"SOME MEN SEE THINGS AS THEY ARE AND ASK WHY. I DREAM THINGS THAT NEVER WERE AND SAY WHY NOT"

At the age of 63 I have decided to devote the next year of my life to blogging – or to be more exact – to see if I can earn a decent living doing this. If there is one constant in my life it is change. I embrace these changes as they come and when I get too settled in my ways I look at what else I would want to do to make waking up a pleasure and my life relevant to the times I am living in.

I started steadyaku47 in January 2009. For the first three months I posted about fifteen articles a month – most of them was really a collection of writings that I wanted to do mostly to see if I could put my thoughts into words. Then in early April I stopped and did nothing for three months. I simply could not bring myself to write anything.

Early July I tried again. Then I wrote what was to me a definitive article “a sobering thought” – which started by asking the question “At what stage in his tenure as Prime Minister did Mahathir decided that the end justifies the means?” I emailed that article to Lim Kit Siang and he posted it on his blog. From then on there was no looking back for me in as far as blogging was concern.

The main difficulty for me was in understanding the technicalities of blogging. As I have said before just signing into my blog used to be a chore - what more actually posting an article onto the blog. Posting an image onto my blog was something I learned to do only in the past one month and loading a video onto to my site the ‘right way’ was something I learned to do just last week – thanks to KS! And the learning goes on.

Now I have made the decision to blog full time. To be more exact to write full time on the internet. Build up my blog site, start other blog site if need be – and generally to see if money can be made on the internet around my writing. To earn my keep from blogging and writing – if I do not then I will starve. My family will starve! This will be interesting times. Yesterday I sat my wife down in front of the PC and explain to her what I will try to do. As she always does – she is supportive of what I want to do – and gently reminded me that to be able to visit our granddaughter in Toronto sometime next year would be nice!

And so I begin. You will notice that from time to time there have already been changes to the template of my blog – subtle changes to text size and colors. More images. More videos. It will all be a steep learning curve. But it has started and I will write about it from time to time. There will also have to be changes to content – to what I write about. The focus will still be on what is happening back home – but I will need to broaden the scope of what I write in order to get ‘critical mass’ in terms of those coming onto my site. In everything that I read about blogging the mantra is ‘critical mass’ – if you do not have the numbers you will not be able to earn a decent income. The name of the game will be to appeal to a wider base of people and yet remain relevant to the core of this steadyaku47 blog – which is to work towards change in our country. I hope that can be done. Its 8.30am in Adelaide – which means it is 7am in Malaysia. My stats counter tells me that I have already had just over 200 hits….I am feeling good.