So I was in London for much of last week. Loved being back in London. London’s a city where there’s just so much to do it’ll take a lifetime to finish doing them all. All sorts of shops, markets, museums, musicals and restaurants.

Going to share some pictures here of the trip.

1) The famous Piccadilly Circus.

Probably one of the most famous spots in London.

Almost as famous as this pub.

I wanna go back again some time.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!

It’s 12AM and I’ve just given Princess her birthday present.

She’s ignoring me now while she transfers her stuff from her old purse to the new one.

Here’s the Miu Miu purse she got.

Happy Birthday Baby!

Ming loves food. To him, the price of food know no boundaries. As long as it’s good it’s good.

Me on the other hand…. I like food but not enough to spend an obscene amount on it (unless it’s a once in a while thing). So knowing that I will refuse to go for any really expensive meals, Ming booked a lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze in London without asking me first.

I found out about it first when I saw his tweet on Twitter which went something like “WOOHOO BOOKED A PLACE AT ONE OF GORDON RAMSAY’S RESTAURANTS WITH @TIMOTHYTIAH!“… but he later very casually told me “Eh by the way, we’re going to Gordon Ramsay’s” for lunch.

I resisted as much as I could but Ming insisted on going (especially since he already gave his credit card details to them). So a few days later I was there.

Finding the restaurant was a whole different thing altogether. Ming and I were looking for it and we walked past it like a few times without even noticing it on the side. The entrance was very low-key. No big signboard, no advertising … nothing. I guess it didn’t need all that to be known.

The place looked really nice. It was empty when we reached because we were early but as lunch hour went on, the place began to really fill up. It became packed with working people dressed in suits all having what looked like business lunches and speaking in English accents. Made me and Ming look damn low class since we were dressed in jeans and t-shirt.

The waiter explained that Maze was a bit of what he called a “savory” restaurant where we try a lot of small small dishes. So we made our orders and this is what we had.

Note: The name of the dishes on the menu were like really really long so I could hardly remember what they were. I’m going to keep it simple. Like a little too simple haha.

Some soup.

Quail that had very little meat on it but tasted out of this world!

Some vegetable thingy I randomly picked (and kinda regretted because it tasted weird).

Pork shoulder.

And this is dessert.

Some mousse thing that looks more like ice-cream than anything.

Throughout the lunch, Ming was busy taking pictures of the food with “The Beast” (what he calls his behemoth of an SLR).

Here’s what I think about it overall.

My experience at Maze really made me look at food differently. The experience was just so different. We’re so used to knowing how certain things taste. Like if we see char kuay teow, we know what that will taste like. If we see fish, we kinda know what that will taste like but you don’t know what to expect when you look at the food in Maze. It’s like you look at the quail and you don’t know what to expect of how it tastes like and what it eventually does take like is something you’ve never before tasted.

To make the experience even better, when you put say the food in your mouth, two things happen to you:

1) You instantly feel a burst of all different type of tastes. It’s like your tongue buds have an orgasm and you’re confused at what you’re tasting (because you know you’re tasting so many different types of taste) but it feels great.

2) You taste the different phases of something you eat. Like the first 1-2 seconds of putting the food in your mouth you taste something, then between 4-5 seconds you feel a different taste kick in and even after you finish, each dish has a different aftertaste lingering in your mouth.

Ming was happy!

In the past couple of months, Nuffnang has been undergoing some new developments. To explain this I would probably have to go into some details of the things we’ve been doing. Not many people know but Nuffnang throughout the region (Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia) is owned by the Netccentric Group. (For those of you remember, I blogged about Netccentric more than three years ago even before Nuffnang started)

The Netccentric Group which Ming and I started a few years ago also controls other web companies under the same group, among which are ChurpChurp, Rippelwerkz and another social media startup we’ve invested in that will be coming up soon. Lots of these companies work hand in hand (some behind the scenes) to make Nuffnang what it is today.

Every growing company reaches a time where it needs to consolidate some of its practices to make it run efficiently so that’s what we’ve been doing in the past few months.

With the growth of ChurpChurp, we increasingly see a number of advertisers we work with constantly looking at overall social media campaigns that integrate both blogs and Twitter, as opposed to just individual blog or Twitter campaigns. So for that reason (among many others), we decided to start Nom Nom Media to resell both Nuffnang and ChurpChurp and integrating them to come up with overall social media campaigns.

If you’re wondering why the name “Nom Nom”, click here to see the Malay Mail article on Nom Nom Media.

We’ve also been on a huge hiring spree adding people on all Nom Nom, Churp Churp and Nuffnang. Here are a few of the Nuffies that joined us this month from Malaysia and Singapore.

From Malaysia

Sara, Nicholas, Rachel and Jacq.

Linda

and there’s Melody and Dana from Singapore.

While the “Nuffies” as we know everyone to be have always been hired under different companies in the group (Nuffnang, ChurpChurp, Nom Nom, Netccentric, Rippelwerkz and etc etc), to the outside world we’ve still always been known as Nuffies and we’ve always worked together as a single team.

The Netccentric Group has grown immensely in the past few years. We’ve now got 40-50 great staff in the group and we all hope that all we’ve been working on for the past few months will position us well to keep up with the growth we’ll have in the coming years.

To those who have brought us this far: our clients, our bloggers/twitterers and very importantly our partners. Thank you for always having faith in us. The next few years are going to be crazy and believe us when we say we’ve done all we can to prepare for it now.

I’m in London with Ming for the Project Alpha Season 2 shoot. The film crew and the rest are actually coming only on Thursday but Ming and I decided to come a little early to do some things here. It’s been 3 years since I’ve been back to London and I kinda miss it. London to me is like…. the only place other than KL and Penang that feel like home to me. Everything seems so familiar and feels like I could just live here.

Today was our first day in London. Ming and I woke up at 3am this morning, suffering from jetlag. There’s nothing like suffering from jetlag. The feeling of wanting to sleep but can’t…. it’s almost as annoying as scratching your finger nails on a blackboard. So we stayed up working off our computers, checking e-mails, making calls etc etc till almost 6AM before we tried to go back to sleep again.

I managed to sleep till like 8AM but Ming stayed awake. So after 8AM we finally decided to wake up and head for breakfast. For tradition’s sake, we had a full english breakfast!

Man… being around Ming just makes you fat because the man likes to eat.

This was breakfast.

Then lunch was Indian Food that Ming really insisted on having and subsequently over-ordering.

And dinner was Four Seasons roast duck.

By dinner I had already given up eating. I ate just two slices of duck and some vegetable. That’s it! I had never ever been to Four Seasons Bayswater only to have so little to eat before.

I spent a good part of the day shopping for Princess’ birthday present. That’s right. The 10th of February is Princess’ birthday and it’s not just any birthday, it’s her 25th birthday. I took the longest time to decide what to get her.

One of the things I knew she wanted was a new purse so we ended up shopping in Westfield.

I had always tried to steer away from buying any designer goods and I think it’s something we both agreed on to some extent. Sure there are increasingly lots of people our age or younger who walk around with LV handbags or all sorts of other designer stuff but I always felt that Princess and I can’t afford to indulge in all that yet. There are so many other essential things in life that I need to save for like a family home (lots of my friends already have achieved that) or my kid’s future education. I mean it’s one thing to buy a camera that we could use to take pictures for our blog and another to spend 5 times more on a handbag or something.

Hence I’ve never really bought myself anything branded so far apart from a Boss suit (which I felt was necessary because you need a good business suit for work sometimes) and maybe my Paul Frank t-shirts (though it’s not exactly nearly as expensive as Gucci or Armani).

Princess and I also always agreed though that we didn’t want to start a consistent practice of buying expensive material stuff for each other and having us eventually be all about brands. Sometimes I think the best gifts are the simplest ones. A good book that you know someone likes, a photo album with pictures of memories in it and so on so forth.

But this was her 25th Birthday so I decided that if there was any time in the next 5 years for us to indulge in something, it was now. Plus Ming had been egging me on to get her something really nice because our relationship had grown so much from puppy bf/gf love to a more mature and stable relationship. So at Westfield, we walked into Miu Miu.

I know Princess likes Miu Miu as a brand. She’s not much of an LV or a Prada person. Maybe because the name “Miu Miu” sounds cute and Princess likes cute things. Nevertheless I had a hard time trying to decide what kind of purse to get her. There were so many to pick from and they all looked almost the same to me!

So I asked them for the newest range and they showed me a set of purses with 4 different colours. I narrowed it down to two colours. Between a baby blue and what they called “Miu Miu Pink” which really looked like Purple to me (when are people going to understand that men can only see 16 colours just like the 16 colour VGA monitor from the old days: Blue, Black, Red, etc etc…. Lavender for example… isn’t a colour! It’s a flower dammit! A flower!!!).

I thought the Baby Blue was nicer and suited Princess’ cute personality better but I was undecided. So I asked the sales assistant for an opinion about what suited my girlfriend best. I described her as “cute little Japanese-sy girl”.

The sales assistant then said “Oh wait let me introduce one of my colleagues to you. She’s also a cute little Japanese-sy girl”. So he introduced us to a girl named Julia.

We later found out Julia was Singaporean. She asked what we do for a living and when we said “Nuffnang” she went “OOOhhhh Nuffnang! I know I know! Very famous company!!!”.

I saw a big smile on Ming’s face.

Julia suggested the baby blue and I was so close to getting it but it had to past one last test. I decided to verify it with one of Princess’ friends. I called Tze up and asked her to pick a colour and she said something I’m ashamed I didn’t know: “Princess hates blue”.

I know she likes pink and yellow but I never imagined that she hated blue. Why? I love blue! Blue’s my favourite colour! Nuffnang’s logo is blue! So is ChurpChurp!!! But the purse wasn’t for me (obviously), so fine I went for the “Miu Miu Pink” (purple) instead.

I told Princess on Skype a few hours later that I bought her the present and she’s excited but I haven’t showed it to her yet.

All I showed her was the bag.

She will see the contents of it on her birthday. The impatient girl went to Googling for Miu Miu purses to try speculating on what she was getting. Nobody but Ming (and Julia) knows which one it really is.

Be patient baby! Your Birthday’s only a week away.

I’m in London with Ming for the Project Alpha Season 2 shoot. The film crew and the rest are actually coming only on Thursday but Ming and I decided to come a little early to do some things here. It’s been 3 years since I’ve been back to London and I kinda miss it. London to me is like…. the only place other than KL and Penang that feel like home to me. Everything seems so familiar and feels like I could just live here.

Today was our first day in London. Ming and I woke up at 3am this morning, suffering from jetlag. There’s nothing like suffering from jetlag. The feeling of wanting to sleep but can’t…. it’s almost as annoying as scratching your finger nails on a blackboard. So we stayed up working off our computers, checking e-mails, making calls etc etc till almost 6AM before we tried to go back to sleep again.

I managed to sleep till like 8AM but Ming stayed awake. So after 8AM we finally decided to wake up and head for breakfast. For tradition’s sake, we had a full english breakfast!

Man… being around Ming just makes you fat because the man likes to eat.

This was breakfast.

Then lunch was Indian Food that Ming really insisted on having and subsequently over-ordering.

And dinner was Four Seasons roast duck.

By dinner I had already given up eating. I ate just two slices of duck and some vegetable. That’s it! I had never ever been to Four Seasons Bayswater only to have so little to eat before.

I spent a good part of the day shopping for Princess’ birthday present. That’s right. The 10th of February is Princess’ birthday and it’s not just any birthday, it’s her 25th birthday. I took the longest time to decide what to get her.

One of the things I knew she wanted was a new purse so we ended up shopping in Westfield.

I had always tried to steer away from buying any designer goods and I think it’s something we both agreed on to some extent. Sure there are increasingly lots of people our age or younger who walk around with LV handbags or all sorts of other designer stuff but I always felt that Princess and I can’t afford to indulge in all that yet. There are so many other essential things in life that I need to save for like a family home (lots of my friends already have achieved that) or my kid’s future education. I mean it’s one thing to buy a camera that we could use to take pictures for our blog and another to spend 5 times more on a handbag or something.

Hence I’ve never really bought myself anything branded so far apart from a Boss suit (which I felt was necessary because you need a good business suit for work sometimes) and maybe my Paul Frank t-shirts (though it’s not exactly nearly as expensive as Gucci or Armani).

Princess and I also always agreed though that we didn’t want to start a consistent practice of buying expensive material stuff for each other and having us eventually be all about brands. Sometimes I think the best gifts are the simplest ones. A good book that you know someone likes, a photo album with pictures of memories in it and so on so forth.

But this was her 25th Birthday so I decided that if there was any time in the next 5 years for us to indulge in something, it was now. Plus Ming had been egging me on to get her something really nice because our relationship had grown so much from puppy bf/gf love to a more mature and stable relationship. So at Westfield, we walked into Miu Miu.

I know Princess likes Miu Miu as a brand. She’s not much of an LV or a Prada person. Maybe because the name “Miu Miu” sounds cute and Princess likes cute things. Nevertheless I had a hard time trying to decide what kind of purse to get her. There were so many to pick from and they all looked almost the same to me!

So I asked them for the newest range and they showed me a set of purses with 4 different colours. I narrowed it down to two colours. Between a baby blue and what they called “Miu Miu Pink” which really looked like Purple to me (when are people going to understand that men can only see 16 colours just like the 16 colour VGA monitor from the old days: Blue, Black, Red, etc etc…. Lavender for example… isn’t a colour! It’s a flower dammit! A flower!!!).

I thought the Baby Blue was nicer and suited Princess’ cute personality better but I was undecided. So I asked the sales assistant for an opinion about what suited my girlfriend best. I described her as “cute little Japanese-sy girl”.

The sales assistant then said “Oh wait let me introduce one of my colleagues to you. She’s also a cute little Japanese-sy girl”. So he introduced us to a girl named Julia.

We later found out Julia was Singaporean. She asked what we do for a living and when we said “Nuffnang” she went “OOOhhhh Nuffnang! I know I know! Very famous company!!!”.

I saw a big smile on Ming’s face.

Julia suggested the baby blue and I was so close to getting it but it had to past one last test. I decided to verify it with one of Princess’ friends. I called Tze up and asked her to pick a colour and she said something I’m ashamed I didn’t know: “Princess hates blue”.

I know she likes pink and yellow but I never imagined that she hated blue. Why? I love blue! Blue’s my favourite colour! Nuffnang’s logo is blue! So is ChurpChurp!!! But the purse wasn’t for me (obviously), so fine I went for the “Miu Miu Pink” (purple) instead.

I told Princess on Skype a few hours later that I bought her the present and she’s excited but I haven’t showed it to her yet.

All I showed her was the bag.

She will see the contents of it on her birthday. The impatient girl went to Googling for Miu Miu purses to try speculating on what she was getting. Nobody but Ming (and Julia) knows which one it really is.

Be patient baby! Your Birthday’s only a week away.

Last Saturday was a tiring weekend… all for the filming of Project Alpha Season 2. The reason we’re there is for a reunion trip between the Season 1 bloggers. I’m not actually a Season 1 blogger (since I’m there more as Fourfeetnine’s BF than Timothy Tiah) but I decided to tag along anyway.

The day started really early. The girls were supposed to be in the make-up chair by 8AM so the first thing I heard waking up in the morning was the alarm clock and Princess giving out a very angry grumble that she had to be up so early on a Saturday morning.

After she went through the usual “Fmls fmls”….. we all got up, had breakfast and got ready start our day.

About 2 hours later (yes it took that long because the girls had to do their make-up and everyone had to wait for everyone else), we were in a 360 Hotel van on the way to Kenny’s gym (with the camera crew in another van behind us).

That’s right guys… Kenny Sia’s gym.

If you’re wondering why Kenny’s updates has been a little less frequent lately, it’s because he has been busy with “Level Up”, a gym he started in Kuching just about 3 months ago. I understand how he feels.

Like when I first started off with Nuffnang I was too busy with too many things happening here and there to be able to sit down every now and then to blog. When I did have the time to blog, I was too tired to and spending your whole day running around doing work doesn’t exactly give you the inspiration to do so anyway.

But Kenny promised that after his gym is all set up and good, he’ll spend more time on his blog again.

Back at the gym, Kenny was happy to see us when we arrived.

Because what he had in mind for us was one intense hour of an exercise dance class.

All the bloggers took part but I decided to sit this one out and take pictures on the sidelines instead. Yes… even Princess has admitted that I’ve grown skinny now so I can afford to put on some weight now. No more motivation to control my eating and exercise now… HAHA!

The class looked like good fun and the film crew caught all of it. Some Kuching bloggers who heard that the Project Alpha bloggers from Season 1 were going to be there decided to join in the class too.

A couple of them were so enthusiastic they all decided to do last minute shopping before they came to buy some Adidas sports wear (You know, because Adidas Fragrance is the main sponsor for Project Alpha Season 1 & 2).

After the work-out, Kenny brought us to Madam Tang’s for lunch where I had this yummy beef noodle.

Took some pictures of some of the people with us at the lunch.

Here’s Michael the director of Project Alpha (on the left) and David from Nuffnang.

We went to the Waterfront later on in the afternoon to continue some filming.

And we headed back to the hotel for a quick break after that.

Dinner was hosted by the people behind 360 Hotel Kuching. They brought us to this huge food court with loads of seafood and we had everything from huge Chili crabs to Satay and some really really nice fish.

I sat next to Steve who’s one of the directors of the hotel.

He was a very proud Sarawakian! He told us how Sarawak was actually very independently run from West Malaysia and how 1 Malaysia was something they’ve had in Sarawak a long long time ago. Where nobody asks about race or anything like that.

Steve had a lot of other experiences. Everything from his business ventures in the past to even some outdoor adventures he’s had the chance to experience in his life. I told him that I hoped I had as many stories to tell one day.

After this trip, I’ve decided that I actually really like Kuching.

I’ll end this blog entry with some pictures we took at 360 Hotel while waiting for everyone else to come down for dinner.

Here’s Sixthseal, me and Beautifulnara.

And here’s Princess and me.
Okay off to London!

Have a great week ahead guys!

If you’d like to follow other developments of Project Alpha Season 2, become a fan of their Facebook fan page

I’m in Kuching everyone!

It’s so weird. It’s like. This morning I woke up in KL, then went for my usual work day. Right after work I headed straight to KLIA and hopped on the next MAS flight to Kuching and here I am.

I’ve never been to East Malaysia before in my life (I know, I’m ashamed!). Kuching gives me a bit of an odd feeling. On one hand it looks like some of the cities in Peninsular Malaysia but on the other hand it’s really peaceful and really clean. Plus it’s a lot more developed than I thought it was.

Something about the place. It feels like a whole new country to me to some extent. Heck you don’t need a passport to come here (if you’re a Malaysian) but when I passed immigration they gave me a 90 day visa, meaning I could only stay there for 90 days under the visitor pass. Really feels like a whole other country to me.

Then again I haven’t really seen much of Kuching yet. Spent much of my evening in KLIA doing some shooting for Project Alpha Season 2 with some of the Season 1 bloggers. Didn’t occur to me to take any pictures of the day except till when I was in the plane not doing anything.

Food was served so I ended up doing the blogger thing and taking pictures of my plane food. Food on a full service airline is quite a bit of a switch from flying budget because you get to order as many drinks as you like and you don’t have to worry about being charged for each and every one of it.

This is what I had.

I thought it was great. Liked the fruit cake and especially like the Ferrero Rocher they added to the meal.

Flight time was 2 hours and soon enough we reached Kuching but we took a long time to get off the plane because the pilot was nice enough to let us take a look at the cockpit so bloggers being bloggers we were all crowding around the cockpit trying to take pictures.

In the mean time, Jojo kept the nice pilot entertained.

He told the story about how he had always wanted to be a pilot ever since he was a kid and look at him now, living the dream. Pilot at Malaysia Airlines.

Got to the hotel shortly after. We’re staying at 360 Hotel in Kuching.

They were nice enough to send a couple of vans to pick us up from the airport.

The minute we got there, Huai Bin dashed to the nearest internet connection and succumbed to his internet addiction.

If you’re wondering where he got the pink hat from, the answer is he stole it from Princess.

We got it all on film!

The room at the 360 Hotel is really nice. It’s like a one bedroom apartment with a small living room, kitchen and bedroom.

This is how a part of the bed room looks like.

Nais!

Tomorrow we have a full day of filming Project Alpha Season 2. Whew…. gotta go to bed now guys.

Long day tomorrow.

Thanks for flying us here MAS… and thanks for putting us up Hotel 360. Oh and of course, thanks Adidas Fragrance and P1 Wimax for giving us a chance to make Season 2 of Project Alpha. It’s going to be great!

Nite all!

Seeing that the Nuffnang team has been working so hard in the past few weeks, last night I organized a stand-up comedy night out for the Nuffies so they can let go and release some of the stress they get at work.

So we went for the MACC (Malaysian Association of Chinese Comedians) at Jaya one to watch Douglas Lim, Kuah Jenhan and Chee Hoe perform. We were all laughing so hard! Saw Firdy rolling around in his seat.

Highly recommend you guys catch it if you have the chance. They’re only on till Sunday. Click here for details.

On another note, can’t believe I’m going to miss the Tiger Run cuz I’ll be overseas.

For the past few weeks, Ming has been telling me that he bought me the best Christmas present ever. He didn’t want to tell me what it was until I saw it from myself but even Pierre who knew what it was said that it was freaking awesome!

So last week I finally made my way down to Singapore for some work and the very second I got into the car he threw a box at me and said “Merry Christmas! Open it!”.

The box looked something like this.

It said Amazon.com on it so I thought that maybe he bought something off Amazon for me. A book ? DVD ? XBOX game? Something like that.

When I opened it though, I saw this.

At first I went

And then it dawned on me… that it was an Amazon Kindle! HOLY SHIT!

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader from Amazon. It’s basically a device where you can download all sorts of e-books from Amazon and store it inside. Then you can virtually carry hundreds of books in it wherever you want and take your time to read it.

It’s unbelievably awesome!

Let me tell you why.

I read a lot of content now from the computer. Everything from news, blogs and all that. The thing about reading stuff off the computer though is that once you’ve been doing it for a long time it my eyes kinda get a little tired from the glare.

The Kindle though isn’t one of those computer screens. The words on it appear really almost like it’s on paper so there’s no backlight and no glare.

So it’s as easy to read as a book. Not sure about most of you but I can read articles on the computer but I can never read novels off it. I just can’t seem to ‘get lost’ in the stories whenever I read them off a computer.

When reading off a Kindle though, my imagination takes me away just like reading off an actual book.

While I still love going to book stores just to browse, it’s lots of fun browsing books on Amazon.com as well. Not to mention there are times when you want to go to a book store just to find one particular book and have to ask around or browse around in order to find it. On Amazon all you have to do is type it in the search bar and it’ll find you the book.

I can’t think of any book that Amazon doesn’t already have! Only limitation is that while the Kindle books database is huge and growing, there are many titles not available on Kindle (but I’m sure they’re working on that). Also you can’t really buy Kindle books from Malaysia because the Kindle is not available here yet but there’s a work around for that. All you have to do is buy a gift voucher from Amazon then redeem it for credit and use that credit to buy the e-book.

If you’re in the USA it’s even better. You can just buy the e-book from Amazon and it wirelessly gets sent to your Kindle.

I read a lot especially when I travel. With the Kindle though you don’t have to bring heavy books along with you. The Kindle is all you need. Plus it automatically book marks any page you stopped at so you don’t have to be worried about losing your book mark or things like that. Plus there are some other bonus features the Kindle has. Like it has its own Oxford Dictionary so you can find the meaning of any word you’re not sure of just by hovering a cursor over it on the Kindle and you can even make notes on each page.

Imagine if all our school students had this. No more lugging heavy school bags to school. Just this one device with all the text books you need.

I think the Kindle is truly revolutionary because if you think about it, that’s how we may all be reading stuff off in the future. We will all each have a device like this next to our bedside tables. When we wake up in the morning, the daily newspaper and magazines are all wirelessly sent and updated to your Kindle so you can read it from there.

Think of all the paper we’ll save (not to mention printing costs that newspaper and magazines can save).

I think the Kindle is great.

It’s not yet available here in Malaysia or even Singapore yet though. So the only way to get it is to order it to a US address and then have it shipped over here. Ming went through all that trouble for me. Thanks Ming 🙂