Fikri, the host from Filemmakers Anonymous, begins the session and introduces himself.

He takes a moment to set up the presenter’s Macbook Pro while the fans wait excitedly.

Soon, the members of Wong Fu Productions (sans Ted Fu due to “some personal issues”) come on stage. Wes flashes peace signs to the cheering audience.

They casually talk on stage and cracking a few jokes along the way. The host asks about the missing Ted.

“With the power of the internet,” as he says in the video, Ted could make a ‘cameo’ appearance via a pre-recorded message. He jokes about actually being in Malaysia by showing pictures of local attractions including KLCC, KL Tower, Batu Caves and a fish spa with his face superimposed.

They share a light moment after watching Ted’s video.

Wong Fu talks about their history as college students who came together to start making videos. They also touch on their experience producing some of their newer videos (the behind-the-scenes picture of the “That Girl” music video by David Choi is shown onscreen).

They emphasize that the lack of equipment and money shouldn’t be deterrents to producing videos. Philip talks about the Wong Fu trio crowding over the computer in their earlier days to buy an expensive video camera on Amazon with their money collectively put together. Wesley mentions a person he knows who wanted $50,000 to produce a short film, and laughs it off as ridiculous – “We could make a video with 50 bucks!”

The host moves on to the Q&A session with the audience.

When asked why Wes punched Wong Fu’s one millionth subscriber in their satirical One Million Subscribers video, Wes jokes that “only I have the right to punch Phil!”

Wong Fu also shares their experience producing their latest web series, Home Is Where The Hans Are.

The session ended with cheers from the audience. Phil and Wes waves as they got up and moved backstage.

Photos are © yauhui, all rights reserved.

Tents were placed in a grid formation near the desert restaurant. From what I’m told, it’s where the local people live – like a mini community.

Most of these people make a living serving tourists and sightseers, since there’s practically nothing else to do in the desert.

Despite being in the winter season, the temperature under the scorching sun can get rather toasty. In fact, the weather is so extreme that you can start sweating in the open, and suddenly be hit with a cold shock as soon as you step into the shade.

A common signature dish here is the curry lamb and grilled chicken on flavoured rice. It almost tastes like our local nasi biryani!

A unique treat served here is their sugar-glazed dessert. It’s crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, though one might find it overly sweet. The dessert does somewhat taste like doughnuts, but shaped in balls.

Here’s a silly picture of me.

With lunch done, the journey into the desert begins.

The desert is so big that tourists have to be brought around in 4x4s! The ride was understandably bumpy…

… but oh boy, was it worth the pain in the ass (literally!).

Being in the desert means you’ll hardly see a single fluff of cloud in the sky. It’s clear blue all around.

We whizzed past mountains after mountains. It’s almost surreal to actually be there.

Interestingly enough, the locals claim that this vast desert was once a sea bed. Yes, this place used to be filled with water!

I can’t help feeling slightly narcissistic when I’m here in the desert for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

They gave us the option to continue the rest of the journey on camels, but at this point in time all I wanted to do was go back to the hotel – I’ve been rehydrating myself countless times but there’s not a toilet in sight. (The tour guide kindly pointed out that I am already standing in one.)

And so I scurried over to one corner and relieved myself. Looking up, I caught sight of carvings on the rock face. The locals later told me that it was left behind well over a thousand years ago by nomads living in the area.

And this is me again, with a funky little fashion accessory. Last one, I promise!

This is the “kitchen” of a common tent where the locals gather and have meals together.

As we begin our way out of the desert, I spotted this group of camels just chilling around on the sand.

We stopped by a small place with ancient carvings along the way.

I was too absorbed with this cat that as soon as I was done taking pictures of it, the 4×4 driver decided it was time to leave.

And that marks the end of my desert adventures.

P.S. I’ve received some feedback from my readers telling me that my captions-before-pictures format was slightly confusing. I’ll change this in the next post.

Despite being one of the poorest countries by water terms, the Red Sea is an incredibly beautiful and well-maintained water body.

Have you been to paradise?

To spend each day being surrounded by such gorgeous sceneries, it must be an incredibly exhilarating job here at this resort.

Stepping onto the streets of Aqaba, this caught my eye. And I have no idea what this does.

A common sight around tourist hotspots, these sand bottlers (or whatever they’re supposed to be called) persistently try to impress passers-by in hopes of another sale.

And to wrap the post, here’s a random shot of a mosque.

Upon touchdown at the Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, I made my way around Madaba – “the city of mosaics”.

Ironically, a small faction has started to sell carpets instead.

This is the church of Mt Nebo. Christians would recognise it as the place where Moses had purportedly died.

The church itself is not big at all, surprisingly. It’s just a small building with a few rows of benches.

And from atop Mt Nebo, visitors are offered a view of the “Holy Land”. That city in the distance is none other than Israel.

Fancy dinner at a fancy restaurant.

And a less-than-amazing hotel breakfast.

The resort that I stayed in was a fairly good one: it’s part of the international Mövenpick hotel chain. It’s absolutely beautiful here, with a unique architecture.

Of course, the real attraction here is the Dead Sea. But unfortunately due to my poor decision-making skills, I have left my camera in the hotel room while I went to the beach. So you’ll have to make do with this silly picture of me.

A random picture I took on the Sydney metro. The windows were awfully dirty and I wasn’t exactly bothered, so you’ll find rough clone stamping here and there.

They gracefully sent me a copy of the event’s press release with several photos attached so that I didn’t miss anything. Read on to check them out!

Alvin Phey, P1 Associate Director Brand & Consumer Marketing

Special Guest Commedian from NZ, Tony Christiansen

Comedy Thursday Comedians

Press Release

P1 CELEBRATES NEW “POTONG STIM!™” CAMPAIGN AT ‘COMEDY THURSDAY’

Kuala Lumpur – Packet One Networks (Malaysia) Sdn.Bhd. (“P1”), Malaysia’s first and leading 4G wireless broadband service provider, lived up to its reputation of having a sense of humour when it sponsored Comedy Thursday at Zouk KL on 6th October to celebrate its new Potong Stim!™ campaign.

The theme of the night was, of course, “potong stim” and some of the five comedians – Papi Zak, Kavin Jayaram, Rizal V. Greyzel, Steve Northcott and special guest comedian from New Zealand, Tony Christiansen – shared their “potong stim” moments.

Similar to P1, Comedy Thursday started three years ago from ground zero and according to Lai, P1’s sponsorship of the Comedy Thursday event is its way of supporting all things fresh and local – in this case, local comedy and comedians.

Matt Bellotti, Editorial Director of Time Out KL, said “We started Comedy Thursday in May 2008 outdoors at Asian Heritage Row with about sixty people in the audience. Now we are in Zouk, with over 350 people and tonight we celebrated our 10,000th guest! Comedy plays a very important role in any society, so it’s great to see companies like P1 encouraging our comedians to continue and thrive and hopefully to inspire others to try comedy or just to come out and support it.”

Michael Lai, CEO of P1 explained that the Potong Stim theme came from P1’s desire to inform the public that using your mobile broadband dongle at home is “potong stim”. “We just don’t say it like anybody else because we embrace humour and also try to entertain through our communications,” said Lai.

P1’s latest Potong Stim!TM campaign informs that a mobile dongle is not built for home use but for light surfing when you are out and about. For optimized broadband at home, a modem with a larger antenna that is connected to a higher voltage power source is required to ensure a stronger signal that can penetrate through layers of walls.

A P1 research conducted by Frost & Sullivan showed that 93% of broadband users in Malaysia are frustrated with their broadband experience just by using their mobile dongles at home and, as a result, P1 responded with the ONE 69 Plan. The plan includes a home modem, a mobile dongle and 100 minutes of free voice calls to fixed, mobile and IDD numbers bundled in for only RM69 per month.

“The ONE 69 Plan is really the best value broadband plan in the market today,” said Lai. “The low price point is designed specifically for mobile broadband users who are used to paying in the range of RM50 to RM90. With the One 69 Plan, they get an attractive 3-in- 1 bundle and more importantly, they don’t have to “potong stim” their home broadband experience!”

P1 treated its guests, comprising of members of the media, resellers and some customers to a fun night of laughter.

About Packet One Networks (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd.

Packet One Networks (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd (“P1″), a subsidiary of Green Packet Berhad, is Malaysia’s first and leading 4G telecommunications company with the country’s widest WiMAX coverage. P1 4G represents the first large-scale commercial 4G WiMAX deployment in Southeast Asia, and the first large-scale deployment of an 802.16e 2.3GHz WiMAX network outside Korea.

P1′s goal is to bridge the digital divide by making access to the internet universal, ubiquitous and affordable for every Malaysian. P1 hopes to play a major part in realizing the nation’s goal providing Broadband for All.

P1 is the winner of the Red Herring Asia’s Most Innovative Private Technology Company in 2008 and is listed in the Malaysia Book of Records as Malaysia’s first WiMAX telco (August 2008). In 2009, P1 bagged the MSC Malaysia APICTA Best of Start-Up Companies award. P1 is awarded the 2010 Most Promising Service Provider of the Year by the prestigious 2010 Frost & Sullivan Malaysia Telecoms Awards. P1′s “Sudah Potong?” advertising campaign bagged gold at the highly coveted 2010 Malaysia Effie Awards. For more information on P1 4G, visit http://www.p1.com.my/.

P1 is the converged communications pillar of Green Packet Berhad, which was founded in 2000 in the Silicon Valley. Green Packet Berhad is now headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and listed on the Main Board of the Malaysian bourse. It has over 1000 employees with nine operations across the globe. For more information visit http://www.greenpacket.com/.

At the receiving end of the uproar was famed font designer Christian Robertson, who had in the past designed brilliant fonts such as Dear Sarah and Ubuntu Tilting. People were bewildered that someone so bright could end up creating such a font as Roboto.

However, it must be noted that every designer has their own tastes and art directions. Not everyone would agree to the same viewpoint. And mine is slightly different. To begin this article, I should talk a bit about fonts in general, and how I thought of them – it is entirely opinionated and therefore should be read as such.

Generally, typefaces can be put under two categories: serif and sans serif. Serifs are, as Wikipedia words it, “semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols”. Typefaces without these details – I tend to call them ‘tails’ in casual conversations – are called sans serifs, “sans” meaning “without” in French.

Serifs highlighted in red

It is hard to deny that two of the most commonly-used sans serif fonts today are Arial and Helvetica, with Helvetica being the gold standard in design and print whilst Arial being an imitation that started shipping in Windows 3.1. To the common eye, they are almost indistinguishable – Arial is, after all, designed to be used in place of Helvetica without having to pay for the necessary royalties. This is an arguable part of typographic history, one that continues even today, but I stand by my view that Arial looks ugly. Period.

Helvetica and Arial in regular 100px

There are just certain aspects of Arial that irritated me. I always had a thing for fonts that give a body of text a certain sense of flow and continuity. Again, it’s merely opinion, but as a designer I like to have a good “feeling” of my designs. Arial didn’t give me that feeling.

Perhaps it’s the way the protruding leg of the R glyph juts out. Or maybe it’s the way the strokes on c and e glyphs end at such an awkward angle.

Or, more importantly, the lack of attention to finer details, like how the strokes meet in the a glyph.

Note how the loop stroke meets the backbone of the a glyph

In fact, if you looked carefully, every terminal stroke on Helvetica glyphs ended at the nearest 45-degree angle. This even extends to numbers and symbols. The entire typeface is consistent and polished, not wobbly and indecisive like Arial is.

With Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft finally introduced to the world a successor to Arial: Calibri. And the first time I saw it, I hated it. It had rounded strokes and a thin, frail appearance. I thought it lacked boldness and character (excuse the pun).

Arial and Calibri in regular 100px

It looks like the type of font I’d see on the cover of a children’s book. It was ridiculous. I never really looked highly upon people who used it on any of their work ever since.

Of course, despite the praise, I do have some gripes with Helvetica. While it does look amazing on print, I design for the screen and I thought Helvetica didn’t really look as good there. I found better choices. Helvetica had clean, smooth lines that extrude elegance and simplicity. The characters are reserved, yet strong and vocal when it needs to be.

But I found that the screen doesn’t need reserved characters. It needs to flow. Each character should automatically lead to the next, not stop and make you have to drag your eyeballs to the following character. This is when I realised something: typefaces that look good on-screen are typefaces that are open. Charismatic. Fun yet controlled.

Enter my favourite sans serif font: Myriad Pro.

Helvetica and Myriad Pro in regular 100px

The sharp-eyed among you would immediately recognise the font. It’s on the back (or front) of some of the world’s most popular devices.

Myriad Pro in semibold 100px

The first time I discovered it, I was amazed. It was gorgeous. It looked beautiful on-screen. It fit perfectly almost every single time I needed a sans serif font.

The terminal strokes on Myriad Pro are more open

As you can see, the terminal strokes on Myriad Pro are more open. They look more natural and pleasing on the eye whereas Helvetica can be harsh and cold. Gentle curves and smooth strokes make Myriad Pro, in my eyes, the ultimate sans serif font.

The curves on Myriad Pro are smoother

I especially love how the top of the P and R glyphs subtly curve convexly in a playful manner. It’s just gorgeous.

And now, we have a new sans serif typeface on the block: Roboto.

Roboto and Droid Sans in regular 100px

Roboto is meant to replace Droid Sans as the system font in Android 4.0 and up. There are certain subtle elements of Droid Sans that one can spot in Roboto if he looks closely enough. One key differentiating feature of Droid Sans was the way the “feet” of some glyphs taper off into a wedge-like shape.

Notice the wedge at the end of the q and d glyphs

If you stacked Roboto and Droid Sans side by side, it would seem like a natural evolution. The character shapes and styles are almost similar, but more polished.

Like father like son

However, one cannot deny the glaring similarities of a select few glyphs with other fonts. Take the R glyph for example: The way the terminal stroke tails off is distinctly Helvetica. Nonetheless, to its credit, Roboto did fix something I never really liked in Helvetica. I always thought the way Helvetica’s loop strokes are stretched so wide just seems odd and imbalanced, like a person with an oversized head.

Roboto and Helvetica in regular 100px. Notice the narrower loop on Roboto

The Kk glyphs are also remarkably similar to a different font, namely Ronnia. The iconic “bridge” is clearly seen, thought I can’t say I like it very much in either font.

Roboto and Ronnia in regular 170px

But the main issue here is Helvetica, the font that even got its own film. Designers and hardcore Helvetica fanboys are, again and again, tirelessly defending their crown jewel font. And I see why.

Roboto and Helvetica in regular 70px

Some even went so far as to label Roboto as Google’s Arial. Roboto, like Arial, lacks the finer attention to details and quality. The kerning is not as tight as Helvetica, and possibly thus not as visually-appealing. Certain aspects are also not as consistent, although it could be for the better or worse depending on how you look at it.

But I think I like it.

Unfortunately the availability of most of these services are usually US- and Europe-only, due to licensing restrictions from record label companies. The choices for local users have generally been very narrow, ranging from using VPNs to listening poor-quality streams, and most commonly, simply pirating songs altogether.

Just recently, I heard of a new service called WOWLOUD. At that time, it wasn’t launched yet so the only thing I saw on the site was a simple form to register your interest. I signed up, and just last week I received an email from their team telling me to activate my account. And so I did.

They prompted me to upgrade to a promotional-priced RM9.90/mo premium account, but I figured that I’ll just stick with the free access pass while I just poke around. There are a few limitations for the free account, namely a 20-hour monthly listen limit and advertisements. You will also miss out on the premium-only “high fidelity music” feature. However, that’s just about the only differences I can find thus far. A Premium Plus account is said to be “coming soon” that features mobile access as well.

Regardless of which you pick, you will still get the ability to create custom playlists, pre-cache your music offline and sync them across multiple devices. It is worth noting that unlike other major cloud music services, WOWLOUD is only accessible from their client app – there is no web player (ala Grooveshark) so you’ll have to install the client on all computers that you’ll want to bring your music to.

Upon login, you’ll see a fairly clean interface that shows you the latest songs and top charts on WOWLOUD. There’s also a news feed lower down, but it appears to be just a feed of their Twitter account. Advertisements will loop along the top and right columns.

The navigation pane on the left will let you switch between views, among them your Play Queue, Local Files, a list of your playlists, and the title/album art of the currently-playing song. You can create a new playlist by double-clicking on “+ Add New Playlist”, giving it a name, then dragging songs from your queue onto the new playlist.

WOWLOUD aims to replace your traditional music player altogether, which explains the Local Files menu. You can import the songs you already have on your computer into the WOWLOUD app and play them as you normally would. However, imported songs do not sync between devices which could cause some confusion if you frequently switch between computers.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can explore the various charts and add songs that you like into your playlist. At the moment, the charts include seasonal (it’s currently a Halloween Chart), top songs of the year, and others that are categorized by language and genre such as Chinese, Kpop/Jpop, Rock, Country, Jazz/Blues and Dance/Club.

Despite being on a free account, the quality of the songs are decent. Unless you’re a serious audiophile, you won’t hear much difference between the songs on WOWLOUD and those on your personal stereos. In fact, if you’re currently listening to low-quality pirated songs (and if you are, shame on you!) then WOWLOUD might even sound better.

With Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music and One Stop Music partnered up for WOWLOUD, you will find most if not all of the songs that you usually listen to.

However, there were several occasions that I couldn’t find songs that I enjoy. In fact, despite having a picture of Michael Bublé on the Top Charts, a search for his name yielded no results. David Foster, Charice and other popular jazz artistes aren’t on the catalogue either. Of course, you can forget finding most unsigned musicians like David Choi and Deadmau5, unless you can somehow convince them to get their songs on WOWLOUD.

Also worth noting in the free version is audio advertisements. Yes, after every few songs, WOWLOUD will uncannily insert a short advertisement before proceeding with the next song in the queue. While not majorly annoying, it could be distracting (or, as you might call it, potong stim) if you’re in the middle of a party dancing to some pop songs played over WOWLOUD, only to be interrupted by ads. The worst part is, the ads themselves are currently low-quality, mushy recordings of artistes endorsing WOWLOUD. More often than not you can’t even hear what they are trying to say. Things might improve as WOWLOUD grows bigger. Hopefully.

The official word is that WOWLOUD accounts are given out by-invitation only, but there’s apparently a loophole: you can head over to the premium sign-up page, register your account, skip the payment step – and voilà!

Head over to the WOWLOUD site to find out more, and if you have already played around with it, let me know how you’ve been finding it thus far!

Update: As a friend pointed out to me on Twitter, the WOWLOUD app does look remarkably alike Spotify’s client. Comparing both, it’s hard to ignore the similarities.