it was hilarious. Watch it here.

I watched this video so so many times. There are so many things you have to notice from the video:

1) First time you watch it

Just look at Yuen Yee and her funny reaction.

2) Second time you watch it

Now look at the Nuffies sitting behind her. All of them covering their faces with the pillows… all knowing what’s coming. Funny enough, they were right behind Yuen Yee but she didn’t notice anything.

3) Third time you watch it

Notice that once Yuen Yee starts screaming, she mysteriously ends up with a pillow that she covers herself with. Where did this pillow come from? Look at how she managed to grab it when it was right behind her… without even looking at it (in the moment of crisis).

4) Fourth time you watch it

Pay attention to the Jacqueline. She’s the Nuffie that has the big white square pillow covering her entire face in the beginning of the video. At first she’s hiding totally right behind that big square white pillow.

Then right after she hears the scream she points downward at Yuen Yee then starts clapping away like a happy little bird.

I have such funny colleagues!

The minute I found out that Secondhand Serenade was coming to KL, I immediately went to get tickets. The truth is that I only really knew one of their songs, the most famous one “Fall for you”. But that song was a song that I always listened to two years ago when I first started going out with Shorty. The whole song’s meaning didn’t exactly fit into our situation of courtship but just one line did “A girl like you is impossible to find”… and I thought then that it was exactly how I felt about Shorty.
That’s of course how I feel about her now still.

It was a small concert held in Bentley Music Auditorium at the Curve.

The crowd though was the most responsive crowd I had ever seen. No joke! It’s amazing. Talk about being their biggest fans. For every song that Secondhand Serenade sang, the entire crowd seemed to know the words and they ALL sang along. What a crowd.

While I was enjoying the show though I realized that Shorty couldn’t see much from where she was standing.

This is exactly the view of the stage from her eye level.

The poor girl couldn’t see the stage at all. Not even a bit and that’s how it’s like for any “standing” concert. So I got Shorty to hop on to my back and she watched it over my shoulder.

So I took her for a little ride!

I gotta say the lead singer, John Vesely is amazing. Gotta love his voice…

I managed to take a short video of him performing “Fall for you” at the end. He didn’t even have to sing… everyone else in the concert was doing the singing for him. Watch it to get a feel of how the atmosphere was there that night.

It was great.

Love them love them! Learned about their other songs at the concert and they’re all good too. I can’t believe I nearly missed it just because I didn’t hear about it anywhere. I’m surprised they didn’t market it any harder than they did.

Guess who the main sponsor for Secondhand Serenade in KL was though…. you won’t guess it. Kayu Nasi Kandar. HAHA!

I walked into the office today and saw this hanging from the ceiling.

Attached to it was a suicide note addressed to Michelle (since it’s her Stewie). I called the Nuffies responsible “cruel’ but  the Nuffies claimed that it was a suicide. Open verdict anyone?

I just finished watching the latest HBO Mini Series called The Pacific. It’s made by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the same people who did Band of Brothers years ago. I remember Band of Brothers and how I would catch it every week on TV. I think it was twice a week when they aired it.

Both Band of Brothers and The Pacific were mini-series about the American side of World War 2. While Band of Brothers covered to war in Europe against the Germans, the recent mini-series The Pacific covered the war between the USA and Japan on the Pacific islands. I typically like movies or TV shows based on modern times. I don’t like all those movies with horses and carriages or anything even older than that. I do somehow have a peculiar interest in Modern History. Especially World War 2.

I don’t know what it is that fascinates me about it. Maybe it’s just the fact that it was probably the largest war that involved the most number of countries the world has ever seen or the stories behind it. TV Shows like The Pacific gives us a glimpse of how the war was like. How it took a toll from the soldiers on the battlefield to the families that wait for them at home. You also get a glimpse of how war changes men. How it pushes even the hardest people to the physical and mental limits. And how… it also forces boys in the army to grow quickly to men.

When I see things like that I think of how lucky we are in these times. My generation has never seen a war *touch wood*. We’ve never had to enlist in the army to fight for the survival of the country we love. So when I watch or read about World War 2 I think of how lucky I am.

I also think about how people were able to do what they did. How soldiers or people in general were brainwashed to the extent that they were able to massacre mass numbers of innocent people. From the jews in the concentration camps to the Chinese in Nanking. It really makes you wonder you know. If people back then could be brainwashed, could we today be too.

Every time I meet someone who lived through World War 2, I can’t help but ask how it was like.

Once in London I met this really old man while playing table tennis in this community court. I learned that he served in World War 2 in the British army so I asked him what it was like. He told me he was one of the “intelligence officers” that were specialized in “fooling” the enemy. So what they did for example was put up rubber tanks and fake tents etc etc so that when the German spy planes took pictures from the air, they looked like the entire Allied army was there. He told me they were so successful in what they did that even when the Allied forces invaded Omaha Beach, the Germans kept thinking that they were going to land on some other beach so they concentrated most of their forces elsewhere.

I asked him then if he knew any of the people who really fought on the ground and he told me about friends he had lost. Friends who had lost limbs to explosives, friends to even had gone deaf because a mortar exploded right next to them. He told me how even those that made it back safely without any physical injury suffered from mental stress of the war and were never the same again. All this.. was depicted in The Pacific.

Then some two years ago when I was in Tokyo I had met one of my father’s old Japanese friends. He had lived through World War 2. I asked him how it was like and he told me how right after Japan surrendered, the Russians in the north were kidnapping Japanese back to Russia to use as slaves. The Americans who arrived however were bringing aid and food for civilians. It was because of things like that, that the Japanese were really afraid when the Russians wanted a part of northern Japan. They were relieved though, when the USA decided not to give up any of Japan to the Russians because it was the Americans that fought the Pacific war, not the Russians.

He then told me how poor Japan was after the war. How they were so poor that he had to donate blood regularly just to earn enough money to buy food. He told me of how the people of Japan were determined to build their country back and had worked hard to do so. He somehow said that it was a feeling that he felt the young people in Japan today didn’t have.

War is horrible. I hope we will never see another World War in our lifetimes. Watch the Pacific if you can. It’s a great series. Here’s the trailer of it.

Here’s a couple of things we’ve been up to in the office lately.

About a few months ago we came up with this program called “Pillars”. Where every “pillar” of the company ie the various departments inside the company are supposed to meet internally among themselves. They’re then supposed to look into all the things they have done in the past year of 2010 and then decide what is it that we can improve on. They then put everything into a presentation and then present it to the rest of the people in the office.

Today was the first day of the Pillars presentation. The Sales Pillar and the Ad Ops Pillar went first.

I loved the experience. It’s a chance for every Nuffie to have a say on what we could do better and contribute their ideas. It’s a chance for everyone to have a voice. It also really helped me learn more about our company from the grassroots up.

It was great.

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We have a new Nuffie. Her name’s Michelle. It’s somehow tradition in Netccentric/Nuffnang/Nom Nom that every time we have someone new come in, we would play a prank on that someone. The prank on Michelle was that everyone managed to convince her that on her 2nd day of work, we were having a “school day” theme. So everyone was supposed to come in school uniform.

So the next day, Michelle came in a Japanese school uniform with stockings and all.

It’s true that the girls have themed days in the office sometimes though. Every Friday, they would all have a theme. Like sometime they would have a Maxi Dress theme or sometimes a “ribbon” theme where wears a ribbon somewhere on their outfit.

This Friday’s theme was “boyfriend’s shirt”. I didn’t manage to get a picture but Kim Ong who visited our office did.

Here’s a picture I took from her blog of some of the Nuffie girls wearing “Boyfriend shirts”.

She also visited our KL office on Friday. If you want to read her blog entry click here.