Thank you all for the Happy event!

Just wanted to thank everyone who attended our Happy event on Tuesday night. And, even if you didn’t come, thanks for letting me know too!

Wanna thank Yasmin from Cafe Libre for being so accomodating. The venue rocked!

Moment of the night

Wanted to share something that’s still stuck in my head and makes me chuckle out-loud sometimes:

(The scene) Everyone was sitting in a circle and we were going around introducing ourselves and our blogs. Somehow, it started to fall into a pattern… “Hi, I’m XXXX and I blog at XXXXX. I blog about XXXXX.” And Erna changed it all…

Erna: Okay, can we stop talking like we’re in Blogholics Anonymous?

There was a pause. Then everyone started laughing.

Second Moment of the Night

So I was asking inane movie trivia questions so we could get people to come out, dig thru the Happy sack, and win a prize.

Can’t remember the question I asked, but Suanie won that prize.

She stepped up, rummaged thru the sack and randomly pulled out her docket to win a… Shaver!

Some people proceeded to make some funny comments that I shall not post here on fear of mutilation. Muahahahahaha….there’s a picture too! Scroll down.

Here are some pictures:

Erna trying out the Wii. It’s official, Wii makes people happy.


Clap, clap, laugh, laugh.

We made the people who came do the Hula. Apparently no one could keep it up for longer than 2 spins.

Exclusive: The SmashpOp thumbs up (sorry Jason, couldn’t resist)

Happy people showing us how to do it.

Guess what Suanie walked home with. I’m told that if you [CENSORED]

Movie tickets for PinkPau.

Shampoo for Swifty. He got two actually. One was some “Threesome” brand.

And a value pack of I dunno what for Kim.

Nigel claims that I only get his side profile in all the pics. Hung Wei’s here too.

Guess who gallivanted all the way here?

Obligatory group picture. There were some more people, but I think they had went off already…

PS… must give credit to the photographer of the night - Louis because I selamba borrow the pictures and put on my site.

Guess who got a domain name?

So I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks already. “Want to get a domain or not?”

The plus point about having your own name as the domain is… well…”glamour-lah” (It’s glamourous). The minus point about having your own domain name is it costs money.

But I’m the type of person who will ponder, meandre and brood over decisions like this, but inevitably inch towards biting the bullet. Today, I bit it.

Started the day asking people about which domain service to use. Suan said Paul’s service very reliable. Then Kel told me to go check out www.exabytes.com.my. Ran a Google search and in Malaysia apparently there’s like tonnes of registrars (like www.webserver.com.my).

Finally, I settled on GoDaddy because its a name I know (heard it over Coolness Roundup) and because I had a coupon that made my 3 year registration cost only US$ 21.45 (can you beat that?).

The next step was to get Blogger to publish to my domain. Thankfully, this was a really simple step with the full instructions here. All you gotta be is a bit patient. I wasn’t, so I was bugging people over MSN and moaning because all I could see for 2 hours after registering was this “parking” page (the page that tells you davidlian.com is coming soon).

Well, as you can see, it works now. And I feel so legitimate. It’s like… I’ve moved off free-service-land into owning my own lease-hold apartment. I’ve actually got my own web-address.

Okay, so people, to celebrate my new domain. Can I say, this makes me super happy and that if I could, I would have entered the Happy Moments contestwith this post. Because it’s hard to express how you feel when you own your own domain name (instead of letting some squatter squat on it). It’s just happy.

Guess who’s gonna win RM 5,000 for blogging?

Actually… I dunno. But it sure ain’t gonna be me.

Darn, the T&C that says:

Entry is open to all residents in Malaysia. However, permanent, contract and/or temporary employees of [insert company name] (including its subsidiaries and related affiliates) and representatives and/or agents and agencies of [insert company name] are ineligible to enter.

Happy, one of the my clients, just announced a blogging contest called “Happy Moments” with a grand prize of RM 5,000 for the best post and / or video of a (you guessed it) happy moment.

All the said soon-to-be-lucky-winner/blogger has to do is think of a unique, interesting, serendipitous happy moment; all those times you just felt cheesily happy and couldn’t explain why, and write a post about it. Better still, if you have a mobile phone that can take a decent video, do a video about it (think America’s funniest home videos.)


Attach this image to the post to prove that you indeed are the owner of the blog. (It may not be up yet)

Then get your friends and family to vote (mine’s for sale. Contact me to negotiate price). Top ten most voted progresses to the shortlist where the truly best three will be selected by Happy as the winners and walk away with RM 5,000, RM 2,000 or RM 1,000 (two prizes of each, one for each category).

Sound’s simple? Just surf over here or www.happy.com.my for more details.

Yup, that’s it. Just a bit sore that I can’t win the prize. And I had a darn good story to tell too. Oh well, maybe next time.

You don’t want THIS at your press event…

This has got to be the nightmare of all PR people – especially the folks handling the invite to the Gizmodo folks!

There’s this part in the video where this Motorola spokesperson actually is presenting about a pretty cool product and… the TV goes off! poof! It went off so fast the spokesperson didn’t even know what was going on.

Still, I think CNet’s reaction to this stunt pretty much sums it up. However, I think I can add that is probably an isolated incident in the blogging community and that the bloggers I’ve had for press events are nothing if not decent and interesting people.

Verdict? This is a one off. Good stunt for Gizmodo (more than 400 comments on the associated post) and nothing that should stop PR people from inviting bloggers again in the future.

Now, nobody get any ideas mmmkay?