NARCISSISM IS NECESSARY

All pictures taken with my Nokia N82.

Saturday - The Day

10 May 2008 - World Lupus Day.

The event that ShutterAsia has been trying very hard to put together for more than a month finally happened with tremendous success. The Minister of Health, YB Dato’ Liow Tiong Lai officiated the launch and was a good sport throughout the event.

Getting this event up was a tough journey indeed, and must be especially so for Freaky (otherwise known as James) whom may I say, single handedly made this happen with little or no help at all. I would like to thank Freaky for roping me in and I’m proud to say that it’s an honour to have worked alongside him. While I escaped to party with Tiesto, he stuck on till 10pm to make sure the event ran smoothly till 1 Utama closed. James, I <3 you!

James @ Freaky, emcee for the day.

I would like to thank Nikon and 1 Utama for being such generous sponsors as well. When I heard from someone who spoke to the Nikon big man, and he revealed that for this event, he doesn’t even care about any newspaper or media coverage. He just wants Nikon to contribute to the photography community and society in general. He knew for a fact that ShutterAsia ran this event with no monetary support whatsoever, everything from the venue to exhibition stands to carpeting to sound system to the balloons….were contributed by companies that supply them. That’s not just it, some of the people from these sponsor companies even got down and dirty helping with the event setup. It was truly an eye-opening experience for me.

1 Utama (thank you Ms. Joey C.) said yes to my request for venue sponsorship within hours of my FIRST email without even batting an eyelid. To be honest, before approaching 1 Utama, I had sent several request to other smaller shopping complexes, most did not reply (as expected) and one even sent back to ask for ROI Report (I was flabbergasted). But 1 Utama, which was my last resort…..because it’s such a successful shopping complex and was very intimidating, said yes to us within hours!

They were also very accommodating to us eventhough the exhibition could not be set up extravagantly in line with the interior of 1 Utama due to budget constraint, but they allowed us to hold our event anyway with nothing but genuine support. You may not know this too, but 1 Utama is probably the only shopping complex in Malaysia with space (it’s called Community Corner on 1st Floor Oval, New Wing) allocated for non-profit organisations that are struggling to afford any space for their charity events.

Anything Butterfly Photography Exhibition is still on-going till 18th May 2008. Persatuan SLE Malaysia will be there selling homemade craft and accepting donations. 1 Utama, 1st Floor Oval, New Wing :)

Satuday - Night

After the event, I reached home at 5pm, showered and made my way to KY’s house. We all had dinner (or rather, I joined them while they were already eating) and then started our journey to PD. I was mostly unconscious during the journey but I managed to wake up during a toilet stop and took a picture of this car with something from the bathroom on the side mirror.

Recycle, reduce, reuse.

We reached Admiral Marina about 10.30pm parked not too far from the event venue. The queues were gawdamn long -_- and it was so humid. I was soaked by the time we entered party grounds.

Can you spot PinkPau’s setan face?

Without further ado, the faggots (our endearing nickname for each other) got a carton of beer to jump-start party mood. And then another carton…

Beer.

I took 1/2 a can and promptly passed out. I would like to defend myself that under normal circumstances I could have consumed 1 can with no problems but I was already exhausted from work.

Here is a picture of Spongefox sipping his beer.

Spongefox sipping the beer.

I puked several times into the empty plastic bag that had contained the beer before I was well enough to walk nearer to stage. I managed to catch a glimpse of Tiesto making his grand debut before passing out again. The last song I remembered hearing before my slumber was In The Dark (which I f-king love).

TIESTO!

Then I woke up to some random stuff I’ve never heard before but were still f-king awesome. I was almost well again and I danced and danced and danced…

Fab lighting.

Sweaty girl.

Kim & KY.

Kim & Eyeris.

And then Love Comes Again came on. I was estatic!!!

You gotta believe that…Love comes again

From then on, it was orgasm all the way, man.

TIESTO!

Crowd was just loving every second.

The finale was amazing. Forever Today came on along with fireworks and confetti!

Forever Today

We left party ground at 3am and made our way home. Thank you to the Suan for driving us all back safely to Ming Tien for supper.

Every time after a rave party, I’d always claim it’d be my last but man, as long as Tiesto is playing my last rave party is not yet in sight.

Sunday

I woke up at 3.30pm on Mother’s Day. Mom was very understanding not to have woken us up, since we stumbled into the house at 6.30am. We went to Pearl International Hotel for buffet, which was fabulous (KY blogged about it here). They had an array of activities lined up for Mom’s Day that I didn’t even know about when I made reservation. They took our family picture and printed it out, had a good lucky draw with trips to various destinations as prizes and yummy goodies to take home. Mom was very happy :)

Then, I taught her to blog and use Flickr!!!!! :D She’s just posted her first entry after about an hour of frustration (heh heh heh) and I hope she didn’t get turned off by the complexity (obviously to me it’s like clockwork). I’ll definitely pimp her blog when she hits her 5th entry. So dearest, please leave some words of encouragement here because she doesn’t believe it when I say a lot of people would love to read her blog!

You want to, don’t you?? (p/s: the momsie is a hottie).

Errr sorry I can’t stop gloating about my Eee PC :)

It is so light, totally unbelievable! I was chatting on MSN at my apartment carpark (still within my wifi area), one hand holding laptop and the other hand typing……standing up, ok.

Check out the comparison…

Eee PC vs Lenovo. Pretty amazing, no?

So I had a panic attack just before the event. 4 out of 5 laptops ordered for the event didn’t work properly, girls haven’t arrived, one of the two big screens for the football matches was a little whacky, venue management tried to change my tray serving to buffet line etc etc etc.

I got home to freshen up after setup and I just couldn’t put on my makeup properly and then I put on so much I looked like a panda then I couldn’t find my phone and some documents and I was so sure I would forget to bring something. Basically I was just running around the apartment trying to fix some imaginary problems and I was hyperventilating while doing so. And I sweat so much my makeup ran I when I saw myself in the mirror, I burst out crying and I felt like the sky was going to fall on top of me. Hahaha.

Anyway, I redo my makeup while still hyperventilating and my pimples seemed abnormally larger than normal and I started crying again. And then makeup ran again, I had to redo my makeup while time was ticking away.

Finally, I reached the venue and found my supplier (and friend, Mike from Xpert Events. Please contact him for your events, he’s the best!) had brought in the replacement laptops and my client was just happily testing them. No one even noticed that I was late due to my panic attack episode heh.

Anyway, everything went so well. My emcee for the night, Liang was absolutely a riot! He’s amazing to work with, very professional, accommodating and best of all, he got the crowd going! :)

So during the half time of Birmingham vs Liverpool, my client asked me to go to the stage to assist the Regional Manager with his speech, so I went lah. And then I was waiting there and the r. manager went up to talk and then suddenly he started to express thank and gratitude for people who’ve made the event a success and then he called me up the stage.

I was like, alamak ok..didn’t see it coming. And then I saw him holding a box and I still didn’t register it cause I’m shortsighted remember? And then, I saw it, the words Asus Eee PC. I screamed, “OH MY GOD YOU GAVE ME AN EEE PC!!!!”. You can try for yourself, trust me it’s very high pitch heh.

Hehehe, omg look at my jawline. So tensed from grinning too long and hard hahaha. Picture from Mike Yip.

I did not suspect anything. It was a real surprise. I almost cried on stage but held my tears back. And I’ve never been properly surprised in my life. It felt really good :)

It’s a gift of something I secretly wanted for quite sometime and in the colour I wanted. My client even took the liberty to jack up the ram to 1gig. Don’t I have the best client in the world, you tell me? :)

All I did was debating about how an Eee PC would have pwn his Mac Book Air (which honestly, is really one of the most amazing stuff I’ve seen!) and he thoughtfully got me one!

Happy camper. Picture from Mike Yip.

Thanks everyone from Lasseters especially the director, you know who you are la!

:)

Okay, finally I’ve got time to sit down and blog about this fabulous race. I was invited as one of the medias to race. I was very happy, yay free phone!

When I found out that my teammate would be a stranger, at first I was a bit sien, why couldn’t they pair me off with Ah Suan or Ah Pau or even Ah Pop so that we could get the free phone and chill. Of course, the organiser had already anticipated this and found a way to counter that. By pairing us with people we don’t know, whom they have shortlisted from the nationwide auditions.

I felt that I owe it to my teammate to perform even harder because I didn’t have to go through all the hassles of auditioning. I heard the audition was tough! Anyway, His name is Fairuz and we clicked from the start. Pork Dickson boy, love his hometown :)

I stayed overnight at One World Hotel and I got the boo over to keep me company (read: bluff him to bring my laptop so I could pull an all-nighter researching). Woke up at 11am for the race! I was so focused my womb wasn’t even sizing up (yeah aunty visited at the same time :P).

All of us had a delicious lunch at Bakerzin, then we adjourned to the starting point where we were interviewed by the media and all. Felt damn glamourous hehehe.

We’ve got 8 teams of different colour. They are:

1. Team grey

Afiq (Harian Metro) and Sharon.

2. Team yellow

Lai Sin (Sin Chew Cyberworld) and Hooi Han.

3. Team orange
WTF WHY WE DIDN’T CAMHO ONE FAIRUZ????

4. Team pink

David and Ah Pau.

5. Team purple

Sadat and Sam (The Star).

6. Team red

Ah Pop and Szetoo.

7. Team blue

Aref (NST) and Sabrina.

8. Team green

Ah Suan and sweet Frankie boi.

At 4.30pm, the race began. We got into our Nissan Cefiro with our race marshall, Phoon and videographer, Kok Wah.

Our very nice race marshall :)

The day was still really bright. We figured that the judges wouldn’t really care about the daylight as long as the places are available till evening time.

Bad decision :( It was soul of the night afterall!

We were given 5 themes; games, live entertainment, food, shopping and nightview. It was raining really heavily when we started the race, so we decided Bukit Kiara Skatepark as our first destination since it has a roof.

Mid-air.

The daylight was really bugging me but I kept telling myself that there’s a reason why the race started at 4.30pm, the judges wouldn’t be so anal….not!

Then we went to Jalan Sayur (off Jalan Pudu) for the Wai Sek Kai. It was about 6pm by then and I read in The Star Food Guide (courtesy of boo) that the stalls would be opened by then. Unfortunately, the rain had prevented a lot of traders from operating so the sight wasn’t really something to shout about. I’m pretty sure it’s a sight to behold later in the evening.

Anticipation.

We left Jalan Sayur only to be stuck in a horrible jam. We were afterall in the middle of the city. At first we thought about going to KL Hilton for the nightview but changed decision to go to Bukit Permai, or better known as Mini Genting by Cheras folks.

How lah I know got so many people know about the place? We were toying with the idea of going to Thean Hou Temple for the view too, but in the end we went all the way to Cheras.

It still wasn’t dark enough…sigh.

When we’re about to leave, we spotted Team Yellow. ALAMAK. We were quiet all the way back to PJ on MRR2, namely due to tiredness and also tulanness of knowing another team has gotten to our location.

But Team Orange will persevere! We went into Kepong and stopped by Fun & Cheer, a wholesaler of everything from stationeries to cheongsam to binocular to party poppers. The reason why we went there was because we thought it’d be a better idea to avoid the typical shopping places like night markets and shopping malls. Besides, I really adore that place!

Find everything and anything here.

Lastly, we went to The Curve to catch a live performance. We weren’t really sure if they’re going to be there but we took a chance. It was almost 9pm by then and the race would end at 9.30pm sharp.

Live performance and Fairuz stealing the limelight.

We were there and out in less than 5 minutes. At the junction turning into 1 Utama, we spotted Team Green’s car next to ours. But our driver, Sharil was really nice, he drove like a mad man and overtook them at a different traffic light :D. We were the 5th team to arrive, I think.

Then we rushed to the laptop and started uploading all our pictures to Soul of the Night’s website. It was quite daunting! We had to upload one by one and also caption the pictures.

The other teams started arriving. Some rushed to the laptops and some looked so relaxed, obviously because they have utilised the awesomeness of N82 to upload their pictures while on the go. We didn’t upload pictures on the go because we wanted to choose our pictures carefully at base.

Me, Kok Wah (our videographer) and Fairuz.

Then it was time for announcement of winners. We were so nervous. I held onto Fairuz in a halal way for support throughout the announcements.

As you should know by now, Ah Suan and Sweet Frankie won the race. Their prize…trip for two to HK with RM1500. Congratulations you two!

Fairuz, don’t be sad!

And here’s our post-race face…still pweety right?

Ah Pau, Ah Kim & Ah Suan.

I had a really wonderful time at the race. Seriously, being born and bred in KL didn’t give me an advantage in the race. In fact, I think a KL native is more likely to be unaware of all the interesting places in KL, the outstation people are more well-informed! But I’m glad I could see so many sides of KL in one night.

Oh yes…and the phone. It’s too awesome. I’ve done grieving for my N95, hehehe.

The Suan won! Yipee yay yay! Go, go to her blog to congratulate her!

Fairuz and I got the consolation prize of RM500 vouchers for Robinson/Marks & Spencer and a priceless experience. Of course, we got the most canggih phone at the moment, Nokia N82 too. Hehehe.

Now I have an N95 and an N82. I’ve grown attached to my N95 already but I’ve also fallen in love with the new N82. How could you not????

More report and pictures soon, I’m so tired now I can’t even type properly.

In conjunction with St. Patrick’s Day, Bossa Nova (Parkroyal Hotel), Bulldog, Sevenatenine, Delaney’s, Nikko Hotel and Jarrod & Rawlins are participating in Guinness Draught Infused Food Creation Contest, serving their very own Guinness-inspired dishes throughout the month of March. All the Guinness-inspired fare will be judged by Chef Emmanuel Stroobant of Asia Food Channel’s Chef in Black.

Thanks to the good folks from Guinness, I was able to sit down for lunch with the celebrity Chef himself, Emmanuel Stroobant at Jarrod & Rawlins. He was there to evaluate the food creation by Jarrod & Rawlins and I was just there to get starstruck, eat and be merry :)

Guinness Stout.

The chef from Jarrod & Rawlins whipped up some Guinness ribs from scratch while Chef Stroobant watched on. I’m all for open kitchen concept cause watching your food meticulously put together by a chef is a wonderful experience.

Kitchen kungfu.

Chef Stroobant shared with me his judging method for all the participating outlets. He has about a dozen categories ranging from hygiene to creativity which he would rank between 1-10, 1 being poorest and 10 being exceptional. He showed me the scores of the other participating restaurants he has ranked in his moleskin notebook.

It was very interesting….I shall not divulge who pwns who aye!

Chef Emmanuel Stroobant evaluates.

Grilling the ribs, baby.

The ribs were pretty good, the meat was juicy and very well flavoured. And I absolutely love the contrast of taste courtesy of the diced beetroot. I hope they will continue to serve the dish after March.

Hearing the little voice calling out for a perfect pint of Guinness yet? Well, then head on to Guinness St. Patrick’s Festival this Saturday, 15th March 2008 at Plaza Mont’ Kiara because starting from 5pm, the first 1000 party guests will get a free pint of Guinness!

Guinness St. Patrick’s Festival

Of course, for the weight watching ladies, there’s always the hotness that is Chef Emmanuel Stroobant as a reason to go to the carnival ;)

Chef Emmanuel Stroobant.

p/s: I’m still waiting for my picture with him. Will post it up as soon as I got it!

So proud to see a Malaysian doing great in the International circuit! Our 13 year old has kicked all 81 arses from around the world. Oops mind the language, it’s a peace poster contest after all, heheheh.

KUALA LUMPUR: A 13-year-old boy from Bidor, Perak, created history by winning the grand prize in the 20th annual Lions International Peace Poster Contest.

Ming Yang Soong emerged victorious after competing with more than 350,000 children, aged between 11 and 13, from 81 countries.

“I felt very sad to see so much fighting and so many people dying in the world. I hope my drawing will help to promote peace.

“All nations must work together to keep this world peaceful,” he said in a statement yesterday.

His grand prize poster was chosen for its originality, artistic merit and portrayal of this year’s contest theme “Peace Around the World”.

Source: The Star.

This is the winning poster. Absolutely beautiful!

Source: USA Today (yes! got picked up by USA Today some more!)

Sometimes, I wish my face, arms, legs and belly would have the metabolic rate of my arse. My arse is so bony it’s not even funny. Beats me why my buttocks are so flat. It’s definitely genetic because no woman on my Mom or Dad’s side have perky bottoms I could envy.

While I have a voluptuous sounding stat of a 36″ hip, it’s all a farce. Yes I may have really wide hips but if you view me from the side, I look like a freakin’ pole. Sigh….

You know, I wish I had an arse like this. You can clearly see where the leg ends and the arse starts. Behold, the perfect fold.

The butt cheeks, shaped like a tear drop flowing down the legs. I WANTTTTTTT!

Unfortunately, I’ll never have an arse. I can only contend with a pair of legs with hurmmm, a passage for expelling shit :(

No wonder I don’t have any picture of me and my flat derrière. Only this one, taken eons ago at my college prom.

Arse-less.

But my woes and worries will soon be a think of the past, as I’ve discovered one of the greatest inventions ever that has reached our shores. Our Malaysia, where everything….socially, culturally and politically are late by at least 13 years. Check out these granny pants:

Granny pants.

Would you buy em? Would you wear em? No, no? Too bad….cause I WOULD SO WEAR IT!

Now, don’t be so quick to judge me or my pants. As innocent as the RM29.90, beige and 100% nylon gramps undies looks, it’s really a very sophisticated pair of underwear.
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Paddings for the arse.

Now who needs plastic surgery? I can confidently strike off my one of my goals-before-35, “get butt cheek implants”. Simple and cheap buttock pads….why hadn’t I think of that?

Here’s an illustration of my physique with gramp pants on.

Instant butt lift.

I’m getting 7 pairs for Monday to Sunday :)