During a recent product launch, a long-time friend and fellow Word Up! supporter Debbie Koh from Jireh Consult struggles to guess my name.

Baby Max’s very own blog. Talk about starting them young!

From left are Sim, baby Max and Chong. (Photos courtesy of http://anna-rina.com/blog.)

“What?! See Ming practically knows half of Kuala Lumpur!” “Gimme another hint, this time, be more specific!”

Word Up! came about from an idea of combining Chong See Ming’s large personal database of contacts with her fellow colleagues’ quest to hunt for freelance writers and editors.

With the familiar newsletter appearing in your Inbox every month alerting you to the Word Up! gathering, Word Up! also had the indirect noble effect of bringing poor and often struggling writers out of the dark, and into the limelight.

It was also at Word Up! that Chong met her future husband, Sim Tong, or better known as Sim.

Eventually, Word Up! took up a life of its own through its Yahoo! newsgroup and postings.

Sim, who’s a struggling writer, as Chong puts it, wrote a novel titled The Other Kind of Dying and is now incubating the second novel.

The incubation period is coming to three years to date, jokes Chong.

The monthly Word Up! gatherings also slowed down after Max came into their world, as the ex-JobStreet.com veteran now struggles with a full-time job in a new company and a nine-month- old baby boy who seems to like caterpillars more than butterflies.

Since Sim already has a domain at BigBigPlanet.com (www.bigbigplanet.com), the Web and blog site is now used primarily as a way of archiving their pictures and memories, as well as sharing their adventures with friends and family online.

The blog has followed the couple to the icy cold reaches of Iceland, to the jungles of Siem Reap, the bright lights of Japan’s Electronic City and even London’s “Tube” with adventures and pictures detailing every minute of their adventures in the past couple of years.

With Max coming into the picture, the Sims have devoted a section especially for baby Max at www.bigbigplanet.com/max, with links to uncles, aunties and even godmother, singer and blogger Janet Lee at http://souldoctor.blogspot.com/.

Sim also has a natural love for tinkering with electronics, from tweaking simple baby ventilator fans to tuning 540 performance motors, the proud father even posts up simple “How-To” along with tips and tricks on a sub-section on BigBigPlanet.com, as well as competing in remote control car races, again with pictures and behind-the-scene stories.

Team BigBigPlanet is also weaning baby Max on a diet of small toy cars as the team is now in dire straits for a new driver. Oldman Sim doesn’t drive as well as he used to anymore, he chuckles!