In his own words:

“A brief of what I need to focus on. I’m in the running to meet the famous football player from England and Manchester United, Wayne Rooney in PERSON. I get to PARTY with him, hang out with him, have lunch with him, get his autographs, get some official merchandise, Q&A session and the best part is, I get to play some balls (I have no idea why Jason chose to word it this way) with him on the field.

I’m competing myself with 3 other regional countries in Asia. Singapore, Vietnam and that includes bloggers from Malaysia as well. Fellow friends of mine, I need some of your huge support to support me! I need 10 supporters to support me.”

And well, if you vote for him, I get to take part in a beer party as well, sponsored by Tiger! As I’m part of the support team

But okay, if you need a reason, here’s why I think you should vote for him:

Jason Ong is a really good photoblogger - over the past few years he’s been producing some of the best shots from our Advertlets events as well as many others across KL and more. He’s also a pretty decent at shooting video - so having him meet Rooney and cover it will be the next best thing to actually being there. Other than that, he’s a hardcore Manchester United fan - and won’t be asking stupid questions and embarassing us Malaysian MU fans when he’s over there.  Also, lastly - this is a regional contest - wouldn’t you rather a Malaysian win than someone from Singapore, Vietnam or Indonesia?

So here’s what you can do to drop your vote:

1. Visit his blog at this link: http://bit.ly/MYtigerJO
2. Drop a comment (comments go towards the score!)

It’s that simple!

Recently, I was part of an entourage of Advertlets Bloggers together with Paul Tan and crew to test out the new Honda Freed.

Our day started off at Souled Out, in Sri Hartamas. Bloggers gathered there before our drive, and we had a good breakfast before we set off to Putrajaya.

We’ve put together an awesome video of the trip, check it out. Featuring sound bites from a few familiar faces and an interesting look at the journey:

Motoring journalist and Malaysia’s Jeremy Clarkson Harinder Singh was our guide throughout the trip, together with Paul Tan of Paultan.org.

Each car was outfitted with a walkie talkie for the trip, which was useful in discovering the features of the car and inter vehicle communication (for example - “eh, someone sesat already! turn back!”).

Honda bills the Freed as a “premium 4 seater”. However it technically can fit about 6 people (and 8 if you REALLY squeeze As someone who is used to driving a 1.8 liter car, I’m used to a quick pickup. The acceleration power seems to be in mainly in the lower speeds, tapering off at about 100-120 km/h.

The Honda Freed is powered by a Honda 1.5L i-VTEC engine, and the car had about 165KG of people + cargo at the time of driving. So I would say that the acceleration is okay, I can’t exactly compare it to a sports car but its satisfactory for the vehicle class and the number of people that were in the car.

The dashboard has a blue backlight. Interesting material - it doesn’t seem to be a ‘light’ in the conventional sense, but rather looks like e-ink as in its not glaringly bright but its visible quite clearly, as if it were printed on.

The fuel efficiency meter is also a welcome feature, it actually measures how many kilometers you are getting out of your drive - useful for fine tuning your driving habits to squeeze more distance out of each drop.

There are two major differences in positioning - the gearshift is on the dashboard, and the ‘handbrake’ is on the floor. The second one takes a bit of getting used to, but having the gearshift on the dashboard actually makes quite a bit of sense, it frees up some space for you to either store stuff, or be able to walk through to the back of the Freed. The dual layer dashboard is a good idea, and it does give you quite a bit of room to put stuff. I wish it wasn’t sloped downward though - it would be slightly better at a 90 degree flat angle.

One of the Honda Freed’s selling points is the walkthrough cabin. It’s useful if you have kids and need to crawl to the back and change a diaper, for instance.

The Freed starts from RM112,980. The units involved in this test drive were fitted with a sports kit that included door visors and a tailgate spoiler. If you’re considering the long term cost as well, Honda has helpfully put together preventive maintenance rates and costs per thousand km.

More info can be found here. Overall it was a good trip, bloggers had fun in addition to learning about how to do a test drive. Thanks to Honda’s PR company & Honda Malaysia for giving us this opportunity. Meantime, if you’ll like to check out what the rest of the bloggers in our entourage wrote, check it out: -

(yes, there were lots of us! Advertlets FTW!)

http://opstupe.blogspot.com/2010/08/all-new-honda-freed.html
http://www.diyanazman.com/2010/08/03/freed-and-terberanak/
http://www.diyanazman.com/2010/08/06/the-all-new-honda-freed-%E2%80%93-a-yummy-mummy%E2%80%99s-review/
http://www.placesandfoods.com/2010/08/hondafreed.html
http://rames.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-out-in-all-new-honda-freed-with.html
http://www.rebeccasaw.com/honda-freed-the-test-drive/
http://www.rebeccasaw.com/sneak-preview-a-day-out-in-the-honda-freed-with-paul-tan-advertlets-bloggers/
http://euveng.com/2010/08/honda-freed-the-latest-utility-mini-mpv-in-town/
http://www.ridzuanrichie.com/pemandu-honda-freed-mudah-melambai-mat-rempit/
http://hanzbr.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-out-with-honda-freed-and-paul-tan.html
http://www.leonardchua.com/2010/08/cruising-on-brand-new-honda-freed.html
http://spinzer.us/2010/08/first-test-drive-with-the-all-new-honda-freed/
http://www.feeqsays.com/2010/08/day-out-in-all-new-honda-freed-with-30.html
http://www.feeqsays.com/2010/08/honda-freed-car-photos-camwhor-photos.html
http://www.botakai.com/2010/08/05/test-drive-the-new-honda-freed/
http://mynjayz.com/2010/08/advertlets-day-out-in-all-new-honda.html
http://theclippingpoint.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-out-in-freed.html
http://walauweiwalauwei.blogspot.com/2010/08/test-drive-review-all-new-honda-freed.html
http://www.missycheerio.com/day-out-with-the-new-honda-freed/
http://howmanthink.blogspot.com/2010/08/honda-freed-bloggers-day-out.html
http://ruzenchung.blogspot.com/2010/08/honda-and-adverlets-pres-all-new-honda.html
http://arystle.blogspot.com/2010/08/honda-freed-mpv-dream.html
http://eforericyong.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-out-with-paul-tan-in-all-new-honda.html
http://bolehland.net/post/singlepost.php?id=69
http://www.cutecarry.com/2010/08/02/cutecarry-test-drive-honda-freed/
http://undercoverproject.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-out-in-all-new-freed.html
http://www.ewinee.com/2010/08/all-new-honda-freed-test-drive-outing.html
http://naomitham.blogspot.com/2010/08/all-new-honda-freed.html
http://www.hanep.org/archives/2010/08/freed-in-saturday-with-the-all-new-honda-freed/
http://youresty.com/2010/08/chapter-21-test-drive-the-all-new-honda-freed-with-paul-tan/
http://www.paeh.net/ada-apa-dengan-honda-freed/
http://shamhardy.com/2010/08/16/sehari-bersama-honda-freed/
http://www.advertlets.com/weblog/2010/08/02/389/

Dear Advertlets bloggers, friends, blog readers and hot babes,

you are cordially invited to August Babies: Josh Lim + Donovan Chan’s Birthday Party at Vanity Mansion, Heritage Row this Thursday.

Join Donovan Chan (Advertlets Sales Director) & Josh Lim (Advertlets Managing Direct0r) as they both turn 21 years old (again, as they did the previous years!) With Advertlets bloggers, friends and lingerie models (hopefully)! Come on time to enjoy free flow and great company.

Date : 12th Aug 10 (Thurs)
Time : 9pm onwards till late
Free Flow of drinks & Finger Food: 9pm-10pm
Choice of drinks: Beer, Soft Drinks and House Pouring Vodka & Whisky
Performers: Stand-up comedians, belly dancers and fire-twirlers
Thanks to Vanity Mansion, our venue and F&B sponsor.

Please RSVP with Hanie Hidayah (haniehidayah) or Jason Ong (Mynjayz) to confirm your attendance. Thank you!

Facebook page is here: August Babies: Josh Lim + Donovan Chan’s Birthday Party

hanie.hidayah (at)advertlets(dot)com
jason.ong(at)advertlets(dot)com

That’s us from Advertlets! A small celebration in the office…with a big celebration on the 12th!

Boryeong is really quite beautiful. Clean. Nice sand. Tanned bodies. Colorful floats. Good facilities. One of the best I’ve ever been to. Actually it is the best.

Yup. This is definitely my favourite shot of the year.

Or maybe this is

Here’s a preview of pics from the Boryeong Mud Festival:

These guys are most likely US military stationed in Korea.

There were waterslides to play with as well.

Shannon & a group of Indonesian college students based in South Korea.

That concludes the post for now. Come back here all next week for more pics from my South Korea trip!

The reception:

Me with some really lovely Korean ladies. Yes, most of them do look pretty damn good. The pop culture samples you’ve seen (eg Wonder Girls, Girls Generation, Hyori Lee, etc) isn’t quite too far off from the reality. I am…shocked. But pleasantly.

A picture at the peak with me, Rebecca, Jin Sook (an SPP representative) as well as a good looking dude from Canada.

Before the trip to the tower, we had dinner by the lakeside -

Awesome view of the lake from the restaurant balcony:

A Korean jazz band played as entertainment. Lead singer was really stunning. Reminded me of a Korean movie I’ve seen where the heroine somehow sings with a jazz group in a bar. Damn I forgot the title though.

The day before that was also another networking night - panorama shot!

Seoul’s night skyline is…surreallistically beautiful.

Malls are heavily populated even late at night:

Lastly here are some interesting Seoul quirks…a special pillow menu at the hotel I was staying, Coex Intercontintal Hotel!

Energy drinks you can’t find anywhere else:

And this last one is…like…wow. I usually smoke Kent, but I guess the only way you can smoke Kent in High Definition is in Korea

More soon! Seoul N Tower really deserves its own post, it will be up too!

The Bandai booth was pretty impressive: Robots, promoters and all!

Don’t know who this guy is, but he’s cute

Me testing out a cool Augmented Reality thing. Hold up the postcard to the webcam (the postcard has a special printed bar code on it), and it will ‘project’ images. Cool thing is that it changes perspective according to how you move and angle the card.

Another cool thing I tried was a gesture based navigation system. It was built by the guy demoing it in the picture below. It’s kind of like a Nintendo Wii controller thing (move your hand left and right/up and down) to effect what goes on screen. However, it’s without having a physical controller

This is Won Hee who explained to me about the system. Happy to have met someone that speaks English fluently all the way over here Apparently, she studied abroad!

I think most of you would be familiar with Domo-kun…

If you didn’t already know, Samsung is from Korea. They have quite a massive presence in Seoul, I saw Samsung Galaxy S ads…4 times! on the way from the airport to the hotel. You probably know their products well enough, so this is a picture of the pretty girl at the booth…

A motion capture thing (It’s how they plot out character animations in films such as Avatar). They are waving some sticks that translate to movement on screen. More on that later.

Lastly I leave you with an angry chicken figurine and his friends.

More soon! There’s a welcome party for Malaysian and international delegates tonight that I gotta get ready for. Should be fun. Stay tuned for more, I aim to blog daily/live if I can

Anyway, if you were following the World Cup this year, the name “Paul The Octopus” might have came up quite a bit. Interestingly enough, he has predicted all the World Cup matches quite accurately.

For those that don’t know:

Paul (hatched January 2008) is a common octopus living in a tank at a Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, who is used as an animal oracle to predict the results of football matches, usually international matches in which Germany is playing. He came to worldwide attention with his accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup.

During a divination, Paul is presented with two boxes containing food in the form of a mussel, each marked with the flag of a national football team in an upcoming match. He chose the box with the flag of the winning team in four of Germany’s six Euro 2008 matches, and in all seven of their matches in the 2010 World Cup. He correctly predicted a win for Spain against the Netherlands in the World Cup final on 11 July by eating the mussel in the box with the Spanish flag on it.[1] His predictions have thus been 100% (8/8) correct for the 2010 World Cup and 86% (12/14) correct overall.

Came across this image today (below), its a pretty interesting theory on how Paul the Octopus has been correct so far:

Heh. Magic? Octopus likes yellow? You decide. Then again, octopuses are color blind. Check out the link, and there’s also another theory about Paul preferring flags with contrasting stripes (the German flag has very high contrast).

Keep in mind also, that Paul is German, and historically, Germany has been pretty good at football over the years.

Probability wise, (from Wikipedia) “assuming Paul’s predictions were no better than fair independent coin flips, the probability of 12 successful predictions in 14 attempts is 91/1684 ≈ 0.56%” - A less than 1% chance.

Anyway, found this image today too.

Viva la Octopus Espanol!

Whether you believe in the logical explanation, or magic, or chalk it up to coincedence, this was probably one of the craziest World Cups ever - with goals that magically didn’t count as well as other mindboggling decisions by the referees, “extra goalkeepers” during the Uruguay vs Ghana match, a record number of yellow cards,  And the vuvuzela. Seriously, the vuvuzela. Aren’t you happy you don’t have to hear it anymore?

Anyway, even though the World Cup is over, remember you can catch up on your favourite moments of all the matches of the World Cup - just check out this link (Bplayer). There were a few matches I missed, and this is really one of the best legal places to watch the World Cup online from here

Coming soon to this blog: Party pictures (like you expect), and some interesting emotional insights and confessions (that you won’t expect…)

Regarding the photos, the aspect ratio in particular is interesting, I think it’s 16:9 (widescreen, like movies) instead of the usual 4:3 ratio. This photo was taken on the way to Rootz. Colors turned out quite nice - this is near Maison btw. Generally the cam performs quite well under low lighting, but I’m still learning the settings to get everything in focus (you’ll notice that some pics are blurry).

So then after we arrived at Rootz…That’s Sabrina, Donovan (a new addition to Advertlets, and a Facebook newbie too) and his friend Yenny.

Yenny seemed quite shy, but she seemed to be very well prepared to pose in the background even while I took a pic of Sabrina.

Met Darynne there as well.

The lovely Cay Kuijpers was there too!

Josiah (who you may remember from here) was there too.

And to end off this post, some eye candy for the girls, courtesy of Josiah:

More clubbing pics soon! It seems my clubbing nights are just getting better and better…practice makes perfect perhaps

I can say that I haven’t always been an avid football fan, but this World Cup has definitely been of a lot more relevance, and I’ve found myself watching a lot more football, whether it’s at Kayu Nasi Kandar, Ecoba, Movida or even the Terrace Bar at Zouk…or just at home at my computer on Astro Bplayer! Especially since there are a record number of Asian teams in the World Cup this time. Well, they’ve all been eliminated now, but they were Japan, South Korea & North Korea (who got absolutely humiliated).

Here’s a short overview of the Asian teams in the World Cup (they are all out, but still, it’s a good read)

(That’s me in my Nike Team Korea jersey. Yes, I don’t know enough about football to form a decision, so I’m supporting the teams that somewhat look like us…)

Me in my Team Korea jersey. Yes, that's Lien from here :)

As someone working in marketing, I think its very cool that Astro is doing this - especially since World Cup broadcast rights are not easy to get (Singapore nearly didn’t get the World Cup rights this year!), and this is definitely a very good ‘preview’ to potential Astro customers. If you’re a Maxis customer like myself, you get special benefits (you get to watch even more live matches), make sure you link your account - here’s how you do it.

If you're a Maxis subscriber, do this! :)

Basically you can watch it from anywhere with an internet connection and a browser. I’m using Chrome btw. No special software required, but you do have to install the Microsoft Silverlight player (Microsoft’s answer to Flash - which actually does a better job of video streaming). From the URL bar, the videos are loaded from Akamai HD - which is a broadband video delivery platform.

Full screen shot of the Astro Bplayer. Notice that I have also blurred out my Chinese name on top, ahaha!

It streamed pretty well on my Streamyx connection (I’m just using a simple 1MB package), and I must say that it seems to have quite a smart adaptive technology - I turned on some heavy downloads (using up about 80-100KBps), and immediately the video quality dropped but the framerate remained
pretty consistent.

It’s free to watch for now, so make sure you drop by to check it out. You can also catch the recaps until the 18th of the month.

There’s a Twitter contest where you can win some really good prizes for watching while tweeting about the World Cup promoting Astro Bplayer along the way.

(Screenshot of instructions from the website)

Prizes include:

Prizes include a 42" LCD TV 3 laptops and RM100 movie vouchers (that's roughly 10 movies).

Give it a try. You never know if you might win it. I can’t join since I’m an Advertlets employee working on the campaign with Astro, but feel free to pass me the 42″ LCD TV if you win…

B: It doesn’t go further than this, does it?

A: Our relationship is not doomed, it is merely not something that belongs to the future.

B: Nice quote. Are you summizing that this is as far as it goes?

A: How long can you spread out the emotion of a one night stand? A week? A month? A year? The remaining period of your lifetimes?

B: Are you saying that love is a game of chance?

A: I’m saying it is a game of skill. Perhaps love is a game, and the winner or loser depends on who leaves first.

B: That’s pretty sad.

A: Not as sad as the one left alone in the end.

B: There are people who are happily in relationships.

A: Perhaps we are not one of them. Or perhaps, you not with me. Perhaps one of them is forever compromising.

B: And perhaps maybe, some like you don’t deserve it.

A: I once believed in the idea of love. But seeing that it was futile, I chose to optimize it to my liking. To love, be loved, and be the first to leave each time.

B: You never know if you stay, what could happen.

A: You never know the pain it could bring if you weren’t the first to leave.

B: That’s negative control. That’s like saying, by committing suicide you are in control of your life.

A: Negative control is still control.

B: In that case, why bother getting in any relationship?

A: Have you heard that saying? “No one pursues pain for pain itself, but for the pleasure that comes with the pain?”. In this case, the optimal condition would be perhaps, pleasure for both of us for a time period of my choosing, and your pain after. Your pain, not mine. Perhaps, there needs to be an exit strategy for every relationship for it to be fully optimized.

B: What you’re saying makes sense in a way. But it just seems wrong on so many levels.

A: I wish you never come to the same conclusion as me. If you can embrace the fact that it was good as long as it lasted, you can free yourself from the feeling that it could be more. Good luck.

B: I hope to never lose so much hope, to think like you.

*Curtain closes, lights fade to black. End of scene*

“This may be a work of fiction. This conversation may or may not have happened. Nevertheless, be assured that some people do think this way, and I just wrote it down. And yes, the gender of A and B are vague for a reason. “

Check me out on foursquare!

If you’re reading this blog you probably know what Foursquare is. If you don’t know, check out foursquare.com. It’s kind of like a location-based Twitter thing, where you “check in” to places to tell people where you are, etc.

Not for everyone, but the more social people usually like to tell their friends where they are, where they are eating, etc. Twitter addicts especially are probably the biggest users of Foursquare.

I probably have like 323 friends on Foursquare (check out my profile here - http://foursquare.com/user/joshlim), and about 15 badges.

So when I heard there was a foursquare meetup, I was pretty excited. I was probably one of the earlier foursquare users, and I remember when even with just a decent amount of checkins, I reached #1 in foursquare check-in points for the Kuala Lumpur location in Malaysia.

Unfortunately on the day itself I wasn’t able to attend, but my colleagues Jason Ong & Rebecca Saw were there to coordinate it. As it was a joint project with Tune Hotels & Advertlets

It was held on the 16th of June (the reason being that 16 is four, squared, geddit?) Here’s an excerpt from the Malay Mail article, together with some pics from Advertlets bloggers and more:

You can also check out an article on the Malay Mail

“In conjunction with World Meet Up Day which was on June 16 (the number being the result of “four, squared”), Tune Hotels organised a meet-up at their Kota Damansara hotel to celebrate.

The first 50 people who checked in received a goodie bag each, and visitors were also given a quick tour of the hotel.

There was also a Foursquare Hunt where participants had to “catch” Tune Hotel PR, Marketing & Communications manager, Biresh Vrajlal using his check-ins as their only source of clues.

There was food for the hungry hunters after and a short Q&A game session with prizes given away. The ultimate goal? To earn the Swarm Badge, which is awarded to 50 or more people who check-in simultaneously at the same location.”

For your convenience, here is a map to Tune Hotels Kota Damansara, with Jason Ong, our favourite plus size male model.

I’ll tell you more about Lien in the next post, but for now we’ll let the photos speak for themselves. This was my first experience doing a full day ‘proper’ shoot with various outfits at a special location, and I’m quite happy with the results. Me and Lien decided on a high contrast theme, with lots of color.

I realised that shooting on a beach without a reflector is quite challenging as the bright light tends to shadow the face if not looking at the camera. Hence, you have to work with the natural light available. Aside from that, you also have to be mindful of which direction the wind is blowing so you can get the ‘blowing hair’ effect.

But most of it happened quite naturally. I like how quite a lot of the shots just ‘happened’ without much staging. This was taken as Lien was walking into the water and had just taken off her slippers.

And looking back…within seconds of each other.

Most of the shots range from a demure/happy/classy kind of look, something which Lien said was very “her”. Later on we tried some happy jumping shots:

I like this one below, doesn’t quite look like a jump. Looks like she’s floating here.

A close up. We decided to go for a minimal makeup look. She’s only just wearing some eyeliner, lip gloss and minimal foundation. Lien actually has some slight freckles, which is pretty uncommon for an Asian girl so I thought it’ll be good to have some of it in the photo. Probably not so apparent in the photo below, but some of the other upcoming close up shots will show it well.

Later on, we had another outfit change and moved to a location further down the beach:

This turned out very well in particular. Some extreme color adjustment on this, but it fits the mood very well. Very dreamy and slightly surreal.

Here’s a preview of the upcoming pics from this series (many more to come!) Come back again later this week for more of Lien!