I woke up early to get things ready for the kayaking trip for Azmi and his sister (who is helping him out) although I wouldn’t be able to join them. I managed to get on the waters on Saturday evening (will post on this later) so I didn’t feel so bad about missing out on the trip.

Later I went with my other half to the Charity Food Fair at the Civic Center in aid of the Autistic Children Association as she has baked some scones and chocolate muffins for the event after which we adjoined to have ‘kway chap’ breakfast at the corner coffee shop at Teochew Association in town.

Duly raising the cholesterol levels in our blood nourished and since we are already in town we went to the Petanak wet market to buy some vegetables and fruits. And we saw a bastard fruitcake on the drive home at the traffic lights who opened his car door and nonchalantly left his empty coke can on the road as if it was the most natural thing to do! What a pig! Despite 50 years on and having some first world infrastructure we are still very much a third world mentality country.

In the afternoon I decided to install WordPress after weeks of reading and thinking about trying it out. Forget the 5 minutes installation as I took over an hour and only managed to get it done with the kind assistance of Jee. Thanks Jee for your time, patience and generosity! And the result is here –which is work in progress and I’ll still be working on and when I have the confidence that I know what I’m doing; I’ll probably switch this blog over to WordPress too as the number of options and control one has makes Blogger looks like blogging for dummies! Yeah, I’m a dummy.

In the evening I went cycling alone as I wanted to take some photos and would be stopping frequently which can be amusing at first and annoying later if you’re cycling with others. Later I went out for dinner and drinks with some old friends and came home nicely but agreeably tired.

All in all it was a simply satisfying Sunday. Trust that yours was too!

If you want to have more targeted readers to your Blog then you will want to know about BlogRush – the latest Blog syndication network.

All you need to do is register (IT’S FREE!) with them and add a FREE widget to your blog and sit back as your posts would automatically be promoted on related blogs across the internet. Check out BlogRush website and watch the video to learn how this powerful service works to exponentially grow your blog’s traffic. Who knows - maybe your blog will get even more hits than Kenny Sia! Dream on but meanwhile do something about it as this is a relatively new service and you want to be the early bird to capitalize on it.

What have you got to lose except perhaps your skepticism that people actually visit and read your lame posts! Whatever.

Here’s best wishes to your first one hundred or one thousand visitors!

It’s kinda disheartening that your usual barber whom you always go to gives you a discount every time you visit him for a haircut as he has to spend less time and effort in doing so! *sigh*

On a more cheerful and brighter note, regular readers to my blog would have noticed that I have changed my template to one with less clutter. Hopefully it would load faster. Actually I had been meaning to do some ’spring cleaning’ to my template but last night I just decided to use a new template and add in the things that I want and exclude those that had been there for historical reasons. I want to cut out the fat on my blog and also on myself! Hmm. I am still sticking to the blogger platform although I have been contemplating switching over to using Wordpress for a while now. I want to but have not found the time to learn how to do so yet. Any kind souls out there want to lend this unker a hand?

You may want to read this if you are thinking of installing a stats counter in your blog from any “Tom, Dick & Harry” stats provider (which are usually ‘free’). Just be careful.

The new blogger is ‘out of beta’ with new stuff like labels, drag-and-drop template editing, and privacy controls and I made the switch over yesterday evening. You can take a tour here to find out if it’s worth the trouble to make the switch as you can still sign in to use Blogger with either the New Blogger (using your Google account) or the Old Blogger (using your Blogger account).

I found out that it was no trouble at all provided you have a Google account already but you can always sign up for one anyway. The only trouble I had was that all my previous postings at www.fh2o.blogspot.com was gone now which I had expected anyway when I made the switch to publish at an external ftp instead of on the free blogspot.com. They are actually not ‘gone’ but were transferred, photos and all over to www.fh2o.kuchingkayak.com! And if you want to publish to an external FTP server, you will need to Set ‘Blog Readers’ to ‘Anybody’ and use a “Classic Template”. I suppose this effectively means that you would not be able to use the new features like labels (categories) that I was looking forward to using the classic template. Darn! Maybe someone can let me know how to include ‘labels’ in the classic template format that I’m currently using? I had ‘played’ around with the various new features and it’s really much easier to use and customise the templates now compared to the old blogger. A ‘no-brainer’ - I like it.

And I could now leave a notice at www.fh2o.blogspot.com to inform people of my migration to www.fh2o.kuchingkayak.com when I couldn’t previously. Maybe I can get some of my old readership back now. Hmm.

We’ll see how things go. *sigh*