Is it just me or does Nike have all the major football stars.

Seriously, I thought that previous viral video that put the viewer in the eyes of an upcoming footballer had a lot of football stars in it. 

Then they came up with another one.

That’s like… can you imagine an ad for Chanel have not just Nicole Kidman but Jessica Alba, Kate Beckinsale, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron and all the other Hollywood superstars in it.

I did a bit of Post-CNY shopping last weekend. Princess had her silly Japanese friend visit us over the weekend and we brought him around.

Anyway, towards the last few months of last year I started my jogging regime. Every morning I would wake up at 6AM just go to jog around KLCC Park before I come home, shower then go off to work.

Then just starting this year I went back to the gym to do a little bit of working out.

The result… my waistline had dropped from 34″ to 31″ and I suddenly needed new jeans.

So I found myself at The Curve last weekend with Princess and Masato and bought myself two new pairs of jeans from Levi’s.

Tadaaaaaa…. check out my new jeans!

I like jeans.

I mean heck, it’s just the best investment in clothing. I wear it for everything. I wear it when I go out on weekends and I even wear it to work every day since Nuffnang’s office dress code is casual, then again so is just about the rest of the advertising industry. I remember once going for a digital advertising conference in Singapore. I wore a suit thinking that well.. it was a conference right?

Little did I realize that everyone there was just dressed in shirts and jeans. That’s all! Jeans have somehow become the new work clothes, at least in my industry.

And it’s the kind of thing where you can spill shit on it and you won’t even have to feel bad because most of the time you can’t even see it.

Here’s the thing about jeans that I’m not sure about though.

I wash my jeans once every 3 days but I have some friends who say that you should never wash your jeans so often. Only once a week or even once a month. I have a friend who said she never once washed any of her jeans. That jeans is not for washing.

Another friend of mine told me that he didn’t wash his jeans for 3 months and when he eventually did, the water he washed it with turned all black.

So what is true? You tell me. 

How often do you wash your jeans? Do the poll on my sidebar.

It’s one week before Valentine’s Day, a day that I used to resent. “Damn those happy couples!” 

So I logged on to Facebook yesterday to see what my friends were doing.

Here’s the funny thing.

Around July – October last year, every time I logged on to Facebook I saw a lot of my friends “ending their relationships”. It was almost as if it was the time of the year where everyone was breaking up. Yesterday when I logged in, not only was NOBODY breaking up, but in fact everyone was getting attached one way or another.

I even saw this girl I used to know from secondary school who just got married. Her wedding pictures were all over Facebook!

I guess Valentine’s Day is a time of love!

Everyone wants somebody to spend it with though the truth is I have had my fair share of single Valentine’s Days and I always found something fun to do.

So I looked around to see what my proudly single friends are doing.

I guess they’re all going for an Exclusive Singles Night Party that says 

What am I doing for Valentine’s Day….?

Well… that’s a surprise 🙂

There are many things that I have yet to learn about running a business and one of those is “hiring the right people“. 

It’s easy to hire people. Just look at your Profit & Loss account to see if you can afford to hire another person to help with the workload and then just make the decision to hire. Once you put out a job ad on any of the job portals you get like… hundreds of applications. It also helps that every day there are people applying to Nuffnang through our Careers Page.

Hiring the right people though is something that I am still very much learning. I have made some really bad hires in the past, not necessarily because they were not good people or anything but just perhaps… they weren’t suited for the job or right for the culture of the company. 

For example Nuffnang runs on a very independent-like work culture. That means throughout your working hours, nobody’s breathing down your neck. You can sleep when you feel like sleeping, you can Facebook if you like, you can do whatever you want as long as your work is done at the end of the day.

Perhaps some people are used to this culture in companies they currently work for, but for some we’ve experienced they come in not used to this culture and start abusing their new found freedom and independence. That means they do all of the above…. but let it affect their productivity a little too much. That doesn’t mean they’re not good people nor does that mean they’re not capable or productive. They probably are. It just means they weren’t right for us and we weren’t right for them.

For a moment last year I was making a string of bad hires and I started to doubt my ability of reading people well. I started asking a lot of help from my mentors: managers or CEOs of other companies that have far more experience and they tell me that the only way to learn these things is to make the bad hires then develop a gut feel that you think you can trust.

I’ve admittedly been very very lucky in finding most of the wonderful people that work with me at Nuffnang today.  That doesn’t mean I skillfully knew how to pick the right ones out of a haystack. Not at all, I was lucky instead. They all came to me filled with so much enthusiasm that it was hard to reject. It was almost like it was a gift from above. 

One day though I made the excellent decision of hiring a girl that boosted my confidence. Her name was Pinky.

She was soo full of life. A very fast learner she picked up on her role in a very short time and just her being in the team boosted everyone’s morale. She was the kind of person that made silly jokes or comments all the time, the kind of person that you always want around your office. 

Of course everyone else in the office has to be just as wacky for it to take a full effect but everyone loved her!

And the best part was she loved everyone too.

She once told me

We were all very close….

Then one day, Pinky got an unexpected offer to advance her studies in Melbourne, Australia. Something that she always wanted to do but never knew if she could. It was indeed a hard decision for her. She talked to me and told me how on one hand she knew that this was something she had to do but on the other hand, the fact that she loved us all made it so hard for her to go. She never wanted to leave Nuffnang.

We all cried and hugged….. (no I’m kidding) but I eventually told her to go. She asked me if I would take her back when she came back and I said of course (if we had the right place for her then). 

Then an opportunity came up one day later. Our Nuffnang Australia office in Melbourne needed some extra help and I thought Pinky would be a great addition to it so we told her that we’ll give her a part-time job at Nuffnang Australia to come in if her schedule suited it.

She was delighted of course… that although she was leaving the team in KL, she wasn’t leaving the Nuffnang Family that interacts way too much casually over the inter-company e-mail chains.

On her last day at work in Nuffnang KL, we took her out for a farewell lunch where we had our traditional CNY yee sang.

And we gave her all a Goodbye card.

With all our ramblings written on it.

Mellissa and KY too gave her a nice going away present.

Pinky… we will all miss you.

Good luck at your shot at being an Aussie Nuffie.

Don’t cry… you promised not to cry!

Times are bad so Princess and I decided this week to cook!

I dug out this old Pasta recipe book that Ming bought for me a long time ago and flipped through the pages with Princess to come up with something we could both agree on. Everything I wanted to eat, she didn’t want and everything I didn’t want to eat, she wanted.

How like that!

So in the end we both settled for the most standard thing that anyone could eat. Carbonara!

It’s actually freaking easy to make, at least the one in the recipe book.

All you need to do is boil your spaghetti.

Then cut up some bacon and ham if you like.

And fry the ham with olive oil until it’s “golden brown” or so the recipe book described it as.

Then while you’re getting that done, crack 3 eggs and beat them with 3 table spoons of cream, something Princess very proudly did while looking as stylish as she could.

And then once the bacon is cooked enough, put in the pasta and the beated eggs and cream into the pan and you’ve got it all sorted out.

The end result… 

Not too bad eh.. only took us like 30 minutes. 

The joke though is that it ended up being more expensive to cook for two people than for us to eat out. I’ve learned that unless we’re dividing the food up to 4 or more people, just eat out!

I’ve been up all night rolling around the bed with a stomach ache. Woke up to throw up 4 times tonight alone, threw up until there’s nothing else but water left to hurl but still I’m hurling. What the hell is wrong with me. I don’t remember eating anything dodgy in the past few days!

I’m waiting desperately for the sun to rise so I can go see a doctor.

I think I’m going to hurl again… brb

Remember Andrew and Jayen, the very funny couple that took Princess and I around Hong Kong while we were there in December?

The two of them finally tied the knot and last night was their wedding dinner! At my age, all the previous wedding dinners I’ve had the chance to attend were all from relatives and family friends but this is the first one of a friend that I had ever attended.

Something that a lot of my older seniors tell me that I will experience more and more in the coming years. They say when you’re 26-35 you’ll be attending multiple weddings a year. 

More and more of your friends getting married which puts more and more pressure on YOU to get married and which also apparently encourages you to budget a certain amount for wedding Ang Pows you have to give out every year.

It’s like you estimate how many of your friends are probably going to get married this year and you budget for it.

Speaking of Ang Pow, Princess and I went to the wedding proudly armed with an Ang Pow. When we got to the registration table Princess asked me

Ish… silly question from Princess. I confidently walked up in front and told them that we were friends of the groom. They took out a list of names and asked us to mark down which ones were our names. I looked at the list up and down for a full two minutes but couldn’t find our names at all. For a minute there I thought that maybe we weren’t invited at all.

Then I turned to Princess and asked

She did of course. And we eventually found our names on another sheet of paper. Then we confidently walked in and sat down on our table with some of our other friends there.

Then about one hour into the dinner I turned to a friend seated on our table and asked

She said

Princess and I were taken aback a little. We let out a big

Then we asked everyone else

And they all said

Then I had a flashback. Right after I got our table number the guy who gave it to me was waiting for me for something. I wasn’t sure what… but it’s like… he didn’t exactly quickly move on to the person behind me right after he gave me my table number. 

But Princess and I got our table number and proudly walked in… we probably looked like a cheap bastards who came to eat free food.

Aihhh… we’re such wedding noobs. It was after all our first wedding of a friend. For all the previous weddings we’ve been to, our parents always handled the Ang Pow part and we shamefully paid little attention to any of that.

I hope he was sober enough to remember though. 

Aihh… goofy goofy us.

1) Chinese New Year cookies are just the best. Someone should open a shop that sells them all year round. I’ll be a regular customer. Love the coffee almond cookies, peanut butter cookies and pineapple tarts the best.

7 Hours is the time it takes from you to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai.

Just about a week ago the Nuffies were having our usual lunch together at a cafe near the office on Heritage Row. We were talking about the usual stuff… celebrity blogger gossip, movies, relationships and sex. 

Then at one point some of the guys started talking about phones. Nicholas who had been with Nuffnang since some of our earlier days had a phone that was close to a hundred years old that he thought needed replacing.

That reminded me of something… of how since months ago we’ve been meaning to get Nicholas a Blackberry since he’s often out of the office for meetings and it’ll help him send and receive his e-mails while he’s out. Besides some of my friends have it and they all think it’s great.

So when we all got back to the office after lunch I pulled him to a corner and told him we were going to get him a Blackberry Bold, the latest Blackberry in the market here so far. That would be Nuffnang’s gift to him… not a company phone but his. That means we buy him the phone as a present and even if he leaves…. he keeps it (you’re not going to leave are you dude?)

The next day we all went over to Pavilion for lunch and accompanied Nicholas to a Maxis outlet to get him a Blackberry. 

Needless to say, he was excited like a teenager about to get his first blowjob.

While the rest of the Nuffies pretended to be sad that they weren’t getting one themselves yet. 

The Blackberry Bold turned out to be a pretty cool phone. 

Now Nicholas not only checks his e-mail in real-time but is online on MSN constantly 24 hours a day wherever he goes. Most of the time however, the truth behind your boss giving you a Blackberry is so that he can e-mail you anytime he likes and you can no longer use the excuse: “I haven’t checked my mail yet”.

HAHAHA! Nicholas… fooled you are!!! FOOLED I TELL YOU!!!

Nevertheless… Nicholas was still happy.

and Pinky still pretending to be sad. 

—————–

Just this week Ming came up with an idea. He declared that Nuffnang should give all its staff Chinese New Year Ang Pow for luck. You know so our Nuffies will make more money throughout the year.

It’s my first time giving out Ang Pow’s since clearly I’m not married, and I had no idea how much to give. So I asked Tim 2 (One of the Nuffies) how much was the average Ang Pow he got every year. Then I took that number he gave me and multiplied it by 10 and that was the Ang Pow we gave out to the Nuffies in the customized Nuffnang Ang Pow packets.

It turned out to be quite a lot of money but I think the Nuffies all deserved it. They all worked very very hard many days, even through weekends sometimes selling ads, servicing clients and even planning events for Nuffnangers. 

May everyone have a Happy Chinese New Year up ahead!

To my readers who are heading back to their hometowns, take advantage of this week to spend time with family and catch up with old friends.

To my readers who are overseas for work or study…. fret not. I know how you feel, I spent 3 years in the UK without coming home for Chinese New Year. It doesn’t feel the same…. but being around friends and a phone call back home just makes you feel better.