But this is no April Fool’s joke. Spotted while riding a taxi Sunday afternoon.

Of all the multinational restaurant chains in the world, a Hooters restaurant will have probably the toughest time breaking into Malaysia.

This American enterprise has  425 restaurants in most states in the US and 19 other countries, including 3 in Asia: China, Singapore and recently, South Korea. Next up: Israel middle of this year. In China, the 4th Hooters restaurant is going to open in Beijing in July, and they plan to have, in all, 10 restaurants there.

The controversy isn’t the food, it’s the policy of the company: targeting male customers, and an all-female waitress staff, dubbed Hooters Girls. There are 200,000 of these girls around. They are selected based on their all-round good looks. You would recognise them by their distinctive uniform: white spandex tank top with the Hooters owl logo and the location name on the front, very short orange running shorts, glossy ultra sheer suntan pantyhose, white socks, and white athletic shoes. Example below is Hooters Girl Ms Melissa Poe:

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I learnt two big lessons recently on things related to wordpress:

When hosting a blog on wordpress.com, or any free blog host for that matter, read the TOS first. And don’t even think about breaking them. My piece of advice for everybody else is: don’t host your moneymaking blog at free web/bloghosts. The hammer can fall anytime. In my case, to make matters worse, I didn’t have any backup. But still I had plan C: I managed to salvage most, if not all, of my posts via google cache.

If you have your own hosting, and are running wordpress, be VERY careful with the General Options - Wordpress Address and Blog Address settings. Read the documentation thoroughly before attempting to change any settings there. In fact, I think there should be a big red sentence there to warn unsuspecting wordpress newbies about this. What happened to me: I changed both settings, found they didnt work, and put back the original settings. It didn’t work. My blog lost all its formatting and I could not access the configuration panel. I followed the steps outlined in wordpress codex on how to use myphpadmin to manually change 2 fields (whose entry needs to be changed to the original blog URL) in the wp_options table, but somehow there was an error. So what I did was export the wp_options, change the 2 fields offline then import the table. Of course this time I remembered to back up the existing wp_options table first.

As of now.

I am concentrating mainly on web communities run mainly by Kadazandusuns, so if I missed anything, pls inform. I have not devised a proper requirement to make the list, only that the forums must only allow posting by registered members. Hence sites allowing anonymous posting are automatically disqualified.

Judging from publicly viewable statistics of its forums, the most popular Sabah-based web communities could very well be the following, sorted by number of members (if that number is not available, by number of posts):

1. Sabah Forum : members: 4319; most ever online: 51; threads: 1,291; posts: 8,638.
2. Jebat.net : Members: 2391; most ever online: 47; threads: 406; posts: 3780.
3. The #Kadazandusun : members: 767; threads: 1,377; posts: 20,500
4. Guritom.com : members: 707; most ever online: 17; threads: unknown (but should be a lot judging from no of posts); posts: 54,510 [UPDATE 13th Dec 2007: according to Cicak, guritom.com is no more.
   UPDATE 15th Jan 2008: According to sunsuron, guritom is now known as socmedia.]
5. Nuluhon.net : members: 342, most ever online: 13, threads: 199; posts: 18,498.
6. Sabah Rhinos : members: about 600; most ever online: unknown; threads: 1,677; posts: 81,428.
7. Kadus Entertainment : members: 3,113 [UPDATE 1st August 2008]; most ever online: unknown; threads: about 1,400 [2,417 as of 1st August 2008]; total posts: about 12,000 [21,421 as of 1st August 2008].
8. akademifantasia.net: as far as I know, this site was established by a Sabahan. Members: 500+; most ever online: 270; threads: 354; posts: 5495
9. Bayau.com: Members: 330; threads: 295; posts: 390

Then there’s the Chinese-language web community sabahlife.com, of which I know very little about.

Of course we are some way off the pace set by national-level web communities like jiwang.org which has been running for 10 years, apparently has more than 50,000 registered members, running on 5 separate domains. I took a peek just now and it had almost 400 members online, and that the forum had almost 5,000 threads and more than 80,000 posts.

Most of these Kadazandusun-focused sites offer streaming audio. One blog that I know does is dbos-fm.blogspot.com. Other web forums like the KDCA forum do not attract many people.

Pics taken by yours truly one fine Saturday afternoon.

Feel free to use as wallpaper. No royalties But pardon the datestamp, forgot to turn it off.

As the Chairman of the Social & Charity Committee for the State Ministry of Finance Cooperative I have to organise at least a dinner or a family day before June.

One I planned is an annual dinner with a difference: on a yacht/ship/boat or whatever you call it. Got the idea from Smokehead of mysabah.com.

I’ve never organised an annual dinner before - it would be an interesting experience.

For family day, I organised for the cooperative several years ago at Pan Pac. It was — too noisy — I dont think we will ever be allowed back in there again.

I was secretary of the cooperative for several years, but from 2006’s AGM I requested to change due to too many commitments. True, you have people under you but still the time and energy commitment are there. Chairpersons of any committee, the secretary and treasurer are automatically members of the Board of Directors for the cooperative. Being part of the responsible team to chart the activities (investments etc) for a mid-sized cooperative is definitely a challenge.

I am not thinking of going for “reelection” during AGM this year as I’m thinking of concentrating other things.

I went for the post to get more exposure and garner experience in handling a cooperative (and perhaps more importantly, dealing with shareholders) - it’s a stepping stone to greater things, having moved up from being president of my department’s sports and recreation club.

No more long queues, no more sourfaced rental clerk.

This machine uses touch screen.

Renting a DVD only costs USD1.50 per day, and USD1 on subsequent days.

You pay by credit card or debit card.

You also return the DVD via the same machine.

Apparently already available across the causeway. The one above is available in the US.

One question: how does it know I returned the actual DVD that I borrowed?

How-to gambling guides, a sure-win, maths-based predictions etc etc have made it to the Malaysian gambling niche of internet marketing.

To obtain the next draw’s forecast, you have to pay RM2. That’s right: the cost is even more than the lottery ticket itself. After 15 draws, they’d give you a 3D/4D strike-it-rich guide. And give your the full resell rights.

I first saw it today at surekena.com, but it turned out that there are at least 2 related websites, namely magnum4dforecastresult.com and bayinspire.com.

whois queries pointed to a Mr Goh, who apparently registered the first 2 domains middle of last year.

Suspicious looking, unverifiable testimonials of satisfied customers litter the webpages.

But the clincher is the sentence at the bottom of magnum4dforecastresult.com’s page which says:

All these results are FORECAST RESULT and not 100% guaranteed. The punter shall be liable at their own risk.

To me that’s more like saying: the probability of winning anything is almost zero. The risk is entirely your responsibility.

In the marketing Q&A which I received via email the following exchange can be read:

Q&A:

Why are you selling it if it is so good?

1. It works and it simply works!
2. Nothing to lose from selling it to others
3. I can make extra money by selling something potentially help others to earn money.

Unbelieveable! Nothing to lose? Help others earn money? Doesn’t he know what will happen if this stuff really works? Everybody will be on it in no time, the gambling houses will smell something fishy, and promptly change the rules. In other words, if it’s so good, I better keep it to myself.

There are many financial advisors around, and as expected, all of them claim to be the best. The truth is, even the best ones might not be the best for you. The reason is that each of us have special needs. For starters, different people have different financial situations. A simplistic look into other people’s financial situation would not tell the whole story. A seemingly affluent millionaire could be surprisingly worse off than a middle-class salaryman.

So how do you choose the right which financial advisor for you? The first thing to do is to review your finances and decide whether you need a financial advisor in the first place. We might think we know best and therefore don’t need to engage the services of a financial advisor, but definitely we would not have as much knowledge on financial matters as someone who’s had such training and experience.

Once you decide that you do need a financial advisor, the next step is to have in mind want you want him to do for you. A financial advisor can guide you on a wide array of money matters, including investment decisions, and managing debt. Some would have specialist skill in one or more areas. Therefore you need to identify your real needs before consulting an advisor on them. You might need to select an advisor who is an expert in one particular field, rather than someone who knows a lot, but only in a general sense.

It’s been there for more than 46 years. I took this pic last month.

You could surmise that there was a flood on or around 18th May 1960.

I stand to be corrected here, but I think the worst flood ever in Tamparuli was in January 1999. And the second worst is in

1960 (or was it 1962). Anyhow, the river must have been swollen, raging, whatever. Did you see the river a few days after 5th

January 1999? It’s absolutely frightening, it’s at least 10 feet above the bridge and so very swift. Nobody, I mean NOBODY,

not even the World and Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps or Ian Thorpe will ever be able to swim across.

Even if it’s not flooding, you should know that rivers are known to “eat” people once a year.