Yesterday a rather nice girl named Jasemaine sent me an e-mail.

Jasemaine is the talented girl who designed the hamster and even the banner for Tuitionhamster.com
Back then, we basically went to her and said that we wanted our hamster mascot to look FAT and cute!

Skinny hamsters are not cute!

It was an almost impossible task for her to do since the cutest hamster in the world had already been drawn ie Hamtaro (which is still not as cute as Ah Bop btw).

But I must say I was pretty impressed by whatever she came up with (although some bastard friends of mine think that the hamster looks more like a bear… IT’S A HAMSTER DAMMIT!!!).

Jasemaine went on to say
” Ya know, I thought the tuitionhamster.com was a college project at first! I didn’t know it was a real business untill I read an article about it in the newspaper one day! :)”

I corrected her.

The truth is that it was and still is a college project meant to help whatever teachers and students we could and NOT an actual internet business.

Actual internet businesses make money… and they charge commissions to make money! Tuitionhamster till today is totally free!

We’ve had potential buyers who were interested in taking over the website but we resisted since we knew it would stop being free to our current users.

The website has been left on auto-pilot for the past one year and since then the count of teachers have grown to over 530.

Unfortunately, some teachers signed up with us have complained that they haven’t gotten any students through us. But we have seen other teachers receive plenty of tuition requests through our website and all for free!

That is what we set out to do in the beginning and I can comfortably say we achieved that we considerable success (considering the tiny budget of RM1,700 including the web hosting that we paid for in advance for the next 3 years and we had and the full-time jobs we had back then).

Anyway, Jasemaine sounded a little awkward in saying this but she e-mailed me to tell me about a charity event happening on the 11th of February 2007.
After telling me about the charity event she went on to say
” Would it be possible for you to highlight this event in yourupcoming blog entry? Your support is much appreciated! If you can’t,it’s totally alright.”

Now I think that is a rather silly question!

Why wouldn’t I want to mention a blog entry on a charity event? (something I’m sure my kind-hearted readers would be very interested to hear about too right?)

I’m sure even you guys would love to hear about it right?

So here are the details.

Hearts N Lightbulbs Valentine Event
DATE: 11TH FEBRUARY 2007 (SUNDAY)
TIME: 8PM SHARP
VENUE: HARTAMAS SQUARE, SRI HARTAMAS
PERFORMERS LINEUP: JERRAL KHOR & ZALILA LEE, NICK DAVIS, DIPLOMATS OF
DRUMS, SAER ZE, YURI WONG, SOFT TOUCH, ESTRELLA, REZA SALLEH

Or you could check out their website here.