Let me tell you about my Saturday last weekend. It was pretty awesome. Here’s why:

1) Seeing the Nuffies work together to overcome a crisis faced by some of their colleagues.

This Saturday was one of the first Saturdays ever that the Nuffies spent a full working day in the office. What happened was a couple of days before our web host Exabytes which manages a great deal of servers for us had an intrusion in their networks.

The intrusion led to the deletion of 50 of their servers and their backups. Call it bad luck but ChurpChurp was one of those 50 servers that were affected. Fortunately for us though we have a remote backup for ChurpChurp so we had something to fall back on but after restoring the backup we still had some missing information. Some accounts or reports or earnings details were missing.

The ChurpChurp team was quick in responding though. They got the site back up, made an announcement and set up a help desk for Churpers to notify them if they had any missing information so they could cross check whatever records they had and recreate those accounts. A lot of work had to be done though and the ChurpChurp team consist of a team of ten.

They knew they were understaffed. So they sent out an email to the rest of the Nuffies in the other companies in our Netccentric group and asked for help.

Everyone volunteered to clear up their Saturdays to come into work and help ChurpChurp. It was amazing. Our office was buzzing on Saturday with everyone working on quickly managing and responding to this crisis.

It’s at times of crisis like this where a team is really tested and I’m proud of the way the ChurpChurp team responded to this. The past few days I saw the stress in their eyes but I saw how they took turns to be each others’ strength and put up a strong front. Because of this support they had for one another, the atmosphere in the office was actually quite upbeat. Everyone was working really hard but still moments of laughter broke out throughout the day.

The vast majority of Churpers who had notified us of problems with their accounts would have their cases resolved and be notified of that in the next few days. Something that would have taken much longer than the time it took. All thanks to the whole team coming together to work on this over the weekend.

Times like these really make me realize that the core asset of a company really isn’t its website or database or technology or anything like that but is the team.

As for me…. I kinda enjoyed our Saturday in the office doing a little bit of data entry work. I joked that we should do it more often and the Nuffies stopped all they were doing and looked at me in fear. Then I said “No la no la just joking! Work life balance ok!”.

2) Got a new coffee machine!!

I took a couple hours out of my Saturday to go to Publika for this Nescafe Dolce Gusto event there were they let bloggers try their hand at making coffee with their cool coffee machine.

The first time I actually tried Nescafe Dolce Gusto was actually during a tea break at a conference I was attending. They had this booth for people to try the coffee from this machine and when I tried it I was really impressed. All you had to do was put a capsule like this that costs RM1.75 each into the machine and you can have all sorts of coffee made.

The cool part was that they let all the Nuffnang bloggers there take home a machine each along with 6 weeks supply of coffee. I now have one at home!

Woohoo!

3) Singing in the car

Sometimes it’s the simplest pleasures of a day that make me happy. Shorty and I were driving out of KL to buy the Nuffies lunch. We decided that if everyone was going to be working in the office on a Saturday we had to tarpau some really good food! We decided to take a drive to Village Park Nasi Lemak in Uptown.

On our way back we were listening to Jersey Boys in the car and singing along to all the songs.

You guys remember Jersey Boys right? We caught it in Vegas and it’s to date my favourite musical of all time (overtaking Wicked).

Here’s a sneak peek on the songs we were singing along to.

It’s awesome.

The last part of my Saturday was actually spent in Zouk with my old uni friends. It was a last minute thing. I didn’t know I was going to go for that until like 2 hours before. I don’t have any pictures for that night in Zouk because well.. to be honest I ended up mixing whiskey and champagne and you know what happens when you do that.

I had an awesome Saturday and you know the funny thing was that I never saw it coming. I just thought it was going to be a regular Saturday that I had to spent in the office when I woke up in the morning. Sometimes as Forest Gump says, life really is a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.

Life is full of pleasures. We just need to know how to find them.

Today marks exactly two months since Shorty and I got married.

I actually can’t believe that it’s only been two months. It surely feels a lot longer than that. This marriage thing just came by and hit me so quickly. Just a while ago I was talking to one of the Nuffies about whether she’s looking to married when she pointed out that she was only 24-25 and too young to think about married. I thought back about the time when I was 25 and I remember feeling the same way. Then just 3 years later I found myself married. Somehow that 3 years from the time you’re 25-28 changes your perspective of marriage significantly. Before that you tend to procrastinate. You think marriage is a long way ahead. Then one or two of your friends get married… and you think to yourself “Wow so fast?”.

And in the next 2-3 years that one or two starts becoming ten or twenty and before you know it… that is the number of weddings you will be attending in a year. Suddenly it will then hit you one day that marriage doesn’t really seem so far away. That it’s actually… pretty close.

Since I got married two months ago, the question I often get asked when I meet friends is

“So how’s married life?”.

I always just replied “It’s ok…” or “It feels the same”.

But today I decided to really sit down and think carefully about how married life is like. And here’s what it’s like so far.

– I miss the excitement of the uncertainty. I always wondered who the girl I would end up marrying would be like. Now I do know her… I miss the excitement of not knowing who she was but knowing that she was going to come into my life any time.

– I miss the excitement of being single too. You know how when you’re single and you go out and then you meet someone that you’re attracted to… there is the excitement of chasing that someone. The courting game you play where you make moves and she responds and when she does respond… wow does it feel awesome! That doesn’t happen anymore when you’re married.

But on the other hand….

– I love the way my bond with Shorty grew. I mean it’s not like we didn’t have a bond when we were dating for the almost 4 years till we got married but once you get married it’s like you know you’re in it with this person for the long run. Through sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for anything good or bad that life throws at you, you will always have that someone that will always be on your side. That is a wonderful feeling. Knowing that no matter what, your husband/wife has got your back.

– Some people say marriage is where romance or love goes to die. Maybe we’re only 2 months in but I haven’t seen any of that yet. I still feel the same about Shorty as I did in the first day I met her. Just last week I was busy at work when I kicked back from my computer to take a break and think about Shorty. I missed her… even though I had woken up right next to her a few hours ago that very same morning… I missed her again.

– Shorty and I still make each other laugh a lot.

Last week we decided to count the number of times we made each other laugh in that one day. We didn’t count the little jokes. Only the big ones that made us laugh out loud. We counted 10 by the time we went to bed that night.

– I don’t feel scared of marriage anymore. Maybe because I’ve already done it hahaha.. but the truth is that up till the point I proposed I’ve always feared marriage and commitment. I now think marriage is cool!

– Shorty and I are still pretty independent of one another. In all my past relationships, whenever I travel away, I always had to call my girlfriend just before I went to bed to talk to her. Funny enough over the 4 years that Shorty and I have been together… we’ve never had that routine. She would go to Japan and leave me in KL and sometimes I would message her but days could go by where we never talked on the phone. When we eventually met up again though we always spent a good amount of time catching up on all that talk.

– Waking up with Shorty is still loads of fun every morning. I always wake up first and go to my study. When I come back into the bedroom she’ll be lying down checking Twitter on her phone but when she hears me she’ll immediately pretend to be asleep again.

– I still ask her sometimes “How did I end up with this Shorty ar?”. A question we ask each other quite a lot because physically we’re really not each other’s type.

So far… married life rocks. I wish we’ll always be like that.

Oh and  we still say “I love you”. Last time was just a few nights ago.

This morning I woke up and saw Neil Patrick Harris posted a picture of him chilling at the poolside of his Vegas hotel. Kinda made me miss Vegas and our US trip. That thought then moved on to me missing… the Cheesecake Factory. This chain in the US with the best cheesecakes. Like this one.

My Cheesecake factory binge is the reason why Shorty decided to ban me from eating any desserts or sugar drinks for the next month after we came back from the US. Man it was so hard and I only managed to do it for 10 days. That 10 days though was quite a challenge but believe it or not in those 10 days, I actually lost a few KG (coupled with my daily jogging routine).

Still I gave up eventually when I was waiting waiting in KLIA for my plane to Manila. I have this airline card that lets me get into the airport lounge for free even if I’m flying economy class. When I was in there I noticed… free flow Haagen Dazs ice-cream. The fat person who wants to be skinny.. in me said.. NOOooo… but the Malaysian in me said “Anything free just take”.

Eventually the Malaysian won. I guess I’m more Malaysian than I am fatty and that was when my 10 day streak of no dessert or sugar drinks ended.

So I was browsing my pictures at one of the Cheesecake factories we went to in the Bay Area and I managed to find one of my favourite pictures of Shorty. When we first got into the Cheesecake Factory I was busy taking pictures and I asked Shorty to go get us a table.

I saw her move on to the girl behind the counter and ask for a table. I noticed that the girl behind the counter had to tip toe a little bit when she talked to Shorty. I thought it was damn cute. Even more cute was this picture I took of her while she was waiting for a table and standing next to a divider. A divider that was actually as tall as she was (I remember the counter to be almost as high as the divider too… just a little lower).

So I put my phone camera on top of the flat surface of the divider and took a picture of Shorty. This is what my phone camera caught.

Yes ladies & gentlemen, this is how my Shorty looks like from divider-level. I think it’s cute.

Before I start on this blog post, I have something to show you guys.

NICE OR NOT MY T-SHIRT?!?

Haha I saw it when I was in Japan town in San Francisco and immediately picked it up. I have this little infatuation for Domokun. If you ever come by our office you’ll see me walking around in these slippers.

Shorty bought it for me two years ago coincidentally at Japan Town in San Francisco as well and I’ve been wearing it since. Not only is it awesome-looking but it keeps my feet really really warm too.

Anyway ok on to the main part of my post. I was just checking my Formspring today… something I haven’t had the time to check at all in months. Yes I’m sorry… I’ve been left many questions that went unanswered and I can’t seem to get down to actually answering them all and I’m sorry for that.

So I logged in today and I saw this question.

I was going about to respond to it when I decided that maybe I should just do a blog post about it. Yes it is the age-old question and society’s expectation… that when a man brings a woman out he should pay for everything. Or he ain’t no man right?

Well I kinda have a really different thought to that.

See to me, a relationship is a pretty strong word. How do you know that you’re in a relationship? What do you physically do or …. what is the thing a man and a woman could do that says the most about their relationship together. No it’s not hugging, it’s not kissing and it’s not even sex. To me… it’s holding hands. You can go to Zouk on a Saturday night and see a couple who just met kissing, hugging and doing all of the above after that. But you will never see a couple who just met… walk and hold hands in public.

So to me when a couple walks and holds hands in public… you know that SHIT JUST GOT SERIOUS.

What is a relationship then? It’s past courtship. A relationship is the conscious decision that a guy and a girl make to commit to spend time together… whether physically or over the phone. It’s almost a promise that for as long as this relationship lasts, each will be there for the other. And as long as the relationship lasts… both will go through the continuous struggles of putting aside differences.

So a relationship is two-way (or at least I think that couples in two-way relationships are happiest).

Now I bring us back to the initial question. Should a guy pay for everything in a relationship?

My answer to that is… it depends. It depends on the dynamics of the relationship and it depends on the economic circumstances of either side. If the guy is earning more, then by all means let the guy pay. If the girl is earning more… then yes let the girl pay. After all why does it matter? What’s important is that nobody takes anyone for granted and everyone is happy! If we spend too much time as a couple bickering over who should pay for what…. we end up forgetting to enjoy the journey of the relationship. That… is a bigger waste than the cost of a dinner or 10 dinners.

Do I pay for Shorty? Yes most of the time I do because so far I earn more from her. We always joked though that if she does Foruchizu and makes much more money than me then she will be the one paying for me.

Still Shorty likes to pay every now and then and it doesn’t matter the amount. It’s only the thought that matters. When we go for a steak dinner, I’ll pay. But when we go eat my favourite pork noodle in Imbi, she pays. Whatever it is… we’re both happy.

So put all expectations aside and just enjoy the relationship. Because would you rather have an abundance of happiness in your life? Or an abundance of money? I would pick an abundance of happiness any day.

After two weeks of traveling to different parts of the region for the small exclusive blogger previews we put together in 4 countries….Today is the launch of NuffnangX.

Before I go on to tell you what it really is about for the first time, let me tell you how this idea came about. Since 2-3 years ago Ming has always said that we need to one way or another find a business that is targeted at the mobile phone. The mobile phone was huge and it was about to get bigger and even today the outlook looks the same. Mobile phones are a bigger deal than they ever were and they’re still set to look even bigger. So Netccentric went on to explore various different internet businesses but we eventually came back to our roots of blogging. Netccentric’s first company after all (Nuffnang) is a company about blogs.

Now here’s the thing about blogs. In today’s world, some 50% of Twitter’s 175 million users and 54% of Facebook’s 900 million users are mobile users. We pulled stats from figures of the 1,000,000 blogs Nuffnang has in Asia and we found that only 1% of blog readers read their blog on their mobile phone. Because of that, the influence of bloggers are being held back. So when I was at Nuffnang Blogopolis in July, someone asked me “What challenges lie ahead for the blogosphere?”. My answer to it… was technology. In the past 10 years so much has changed when it came to social media. Friendster, MySpace and Bebe came and went, then came Facebook, Twitter and today we have Instagram and Twitter. On the blog front, the only thing that has come out of Silicon Valley are platforms like Tumblr and Posterous but when it comes to long-form blogging, all we have is still WordPress and Blogger. After 10 years.

We waited for Silicon Valley to come up with some new mobile innovations for the blogging community but after a few years of waiting nothing happened. So one day Ming and I decided that we had to do it. So Ming and I took out money from our own pockets and created a new company called NuffnangX that will develop a mobile app for reading blogs. Credit to Ming… the app was his idea and I thought was one of the best ideas ever.

As much as felt passionate about the idea and the app it’s a risky investment though. NuffnangX has no revenue model, no ads no nothing for now and will likely not have one at least for the short – medium term. In this period we’re all focused on only one thing… to build a product that users love.

So what does NuffnangX do?

1) Follow Blogs You Love

You can follow blogs that you love just like you follow people on Twitter or Instagram. You can also comment on them, heart them, or share them but that’s not it.

This is where it differs from a traditional reader. Now traditional readers normally pull the title of a blog and then its first paragraph. We felt though that one paragraph is still too long for people to decide whether they want to read a blog or not on a mobile phone. So we developed an algorithm that will crawl through an entire blog and pick the one most interesting line of the blog entry to display on the app.

We call this line the “elevator pitch”.

So for example, when I read Xiaxue’s blog on my reader this is the line it pulls.

The “elevator pitch” may or may not be the first line of the blog entry. In Xiaxue’s case if you compare it with the full blog entry, the line is somewhere in the middle and it’s good enough to tell you what “Quirky Kwerkee” is about and interest you to click it.

Cool huh? It’s currently about 70-80% accurate but will get more accurate in time. How the algorithm does it is still a secret but we’ve filed for a patent for it.

2) NuffnangX Conversations

The other cool feature about NuffnangX that probably hasn’t been properly discovered by a lot of users yet is NuffnangX Conversations. This feature we hope will change the way people leave comments on blogs and respond to them. Traditionally if you want to leave a comment on a blog, you fill up a form and then you leave a comment there. When a blogger wants to respond to it, he/she leaves a another comment herself like this.

That is one of the most frustrating things about making comments or responding to comments.

What NuffnangX conversations does is that it lumps comments into conversation threads.

And because everything is on mobile, when you leaves a comment on my blog via the NuffnangX Conversations plugin below OR via the NuffnangX app, I will get a notification on my phone. When I get that, I can reply your comment from my mobile phone and you will then get a notification on your phone (if you used your NuffnangX account to comment). Commenting on blogs then become a very direct conversation with bloggers and bloggers can reply comments now when they’re on a bus or waiting for an elevator.

You can try it when you see the NuffnangX Conversations plugin at the bottom of my blog.

3) Discovery

There are millions of great blogs out there all over the world. Many blogs that you would be interested to read but you just don’t know how to find them. Up till today there still isn’t a really easy way to find good fashion blogs or tech blogs or even sports blogs. We hope to change that in NuffnangX. To make it easy for people to find new blogs in categories they’re interested in. I for example am really interested in technology, gadgets and celebrity news so NuffnangX has helped me find and follow blogs I wish I knew existed before.

All in all, NuffnangX’s launch today marks the end of some 9 months of preparation work. It is however only the beginning of what we plan to do with the app. After ironing little bugs we have in our initial launch we have so many more ideas on things we can do with NuffnangX. Ideas that we’re holding back for now because we want to make the app as simple as possible to understand. It’s a long road ahead for Ming and I… but a really exciting one.

So download NuffnangX on the Apple App Store for iPhone or Google Play for Android and try it out. I’d love to hear what you think.

Back to work now for me! I have a conference call with the US NuffnangX team in 90 minutes. Good night everyone!

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UPDATE: OMG 9 HOURS AFTER LAUNCH AND WE’VE MADE IT TO THE 5TH MOST DOWNLOADED APP ON APPLE’S APP STORE IN SINGAPORE AND 11TH IN MALAYSIA!!!

Today I learned that my blog is one of the few blogs my dear friend Eric Soong reads. So say HELLO ERIC SOONG!

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Hello!

Somewhere in the middle of this week I found myself in the air again!

Lilian,  my new assistant and I took a flight to Manila for the NuffnangX preview event there to twenty of the top bloggers in the Philippines. Of course…. since we were going there we took the chance to do some work with Nuffnang Philippines too and to have lunch with the team.

The team in Nuffnang Philippines now is 16 Nuffies strong. I still remember when we first invested into the Philippines back in 2008. Ming and I had taken whatever money we had earned and then put it all into the Philippines. The digital market in the Philippines at the time was small but we believed in it and we were blessed with finding good partners there. 4 years later it’s paying off. Nuffnang Philippines is one of the fastest growing companies in our group and that investment we made in 2008 paid itself back and more. Not just in monetary terms but in the friendships we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned.

Of all the Nuffies we have everywhere, I think in no other country do the Nuffies love to drink as much as the Nuffies in Nuffnang Philippines do. Every time I go there my liver gets punished a little. When I was at the Nuffnang Philippines office this time round though, I spotted this on one of the Nuffies’ chairs.

They actually made their own custom made Nuffnang letter jacket. Kinda reminds me of McKinley High in Glee. Heh now I feel like making one for the rest of the Nuffies too. The NuffnangX Blogger Preview there was really fun. Maybe it’s because I saw some familiar faces.. like Jane here who I met some few years ago.

The event was held at this cafe called the Big Bad Wolf. The Big Bad Wolf ladies & gentlemen is where I then had the best potato skins I’ve ever had in my life. Now I’ve been to loads of different places with different styles of potato skins but this one… was the best.

It was a little bit crispy but not too crispy… and a little salty. So yummy.

Almost as yummy as the steak I had the night before. Our partner Eric brought us out. Every time I go to the Philippines our partners there bring us out for awesome food.

The Nuffies on the other hand bring me out for drinks and to try weird food. The last time they tricked me into eating ox brain. Remember that?

Still the Philippines was loads of fun. For next year’s Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards we’re deciding whether to hold it in the Philippines or in Australia. The team in the Philippines is a bit worried about the daunting task if they were to host it next year. They want it to be hosted in Melbourne… but hey I told them… after all.. “It’s more fun in the Philippiness”.

While I was in the US I spent a lot of time thinking about our company culture. Sure Nuffnang’s culture is something to be proud of. The Nuffies as we know it are a really fun bunch and it’s really fun to work at Nuffnang. Or so I hear.

But as in all things we do, there’s always the possibility of doing better. So I spent a lot of time in the US thinking, reading and even visiting Zappos there to figure out what their culture is like and how we can take ours to the next level. I came back energized… with loads of ideas ready for implementation. I recruited some Nuffies to help implement some of these ideas and the first one was implemented just last week.

It’s called the Nuffie Hero’s Wall.

When I was in the US, Shorty gave me an article to read about how people get motivated at work. One of those things apart from money and all is recognition and show of gratitude for a good job done. In many Asian companies though, the culture is very much stick more than carrot. So if you do a bad job you almost always get scolding but if you do a good job you may not get recognized or praised for it right?

I realize that happens in our company too and I’ve been guilty of that myself. So I came up with the idea of this Nuffie Heroes Wall. Where Nuffies can leave “thank you” notes for any0ne in the company that they think has helped them or made a difference for them be it at work or even personally. It could be “thank you for staying up late last night and helping me with this project” or “thank you for helping me get through my break-up”.

This will be put up for everyone to see and every two months we clear the board to make space for new notes and the old notes get passed on to the relevant Nuffie for that person to keep. When we put this idea together we weren’t sure how many people in the company would actually use it but wow the response was great. So much that we had to make more space for each month on the board.

There are many other initiatives we have planned but that will come in the following months. So as to not introduce too many things too quickly for the 160 Nuffies in our organization.

On another note Red Bull was really nice to give us a fridge that will be stocked up periodically with Red Bull. They dropped us a mail one day and said they identified the Nuffies as “key opinion leaders” so they all gave us one. Thank you RED BULL!

And finally last week our whole company took a Thursday afternoon off and we went Disco Skating.

I had not skated in 10 years or so but man was that fun to pick up again.

Some of us like Nic Chay here had never skated before so he struggled a bit.

But for most of the time we had Nuffies who knew how to skate coach and help the Nuffies that didn’t. It was good fun.Ok gotta go now guys. Catching a plane to Philippines now for the NuffnangX preview there. See you guys soon.

So let me tell you all about my weekend. This weekend is different from all my other weekends? You know why?

Because it’s one of those weekends when I’m all alone… in this case because Shorty is in Japan for work. Before she left though, she added something in my car. Something I only discovered the next morning after she was gone. So I hopped into my car happily that following morning and I saw THIS on my dashboard… staring at me.

I took a picture of it and posted it up on my Instagram (in case you’re not already following me, you can do so at @timothytiah).

And these were the responses I got.

Clearly a number of people have seen our wedding video where I promised to be only “moderately angry” when she put a Hello Kitty sticker on my car.

This however wasn’t a Hello Kitty sticker. It was some air freshener that stood on my dashboard. Now anyone who looks at my car is going to think that it’s driven either by a girl or a very girly man. In any case I left it there and all weekend I have been struggling to make my peace with it. I still haven’t though. When I was stuck in the jam yesterday I could see it staring at me there with that big act cute smile. It took a lot to hold myself back from whacking it off my dashboard with one swing of my arm.

On another note, I picked up a copy of Malaysian Tatler over the weekend because I found out that a short mention of me was in it.

My friends think I look pretty good in that picture but believe me when I say it’s not because I look good in real life. The photographer had to take some 1,000 pictures of me before he could finally found one where I don’t look either fat, stupid or geeky. Plus on top of that they probably had to airbrush my pimples away too. Credit to them.. they did a great job 🙂

I must say… being the first time Shorty has left me for the weekend, I under-performed when it came to making the most of my “freedom”. On Friday night I went with some Nuffies to meet up with some bloggers at an Asahi drinking session. Where we ordered some 65 glasses of Asahi.

We had it at this bar on KLCC Tower 3. Can’t remember what it’s called but it had this beautiful view of the twin towers.

I don’t know many places where you get to have drinks right next to the tallest twin towers in the world. Here’s me with Povy and Jamie in one of the few pictures I managed to take that night.

I came totally under-dressed too. Everyone there was dressed up in shirts and all but I ended up going in a t-shirt that said “Osaka” on it. Totally unintentional because well.. when I went to work that day choosing to wear that t-shirt I didn’t think I would be going out for drinks at a nice bar after. In fact I didn’t even know that was happening… but some of the Nuffies dragged me along.

So Friday night was off to a good start right you’d think? Right after the NuffnangX preview I was at a bar on top of KL City having drinks with some cool and good looking, well-dressed people. Well… not really. I was the first to leave that night. Went home by 10PM to sleep. My friend Wilson who owns Milkadeal.com then messaged me and asked me to go Butter Factory … apparently some new club but I said nahh wanna go sleep. Just before I slept another friend messaged me and asked me to go clubbing too but again nahh… I tucked myself into bed and was asleep by 11PM or so that night.

Saturday night was even less eventful. I had dinner with my family here and then right after I went back, played some Battlefield 3…. and then was in bed by 11PM. Part of it was because I’ve been keeping myself intentionally jetlagged by a few hours so I could wake up early and go to the gym before I go to work or something but still… how did I just waste Friday and Saturday night sleeping away when all my friends were partying?

Seriously… what has become of me? Is this normal for all married people that… well you just get boring or lazy to go out after a while? Or is this just happening to me.

Oh well we’ll see anyway. Now I gotta go for Sunday dinner with my family then come home to sleep… probably before 11PM again. Ish.

It’s just a few weeks now before our launch of our Silicon Valley startup based in this building in Sunnyvale, California.

This building is a huge center where loads of other Silicon Valley startups are based. Paypal was supposed to have started off here when they were first founded too.

The startup Ming and I are doing in Silicon Valley is called NuffnangX.

Even though it borrows on the name of Nuffnang that we came up with some 5 years ago, NuffnangX is a completely separate unrelated company from Nuffnang. Unlike Nuffnang which is a mid-sized company with a strong management team that practically runs the company now, NuffnangX is a startup with few staff and limited resources that will need loads of personal attention. So Ming and I have invested lots of our personal money and time into it because we believe in it.

But still we know that it’s one of those things that will either be really big some years from now… or completely fail. There is no middle ground because there is no revenue model yet and for it to really make money in future it needs scale. Lots of scale. So much scale that we know even if we’re successful in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia or any of our other Asian countries we’re in… it wouldn’t be big enough to survive. So that’s why we decided to invest in setting up offices in Silicon Valley and in London, to try to cater to our US and UK users.

My colleagues in our US office here Ezen and Gabriel along with some others will be helping us with that.

NuffnangX isn’t meant to be a company or a product targeted just to the Malaysian or Singaporean market. It’s meant to be for the world and our dream is to change the blogosphere of the world.

So far the excitement and the experiences we’ve been having doing this new Silicon Valley startup has been really rewarding. The stress is tough… but still it brings me back to our exciting startup days from before. If we fail, I know at this point that we’ll have no regrets. Ming and I would have lost a lot of time and money… but we would have made in experiences and lessons.

If we succeed though, I hope we would be the first Asian company to be able to break into Silicon Valley.

Wish me luck guys.

If you want to be kept up to date with NuffnangX’s developments, you can go to www.nuffnangx.com.

Or follow NuffnangX on Twitter @NuffnangX.

So here’s the deal. I’ve always wanted new experiences… and one of the things on my bucket list is to go sky diving. I’ve always wanted to do that but was held back by the thought of the feeling of the ‘drop’. Like I love rollercoasters but the one thing I can’t stand to bear is when you feel like you’ve left your stomach behind (still because I love the thrill I end up doing all sorts of roller coasters). Recently though I happened to find out that sky diving doesn’t have that drop feeling at all.

It basically just feels like floating all the way down from the air.

That removed my last and actually only fear of sky diving and I was all up for going. So in Vegas last week I had researched a place to dive and decided to go. The day before I planned to go I was talking to Shorty about it and she wasn’t excited about the idea. She said “NO NO NO… What if you die?”. Then I asked her if she’s putting her foot down and she said “Yes”, followed by a stamping of her right foot on the ground.

I didn’t give up though. I kept bugging her about it all the way till the night before and she finally said
“Okay! Google skydiving accident stats and let me see them”.

So I googled it hoping to find something encouraging. That you know… it’s really safe now with technology. The stats I pulled showed that in 2012 alone, about one reported person a month has died from Skydiving. If that didn’t scare Shorty enough, it went on to describe how the accidents happen. In one case both parachutes didn’t open on the way down and the instructor and student that was strapped to him just went splat on the ground. The student died on the spot but the instructor lived. Though he was critically injured.

In the end I yielded. So I started looking for another experience to do in Vegas and I found one where you can drive supercars on a race track.

I signed up for it immediately and the next morning we found ourselves on the way to a race track.

When we first got there, they got us to go for a briefing on some basics of driving on a track. Then they brought us in a car around the track so we got familiar with it and then they got us all to put helmets on.

Shorty said the helmet made everyone wearing it look silly. Never bugged me though heh. After suiting up, we picked whatever cars we wanted from the whole selection of Ferraris, Lambos, SLS, R8s, Astons and the likes. Then we sat in the car with an instructor who then taught us how to drive. He taught me how to take turns quickly… you know… slow down before a turn, drop a gear and then release a gear just while you’re making the turn.

I ended up trying out two cars. The first one was a Ferrari 458 Italia which apparently costs upwards of RM2 million in Malaysia. This is the instructor briefing me before I got on to the track.

The 458 is the latest Ferrari and I must say it was amazing to drive. I thought it was the most forgiving car to drive. I could take sharp turns too quickly and no matter how I punished the car or yanked the steering wheel, the car would stick to the ground.

I got a video done of me driving the car with the instructor. You can watch it here.

After the Ferrari F458 Italia I tried the Lamborghini Gallardo.

Unlike the Ferrari 458, the Gallardo is the lower end of a super car (unlike some of the other Lambos). So it didn’t handle as well as the Ferrari but somehow I loved it. I loved how it”s smaller and more compact looking… and looks really sharp. I thought I’ve always wanted a Ferrari before… but now I think my dream car is a Lamborghini Gallardo.

Because it didn’t handle as well as the Ferrari (and because I’m not a good race track driver) I ended up taking turns too quickly and had my car skid. Was still loads of fun though.

At the end of the experience we had one last option (notice how they only allow you to go for this next option only at the END). We could go on a “ride along” on a Corvette. The driver was a professional race car driver that would drift the whole track. I asked my instructor if I should go for it and he said “Well do you like rollercoasters?”
I said “YES!” and he replied “Then go for it!“. So I did.

This is a video of what happened next.

I had two new experiences that I had never had before that day. One… to drive super cars on a race track.

And another… to ride with a professional driver as he drifted through the track. Both were equally awesome.