The Adventurers' Club

Created a new web site today. The Adventurers' Club. I hope this project proceeds as we hope.

Festival of the Hungry Ghosts

I have been electronically rummaging through all my old digital photographs and created a few new galleries for the web site. There are photographs of the Singaporean CBD taken on an impossibly clear day as well as shots taken at Pulau Ubin, Jurong Bird Park, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and Chinatown ~ back in 2000.

There are two other quite different galleries... one is of the Thai pop singing duo "China Dolls". I had gone to Bukit Panjang Shopping plaza to get a haircut and the duo were making a publicity appearance so I took some photographs of the performance and the crowd that had come to see them. Finally there is some photographs of my wife Shao Ping making offerings down by the void deck of our flat in Choa Chu Kang during the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. I like those photographs in particular.

Fijian bloggers may be gagged by military government

It seems that Fijian bloggers may be gagged by the military junta running the country. Check out these three blogs for more on the latest. Intelligentsiya, ResistFranksCoup and Discombobulated.

My first editorial on my old Pasir Ris Mercury site, an early incarnation of a blog, back in 2000 was a comment on the previous coup in Fiji. History repeats itself.

Taiwan photographs added to gallery

I added a sequence of image galleries featuring photographs taken in Taiwan during 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004. Our wedding banquet is incuded!

Historical sites added to home page

I added five galleries of photographs taken at various points in Singapore and Southeast Asia during 2001 ~ 2005. The photographs were taken in Kanchanaburi, Thailand and three points in Singapore: Kranji War Cemetery, Labrador Park and the Ford Factory Museum. I also added a gallery of photographs taken at the ANZAC Day dawn service at the Commonwealth War Graves in Singapore.

Photographs of Malaysia added to site

I added four galleries of photographs taken at various points in Malaysia during trips made in 2000 ~ 2002. The photographs were taken in Johor Bahru, Pulau Besar, Tioman Island and Kuala Lumpur.

Building the new web site

My web site has recently undergone a major revision. I had been constructing the revised web site using Apple's iWeb software application however the actual web pages took an eternity to download. They looked absolutely brilliant but each page element did take an age to download. I tried two different web servers just to check. One in Hong Kong and the other in Melbourne. Each web page looked messy as it downloaded as well. It was a real pity.

I borrowed the style of the iWeb "Gazette" template and built this using Macromedia Dreamweaver and simple html. Nested tables. I did not wish to play around with style sheets too much at this point. Maybe later. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to create all of the photo gallery pages. I love the way you can manage sites in Dreamweaver and make site wide changes. Excellent!

Bintan image galleries added to site

I added three galleries of photographs taken on the Indonesian island of Bintan during trips made in February 2001, May 2001 and January 2002. Bintan is part of Indonesia's Riau Archipelago and is only 40 kilometres from Singapore. There are a number of resorts on the island. I believe they are funded by Singaporean capital and are somewhat separate from the rest of the island. The black amd yellow mangrove snake in the photograph was one of the highlights of the first trip. Shao Ping and I were being given a tour of the local mangroves in a small boat and the mangrove snakes were curled up on the branches overhanging the water. I took that photograph holding my camera in my right hand and the branch with my left hand. Took a few quick snaps and carefully retreated.