Friday, July 23, 2010

Another interesting week

I'm getting lame at making blog titles. Anyway, here's a quick round up of this week. I'll obliviously think I'm a celebrity to justify the importance of this post. Readers be warned.

I was assigned the role of Toastmaster of the Evening (TME) for last Wednesday's Toastmasters meeting. It's like being Master of Ceremony (MC). I had attended meetings for dozen of times, but I'm so ignorant that I couldn't remember how the previous TMEs did their job. So I contacted Penny Chin, a fellow member, to help me prepare. She's so great at explaining it, but I was so shallow (and yes, ignorant) that during D-day I performed awfully. At least everybody laughed.

In the meeting there were some guests, all new faces, mostly cute chicks including a French girl who works as translator and has traveled all over Asia <-- if this information is not accurate then I definitely not paying attention to her talk. But the guest that interested me most was a guy named Khairul. No, I'm not gay.

Shameless plug: The club I'm a member of is quite international. We have members from Indonesia (me), Russia, Myanmar, Taiwan and Pakistan (and of course, Malaysia). If you're in Kuala Lumpur and want to sharpen your communication/leadership skill the fun way, feel free to come. Guests are most welcome, and it's free.

Back to Khairul. He's a quiet guy most of the time during the meeting. But just now I checked his website (he gave his name card), and wow I'm amazed. I never thought there is any Web 2.0 guy in Malaysia. Skimming at his blog, I can see he's passionate with Web technology. Cool. And he's the one who brought the French girl to our meeting. Even cooler.

The thing is, I'm a really Web 2.0 geek, developer type. That's why I'm enthusiastic when encountering geeks-alike. I don't just use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, and numerous others, but I also longing to develop something like those. I'm currently developing a super-awesome-caffeine-induced social thingy in my secret underground lair. I'll keep you updated on that.

Apparently one French a day was not enough. After the meeting, Penny said she wanted to pick up this French guy who supposed to stay at her house. She joined a website where people can host foreigners. I thought the idea was dangerous and crazy. We followed Penny to a nice Mamak nearby KLCC and met the guy. He's nice and polite. Maybe the idea wasn't that crazy.

The day after I went to watch movie in KLCC with Penny and the gang, including the French guy whom I can't remember his name (it's French). I had some interesting conversations with him. He said he was from Australia where he worked there for some months using Working Holiday Visa.

He also shared his experience when he first arrived in Bali. He told me that some guys were "very friendly" to pickup his bags for him, but then they escorted him to money changer to claim their fee. He also thought the taxi driver took him around to increase the meter. Classic.

That's the problem in Bali (but I guess in many tourism places as well), some people are just like to take advantage of clueless tourists. I told him that I experienced the same even though I'm *Indonesian*. Either they're preposterous or I was really stupid (I think both). Next time when you plan to travel, better do your homework before you get there. Ask Google.



3 comments:

  1. Hiya, thanks for the link! Nice meeting a senior programmer like you =D

    Btw it's actually the French girl that brought me to the meeting, hehe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know... I'm awesome :)

    (and apparently you did listen to what I was saying, that's pretty good for a guy :p)

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