Hello All!

I’m actually blogging now from a villa somewhere way outside Melbourne. It’s going to be a relaxing weekend. Out here with David (one of our partners for Nuffnang Australia), Pierre and some other friends. Will blog about this weekend next week or something.

In the mean time let me catch you up on what else I’ve been up to in Melbourne this far. Reached on Wednesday morning but was too tired to go into the office because I didn’t sleep much on the plane. Was one of the unlucky passengers that had a seat that just wouldn’t recline. So I was pretty much upright for the 7-8 hour flight. There goes my day. So Ming went into the office and had all the meetings without me.

Thursday though I headed to the Nuffnang Australia office with Ming to catch up on a lot of updates on how Nuffnang Australia was doing. I’m quite excited for Nuffnang Australia. It’s grown really quick in the past 12 months and I think we’re beginning to see a lot more activity on that front. Lots of other things we’re working on too.

We had a great lunch that day. Ming brought us to this restaurant that he wouldn’t allow me to tweet about or blog about. I took a picture of the outside of the restaurant and he warned me not to share it with anyone else because that restaurant was like his secret place. So fine….

Ming ordered enough food to feed a Mongolian army. So much that we couldn’t finish it all that he went around with a plate passing the food on to the other side of the table. Had to take this picture here because it’s not often you see Boss Ming waitering around.

The afternoon was spent in the office too until of course Pinky came in to tell us that the Coffee for Nuffies session was starting soon.

You guys know about Coffee for Nuffies right? It’s a monthly coffee session we started in the KL office where we invite 4-5 Nuffnangers to the office just to have coffee and meet any Nuffnang Staff.

Our Melbourne office decided to start one and Ming and I were supposed to be the “Nuffies” the Nuffnangers here would meet.

Had a great time meeting a lot of the Australian Nuffnangers. Some were Malaysians living in Melbourne now too including Michelle here whom I know has been following my blog for a while.

Always love meeting up with Nuffnang bloggers and it’s something we try to do each time we visit an office in another country. Just like how we met up with some Pinoy Nuffnangers while we were in the Philippines a couple months back.

Gotta go now guys. Will blog more soon.

I miss home.

——-

Updated: On my slow Sunday afternoon I just finally caught up on some Project Alpha episodes. Here’s to share some of the latest.

This is Niki Cheong’s first episode.

Niki Cheong is a really well known columnist with The Star. He’s also the cousin of Elaine Daly. Whom you will see in the videos too 🙂

And this is when it really gets interesting. Where Jojo along with Niki flies to London to catch up and interview Xiaxue, Singapore’s top blogger.

In this episode, we get a tour of how the MAS first/business class lounge is like. We get an insight into why some travellers are willing to pay a lot more for their plane ticket 🙂

LONDON!!! Where they finally meet Xiaxue and Mike! (and a hotel staff that has been there for 30 years and served drinks for all sorts of celebrities including all the James Bonds).

Xiaxue gets recognized on the streets of London!

These episodes really make me miss London. Makes me wanna go back!

Last night over dinner we all had a intense discussion about Apple. You see it all started when I saw for the first time an iPad. Our Nuffnang Australia office has one so I was playing around with it yesterday. It was cool and all but in 5 minutes it went from everybody crowding around wanting to play with it to being left on the table alone doing nothing.

The conclusion was… I’m not going to buy one yet because I really don’t know what I would use it for yet. I think I’ll just let everyone else use it first and show me how they use it on a daily basis before I think of getting one in the future. Besides, in a few months they’re probably going to come up with better versions of it.

So anyway back to Apple. My first Apple product was an iPod. I bought it in London because in London where you walked a lot you kinda wanted an MP3 player and the iPod seemed to be the default choice. I loved it but it wasn’t exactly enough to turn me into an Apple Evangelist.

Then right after I graduated and before I started Nuffnang with Ming, I bought myself my first Macbook. That was when it happened. I loved the Mac OS.

Suddenly all my frustrations that I had with Windows disappeared and using a computer became so easy! I turned …. straight away into an Apple Evangelist.

Then I followed up with buying some other Apple products. Not stuff like the Apple TV or iPod Shuffle because I thought they were useless but the iPhone for one. This is when it started going downhill from there.

1) The first iPhone I got was the iPhone 2G. It looked cool and flashy and all that but it lacked a lot of important features like 3G, the ability to forward SMSs and etc etc. I even wrote an entry about this back then.

Shortly after, Apple came up with the 3G which and 3GS with upgrades of what the iPhone should be able to do as a normal phone. I couldn’t help but feel led on. As an Apple Fan, I bought the product as soon as it came out but only to find that the product’s features were inferior even in those times. Why? Companies these days when they come up with expensive high-end electronic products they make sure it has the best features of its time. Why deliberately wait if not for the reason to just make us buy another one again? I eventually bought the 3Gs when it came out so if that was the reason it worked perfectly!

2) Then recently the leaks of the new Apple iPhone come out. Apparently found in a bar. The minute I saw this I thought that this was getting totally old. Heck even CNN who reported it was asking experts if this was just another marketing ploy by Apple. Sure… you use it as a marketing ploy once, great. Use it as a marketing ploy as many times as they did, I think it just starts to insult my intelligence.

But the Apple evangelists eat it all up and go all the way for it.

3) So what else does Apple do?

Jason Chen is the tech blogger in the USA that “leaked” it. He apparently bought it from a guy who found it in the bar just to write about it. So Apple got the police to ask him to return the phone which he did but that wasn’t enough.

They got the police to raid his home and confiscate all his computers and all that.

What is this? Because somebody in Apple slipped up (assuming this was a real leak and not a marketing ploy), the blogger who blogged about it gives the phone back eventhough he’s paid good money for it. And you still go in and confiscate his stuff. Not to mention that it is these tech bloggers and journalists that give Apple all the hype it gets anyway.

And of course with this raid and all… some people may think that oh.. yeah maybe it wasn’t a marketing ploy. Maybe this time it was a real leak. Well call me cynical but I’m thinking.. maybe they knew everyone was thinking it was a marketing ploy so they decided to do this raid to convince people that it wasn’t. It worked at least to some extent.

4) There are a lot more reasons to why I’ve lost my faith in Apple but I’m going to go to the most recent one that was the ultimate tipping point for me.

Just recently I upgraded my Macbook Pro and bought a new one.

It’s the one on the right in this picture.

The new Macbook Pro I realize has a unibody. So that means you can’t take out the laptop battery when you’ve plugged it in. Now in my experience, when you leave your laptop battery in when you plug in your laptop to power, it will slowly kill the battery life. Eventually you’ll have a laptop battery that lasts like 5 minutes.

I was totally frustrated when I found out about that. I travel a lot! How can I not have a laptop battery that works?

So I tweeted my frustration and some of my dear followers replied that the new Macbook Pro has a chip that regulated the power between the charger and battery so even when it’s plugged in, the battery life doesn’t die like traditional notebooks. I was impressed… and happy for a while. Until I checked with a number of my friends with Macbook Pros and they tell me that all their batteries after a few months or a year, don’t last very long.

So is that chip just marketing speak again? Or does it not work?

What does Apple want us to do? Send back my Macbook Pro every 2 years to get them to change my battery for me or to just buy a new Macbook Pro?

Because of this frustration of knowing that my laptop battery ain’t gonna last… for the first time ever I actually considered moving back to a Windows based laptop if this Macbook Pro battery dies on me in no time. That’s right… goes against the saying “Once you’ve had Mac you never go back”.

So everyone, that is why I no longer love the Apple Brand as much as I did before. Sure I still use their products and I still probably will buy more of their products. But I will be very objective when talking to people about them. I won’t go “THIS IS THE BOMB THIS IS THE BOMB” without evaluating myself. I would probably just go “This is good but this is what’s not good about it.”. I will no longer love the brand anymore.

Maybe one day I will have my faith in Apple again…. until then… this is it.

As you know I’m now currently in Melbourne. Got a busy afternoon ahead in the Nuffnang office here and then there’s the “Coffee with Nuffies” session later this afternoon where Ming and I are supposed to meet some Australian Nuffnangers here. Will take loads of pictures of my day and blog about it in the coming days.

Today though I’m going to tell you something really petty but annoying that happened to me on my flight here. So I had just boarded the plane bound for Melbourne, I put my bags in the overhead compartments and just settled down in my seat.Seated next to me was an aunty. I acknowledged her with a “Hi” and realized that she didn’t speak English too well. I think Cantonese or Mandarin would’ve been her first language. No worries about that though.

About 15 minutes later, the air stewardesses came around to pass out Australian Immigration Arrival cards. You know the kind of things you have to fill up every time you go to another country. You put in your name, address, passport number, where you’re staying in Australia, how long you’re staying etc etc.

Since I had just packed my passport up in the overhead compartment above me, I decided to keep the card in the seat pocket in front of me until I land. Then while waiting for people to exit the plane, I would fill in the card then. Saves time too.

7 hours or so later the plane finally landed and I reached into the seat pocket in front of me looking for my Arrival card but it was GONE!

After turning my whole seat around, the Aunty seated next to me finally said something along the lines of
“Oh…. I took your arrival card… sorry… I wrote my card wrong so I took yours. Didn’t know it was yours”.

I was fuming inside. A part of me couldn’t help but feel that she knew it was mine (I mean it was in MY seat pocket after all and she saw me put it there) but still blatantly took it from me because she messed up her own card.

But the other part of me refused to allow such any sort of a violent reaction. We’ve all been brought up in Asia to learn to respect the elders and not talk to them in any way like that. So I just looked at her and said “It’s okay Aunty”.

Now this is a really petty thing. I mean at the end of it maybe costs me an extra 5-10 minutes or something getting my card at the immigration counter and filling it up then. So it’s not so much the time but just the principle of it… of someone taking something from you… maybe because they value their time more than yours. If the Aunty had asked me for my card because she messed up mine, I would’ve gladly just given it to her.

It’s not the first time I’ve experienced rude aunties like that. How many times have you been at a lunch buffet only to see a bunch of aunties collectively try to cut your line. Worse still is that they don’t even look at your apologetically. They go in there thinking it’s their right and when you try to prevent it they give you a nasty look.

Now lets not generalize all aunties! Only a minority of aunties fall into this category. I’ve met many of them who are very nice and if they need help in anything they’ll ask in a very polite manner that makes you just want to go out of your way to help.

But to the rude aunties… please stop doing what you do.

Is it just me who experiences all these things with rude aunties? Anyone else have any experiences like that?

I just arrived at Melbourne! Am here for a week to visit the Nuffnang Australia office here and have some meetings. I’m here without My Hello Kitty this time though. She can’t tag along on my business trip because she doesn’t have enough leave so yesterday morning we had a long goodbye.

The night before though we stayed home and watched a movie called “Blow”. It’s a true story about a drug dealer named George Jung. It starred Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. It’s an old movie. Released in 2001 (heck I was in Form 5 then)… but I thought it was a really really really good one. If you guys have the time, check it out. Here’s the trailer.

Aside from that, I’ve got a little something for everyone today. You know how My Hello Kitty and I have been really big into comedy shows lately right? Well PJLAC in Jaya One is having the PJ Laugh Fest from the 30th April to 30th May and I have some passes to give away (thanks to Imm Ai from Jaya One).

Today is Ming’s birthday. Ming has been a great friend and business partner to me so this year I wanted to give him something special for his birthday. I initially had something else in mind until Pierre called me one day and mooted an idea.

You see… Ming’s the kind of guy who puts a lot of value in experiences. More value in experiences than in physical items. Like when we went to Singapore F1 last year, he bought the official caps for all of us not because the cap looked nice or anything but so that we all had something to take away and remember the night.

The other thing about Ming is that he’s a HUGE Manchester United fan. The biggest I have ever seen. He knows everything about every player and he makes it a point to catch almost every match. Every year he will also make it a point to fly halfway across the world just to watch a Man Utd match and support his team.

When his team takes home a big win, Ming sometimes gets so happy he cries. When Man Utd loses though, even his girlfriend Estee says that she knows how to stay out of his way the next morning for he’ll be in a very very foul mood.

So combining the two together Pierre and I put together a birthday surprise for him. Last Friday we forced him to come down to KL for it not telling him what the surprise was. He kept guessing what it was and seeing that it was dinner he kinda guessed that we were bringing someone over to meet him.

This is Ming at the dinner before he knew who he was meeting. All anxious and all still trying to guess who we were bringing.

He’s also known as “Captain Marvel”.

When he walked in, Ming acted all perfectly normal only for us to learn later that he was actually screaming in excitement inside. He initially started off by asking Bryan what he was doing in KL. Bryan answered that he was in KL just to have this dinner with Ming. Ming somehow didn’t believe it so he asked Bryan another couple more times throughout the night until we had to really drum it into him that Bryan Robson had REALLY flown in all the way to KL just to have that one dinner with him.

For all those who have missed the first few episodes.

Here’s the trailer.

Have a great weekend guys!

To catch the rest of the episodes as they come out, click here.

We all use printers these days. I remember the first time I ever saw a printer. My father bought it along with the home computer we had. That was a looong time back. Even before computers themselves had hard drives… the first computer we had was the one with those big floppy disks which we put in to play games like Alley Cats (or… I think Bubble Bobble? Man those were good days)

It looked something like this.

The printer we had though looked like it was made out of the same metal from this old computer. Something like this.

When printing it made as much noise as bunch of workmen drilling a hole into the ground to find oil. It wasn’t just loud noise. It was the screeching high pitched kind of noise. You know… something just a step below from a school teacher scratching her long nails on a blackboard.

I’ve been through many many generations of printers since then and learned lots of things. I’ve also ended up buying lots of different printers in my lifetime. Some for my home use (that sometimes seem to fail when I need it the most… like when I need to print my e-ticket hours before a flight) and some for the office.

For the home, I always end up buying a colour inkjet because they actually cost a lot less. Their cartridges cost a lot more than the cartridges of laser printers though so if you print a lot then a Laser printer might save you a lot of money. I don’t print that much at home so I opted for that.

I remember interning at this investment bank many years ago and printing a company’s Annual Report in colour. My Boss hauled me up and gave me a big scolding. I was naïve then…. You know thinking that the money investment banks make is limitless so why not pay more so I can read my Annual Report in COLOUR!!! I deserved the scolding I got… I know.

Today in the Nuffnang office though it’s a whole other thing.

I try to keep the Nuffnang office as environmental friendly as possible. Like during the day when the sunlight pours in from our big windows we don’t turn on many of the lights in the office.

Or that we have a policy where we only really print when needed. As much as we try hard to be paperless though some of my colleagues especially those in the Finance and the Admin part of the company use the printer a lot to print stuff. For that we end up using a laser printer since we don’t exactly print our Profit & Loss statements in colour. If My Hello Kitty ran the company though she might. She’ll probably make sure each Balance Sheet had a Hello Kitty Star on the top right corner of it.

The only other time we would use a colour printer in the office is maybe to print photos of our events and put them up on our Nuffnang Footprints Wall.

Recently though HP’s been running this campaign on Nuffnang about some promotions they have on their HP Photosmart and HP Officejet printers. The Photosmart I’m thinking can replace my dead printer at home and the Officejet works for offices.

If you’re getting a HP Photosmart printer you’ll get an additional Photo Value Pack that includes ink, HP Advanced Photo Paper and HP Photosmart Essential software. The printer even has a Color Graphic Display which makes viewing photos easier with its touchsmart frame. Plus to help with connectivity, the Photosmart 4780 is wireless!

If you get the HP Officejet Pro, you’ll get an additional High Capacity XL Black Cartridge with it. The 8500 is feature packed with built-in double sided printing, Ethernet networking and water resistant print outs. Good if you have an office that prints a lot. Cuts your cost-per-page into half and acts as a printer, fax, scanner and photocopy as well. We have one of these all-in-one things in the Nuffnang office too. Except that the one we have doesn’t print as fast 🙁 . Maybe time to upgrade that one then we can have two printers in the office.

Like all good things, this promo doesn’t last forever. It ends on the 30th April 2010 (while stocks last).

To find out more about it click here or call 1-800-88-9886

On another note, anyone else here loves Bubble Bobble?

Makes me want to play it again.

I’ve been thinking about it for soooo long!

So long I tell you! I used to play XBOX and watch all my movies on my old boxy TV at home

until of course I had some friends start telling me that playing XBOX on a proper LCD HD TV is a whole new experience altogether.

Still.. I didn’t buy it right there and then. It’s a heavy commitment. So I thought about it for a full month until Mike (Xiaxue’s bf) one day finally pushed me over and convinced me to buy one. What he said was that he was having the same dilemma as I was before he bought his LCD TV…. and now that he has, the only regret he has was not buying it earlier than he did.

Of course Boss Ming’s tweet reply to me the other day as well helped egg me on.

So well… I went shopping with my Dad (who was visiting from Penang) yesterday. We went to lots and lots of different places to look at TVs. We even went to this shop in Low Yat that claimed they had the lowest prices. The sales guy went to the extent of showing us a piece of paper with prices on it and saying that the price he was quoting us was already at cost. I didn’t believe it of course. Why would you sell a new product at cost?

We eventually ended up at Harvey Norman in Pavilion. There this salesman starting telling us all about what TVs to get and he was pushing this particular LG model really really hard. The 47-inch LCD TV came free with a home theater system and a DVD player all for RM7,299.

I compared it with the other brands in Harvey Norman and they all cost about the same or more (without the DVD player and home theater system). So my Dad immediately said “Son… buy this… it’s value for money”.

And like a good son I did… along with what could’ve been my life savings. (Then again LG ran a Nuffnang campaign to push its Scarlet campaigns some time back so okay I’m just returning the favour).

One day later, my new TV arrived!!!

Along with my home theater system.

My living room looks a bit more equipped now.

And my XBOX games… look a lot more fun to play.

We were at Karen’s house warming last Saturday and I played Raving Rabbids for the first time. Man that has got to the be most fun Wii Party game ever!

Check out My Hello Kitty and Jestina playing. Both shaking the remotes.

Ok here’s what’s been up with me lately:

Last night my Blackberry died. For some reason it suddenly started resetting itself and before it could finish booting up it would reset itself again. It’s like my Blackberry didn’t want to wake up. Just kept turning itself off whenever it was being turned on.

Panic struck me almost instantly! Life without my Berry. It’s only been months since I’ve started using my Blackberry but I gotta say it has helped a lot with productivity. Like whenever I’m out I’m still always in touch with my e-mails. Now I still have my iPhone of course but it just doesn’t do e-mails as well as my BB.

Oh well… I’ve sent it in for warranty and it’s gonna take 2 weeks. 2 weeks!

My addiction to my BB was so bad that I even considered buying another BB just for these two weeks. Then fortunately I realized how stupid I would have been for doing something like that.

Went shopping with her and she saw a shop full of Hello Kitty things. Ended up buying another Hello Kitty thermos.

What I think she needs though is new shoes. Today she was wearing this pair of shoes and every step she took she let out a little yelp of pain.

Curiosity finally made me ask

“Do you have ANY high-heels that don’t cause you pain?”

She looked down at her feet and replied
“Actually these are one of the most painful ones I have….. “

Then her face lit up when she went on
“…. BUT THEY’RE SO PRETTY!!!”.

Like my mother would say. Girls these days all willing to suffer to look pretty.

Speaking of shoes, apparently one of our Nuffies has just as much trouble waking up as My Hello Kitty does. In her blurness before coming to work one day she actually accidentally wore 2 shoes each from a different pair.

So they looked like this.

I was supposed to share with them how to go about getting a job after they graduate. At first I wasn’t sure if I was the best person to talk about it since I’ve never really got interviewed for a full-time job before. I started Nuffnang straight out of university.

The nice organizing committee there convinced me to still come and told me to talk about what I look for in people I hire. It’s the first time I’ve talked at a college for something like this. I’m usually brought in to share the Nuffnang story or my journey as an entrepreneur.

Either ways, I think it went alright… right guys?

*fingers crossed*

Check out this picture I took of her in her pajamas.