Was at MOS with some of the Project Alpha bloggers on Friday night.
Do you guys recognize anyone?
MOS with Project Alpha
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Presents!
Pierre and Ming spoil me sometimes. They buy me a lot of nice things. I almost feel like a mistress to them. It’s funny though… Ming scolds me every day for spoiling Princess. Like he never gets over my Shoe Shop Surprise or the Birthday Surprise I gave her but in return… he spoils me…. his business partner.
Ming was down just last Friday in the Nuffnang KL office to brief everyone (well almost everyone) about a very big Nuffnang event coming up in the next few months.
It’s the biggest thing we have ever done. I’ll give you a hint… it involves bloggers from all over the region and it’s going to be held in Singapore.
While he was down, he also brought me a little present he got for me when he was in Moscow a few weeks ago for a friend’s wedding.
He bought me this hand painted Russian doll. I can’t remember what it’s specifically called but you know it’s the thing where it starts with a big doll and when you open it up there’s a smaller one and inside that another smaller one and it goes on and on.
Here’s the one he bought me.
Guess who!
And inside him….
Guess who….
and inside him…
Guess who!!!
and inside Mr Clinton…
Guess who!
and the tiniest of all…
Guess who!
Cute huh? I’ve placed them all on my table in the office now.
Right after Ming gave me the cute little present, Pierre showed up and gave me a present from him too: Another Manchester United jersey… Ming already gave me one a few months ago.
The two Manchester United fans have been trying very very hard to convert me to a fan as well. Ish… GOLDFINGER….. SAVE ME FROM THEIR GRASP!!!
At the back of the jersey, it wrote this.
I’ll leave it to one of you guys out there to tell everyone else what Jipaban means in Hokkien.
Thank you Ming and Pierre. You both spoil me!
To add to that, GAP is going to spoil me too. Well… this weekend to be exact.
I’m not going to say exactly what because I don’t want to spoil the surprise but this video is a bit of a hint. Will blog about the experience when the time comes.
Oh and guess what guys. I’m going to Melbourne next week to catch up with our Nuffnang Australia team at our office in Melbourne. I’m bringing Princess along with me too. Couldn’t bear the thought of her having to spend Merdeka weekend alone.
So next week… it going to be a great week. I hope.
Project Alpha
Since I started reading blogs some 3-4 years ago, I’ve always followed closely a number blogs and I’ve always wondered how the blogger I follow every day is like in real life. You know, is she exactly like how she is on her blog? Where does she stay? What does she do for a living?
Those are questions I always pondered upon. Then Ming and I started Nuffnang. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of these bloggers and get to know how they’re like in real life. Some are different than in their blogs, but some are strikingly similar. I’ve always thought that it would be cool to have a show about the lives of bloggers. Now with Nuffnang, I know a lot about blogs but I know very little or actually nothing about producing a TV Show.
Then by some really cool story I met the people at Kyanite. This guy named Michael and the host Jojo Struys who both had experience producing loads of TV content provided me with an option to make my dream come true. So after months of planning and looking for funding, we’re finally filming the show. It’s called “Project Alpha” – Uncovering Malaysia’s Top Bloggers with Adidas Action 3 as the title sponsor.
Shooting for the show just started a few days ago and Princess was one of the 7 bloggers that we were going to feature in Season 1. So this morning we were all up at 7AM for the start of the shoot.
This is how sleepy Princess was.
Even the camera crew that arrived early at Princess’ home fell asleep while waiting for everyone else to arrive.
It was too early for anyone to be up on a Sunday morning. But soon enough, more of the crew came… including two full-time make-up artists whose responsibilities were to constantly touch-up Princess’ make-up.
One of them even put make-up on me.
At first I resisted and cursed the idea… but after seeing what she did to me I was impressed. She completely hid all my pimples on my face. Look how smooth my face it? Like baby backside.
I started wondering for a while why guys don’t just wear make-up every day like girls do… then I remembered that most of the time, pimples or no pimples… how we look doesn’t bother most of us enough to take the time for make-up.
I’m not going to spoil the show before it comes out so I’m not going to the details but it was basically us just following Princess around on her Sunday. I was in it for quite a lot since I was a big part of her day (and her life haha) and we had a lot of really funny moments. I think it’ll be fun to watch,
I learned a few things today too! See that thing on top that looks like a mop?
That’s called a BOOM. Something I learned today, among many other movie terms. It’s meant to be like a mic that is held high enough to avoid the camera frames but low enough to catch our voices. That’s Michael, the Director briefing Jojo, Princess and me about something.
We ended the day at Hitz.FM all the way in Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil. We were there to do a radio interview about the show with Adam C.
At first we thought that we were just doing a pre-recording but we much later only found out that whatever we said went out to the world just a few minutes later.
Junior at Hitz.FM didn’t make it any easier for us. He said “What you guys just said just went out to 1.3 million listeners out there”.
The people at Hitz were really great though.
Both Adam and Junior were really really friendly and they did a lot of stuff to help clean up the screw-ups Princess and I made. Adam is the guy on the most left and Junior is the guy on the most right.
We finally ended at Hitz.FM at around 8.30PM, after our interview segment that went live at around 7-8pm. Michael the Director motioned a circular movement with his hand and said “Okay everyone… it’s a wrap!” and everyone in the crew started clapping. We had been filming for 12 hours straight, today alone.
It was indeed quite an experience to have… being filmed for a show for the first time in my life. And being interviewed on the most popular English language station in the country.
Project Alpha is going to be out in September so remember to catch it then. I hope it will be as fun watching it as it was fun making it.
Kinder Egg Outing
Last night Ming, Pierre and I had a bit of a guy’s night out. Just the 3 of us. We started off with a steamboat dinner at Xiao Fei Yang in Pudu… which lasted some 2-3 hours then we headed off for drinks at this Mamak near Menara Citibank.
I think it was called Penang Nasi Kandar or something.
When we got to the Mamak Ming went straight to the rest room first. He came back about 10 minutes later with a big cheeky smile on his face and a plastic bag in his hand “WAH!!! THIS IS LIKE A SUPER MAMAK!!! EVERYTHING ALSO GOT!!!”.
He dropped the plastic bag on the table and took out 3 Kinder Eggs. One for each of us.
He went on to explain: “These are the best man! You know like last time when we were young, why did we buy Mamee Monster? Because of the sticker inside! Same for Kinder eggs.. we buy for the little plastic toys we get inside”.
So while talking we all unwrapped our egg. I ate my Kinder chocolate in the egg but Pierre and Ming didn’t touch theirs.
They had clearly bought the egg only to assemble the toys and see what they got.
I assembled mine only to find a viking ship.
Ming was happy with his. He had a cute little blue eskimo toy that looked like this but with a face.
It even came with a sticker of a face that you could put on the face of the little blue figure. He thought it was really cute. Then I picked up his little eskimo to take a look and the face accidentally dropped out and fell on to the wet floor of the mamak. We were seated outside and it had just rained.
Ming went ballistic “NOOOOOoooo!!!! MY FACE… WHY YOU DROP MY FACE!!!!”
He kept saying “PICK IT UP !!! PICK IT UP!!!”
and guilty as anything I kept quiet for a while but Pierre backed me up
“NO MING!!! NOOO!!! It’s all wet already!! It’s gone!! It’s washed away!!!”
Then Ming stood up and shouted
“I don’t care!!! We going to buy more until we get back my ESKIMO!!!!”.
Pierre volunteered to buy the second round. He suggested that we each buy a round. The second round came and… still no eskimo. In fact Ming got some stupid toy and I got something even more stupid…
Not sure what mine was but it looked like some kind of weird alien sperma.
Ming was frustrated after he opened his toy then he looked at me for a few seconds.
It was my turn to go buy. I went to the convenience store at the back of the Mamak and picked up 3 Kinder Eggs. When I put it on the counter the old man who owned the shop looked at me and then shook his head. Just before me he had probably seen Ming come twice to buy the Kinder eggs.
I avoided eye contact… out of shame, paid then ran away.
When I got back to the table we opened up all our Kinder eggs… no eskimo.
This is the mess we made by the end of the night.
And these were the toys we collected by the end of the night.
Each Kinder egg was like RM3.50 so we ended up spending 5 times more money on the Kinder Eggs than we did on the drinks at the Mamak.
Drinks at Mamak = RM6.10
Kinder eggs = RM 3.50 X 9 = RM31.50
Fun cheap thrills from opening up Kinder Eggs with friends = Priceless.
Nuffnang Looks Different!
Just a few days ago we launched a new layout for our Nuffnang site.
If you guys knew the process it went through to get to this. We basically had all the different Nuffnang teams come up with different design on how they thought the Nuffnang site should look like. Then with some 4 mock-ups or so we sent it to the team leaders in each country that Nuffnang is in and they took a vote.
The winner was this one.
One thing about all our sites is that we thought since we were in four different countries, each site should have its own localized features.
So what we did was… at the bottom of each page, we had the city skyline of the capital of the country we were in. Nuffnang Malaysia looks like this with the Petronas Twin Towers and the KL Tower visible.
(Pay attention to the bottom of the following screenshots and click to enlarge)
Nuffnang Singapore had the Singapore Flyer and some landmark Singapore buildings.
Nuffnang Australia had the Harbour Bridge and Sydney Tower.
And Nuffnang Philippines…
The other cool part that some of you may or may not notice is that…. during the day, the sun shows in the skyline. During the night, the sun sets and the stars come up. These screenshots I took of all the other countries were taken at night. But the screenshot for Nuffnang PH was taken during the day.
You can check out the different sites here.
Notice how they look?
Cool huh? I know I like it 🙂
If you’re a Nuffnang member login and check out the inside too.
Should’ve listened to grandma
Ahh I remember the moment. I was still studying my A-levels back then when my grandmother told me over a family dinner. She said to me in Hokkien “You should study to be a “loke-kun” (a doctor). Doctors make a lot of money”.
I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t want to be a doctor! I wanted to be a banker. Well back then I wanted to be a banker, 10 years before then I wanted to be a postman and when I was 5 I wanted to be a soldier. Look at where I am now… none of the above. I ended up being… Fourfeetnine’s boyfriend. Haha
Anyway today I went to see this skin clinic near Imbi by a doctor named Doctor Ting. I was supposed to see him to get some medicine from my pimples. You normally queue up for 3 hours to see him, then he sees you for like 2 minutes and then he gives you the same medicine he probably gave another 300 growing boys that saw him earlier that week.
You can’t book an appointment in advance for Dr Ting. You have to call the clinic up at 8.30AM when it opens and then rush to get a number. So at 8.30AM, Rina started calling the clinic up for me but she didn’t manage to get through. The line was engaged throughout… you know as if they were giving away free money to anyone who called that number. So about 10AM I decided I was done waiting so I went straight to the clinic. The lady told me that I was the number 56. And I probably had to wait till 6PM or so before I could see the doctor. The clinic was full with a lot of other people waiting.
So there you have it. Every day, people rush to get an appointment and wait all day and pay just to see a skin doctor. Plus you only give them enough medicine for a month so they have to keep coming back to you each month. Damn I would’ve been so minted.
I should’ve listened to grandma.
Top Hat
Yesterday Princess and I met Suet, Jia Meei, Li Tat and Barry for lunch. I’m not sure how they suddenly decided that they wanted to go for an expensive lunch on a Saturday afternoon but they initially booked Kampachi’s lunch buffet.
The buffet though was supposed to end at 2.30PM and Princess wasn’t able to make it in time because she finished work only at around 1.30PM (Yes…. she was working on a Saturday too.) So in the end, we ended up looking for somewhere else nice to go for lunch and to spend the afternoon chilling out.
Out of nowhere I suggested this place near Jalan Kia Peng called Top Hat.
Top Hat is a restaurant that know of only because an aunty of mine loves to bring my mum there. It’s apparently won some “Best Restaurant” awards from the Malaysian Tatler and it’s famous for these little things they call “Top Hat”, like the one Jia Meei here is holding.
Everything else on the menu though was so pricey it really made me wonder how the other people at the restaurant could afford to eat lunch there. I later realized that everyone in the restaurant were like “tai tai’s” having late lunch and tea. We were by far the youngest table there in the restaurant and the ones that really looked like we didn’t belong there without our parents. Princess tried her best to put on her ‘tai tai look’ but to no avail.
Princess and I quickly ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. We had the chicken & mushroom pie which cost like RM30… but was absolutely lovely!
Then for dessert we had a slice of Tiramisu that cost RM16 and like 3,000 calories.
We ended up staying there from like 2PM all the way to 5.30PM chatting so I guess we all made it really worth while. The best part about the restaurant is… you know how when you tend to ‘overstay’ yourself in some restaurants, the restaurant purposely turns off the air-con or stops refilling your glass of water/tea as a hint to tell you to f*ck off?
Well the people at Top Hat just kept topping up our water and left the air-con on even though we were the last ones left in the restaurant for a long time. That’s something I learned to appreciate… and with that I gotta say that it made my RM30 chicken & mushroom pie a little bit more worth it.
That of course… and the camwhoring we did while we were there.
This is a picture of Princess and I from the outside of Top Hat. Taking a reflection of ourselves on the glass doors.
Princess and me!
Princess and the girls
And me and the guys doing the “See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil” pose.
The guy on the left in the white shirt is Barry. He’s Princess’ brother who also happens to be Suet’s bf. You know when I first met Princess’ brother when he came back from the USA a few months ago, we both tried really hard to get to know each other.
We would be watching TV in her living room and sometimes I would try to make conversation like ….
“So Barry… you went to London right? Where did you go?”
And he would oblige… but the conversation will somehow find a dead end in like 30 seconds after it started. Then on other times he would do the same to make conversation with me too and it would shortly die. After a few attempts, Princess was convinced that we had nothing in common… UNTIL……. haha… after hanging out a bit more we learned of a few things we had in common.
Like the fact that he used to play Magic The Gathering just like I did. Or like today I learned his name as the same Chinese Character “you” (有) that my Chinese name has (hahaha I know that’s a stretch but hey beyond that there is more too). We learn more each day… more and more….
We still have some kinks every now and then though. Today I was at their house showing them a DVD I had bought “17 Again“. Barry saw it and shouted out in disgust “HAH!!! WHO BOUGHT THIS?!?!?!“
He must’ve thought it was some lousy show or something so I nudged Princess
“Quick quick!!! Take one for me baby… say that you bought it”.
Princess quickly raised up her hand “I BOUGHT WAN!!!”. We later came clean and I told him I bought it… because I like Matthew Perry.
He decided to not make a big deal about it but I think he was probably shaking his head deep inside thinking “My sister’s boyfriend wants to watch 17 Again…. tsk tsk… says a lot about his character”.
And when I turned my back he probably went
“I’m watching you Timothy Tiah!!!! You better not hurt me SISTER!!!!”
Thoughtful Gestures
Yesterday was my first day back at the office after a few days of being sick. I got into the office and I saw a package addressed to me on my table along with some other mail that Rina very nicely organizes for me every day.
I opened up the package and found this P1 Box. Inside of it was a P1 t-shirt. I started wondering how and why P1 would suddenly send me a t-shirt. I don’t remember subscribing for P1 Wimax or anything…. until I found this card attached to it.
On the card was a short hand-written note.
“Dear Timothy, It’s truly a pleasure meeting you at MDA VIP Dinner @ Bukit Kiara. Do keep in touch. Keep well.
Signed, Michael Lai, CEO of Packet One Networks (M) Sdn Bhd”.
I had met Michael a few weeks ago at a dinner. We struck up a conversation and exchanged business cards. A few weeks later he sent this little ‘present‘ with a note on it.
I think this is the kind of gesture that we could all really learn from. This one small little thing he did, will make me remember Michael Lai from P1… a long long time.
Nuffnang Signages
Got these pictures off the Nuffnang Philippines blog.
It’s a picture of some signages the team in Nuffnang Philippines put up in Bonifacio High Street, where our office in the Philippines is at.
So nice… seeing the Nuffnang logo lit up so nicely at night.
I like the way the team in the Philippines signed off on their entry.
To quote them “It’s just our way of saying that, hey, Nuffnang is here to stay”
What Love Is
I’m sick again today!
I normally get sick like once in a year but somehow this year is really taking the cake for me. I’ve been getting sick so many times I’m beginning to lose count. Right now I’m down with a fever and flu. Yes Yes I know what you’re all thinking but the Doctor today said he doesn’t think it’s H1N1… at least unless it doesn’t get better in the next few days.
The thing about being sick is that you’re forced to stay at home and rest. For me it’s like putting the brakes on my usual work life and I start thinking less about business and more about my personal life. This afternoon I asked myself the question of where my personal life was going.
Sure I’m blessed with the presence of some really good friends in my life so no real complain there. I don’t necessarily live the life that I used to love anymore. Much less clubbing every weekend, much less going out to bars and a lot more staying at home and watching TV with Princess.
Then I really started thinking about Princess and the relationship we have now.
Love is a really funny thing. While I’ve had many girlfriends before in the past, I think for the first time in my life I think I have finally began to understand what love is.
Love is when you feel for someone truly for all the good things and all that bad things that come with that someone. Love is not physical, lust is. So while I appreciate how pretty Princess is,
beauty alone isn’t enough to keep us together for a long time. What keeps us together is how she makes me laugh every day, how she doesn’t mind doing stupid things
how she can make me feel better every time I share a problem with her, how she knows to be strong when I am weak and how I get this little fuzzy feeling when she rubs her head against my shoulder.
Sometimes Princess gets a little jealous when I hang out or talk about a pretty girl but I gently remind her that she’s missing the point. There will always be pretty girls around just like there are lots of guys who are far better looking than me out there. But what she gives me is something I think no other girl can give me.
And that is the feeling that makes me all complete.
I think that many girls out there will find the same thing in a guy. It doesn’t matter so much if you’re pretty or not. So if you think your bf really loves you like I do to Princess, then there is no need to feel insecure or jealous.
While I really appreciate her efforts in always making herself look good (you know, the make-up, the hair curlers), Princess will lose her beauty some day sooner or later. But unless the person who she is changes, I don’t think I will ever stop being as into her as I am now. Don’t tell her that though. Every day we both call each other fat and threaten to break up with each other if we put on more weight (just to keep each other on our toes) but deep inside we know that no matter how many KGs we each put on, we’ll still be together.
Princess and I have only been together for slightly less than a year but for the first time in my life, I think I’m settled. Of course time will only tell where it’ll go from here. But right now… my life feels complete.
So I’m happy with my personal life now. Could I please get well and go back to work?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space