My name is Kenny Sia.

All studio photos courtesy of Alvin Leong Photography

I was born on the 27th November 1982. That makes me 24 this year, and a Sagittarius. I’m the youngest in my family. Also the most rebellious.
My field of work is in IT management. Apart from my full-time day-to-day job, I spend a good deal of time on this website, which is starting to give me pretty good side income. I also pen a regular column with KLue Magazine titled Blogroll, where I showcase the best of Malaysian blogs.

I am a health-conscious person eventhough I may not look the part. I’m not one of those lucky enough to be blessed with good genetics or a high metabolism rate, which is why I go for a workout almost everyday and watch my diet very carefully.
I like a nice skinny latte and I still drink alcohol socially, but I don’t smoke.
I enjoy travelling immensely and one of my favourite cities to visit is Singapore. My aim is to visit at least two new cities overseas every year.

I live in Kuching, Sarawak. It’s a humble small city located in East Malaysia, about 2 hours by plane from the capital Kuala Lumpur.
Kuching is one of the hidden treasures of Malaysia, a wonderful place that strikes a perfect balance between the fast-paced lifestyle of a big city, and the intimacy of a laid-back rural kampung. Everything you see in travel brochures about Sarawak is true. We really do live on trees and wear red loincloths around town.

Previously I lived Perth, Australia, where I spent a good 8 years of my youth growing up. Perth remains a place very close to my heart. It’s been almost 2 years since I left Perth and I still speak with a distinct Aussie accent, a nagging habit I’m struggling to shake off.

I’m a graduate of Curtin University, where I hold a Bachelors degree in Physics and an Honours degree in Electronic & Communication Engineering. None of my two degrees have any relevance whatsoever to my field of work right now. I haven’t yet found the need to use complex Calculus to solve a really bad business decision.
The moral of the story is: get a commerce degree instead. You’ll live longer.

Before I landed at my current job, I used to work as an EMC test engineer, a software engineer and a home tutor. Out of those three, I enjoyed being a home tutor best.
For several years, I charged an equivalent of RM140 an hour regurgitating high school science and maths to anyone who’s willing to pay. My students included many people from a wide range of backgrounds: from local Australians to overseas students, overachieving 16-year-olds to late 40-plus-year-old moms, filthy rich Indonesians to dirt poor Somalians, and of course plenty of Malaysians rushing to do their last-minute cramp before the exams.

My father was diagnosed with advanced stage kidney cancer in late 2004. That was a very sad and difficult period in my life. In March 2005, I left my many friends in Perth and a handsomely-paid job to move back to Kuching to be by my father’s side. He passed away peacefully in May 2005.

I started this website because I wanted to chronicle the drastic changes over that tumulous period in my life. My blog began from when I was still living in Perth, to when I decided to move back to Kuching, to when my father left for a better place, to me experiencing reverse culture shock settling down here, and finally to me becoming the person that I am today.
This is my website.

And this is me. I am Kenny.

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Do you have an autograph book?

A rare occassion happened today. I was cleaning up my room and I came across my autograph books from ages ago.
These autograph books are from my late primary school years, back when writing pointless well-wishing messages for your classmates were still considered cool.

Looking through them brought back a lot of nostalgic memories. Not sure if kids these days still keep something like that. I suppose with Friendster or Multiply these days, it’s a lot easier to keep in touch with your old schoolmates. There’s no point keeping an autograph book now.
But before all these online social-networking sites were invented, this was what we do. Each one of us kept these fancy little notebooks with fancy little covers, and we passed them around among our classmates and wrote messages in them.

My autograph book has a Little Bobdog cover on it.
If I carry something around like that with me today, someone would report me for commiting a crime against humanity.
Having a Little Bobdog notebook is about as bad as me wearing Hello Kitty underpants to go out. Litte Bobdog! Can you believe it? What the hell was I smoking?

Normally on the first page of our autograph books, we would write some sentimental crap about how we’re all leaving school soon and how we should treasure our friendship together.

It’s very ironic, because I don’t even remember half the people who left messages. in my autograph book. Who the heck is Tan Yen Yeu? I don’t remember knowing anyone called Tan Yen Yeu!

You gotta cut my cheesiness some slack because these were written WAY back in 1991.
Thank goodness I don’t write like that now. FRANCE no longer stands for Friendship Remains And Never Can End. France in 2006 stands for Our Football Captain Likes To Headbutt Foulmouthed Italians And Gets Himself Sent Off.

In 1991, I was a young and stupid 9-year-old who doesn’t know how to spell “friends” and wrote “souvenir” as “sasnival”. What kinda word is “sasnival”? I must be writing in German.
It felt a bit strange to see people referring to me by my Chinese name. Most of my friends call me Kenny. I’m still not used to people calling me Tze Foo.

A friend of mine suggested that I might as well drop the “Tze Foo” and replace it with “Dot Com”. That way my full name will become “Kenny Sia Dot Com”

By this point, you must be wondering how much vocabulary a 9-year-old has to be able to fill up the pages of an autograph book. The answer is: not much.

Almost all the well-wishing messages written were tacky poems copied from somewhere, like this one.

Sometimes, I don’t even know if what they’ve written were meant to be well wishes. If it’s a joke it’s not funny at all.

In fact, I was so disappointed with the quality of messages left for me, that I myself wrote in my own autograph book.

I know, how pathetic right.
At least some of the poems still have potential give me a chuckle after so many years.

My favourite poem in my whole two books though, was this one. I saw this poem repeated several times. Seems like my classmates seem to have a penchant of wanting to marry me with a giant hairy ape.

Coincidentally I just came back from Hong Kong. But it’s 2006 now, so I’ve taken the liberty to “update” the poem a little bit.
Here’s how it should go:

Go To Hong Kong
Eat Until Song Song
Come Back Hong Kong
Become King Kong

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