Okay here’s the story.

One of my buddies here in Penang stays in an area where in order to get there, you actually have to go through some rural jungle road.

If you drive down that road often enough, you’ll see see something you don’t usually see anywhere else.

Once it was late at night and I was driving down the really dimly lit road when suddenly I saw a huge snake crossing the road. When I say huge I meant it was fat as anything and its length was from one end of the road to the other.

I didn’t manage to stop in time so I quickly just ran over it and it felt as if I ran over some speed bump.Too bad I didn’t actually get to take a picture of that snake but man it was huge.

The funny thing is the next morning I drove down that same road and the snake was gone!

Heck if I ran over a person with my car he would be dead for sure but that wasn’t enough to kill this huge snake!

Anyway just today I was driving down that same road again when I saw a huge lizard casually taking his time to cross the road.
Heck fair enough it doesn’t look that big in pictures but if you were there and you could see it in detail, man it made me stop my car just to take a look.

I whipped out my phone and started snapping away.

At one point it stared at me with one of its eyes as if it was going to pounce on to my windscreen.

Too bad I was alone and had no one to share the moment with. After admiring it for like 2 minutes and after waiting for it to cross the road I drove away.

Now here’s a question for all of you.

If you were to see a big lizard like that on the road while you’re driving down alone, what would you do?

Would you…

(A) Slow down and slowly try to drive past it.

(B) Turn back and take another route.

(C) Get down from the car to take some pictures.

(D) Floor the accelerator and try to run over it screaming “DIEEEEEEE MUTHAAFUCKAAAAAAA!!!!!”.
If you answered (A), well done on you for always keeping out of trouble.

If you answered (B), you’ve been watching too many horror movies. It’s just a big lizard and you’re in the safety of your car!

If you answered (C), you must be a blogger.

and if you answered (D), I bear no responsibility for what the environmentalists or care for wildlife people will do to you if they find out who you are. If I were you I would go hug a tree now just to make up for it.GO!!! GO AND HUG A TREE NOW!!!

HUG IT HARD!!!

Legend has it that one should not have durian and consume alcohol along with it.

Apparently the belief is that drinking alcohol with durian in your stomach will expand the durian in your stomach and eventually cause your stomach to explode.

Today, some of my friends put that to the test.

We had a DURIAN PARTY!!!
Any of you guys had a durian party before?

It’s where we’ll all buy lots and lots of durians and have durian for dinner at someone’s place. I know I know… a little bit of a weird idea at first but once you get used to it… it’s not that bad after all.
All you need is TRUCK LOADS OF DURIAN (well fine I exaggerated) and the tools of trade. A big CHOPPER

When I got to the party, a particular tray caught my attention.

It was a tray with wine glasses.
I thought to myself.. heck… maybe everyone really IS serious about drinking alcohol while eating durians.

And true enough, shortly after we started eating our durians, the beer was the first to come out.
Lots and lots of beer.

I didn’t have any though… not worth having my stomach blow up because of that. Besides I’ve always been more of a Heineken guy.

So I just focused on durians. I must’ve had like 15 pieces before I sat back on a plastic chair with my bulging stomach sticking out.
Turns out that half of the people there were like
“Uhh… no booze for me… I’m not taking the risk of having my stomach explode”.

Whereas the other half… just went….
“YAAAAAM SEEEEEEEEENGGG!!!!”

And soon the beer was done and red wine made its debut.

In just one hour we were done with countless number of durians and I was feeling so thirsty that I was drinking soo much water to quench my thirst.

That was about when one of my other friends came to me and said
“WOI!!! Don’t drink so much water after you eat durian, it makes the durian expand and makes you feel even more bloated!!!”

I looked at him for a minute and asked
“But I’m thirsty.. then how?”

He grabbed me a can of Tiger and said
“DRINK BEER!!! BETTER FOR YOU!!!! LAI LAI LAI CHEERS!!!!”

Ish..

By the end of the night, we must’ve finished 10-15 durians… and was stil left with countless more!It’s now been hours since the party now and so far I haven’t heard anyone who was drinking there get into any trouble so I guess… maybe that legend really is just a myth. Either ways, I wouldn’t take the risk.

Would you?

I’m back in our Penang office right now.

Just took a 4 hour drive from KL back to Penang yesterday to see if the team here is keeping well but most importantly to do some interviews.

Nuffnang is hiring again and I’m going to be spending much of the next few days in this Board Room at the Penang office.

Ahhh… this board room brings so many memories. It was the very same board room that all the early meetings at Nuffnang were held to address all our issues back then (don’t be carried away… our Nuffnang KL and Singapore office are hardly as nice as the Penang one).

These few days I’ll be using the boardroom to conduct some interviews for some new positions at Nuffnang Malaysia.

Among the positions we’re looking to hire are: an accountant, an ad operations guy and a PHP programmer.

If anyone asks me what is the hardest part of doing business, it’s not so much raising funds to do it... that’s really easy.. heck so many Venture Caps and companies have approached us wanting to invest millions in Nuffnang.

It’s also not quite selling.. although that’s pretty hard as well.

But to me.. it’s finding the right people.In the past year at Nuffnang I’ve found myself always looking to hire more and more people to keep up with the fast growth of the company. Being young, I have made my fair share of bad hires but I’ve always learned from my mistakes and very fortunately managed to hire very good people later on.

The crew at Nuffnang is really very much life family to me and I take pride that we are a young and fun bunch. The oldest at Nuffnang is 28 years old, and the average age is 24, similar to many other tech companies like Google or even Jobstreet when they first started off.

I take pride in that… that we’re a very young company run by young and very capable people. So much that it shocks our clients sometimes when they meet us in person to see that such young people were responsible for delivering such unquestionable results.

And because we’re young, our work culture is pretty unique and open.

Everyone works independently without having to have any supervisor breathe down his neck but everyone understands that if he doesn’t keep up with his work, he holds the entire team back from moving forward and we’re all working collectively for the same thing.

I love our team at Nuffnang and I think we have the most capable team I could ever ask for and I think they love me too. Right guys?

Now I’m going to have to go into an interview, to add to that family.

Last night I was out with some friends at Laundry and we started talking about How Long on Average Does Sex Last?

What happened was this.

One of my friends, lets call him Jacob was away in the toilet when the rest of us who were there talked to his girlfriend and asked her “Hey how long do you think?”

First she asked what the definition of it meant, whether it included foreplay or not and we said NO. Only actual intercourse is counted.

Her answer then was…
“10 Minutes”.

So fair enough right?

We went back to our beers until Jacob came back.
Now the thing about asking this question to guys and girls is. Most girls will be honest about it but most guys find it natural to exaggerate a little bit. Obviously Jacob’s girlfriend’s answer should be pretty accurate right?

Then we waited for Jacob to come back from the toilet and we asked him the same question.
His answer.. true enough was… “20 minutes!!!”.

What’s the actual answer then.

I was browsing through YouTube the other day, looking at the Most Watched Videos of the day and I happened to come across this video that interviewed what people thought was the average duration of sex and what the actual duration is based on certain studies.

You can watch the video for the answer.

Or if you’re in the office and can’t watch it fine let me give you the answer.
The average duration of a sex session is 3-7 minutes.

Compare this to the poll results that you guys submitted.My readers must be awesome in bed.

So today I was at Suntec Convention Center again in Singapore for the Ad Tech Conference Day 2.

Now in these conferences you meet a lot of other people and I happened to meet this American guy who is the Asia Pacific Vice-President of a very very big website… and I mean a HUGE site.

This particular site is one of the most highest trafficked sites in the world and most certainly one of the most well-known. They’re so big they even have a huge dedicated sales team.
When I met the guy, we were just casually talking when he started telling us how when all the ad networks there at the conference met him and found out who he was, they immediately wanted to get him to join their network eventhough he’s representing a site that is already so huge that it probably already brings in ad revenue in the hundreds of millions each year.

He seemed okay talking to Ming and I though. We weren’t trying to sell him anything.
So anyway, he was saying why he prefers to handle his own sales team and all that and how they already make huge amounts of money which is why he hasn’t really found it in himself yet to sign up with one of those huge ad networks.

But I particularly liked the analogy in which he used to describe his situation at the conference.

He said
“I’m like the prom queen… and everyone wants to fuck me!”

LOL

PS: Hey on another note. I was surfing the net when I happened to find an interesting statistic about the average length of sex.

Very interesting answer but before I give you the answer, lets do a poll on my blog to see what my readers think. Okay guys.. be honest and answer the poll on my sidebar! I’ll post up the answer tomorrow or the day after.

I left KL yesterday to head to Singapore.I’ve been sitting on so many airplanes lately I’ve been getting a bit uncomfortable on planes so I decided that this time I had to take a bus down instead and let me just say it was a refreshing change… though I may go back to taking planes again soon.

The reason why I’m down in Singapore these couple of days is for an event called Ad Tech. To the online advertising industry all over South East Asia, Ad Tech has got to be one of the biggest conferences around.
It’s the kind of conference where everyone who’s anyone in the advertising industry goes for. If you’re not going for the workshops they have there, it is at least worth going to meet all sorts of interesting people there.

The conference covered a lot of topics about online advertising, whether it’s measurements or video ads or even whether it’s bridging the confidence gap for online advertising.

Yes it’s a joke right?

In Malaysia there are said to be 10-12 million internet users and yet… many many advertisers are reluctant to try online ads or even online mainstream ads like MSN and Yahoo let alone something like blog advertising.

Anyway this year’s one was a little bit special.

One of the workshops we had was on blogs and… my partner Ming was one of the speakers on the panel discussion they had to the huge crowd of people.

It was truly an honour for Nuffnang to be on such a panel along with Xiaxue and Jeff Ooi.Being the cheeky partner that I was. I kept trying to make Ming nervous before his speech.

I mean this was not only a huge crowd that he was speaking to but it was a crowd that carried a lot of weight. Everyone in the crowd had some kind of influence on his/her organization.

So I kept saying
“WOW.. I counted the seats.. there’s like 650 people here!!!”

And his reply was
“F*CK YOU LAH!!! STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME NERVOUS!!!”

So to distract ourselves we took some pictures. One with Jeff and one with Xiaxue.
It was a pretty great talk, although the audience was a little more captivated by another talk we listened to earlier in the morning when a few of the industry leaders, one from an advertising agency and another from Yahoo compared online advertising to sex.

He said something along the lines of
“Online advertising from a marketers point of view is a bit like sex. When you’re a teenager you hear everyone talking about sex so you’re curious to try it. When you do, you get disappointed the first time.. but the great thing is you keep trying and when you do you get better and begin to enjoy it”.That sure woke everyone in the audience up.

Anyway, after Ming finished his speech, I went for a few more workshops and we ended the day late in the evening with this networking session they had for all the industry people.

It’s the kind of thing where they just served drinks and everyone met everyone else, exchanging name cards.

I met all sorts of people there… apparently even the owners of Friendster were there and fortunately when I handed by card to anyone I met, the response I got was
“OHHHHhhh.. NUFFNANG… I’VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT YOU GUYS!!! YOU GUYS ARE GREAT!!!”

Ahh… being human, sometimes it’s just nice to get a leeetle bit of recognition for your work.

Got another full day at the conference tomorrow.

WHO THINKS THIS GUY IS A LEGEND!??!?!?!

Watch this video.

Bloody hell!!!!

When Ming and I first started Nuffnang a little more than a year ago, we did almost everything ourselves.

Everything from answering e-mails from bloggers to hiring more people to doing our own accounting to doing sales pitches to get the sales in.

Then as the network grew and our clients became bigger and bigger, the team grew bigger and we had more help but the growth of Nuffnang has been so fast that even till today we haven’t been able to hire everyone we need.

For a startup entrepreneur, it’s a very liberating yet worrying feeling to have more people working with you. Liberating because you have more help and can afford to delegate but worrying because you have to start trusting your colleagues that they will do a better job than you.

In the past, whatever community events were all mostly planned single-handedly by myself too (though of course they were in a very much smaller scale then since Nuffnang was a lot smaller then compared to now). That means I even did all the packing of goodie bags too.

But last weekend’s Wild “Live” Blogging event was a first for me.

One day many months ago my mum called me up and said
“Son.. you are working so hard you are going to burn out, you MUST learn to delegate and just focus on the things that really really matter”.

So in the Wild “Live” Blogging, I really let go. Rather than go through all the details, all I did was oversee to make sure everything was going as planned pre-event and signing all the cheques.

Robb and my other colleagues at Nuffnang handled the rest, even the sourcing of my LION COSTUME.

ROAR!!!

Okay I just have gotta say this.

Nuffnangers are among the most sporting people I ever know.

I mean… have an animal-themed party anywhere else and chances are.. maybe only 20% of the crowd will really come as animals.

But have one with Nuffnangers and almost EVERYONE turned up in their animal costumes.

I’m just gonna show you guys some pics of the wonderful night we all had.

Lets start with Michbaby who came as a bunny.

There were quite a few girls there that came as Playboy bunnies hehe.

The “COW BOYS” of the night. Check out their nipples.

Then there’s PinkPau who came as a ladybird armed with her own leaf.

A few MDG girls were there too including Hanis over here who came as a moth

And Ringo who came as a LIONESS

Kenny came as Winnie The Pooh!

The big crowd of everyone playing around that night.
Look how everyone is smiling…
such a nice feeling.

Michelle, PinkPau, Sam and Fayth

It got a little crowded there at some points but sooner
or later everyone learned to space out a little.

We had 5 laptops there all hooked up to Maxis Broadband for
anyone to LIVE BLOG about the event.

Kenny dancing with one of our “Cow Boys”

Sam, Audrey, Ringo and Suet all looking wonderful. Can you see Sam’s bunny tail?

I’m too short to take good pictures sometimes.

Check out the butterfly!
We had a few butterflies that night, all with big big wings. It was so cute.

And finalllyyy…

A group picture of everyone (well okay almost everyone) who work (or used to work) at Nuffnang.

Including our Nuffnang PR, Kim from KimKomm.

To my colleagues who did a fantastic job, congratulations.

Thanks very much to Maxis Broadband for whom without… we would never be able to hold such an event for all 200 of us.

And finally… thanks to all you Nuffnangers who made the party WILD beyond our imagination.

If you guys wanna see more pictures, click here for Shaolintiger’s set and here for Kid Chan Studios our official photographer of the night.

When Ming and I first started Nuffnang a little more than a year ago, we did almost everything ourselves.

Everything from answering e-mails from bloggers to hiring more people to doing our own accounting to doing sales pitches to get the sales in.

Then as the network grew and our clients became bigger and bigger, the team grew bigger and we had more help but the growth of Nuffnang has been so fast that even till today we haven’t been able to hire everyone we need.

For a startup entrepreneur, it’s a very liberating yet worrying feeling to have more people working with you. Liberating because you have more help and can afford to delegate but worrying because you have to start trusting your colleagues that they will do a better job than you.

In the past, whatever community events were all mostly planned single-handedly by myself too (though of course they were in a very much smaller scale then since Nuffnang was a lot smaller then compared to now). That means I even did all the packing of goodie bags too.

But last weekend’s Wild “Live” Blogging event was a first for me.

One day many months ago my mum called me up and said
“Son.. you are working so hard you are going to burn out, you MUST learn to delegate and just focus on the things that really really matter”.

So in the Wild “Live” Blogging, I really let go. Rather than go through all the details, all I did was oversee to make sure everything was going as planned pre-event and signing all the cheques.

Robb and my other colleagues at Nuffnang handled the rest, even the sourcing of my LION COSTUME.

ROAR!!!

Okay I just have gotta say this.

Nuffnangers are among the most sporting people I ever know.

I mean… have an animal-themed party anywhere else and chances are.. maybe only 20% of the crowd will really come as animals.

But have one with Nuffnangers and almost EVERYONE turned up in their animal costumes.

I’m just gonna show you guys some pics of the wonderful night we all had.

Lets start with Michbaby who came as a bunny.

There were quite a few girls there that came as Playboy bunnies hehe.

The “COW BOYS” of the night. Check out their nipples.

Then there’s PinkPau who came as a ladybird armed with her own leaf.

A few MDG girls were there too including Hanis over here who came as a moth

And Ringo who came as a LIONESS

Kenny came as Winnie The Pooh!

The big crowd of everyone playing around that night.
Look how everyone is smiling…
such a nice feeling.

Michelle, PinkPau, Sam and Fayth

It got a little crowded there at some points but sooner
or later everyone learned to space out a little.

We had 5 laptops there all hooked up to Maxis Broadband for
anyone to LIVE BLOG about the event.

Kenny dancing with one of our “Cow Boys”

Sam, Audrey, Ringo and Suet all looking wonderful. Can you see Sam’s bunny tail?

I’m too short to take good pictures sometimes.

Check out the butterfly!
We had a few butterflies that night, all with big big wings. It was so cute.

And finalllyyy…

A group picture of everyone (well okay almost everyone) who work (or used to work) at Nuffnang.

Including our Nuffnang PR, Kim from KimKomm.

To my colleagues who did a fantastic job, congratulations.

Thanks very much to Maxis Broadband for whom without… we would never be able to hold such an event for all 200 of us.

And finally… thanks to all you Nuffnangers who made the party WILD beyond our imagination.

If you guys wanna see more pictures, click here for Shaolintiger’s set and here for Kid Chan Studios our official photographer of the night.

A conversation I had over dinner today

Jane: Hey you know, sometimes you go to places like Body Shop and they put up a big sign that says “NO ANIMAL TESTING”. If they don’t test their products on animals then what do they test it on?

Me: Ermm.. maybe like.. lab rats?

Jane: But rats are animals too.

Me: Oh uhmm… then maybe the chemists tests it on themselves

Jane: I highly doubt there are enough chemists to test all the products they have out there.

Me: Well then maybe.. they just don’t test it. If you have some kind of reaction to it, there’s always a hotline number you could call and that’s how they’ll know…

Jane: Well I guess that’s better than testing on animals……

*3 seconds later*

Jane: No wait…